The cover of his life could have been printed in salt and rust. Lacolone stood on the very edge of a sinking boat, jacket whipping like a funeral flag, the horizon a smear of burning light. Somewhere behind him, a torn Algerian passport floated face down on a blood-red swell. The world tasted of metal and rain; the sky was a bruise waiting to open.
He had left in the narrow quiet of an alley where boys kicked a battered soccer ball into broken walls and the summer air smelled of dust and unanswered prayers. That alley had been a map of small deaths: a shutter hanging by a nail, a door that never closed, a fridge whose light never worked. His friends clustered there like doubts that never got voiced. Lacolone wore a red-and-black zip jacket as if it were armor and offered a smile like a joke meant to steal courage back from the day.
"A car?" one of them scoffed, arms folded. "Bro, I can't even afford meat once a month."
"Marriage?" another muttered, slouched and tired. "With what? A hundred and twenty dollars and a rented coffin?"
They laughed the kind of laughter that came after surrender. Someone flicked a cigarette into dark air and said the country had turned their dreams into ghosts. Lacolone listened and then, softer, said what he always said: "Yeah... at least the sea doesn't ask for paperwork."
That night the wind came hard enough to argue with the houses. Lacolone stood before his childhood home—broken shutters, paint peeled in strips like dead skin—and felt the place pull at him with the weight of everything he had been taught to honor. The wind carried dust and the faint ghost of his mother's cooking; his eyes blurred. He leaned closer to the doorway for a moment that felt much longer than it was and whispered, almost inaudible: "Mama... I'm sorry. If the sea swallows me… tell them I only ever wanted to live like a man."
Once he boarded the shadowed boat he did not look back. The quay was a memory that belonged to someone else now. Waves took the light. The night swallowed sound. On the deck of that crowded little coffin of a boat, men and women pressed together against a sky that promised nothing. The jokes they traded were thin ropes trying to bind them to humanity—one of them swore he'd seen a jinn and half the boat jeered that mermaids were charging rent.
Lacolone kept time with the hull, tapping the rhythm of his heart on the wood and singing a line he made up in the dark: "Sailing to nowhere, chasing a maybe—freedom's a song that drowns in the navy." When someone suggested he pick a name for himself on the trip—El Tigre, El Corvo—laughter peeled like glass. A girl called him Lacolone and the name stuck, a small, ridiculous crown.
Storm likes to announce itself like a bully. The sea shifted from velvet to menace; clouds knitted together and the wind began to sharpen. Lacolone stood with his back to lightning and shouted into a sky that owed him nothing: "Hey, Fate! I'm dirt cheap—but my dreams are not!" The sound went out and the sea answered with hungry teeth.
They came without warning.
A monstrous shape breached the water and the world ruptured with a scream. Men pitched into the air as a shark the size of an omen took a man whole. Blood dotted the waves and fell like confetti. Chaos taught its oldest lesson in seconds: the sea could be beautiful and merciless in the same breath.
Lacolone moved before he could think. He scooped a child into his arms, shielding her eyes from a nightmare made of fins. Around him people clawed and shouted and cried; one friend screamed that the legends were true, that the water itself had turned predator. He found a pistol—stolen from some smugglers' kit or tucked away by fate—and pulled the trigger. The sound was a slap against the storm. Two sharks bled in the black water, but the violence had already written itself onto the boat: a gash of panic, the floor slick with saltwater and fear.
They were sinking. The hull took on a new temper as water climbed like ink. Migrants screamed; one man laughed in a broken way, "At least the ground doesn't bite!" The irony tasted bitter and old.
"Don't panic!" Lacolone barked, voice hard as flint. "I'm killing every damn shark before we sink!"
He wrapped his hands around a small beacon—military-issue, its plastic casing chewed by salt—and held it like a prayer. The light blinked like a heartbeat. Migrants stared as if the device were either salvation or a joke crueler than the sea.
"We trick them," he told them. "You distract. I hijack." The plan sounded thin in daylight and somehow heavier at night. Someone whispered about being jailed, about being labeled terrorists if they were caught. Lacolone's eyes burned. "Let them come," he said. "Maybe I lost my mind. But not my fire."
Then the sky was full of light again, but it was not lightning. Helicopters appeared—black, precise, the world trimmed by blinding searchlights that painted everyone in guilt and exposure. For a moment there was hope that the machines meant rescue. Then the guns spoke.
Marines opened fire. Bullets found flesh with the practiced indifference of men who lived inside rules and checked conscience at the door. Screams erupted into a jagged symphony. The little girl and her mother next to Lacolone folded like bad paper. He watched them go, pistol in hand, rain washing red into the sea. The rain itself seemed to understand the wrongness of the moment and slowed to a hush.
Later, the boat was a scripture of death. Lacolone knelt among bodies, water running over his clothes, blood a dark map across his hands. He had no words left. The world had swallowed meaning and spat out a small, private cruelty: Why him? Why them? He pressed his forehead to the wood and felt the weight of a thousand ordinary deaths.
When dawn came it was dull and honest, and the European coast crawled out of the mist like a promise made of stone. Lacolone took the wheel with hands that trembled, fingers numb not from cold but from the thin, hard calculus of grief. The storm eased as if the sea, exhausted, had decided to sleep.
"If the world gives no meaning to their deaths," he whispered to the horizon, "then I'll become the meaning."
His voice sounded less like a vow and more like a fuse. In the corners of his mind the faces he had lost returned—small, stubborn, accusing. A new kind of fire kindled in his chest: not the naive warmth of a boy's dream, but a deliberate, cold flame.
He set the boat toward Europe. The ocean behind him held the smell of salt and blood; ahead, the coast was a pale promise of law and hunger and something like safety. He rode the small craft alone, soaked to the skin, eyes sharpened by grief. The last thing he said to the dark water was not a plea but a sentence carved out of iron.
"Even if I must burn the world for it."
No smile followed. Only the steady, terrible light of a man who had learned what it cost to keep a dream alive.