25 Vhalar 720
The beach he was standing on seemed to stretch endlessly on either side, but he knew that it couldn’t be endless. Nothing was endless, not even the plague that put him where he was now. He thought he remembered seeing the edges of the island from the middle of the water where he was drifting after the crash. While the beach dragged to the right and to the left of him, the beach fed into a forest a few hundred yards ahead of him. It was late enough in the day that the sun had dipped far enough behind the trees for him to use their shade as refuge. It was an oddly beautiful sight, the sand giving way to grass and trees, but it was also a daunting one. The tree line was thick and he could hear sounds coming from within. Sounds like birds chirping irritating chirps. Sounds like lizards scurrying across the ground. Yet beyond that there were sounds that I didn’t want to face unarmed. There was a sound like a child imitating a wolf howl but a louder noise drowned it out. He didn’t know how to describe the louder noise that drowned out the howl so he didn’t think much about it. All he’d really been able to think, both adrift and now, was that he was alone again. He hated being alone. He hated not having anyone to talk to and he hated being told not to talk to those who he thought he could, but he did what he was asked because he was trying to be good. Now he didn’t have to worry about being good, he didn’t have any choice in the matter.
It wasn’t long until the sun had gone down behind the trees of the forest and cast shadows over the whole beach. He felt more alone in the dark than he had in the day but only for the first few hours. After the first few hours, the creatures of the night let lose their various songs, reminding the man not to venture into their forest. He had to remain distant. The man gathered all the sticks he could from the perimeter of the forest without venturing in, out of respect and fear for the denizens of the forest and tried to make a fire. He discovered quickly that he had no idea how to start a fire. He never thought he’d need to know. He spent nearly an hour sitting hunched over a pile of sticks, spinning one on top of the others to try and create a fire. He didn’t even do well enough to see smoke but that was probably for the best. If he’d seen smoke, he might have had hope, and if he had hope then he’d have spent the rest of the night making futile efforts to start a fire.
By the time he gave up on making a fire and threw down the stick he’d been rubbing against the others his skin felt the worst kind of icy-hot. His sunburn gave a superficial heat and the cold snapped it away. The heat from the burn was like a blanket with a bunch of holes in it. It warmed him while he tried to sleep but it didn’t quite do its job. In hindsight it was a burn so it did its job, just not a blanket’s job. It was hard to get to sleep that night but after a while he dug into the sand and managed to ignore the sensation enough to doze off for a few hours.
In the morning the sun rose over the water and thawed the last man out of his sleep. He checked his sunburn first to see if it had begun to peel yet, but it hadn’t. There were cracks along the surface, but it was not ready to peel. Then he thought about trying to sharpen one of the sticks into a spear to fish with but honestly, he would rather have ate the seaweed. So instead of fishing he turned to the forest. He had no hope of swimming off this island and he couldn’t walk the beach forever. If he wanted to see anything other than the beach again, he had to go in. However, he had not forgotten the sounds he heard all night long. The birds and the howling that threatened to keep him awake lingered in the back of his mind. He liked people. He missed people. He did not miss the animals or the birds in the parks. He missed his city. He missed the streets and the idle conversations. He missed going to get an ale and talking to his server for a little longer than he probably should have. He missed going to the town center for lunch and watching people walk around. He remembered how he and his friends would pretend that they were directing a play and all of the people in the mall were just extras in the background. When they got particularly bold, they’d shout stage directions and hide as if they hadn’t done anything at all. They played all sorts of pranks that they shouldn’t have because it was fun. However, he was in an entirely different world than that one now... He took a deep breath and put his focus back on where he was, not where he wished he could be.
The man used the daylight to walk the tree-line on the beach until he found a broken branch that was large enough to work as a club because he didn’t want to spend hours making a spear. It was a little ironic to him that he thought it was just too much work to make a spear when he had nothing but time to waste. He never dared to step into the forest before he had a weapon but with the club in hand he felt a certain confidence that he didn’t have before. He wondered if it was the confidence he felt with a club in his hand that had driven all of civilization but a moment later the thought had passed and been supplanted by a new one.
He was very hungry.
He pushed through the shrubbery into the forest. The trees weren’t as thick a few hundred feet in so the sunlight peeked through the leaves. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for him to make out what was in front of him as he moved forward. He didn’t find anything immediately. In fact he didn’t find anything for quite a long time while he walked through the trees. The first great find of the day was a bush with small, red berries on it. They didn’t look like any berry the man had seen before. They certainly weren’t raspberries or black berries and they were red so they couldn’t have been blue berries. They were too small to be strawberries but the man thought for just a moment that they might be little cherries. He didn’t think about the dangers of eating fruit he found in the wild until he was shoving a second handful of the berries into his mouth. The juice that seemed to pop out of the berries as he chewed them was bitter, not sweet, and a few seconds after forcing them into his mouth, he wretched them back onto the forest floor.
The man cursed to himself because there was no one else to curse to.
The man ate a large leaf that he thought might have been a form of lettuce but it was not. He chewed on some tree bark that he thought would make him feel less hungry but the only thing that helped in that regard were the few insects he chewed through when he bit into the bark. After the third piece, he managed not to throw it back up. His stomach felt both better and worse at the same time. It was full, but now there was a sharp pain in it. After nearly half an hour of biting into things and finding out they weren’t going to cut it as food, something decided to bite into him.
It happened almost too quickly to describe. The man had just taken a bite into his fifth piece of tree bark- he thought it was redwood- when suddenly something dashed out of the brush and bit into his leg. Instinctively he swung his club down by his leg and caught the side of the thing that was biting him. It whimpered like a dog going to the vet and ran back into the brush before he could get a good look at it. Panicking, the man put his back to the tree whose bark he’d been chewing and gripped his club with both hands so tightly he would probably have felt the wood digging into his skin if not for the burning, horrible pain in his leg. There were move punctures than he could count where he’d been bitten and he didn’t have enough time to count because the creature dashed out of the brush again. It moved in a fuzzy blur towards him and he swung my club like a baseball bat at it.
Thunk!
His club hit the creature again and it fell beside him. He got a good view of it then, in the few seconds while the beast scrambled up and took off into the brush again. It was a wolf, a small wolf but a wolf all the same. When the beast had run off, the man plucked most of the dirt that he could from the bite wound on his leg but it was bleeding a lot and with every effort to stop the bleeding he was pushing down on his sunburn,
The last man on the island ripped off a chunk of the bottom portion of his shirt and wrapped it around his leg. That stopped- or at least slowed- the bleeding enough for him to stay on his feet and keep going.
The man kept limping through the woods for a long time until he decided he wanted to go back and lay on the sand. It was about then that he realized how large the forest really was. He looked in every direction but couldn’t tell which way would lead him to the beach and which would lead him deeper into the forest. In light of the attack, he knew the forest wouldn’t be safer at night, but he didn’t think he’d be able to get back to the beach. The man decided he would have to hope that the beast was smart enough to stay away. Without fire he didn’t have much except hope.
He walked until he found a trio of trees with a bit of grass in the middle of them just big enough for his entire body. He curled up between the trees and tried to sleep but he couldn’t shake the sounds of the forest from his head. He stayed between the three trees all night but he did not sleep. His eyes watched the brush and he waited for the creature to come for me again but it didn’t. The only other creature he saw that night was a lizard who thought the three trees would provide him- or her- a nice shelter. He named the lizard Leonard. Leonard was his only friend on the island and by dawn Leonard had scurried off to do whatever it is lizards did when they were stranded on an island.
Just like that, the man was alone again.
At dawn the howling began again but this time it sounded much closer. The man worried that the wolf had gathered its friends and was coming for him again. He grabbed his club and held it with both hands while he scanned the forest around him with bloodshot eyes. He could hear birds and little animals running through the shrubs, but he couldn’t see them. He stood on his wounded leg and felt a small flare of pain, but he did not let it stop him. He took a deep breath and set off in one direction, away from the howling.
Away from the life.
When he finally found the sands of the beach again, he wasn’t thinking about his friends anymore. He wasn’t thinking about the movie theaters, the malls, the fried chicken. All the man could think about was how grateful he was to finally be alone again.
