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“I was around my thirties and my father was getting too old to go on the expeditions like we always did so, during the last time, only me and my brother were doing them.
That period was hard for us, we couldn’t find any fish in the sea due to an incident that polluted the waters around our house. We didn’t have fish to sell or to eat and neither money to buy some bread. Our family was struggling against hunger.
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That day my father told us that the weather wasn’t good and that we mustn’t go into the sea.
My brother and I exchanged a look and I’m almost sure we were thinking the same thing: “Our old man has gone mad, isn’t he?”. We were in summer and the sun was brighter than ever.
We decided to don’t listen to him and sailed in search of fish.
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“He is fucking crazy, eh?” - I told my brother as we were enough away from the house
“Yep. That fella went mad after the encounter with that monster. Do you remember it?
“How could I forget that son of a bitch? He scared the shit out of me and he made our dad bleeding a lot” - I said.
We stayed silent for the rest of our trip so we won’t scare the fish.
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That was our lucky fucking day.
We filled all our containers in 3 hours with big fish. It wasn’t passed even thirty seconds that the sky became dark, so dark that we almost couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t a normal storm.
The boat started shaking.”
The old man stopped for some seconds and a little tear came down from his eye.
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“As I was saying, the boat started shaking. The containers were so full of fish that the shaking made some of them go back into the sea.
My brother and I started rowing as fast and strong as we could but we barely moved, it was as if the water was heavy.
I stretched my head a bit to see the water and I saw a lot of different colours that were brightening the sea in blue, red and yellow. The sea around us was full of jellyfishes.
We didn’t know what to do and we noticed that, after one minute, the jellyfish continued to grow in number. The boat was shaking heavenly and I was struggling to stay on the boat. My brother was struggling too. He was tinier and shorter than me.
After another minute, he couldn’t resist anymore and fell into the sea of jellyfish.
My brother started screaming in pain while I was trying to help him pulling towards the boat without any result. It was heartbreaking.
My arm, immersed with my brother in the sea of jellyfish, was burning like never before. It was so damn hard to keep it down there.
I think that to describe that pain you could imagine pouring your hand in a chimney fire. I never wanted to imagine what my brother was going through.
All this lasted only 30 seconds because, after that, my brother stopped screaming and struggling and stayed still.
After he died, all the jellyfish faded away into the bottom of the sea.
And from the very same place, a strong light flashed towards me making me blind for some seconds.
I then found my brother on the boat along with a hundred jellyfishes that I never had seen before.
I came back home as fast as possible while crying and shaking in for what happened.
…
The next day we had my brother's funeral. I also went to sell the jellyfishes and I was astonished. They granted us enough money so we didn’t have to struggle anymore."