It is a golden arc, the one I am sailing on. Even the water it is cutting through seems golden flowing around it. I stand on the deck, looking out in the distance, the little waves crashing into each other. I checked my heading, still on the right course for the east coast of Japan. I smile, thinking how all my meticulous plans to reach the land of the rising sun have been let down. But now, old, wrinkled, rich, and a proud owner of a yacht called The Sunbeam, I am heading there. At long last, about to tick the long awaited item off of my bucket list.  

I know the journey wasn’t without its turmoil. There was the storm, there was the hull breach by a mad shark, and there was the missed refuelling station. I don’t have much recollection of any of those events, but I know. And now I am only six days away from the dock that is waiting to receive my seventy foot long boat. 

“What are you doing on the deck alone?” I hear his voice behind me. 

“Just looking at the waves.” I reply, turning around. Atish stands there just beside the mast. I notice his face looks different. His hair is long, not having been cut for quite a while. But his beard looks crisp. 

“They’ll look better near the coast, dad. You should come in, the winds are picking up.” He tells me. 

“Let me be, son. I don’t want to miss the journey to the destination, no matter how much I’ve waited for it.”

Just then, she comes on the deck too, as pretty as the first time Atish had brought her home. For some reason, she refuses to call me dad, choosing ‘father’ instead. “What is that?” She says, pointing to something in the distance. 

I turned to the way she was pointing. So does Atish. There’s a little black circle in the sky. It seems to be in space, and it appears like a weather balloon at the same time. It starts changing colours, gradually becoming more and more grey. In the next thirty seconds, the sky is a mute grey. No clouds, no texture, no blue. Just grey, as if we’re covered by a cloth. And then it turns dark again. 

I see threads of light flowing past me. They wrap around me, stinging wherever they touch. Atish grabs his wife and takes her below deck. But the beams follow them. I hear a scream, a heart piercing holler coming from below, but I’m unable to move. 

“DAADDD!!” Atish screams. The threads of light are coarse to the touch. And now I’m covered in them, hardening. The beams pulse when I touch them.

“What are you?” I ask, my voice hoarse. 

I don’t know how I can hear them, there is no sound. But the beams pulse as in like those psychedelic visualisers of old media players in computers. I can make out what they’re trying to say. 

“We are the beams of the sun.”

“So is this boat.” I say. 

“We know, we’ve come to take it. It’s ours.” They sing.

“But I have to reach Japan.” I plead

“You’re not ready…” Their voice fades. “You’re not ready…” Barely a whisper. “You’re not ready…”

“Why not,” I ask. And one of the sunbeams pierces the deck of my sunbeam through the flooring. I am whisked into the air. I see my skin glowing. Am I becoming one of them too? I think. And one of them replies. 

“You were always ours…”