And the Rest

A short break with the novel. I wrote a very short story and I wanted to share with you.


                                                   And the Rest

A man is whistling while walking down the beach on an island far off from civilization.  He is dressed in, what were once clothes, and have been reduced to tatters.  A red and white shirt is now no more than a crude smock and bucket hat now serving primarily as a sun visor. The hair on his head and his face has grown long and ragged. The sun has bleached his hair and tanned his skin. Once a happy man, he now has a default grimace and a permanent contempt. He has not smiled in many, many years. He stops dead on the beach.

In the distance there is a strange man walking in his direction. He runs in the direction of the person approaching and begins to speak. Nothing comes out at first; he clears his throat and tries again. “I’m sorry sir I have not spoken to someone in a very long time. I cannot believe I am finally seeing another person,” he said with a coarseness in his throat. 

“My name is Jonas Grumby, I was flying overhead and saw this island, I thought it was uninhabited, I guess I was wrong.” he said “So you came down here in a plane? Is it still here?” asked red smock. “It’s a helicopter actually and yes. I can take you back to Hawaii with me sir. How long have you been on this island and how did it happen?” .

 “It has been so long that time has been lost to me. How, however, is all I ever think about and I can share without hesitation.” Said the man. He sits down on the beach and gestures for the man to do the same “just sit back and I’ll tell you the tale. 

“The trip was supposed to be uneventful, a short trip to and from port. I was the first mate and we had five passengers. Things were on schedule until we hit a rough patch of weather and lost control of the ship. I did everything I could to help but it was useless, we fell of course and crashed into this island.

            “I checked the charts and this place was not mentioned in any of them. Thankfully all of the passengers survived the crash. Including me there was six of us. A well to do couple, an up and coming actress, A teacher from nowhere Ohio, and someone else whose name escapes me. There is nothing much on this island but coconuts and bamboo. The first of which proved disastrous. The coconuts on this island have a rare bacterium that grows inside. All of us grew very sick. The teacher got it the worst of us since he was trying to be inventive with the meals he made of the coconuts.
            I suffered a serious bout of dementia.“I created a new world around me. I imagined that the well to do couple was in fact super rich. I envisioned them having impossible amounts of luggage filled with tons of clothes and money. The actress I turned into a famous starlet on the cusp of her fame. I gave the teacher an appropriate fascination with coconuts; he made everything from radios to walkie-talkies and once even a TV out of the things.  I cannot remember the last one but I think she did something. I gave us adventures and made life on the island manageable in my head. Celebrities would visit us and we would be far too wacky for them to want to save us.

            “After a while the people stopped coming in my head and I imagined us getting off the island only to come right back. We opened a resort for people to visit us on the island and get away from it all because in our time here we learned that the island could bring us all together. At the end of it I even imagined us being visited by the world famous Harlem Globetrotters. Can you imagine such a thing? I eventually came out of it and realized I was the only one alive. Everyone around me had been dead for weeks. Whomever lived the longest had started to dig graves for the dead so I finished the jobs and said a few words for each of them, even though my only memories of each were all in my head.” The man in the red smock took a look at Jonas Grumby and sighed deeply.

            “The worst part of all of this is that I will still occasionally dip into the dementia and rerun these fantasies in my head, sometimes for hours or days on end.  I realize in telling you this story that I omitted someone very important to the tale.  It was you skipper. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save us, there was no one I would ever want to be a first mate to other than you.” The skipper vanished. Gilligan pushed himself up off the ground and continued to walk down the beach. There was a clearing on the other side of the beach with bamboo and coconuts and he needed them for a new animal trap.

                                                            The End.