One Man's Island

I wrote this story two years ago. I read it again this morning, and it’s actually pretty good. I changed the tense (to my new favorite, PRESENT) and fixed it up a little bit. So let me know if you like it, and let me know if you have an idea that you'd love to see come to life in a short story just like this one!

The waves curl and fall. The water reaches over his feet and pulls the sand away, and Ian turns the gold band on his finger. It’s tarnished by seawater, but it reflects the two gulls high in the cerulean sky.

The step behind him is soft, and he turns to see who it is. A woman, not middle-aged and not young. Her shirt’s white and her hair is pulled back at her neck and released again to fall over her shoulders in an ancient-feeling way.

“No one has been here for a while,” he says.

She sits down a few feet away. Ian’s silent, still turning the wedding band on his finger.

“What do you see?” she asks.

He looks up to see whether she means the question. She’s looking out at the sea.

“Waves. Gentle by the shore, breaking hard on the rocks on the end of the island.”

The wind blows a breeze against his face that smells of salt and seaweed.

“What if I were to tell you that your wife is dead, Ian?”

Why must they always try to convince him of the same thing? What does it matter to them?

“I know that she isn’t,” he explains. “There are things I know, and that’s one of them. When I was in the water, I saw this island. We all saw it. She isn’t here, so she’ll be coming any day now.”

“But how do you know?” the woman asks quietly.

The foam rolls away from their feet, taking the sand with it.

“Do you know that the water will return?” he asks, pointing.

She looks down. “No,” she says. “But I believe it will.”

“Then to you, I will say that I believe Anna will find this island and return to me.” He chokes on the sound of her name, not expecting it so sudden. It’s been so long. His heart aches and the sea and the sand and the sun blind him.

By and by he remembers that the woman is there. It’s a nice thing to have company.

“Who are you?” he asks her. He’s worried the words are curt.

“My name is Doctor Emma Bailey.”

He suddenly doesn’t care about being curt. “Are you a psychiatrist? Is that why they sent you to talk to me?”

“Yes. We’re worried about you.”

He stands up suddenly, sand falling from his clothes, He walks up the beach and throws another log of wood on the fire. He lifts the pointed stick from where it marks the buried fish, digs them free and ties them over the flames.

He roasts them slowly, turning them to be soft and moist and perfect.

When he looks back at the beach, she is gone.

He’s terribly, terribly lonely that night. 

*****

He wakes when the world is dim and young. Already the air is sulking in the heat. His feet are dry and cracked from the salt and the sand, and he sits where the water can’t reach them.

He thinks he hears a step and looks back eagerly, but it’s only frond falling at the edge of the trees. When she comes, he’s so lost in his thoughts that he does not notice until she sits beside him.

“Hello, Emma.”

“Hello, Ian.” She gazes out at the sea.

He searches the horizon, imagining the triple decks of a cruise ship, the etched forms of Navy ships, the sail of a little boat.

“The sun on the sea is beautiful,” he says, turning to look at her. She smiles, and her eyes smile, and they’re the color of the sea where it hasn’t reached the shore.

“Yes. But the sun on the snow on the mountains is my favorite. I love to ski in the early spring, when the snow is orange and pink and yellow.”

Anna. Every winter she begged him to come to the mountains. The tears in his throat scare him, because there’s nothing to cry about. Only, he’d been alone for so long.

“I can’t ski,” he says. “I fall every time. You must miss it, though.”

“It’s not winter yet. There’s always a break for summer.”

“I hate this island. The words hold him a captive and use his tongue. “I hate the sand and the heat. I hate the taste of fish in my mouth and the sound of the waves. I hate the sun on my back—’’

“I know,” she says. “I know, Ian. One day this island will be gone. Forever gone.”

He lets her words touch him, feels a strength in them, a forbearance build inside him against loneliness and the island and the merciless sea.

“I’ve thought of going to see your camp,” he says, hesitantly, “but I might miss her boat, or she might miss the island if she can’t see us.”

“If you could have anything, anything but Anna, Ian, what would you have?”

The question is friendly, and he’s not annoyed.

“Honey,” he says, after thinking. “Golden honey, and a real spoon to eat it with. What would you have, Emma?”

She’s silent for a moment. 

“I would have my boy be able to hear again.”

Ian looks at her. “Your boy is deaf?”

“Yes.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirteen.” He hates the way she is sad. “He was sick when he was four, and he lost his hearing.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, not knowing what to say. “When the ship comes, Anna and I could come see your boy.”

He glances away from the sea again to look at her eyes, and there’s tears in them.

“How long will she be?” He wonders. “She’d have to convince the ship to come. They’d have to find the right island.”

“The right island,” Emma says. But he hears the emptiness in her words.

*****

She brings him honey the next day. A golden jar, and a silver spoon, from the camp on the other side.

The day after that, there’s a bottle in her hand.

“It’s a different sort of thing, Ian. It’s—it’s from Anna.”

His heart leaps and he takes it from her. “Where did you find it? How—’’

“We found it in the water.?

“But the ship sank out there.” He points, angry, into the ocean. “It should have come to my beach. You opened it?”

“Yes,” Emma says. “Don’t be angry, Ian, we didn’t know who it was from.”

“Why would she write something in—’’

The step is quick and urgent on the sand behind them. Ian turns to look up the beach. It’s a young man, a very young man, small and nervous and urgent. He stops and looks at Emma.

“Doctor Bailey?”

Emma looks at him sharply. “What, Steven?”

“It’s urgent.” The young man glances at Ian.

She stands up quickly. In her face a soft sort of tenderness when she looks at him, like a blanket against his own frustration. She walks away up the beach. He feels strange and alone, and for a long time he looks at the sea without searching for a ship. Then he remembers the bottle.

He turns it upside down and the paper slips out easily. It’s patterned with flowers. He knows the pattern.

Ian, I went back to our room to look for you. The water is almost up to my waist and the door is jammed shut. I hope they find this bottle. I know you loved me for real, and it will be hard for you to let me go. I love you, but I’m not the only one who can. 

I miss you already.

Anna

The paper trembles in his hand and the sea swirls in his head. The sound of shattered glass comes with a sudden, stabbing pain in his hand.

he’s on his feet and the sand burns like coals. He’s running up the beach, and sees his fire. He picks up a burning log and hurls it into the trees. The fronds on the ground flicker and glow, and he throws another brand, and the flames crawl up the trunks of the trees. Behind him, he hears the sea laughing, mocking him.

He runs from the sea and the sand. Through the burning trees, and the heat of them singes his feet. The sea cackles far behind and he stumbles and falls, the dry palm fronds scraping his face.

He lies still, watching the blood ooze from the gash in his hand.

Anna is dead.

When he wakes up, he’s on the sand, hungry and thirsty and his limbs aching. The sun doesn’t burn his skin, it’s a bright, bright thing that hurts his eyes, and he doesn’t hear the ocean, only the blinding of the sun on the water, all of it a pain in his head and his hand. 

And Emma. She’s part of the pain, sitting beside him, the silence broken by the soft sound of her sobs.

He sits up. He doesn’t feel the sand anymore, and even the pain goes away.

“Emma?”

She looks at him.

“Emma, was it—your boy?”

“Yes.” her voice is husky and full of tears.

He lifts his arm and puts it around her. he wishes that he could send her strength, send her the power she built inside him many times. But he’s broken and empty.

Her hands tremble as she opens them. “I…they…found something under the water again, Ian. I thought maybe—you would see—what it meant. But if the bottle did nothing…” She sits up straighter, forcing his arm from her shoulders. “I’ve tried. I want to help you, bit of you won’t see, there’s nothing more I can try.” She breaks into a sob.

The thing in her hands is small and beautiful. A band of gold, inset with a diamond.

He takes the ring gently. He lifts his arm around her again.

“Emma. I know. Anna is dead.”

She looks at him. There’s surprise, and then confusion in her eyes.

“Then what?” she whispers at him. “What are you waiting for, Ian?”

“For a ship,” he says.

She loos toward the horizon.

“What do you see?”

He looks at the ships bobbing on the waves. A bell rings, and the sails of the little boats fill gently with the breeze.

“Ships,” he says. “But none of them will take me home.”

“I will be your ship, Ian,” she whispers, and she takes his hand.

Something is changing. There’s ground underneath his feet—no, not sand, something smooth and hard. His hands jump back, find something to hold—plastic, the plastic arms of a chair. The sun—where is the sun? The sun is gone, and the sea is gone, gone with the glare and the breeze.

“Emma!” he cries in terror. He stares at the wall of a room, a green. A window, and outside, a bush of white flowers.

She squeezes his hand. “it’s all right, Ian. Do you see me?’

He turns violently. She’s there, her face gentle.

“The island—where is the island?” He feels the panic rise and fall with his chest.

“There is no island, Ian,” she says softly.

His eyes fall still on her face.

“You saw the island from the water,” Emma says. “When they rescued all of you, they couldn’t get close to the sinking boat. You stood there, at the rail, and watched it go down. Anna was trapped in there. I think,” she says quietly, “you broke in your head, a little. You imagined you had reached the island, that she had been rescued and would return to get you.” She looks into his eyes.

“I couldn’t find her,” he whispers. “I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t, and this guy picked me up and forced me over the edge—’’ 

He lets the memories sink in. He looks at his hand. It trembles, but there’s no wound.

There’s a translucent door on the wall. He can just read the label on the other side.

Ian Rand, Mental Patient—Do Not Enter.

“You look hungry,” she says. “You should get something to eat.”

He stands up, carefully, not letting go of her hand. 

“Let’s go together.”

*****