Tattered, Velvet, Ocean by Ben Spivey

Our white teeth soured in the salt water as we sank into the ocean, slipped, and swam again—breaking the surface, meeting the sun's light. "There," I said, "a rope." It beat with the buzz of the waves like a crooked dancing vein.

Those were her hands around the thin rope, swaying, pulling. Those were her white teeth smiling between lips and the noise of the ocean's slush. And I followed close, gasping, swallowing salt water—the waste filtering in my kidneys.

We built boats from the sharp splinters and the terrible debris. We packed them with barrels of sand to make islands. We piled clocks so we'd never lose time.

We made love for years, and years, turning our bodies into machines—carrying the sand, stacking, and throwing it over the waves.

She bore many children:

As time passed she began to feel the stress of no sleep.
  Our children became restless. Blackness curved my eyes like terrible leaches. I cooked over a fire, stacked wood, surrounded by stone. We spoiled no food.

We found a door:

The door's knob had only a hint of rust. It was intricate. It was hand carved.   We stood at the edge of the island and stared at its lines and circles, debating, holding our breath, giving meaning to the depth of the notches.
  A shifting light flickered from the space at the bottom of the door in a long draw across the ocean's rotted velvet carpet, torn by decades of sand.
  "That door will lead us deeper into darkness," she said.
  I nodded.

Our children sang:

"God oh God the depth of the ocean."

The children were sucking her tired breasts in the damp darkness as she felt her shape. She worried about her fatigued figure until she slept, blanketed in what was left of her tattered dress. They wiped spoilage of milk from their lips with their thin fingers, never looking at the door.

There was no moonlight:

I crept low, digging my fingers and toes into the sand, crawling past our children, past my twitching wife, (and for the first time) past the velvet, past the wet door and into a tunnel of mud.
  I moved on all fours through the tunnel, my head scraping the ceiling. No light.
  In a brief moment, after so much time had passed, I saw through the mud and the dirt of the tunnel, squinting. I saw people draped in robes. I watched them sway their hands like conductors ordering a symphony. They spat. They mimicked each other's vex. They held books. They erected crosses. They crucified.
  And I moved on in the darkness.

I fell into a room:

In the center of the room was a red-bulb of light hanging from a wire dripping the earth (mud, sand, water) like wax. Clocks lined one wall, light lined another.
  The clocks ticked and beat steady and jagged. Rhythm, and not rhythm, disorienting but familiar. Light danced.
  The room had no windows. Smoke coughed through cracks in the wall's emptiness. Puffs collected in swirls, glowing and growing stagnant in the light. The mud and the ocean leaked through.
  I knelt and turned, watching the smoke seep.

The light switch would not turn off the glowing. I unscrewed the bulb, slowly. I held it in my fingers, hot and menacing, beating like a heart.
  In that room full of clocks and light, full of smoke and mud, I was only terrible.