Overview

You lose a critical customer or worry that the next revenue project might not close. Perhaps you face a layoff, reduction in work force, or being fired. Maybe your love life ends, death takes someone special away from you,  or an unexpected illness or accident leaves you confined.

Business and personal challenges confront us daily, leaving us angry, frustrated and dazed as we look for answers and direction. These trying situations make us struggle against the tide and the results leave us feeling high and dry … Beached!

By exchanging life on land for a corresponding existence on the water, the activities here; whether enterprise, manufacturing, education, research, medical, hospitality, service, or entertainment, take place on water-going vessels. Beached is a parable, or story, about life in and on the water and the six characters who find themselves unexpectedly high and dry.

Meet some of these characters who feel the blow of life’s challenges and then must deal with the uncertainty and decisions that follow.

 

Kate

She scooped up a handful of warm sand and let it slip through her fingers. Her other hand still clenched the memo that came across her desk last month, “At the beginning of next quarter, the entire company, across all departments, will need to implement a reduction in force of 35 percent of current personnel.”

She sat motionless, remembering her reaction and thoughts about having to let some of her team go—never seeing her own layoff coming.

Ian

An unidentified and unwelcome harbinger of fate had chosen him. He now considered himself a mutant. At this very moment his body was producing tumor cells jumping into that perfect internal transportation system, his bloodstream, looking for a comfy spot to reside and begin growing anew. Cancer. It was real now, with a direction of its own, and his life, or what he had left of it, would never be the same.

Jan

She tried to forget the morning paper left askew on the breakfast table, obituary page open, and the words highlighted in yellow: “…long-time resident, served on local community boards. Survived by his loving wife, Jan.”

Tracing 56 over and over in the sand, deepening the indentation with each stroke, her mind wandered back to events of the past month. He was too young to die. Now she was alone.