"A Seafarer's Miracle"

It was exactly 2 am in the morning, when I had woken up from the sound of crashing waves banging the walls of the ship I was on. Enormous as a fifteen-story building, the waves were intrusively pushing our cargo ship side by side as if it were trying to tip it over as hard as it could. The weather was not on our side either, as a violent downpour had accompanied us on our voyage and bolts of lightning would repeatedly strike the very waters our ship had sailed upon. Suddenly, boom! I heard a crash on ship.

"Kaloy! Kaloy!" my co-seafarer, Isidro, had ran down to my cabin, panting. "Whats going on?" I said, worried with the the sounds I've heard from the massive waves and the recent crash. "The ship.... it had a collision with a rock as huge as a house! It's badly damaged. It's starting to sink," he said while grabbing a picture of his parents. Horrified, my heart started to palpitate faster than a racing horse. "Kaloy! Lets go," Isidro called.

Disregarding my distress, I quickly followed him up on the deck where we ran towards a lifeboat. We got on and carefully lowered it down with its rusty winch. To my dismay, in the middle of lowering the boat, I had slipped! 

I was falling into the deep, dark sea; and I struggled to swim up; it felt as if the sea was pulling me down. I started to lose air. Feeling weak, my eyes were eventually near to a close. My ears could no longer hear, my arms and legs could no longer move. The only thing that remained were my thoughts. I was expecting those moments to be my last. It was surely over for me. I had continued to sink into the fathomless sea.

Suddenly, I felt something move below my chest and stomach. It started to thrust me up. "What is this?" I thought. As it continued to push me up with all its strength, it was later able to successfully get me out and above water. Grasping for air, it felt like a miracle.

Though, I was weak and my surroundings were quite dark, I had managed to slightly open my eyes and see parts of the creature that had saved me. I saw how it was gray and it had pale yellow spots and stripes. "Thank you" I said before completely losing consciousness.

The next day, I woke up in a hut near the beach. I was laying on a bed made out of bamboos. Suspicious of where I was and how I got here, I quickly rose up and looked around. The environment felt calm, the breeze was warm, and the air was filled with the smell of grilled fish.

"You're awake," an old dark-skinned woman wearing a daster with her hair tied up in a bun, said. "Nay, where am I? How did I get here?" I asked, confused. The woman sat beside me and patted my shoulder. "Calm down. Listen, my husband is a fisherman. He found you floating on a broken bamboo raft. Realizing you were alive, he brought you to our home, here in Talisay," she replied. "Talisay?" "Yes, Talisay. You're here in Cebu," she specified.

"What happened to you?" she continues to ask. "Last thing I remember, I was drowning then some sort of fish pushed me up and out of the water, saving me. I'm sure it was a fish but I don't know what kind," I answered. "What did the fish look like and how big was it?"  " I couldn't really see it clearly since it was dark but it looked like it was gray and it had pale yellow spots and stripes. I'm not exactly sure how big it was but I can say that it was bigger than me," I said. "You must have been saved by a butanding, they used to come near these shores" a wrinkly old man, wearing a straw hat, said as he entered the hut.

"A butanding?" I replied.