Amabell was born on the Ides of March, 1602. She was a lovely girl, kind as can be, with wonderful cupreous locks of hair. Familiarly, she was unremarkable; a low class lineage, with her father as a dockworker and her mother as a seamstress.
She was, of course, fated to follow her mother’s footsteps and learn to sew. But she never did get a good hand with textiles; not that she tried. She was much more enraptured by the world around her, by its patterns and systems, by its rules and methods - Indeed, she had a talent for mathematics, a knack for chemistry, an incomparable sense for botany, a wunderkind in almost all academic disciplines.
It came to be that one day, her father fell terribly ill. A doctor, a kindly volunteer (and thus with little medical knowhow), determined it to be incurable and ultimately lethal. Amabell knew, of course, that such a call was wrong: She had seen pigs fall ill the same way, and recovering when eating a specific set of herbs.
So, she prepared an emulsion of these herbs, in such a way that a person may digest them similarly, and her father’s health perfected almost immediately. A miracle, they told the questioning neighbors.
Soon later, the entire dock fell ill the same way, and Amabell unhesitantly distributed her medicine to everyone’s betterment. A terrible mistake: she had shown herself as a witch. It was the Ides of March, 1616.
Her trial was swift and unfair; the standard. As sentence, she was to be chained to a rock and thrown in the sea. On June 12th, to the sound of her mother’s cries and pleas, she was pushed off the end of the longest dock and sank a measly ten meters to the bottom. The water was too dark for her to be seen from above, but she could make out the silhouettes of the people peering off the sides, and could see the underside of the boats.
Her air ran out quickly, as she screamed and begged for mercy from within the water. The her lungs started to flood, her mind - perhaps in a caprice of enjoyment - noted in detail as the muddy water passed her nostrils, her throat, her trachea, and pooled in her alveoli; as it overflowed from her lungs and flooded her stomach and intestine.
But her knowledge failed her when, after three, five, ten minutes, she didn’t lose consciousness. As she kept breathing in and out gulps of water, as she felt the cold across her skin.
She didn’t know by then, but by some miraculous coincidence, by a uniquely lucky landing of God’s die, by an inconceivable alignment of biological rarities, she was naturally born immortal.
After realizing she wouldn’t be allowed an end by the hand of Death, she hoped to sleep a bit when the pain numbed. It didn’t.
She drowned through all summer. She didn’t have the strength to keep struggling, so she just floated limply below the dock - She had stopped hoping to, if not sleep, then pass out. The foul taste of the seawater eventually mellowed in her tongue until she was used to it. This was, perhaps, the only kindness she got from her miraculous biology.
She knew when it was Sunday because she couldn't see her father’s silhouette working above her. All working days, she saw him pray above the water, above her. He told her of how the family was doing, of her mother, of her younger brother. She couldn’t hear a word, but she could see his mouth moving. She was thankful for that one apology of a relationship - It let her pretend to be a little more alive than she really was.
By the end of August, she started to die of starvation, too. She came to learn that immortality only guarantees a lack of death, not a lack of dying.
She passed the time by watching the ships and boats pass over her, she combed her mind trying to tell galleons from schooners from brigantines. Sometimes, a bit of the cargo would drop into the water; she’d watch the fishes snatch them in front of her. On one occasion, close to September, a full box of mangoes fell into the water, some two meters from her. She saw fishes and crabs slowly eat through the entire thing, slowly enough for some to rot and wither away.
Winter was worse: Her father never worked in December, the dock was frozen over. So, she lost her calendar, her last relationship, and sunlight. The cold water stung more, it fractalled on her skin, it cut her lips, it poked into her eyes. Her limbs were a charred black from frostbite, but didn’t fully necrotize: No one has had to describe the feeling of pain through dead limbs, so there’s no word for it. She didn’t have the energy to come up with one.
With whatever her mind was using to be able to think, she clung to the thought of her father returning once the ice thawed. She thought this during Christmas, and New Year’s Eve; she didn’t know either one had passed.
Her father didn’t return once the ice broke. She didn’t know he had died a month prior. She knew exactly what would’ve cured him, but she only thought that he must’ve moved on: People can’t spend infinite time doing something meaningless.
After winter, it was March. She only vaguely knew the Ides was close, so she thought of her mother’s singing; unconsciously, she tried to sing along too, but she didn’t have air and her vocal chords atrophied in autumn.
Still, March is a spring month, and even though she wasn’t as deeply read on marine biology, she figured the kelp and sea moss would also bloom. Perhaps the only kindness she was afforded then was to be right: As the days passed, the receded grasses advanced along the sand, the kelp grew and tangled in front of her, the sunlight diffracted through the leaves in filigree patterns, the fishes lay their eggs in rocky nooks, the crabs paraded new shells. Moss colonized the metal of the chains.
Her eyes were tired, very tired, and had sustained more damage than any eye should survive. Consequently, her vision had been reduced to a blurry mess that forbade her from properly noticing these beauties.
Her nerves, perhaps made more sensitive by the necrotized flesh rotting and revealing them to the outside, were sensitive enough to notice the slow warming of the water. The damage also made her randomly twitch her fingers, toes, eyelids, lips, nostrils, which scared away small fishes that planned on nibbling away the muscle and skin and sinew.
By summer, though, the fishes grew accustomed to them and started nibbling anyway. She could feel each and every microscopic bite - Under such a lack of stimuli (Beyond the pain and drowning and starving and dying), even the smallest thing are avalanches.
She knew from her father’s complaints that July was the busiest month at the port, with an excess of ships made heavy by an excess of cargo. It just so happened that the Royal Betty, a famous oceanic trader, docked atop her. It was so very large that it actually hit her when it arrived, and pushed her slightly further down. They didn’t notice, of course, but she felt every heavy step rumble through her body; every barrel of beer that was carelessly hauled and thrown into the cargo deck.
She knew from woodworking and shipwrighting books that only a handful of centimeters of wood separated her head from fresh air. But she hadn’t eaten or slept in more than a year, so what could she have done about it?
Only then did the thought cross her mind: It was July. She had been drowning for more than a year. She didn’t have the strength to be all that sad about it, not that you could tell tears from seawater.
The years, months, weeks, days blurred from then. Ships came, ships went, fishes pricked at her skin and frostbite ate more limb each winter. One wouldn’t be faulted for imagining immortals as youthful and healthy, but they’d be wrong: She aged, stunted and shrivelled, for fifty Ides of fifty Marches. Though of course she couldn’t tell it’d been so long.
By then, she was vaguely aware that both her parents must’ve passed. She didn’t even have a clue her brother had married and had children. He had even proposed on the very dock she was drowning under, too young to remember his sister in any good detail.
She had stopped believing in God about a month after being thrown into the water, but every handful of years she tried praying again. Mostly in thought, of course, since she could barely move her lips, let along clasp her hands together. It never worked, of course, but at some point - Maybe as a punchline by fate, probably as a hallucination of a decades-starved brain - The Grim Reaper appeared in front of her and told her how beautiful Heaven was, of the tulips and palaces and festivals and luncheons; of the fat residents that ate twice, thrice what anyone should because they could; of the dances and parties and the rivers of wine and the clouds of sugar and the doves and the laughter. Then she had drowned for a century.
History books note the war of 1712 as particularly bloody on the harbors: Warships firing parades of cannons against the wooden jetties and stone façades, soldiers trained and hardened by years of combat against fumbling and bumbling idiots who’d never held a weapon. The books, or course, don’t note the woman drowning under the cannon fire, who saw balls of lead plunge around her and prayed none hit her (Perhaps, because it’d hurt more to be pressed by lead for decades. Really, because on some base animal level one wishes to not die even if they know they couldn’t anyway). She couldn’t even cover herself, couldn’t move her limbs, just float dying and limp.
But worse, far worse, were the bodies. When the first sank, it had been the first time in one hundred years that she felt fear. How couldn’t she, seeing a corpse with half its face blown off fall some meters from her?
And then, someone sank that wasn’t fully dead yet: A young gentleman - her type - from an attacking galleon. In his last moments, drowning and shot in the carotid, he looked at her. At her eyes. He saw a many-times-dead corpse, and she looked back.
She felt guilty; guilty at being happy that someone had seen her, because it meant making someone else’s last sight a drowning century-old living corpse.