There was a place on the south side of the sandy island where one couldn’t see tell if they were looking at water or dirt. The beach there was so gradual and long that the waves rolled in gentle and thin. By the time they reached the middle of the beach, they were just a layer of crystal-clear liquid. The sand looked the same with and without water over it. This was a place where there could be no truth—only the possibilities of wetness and dryness.
This was Arn’s favourite place on the island. He lay on the sand for hours on end—bored, sick, starved. Here, all of his maladies seemed to drift away with the tide. Here he could be both alive and dead. Or maybe good and evil.
“Arn,” Gamden called. His voice was weak. It was only a hundred such calls that allowed Arn to interpret the raspy sound in the midst of the scraping wind. Arn slowly sat up and looked toward the trees. Gamden preferred the shade to any of the island’s more interesting locales.
Arn was dizzy, but he turned and looked at Gamden with his red, stinging eyes. His fellow castaway had lost a lot of his hair, just like Arn, and his skin was red and dry. Arn felt like he was living inside a husk, like his outer layer of skin was a baked shell and his sore flesh was hiding inside. Arn licked his lips and asked, “What?”
“Is there a boat?” Gamden asked.
Arn rolled his eyes and turned to survey the flat, ocean horizon. Gamden started to chuckle and soon Arn joined him. They laughed for a few minutes, before Arn shook his head and growled, “Stop asking that. It shouldn’t be funny.”
But it was. Gamden had asked him almost every other day for the last…. Arn had no idea how many days they had been on the island. Months. He had watched the Tear of the Moon come and go. The last time he had seen the small white companion in the sky, Arn had been hunting with—what was his name? Loklar. Arn smirked. Loklar. He had let that fool die in a rocky pit.
“Should we eat it today?” Gamden asked.
Arn turned his face back to the trees. There was one coconut left. The others were still flowering. “We should wait.”
“Should we?” Gamden asked. “We had the last one a month ago. Or more. It was before the Tear started in the sky.”
Arn closed his eyes. The sun was scorching hot against his hair-strewn, half-bald scalp. The water was cool against his folded legs. The thought of the rich, oily milk inside the coconut made his stomach clench tighter than a thigh muscle. He would have vomited if there was anything else in his stomach than the blood leaking from his gums. “Fine,” he said.
The first obstacle to their goal was getting the coconut down. The last two they had eaten had eventually fallen off the tree, but this one had not. They devised a system to shake the tree back and forth; Gamden stood on the shady side, while Arn stood on the sunny side. They took turns pushing, their wiry arms scraping against the bark as often as they managed to budge the trunk.
Just when Arn was ready to give up and wait for the nut to fall on its own, they heard the shaking leaves crack. Gamden leapt to the side as the coconut plummeted downward. It cracked off the back of his hand and he shouted, “Sea and stars! Curses! That hurt.” He cradled his hand while Arn reclaimed the large brown fruit. Though he had eaten coconut already, it still seemed to be the strangest thing to eat.
They had a small collection of rocks near the second palm tree. Arn chose a few to make a stone base and selected the sharpest to place in the center of the pattern. “Go check the water, if you’re not going to help,” Arn told his fellow survivor.
Gamden muttered profanities as he marched across the scalding sands to their moisture trap. Arn lifted the coconut over his head and brought it down on the bed of rocks. The sharpest rock stuck in the bark-like shell. He pried it out and quickly held up the coconut in case he had reached the inside. No milk dribbled out, so he replaced the rock and raised the coconut again. This time, his left hand’s trembling grip slipped off and he smashed his fingers off the rocks at the same time that he brought the coconut down onto the sharpest. Thankfully, he avoided landing it on his left hand, but he held up his skeletal fingers to examine the new bruises. He vividly remembered smashing his face off rocks on Scoa Isle—the day he had been rewarded with his ugly features.
“It’s broken!” he called, as Gamden came striding back toward him with the fur sack of water.
“Your hand?” Gamden asked.
Arn shook his head and showed Gamden the damage to the coconut shell. He gingerly picked away a few pieces of the shell and then lifted the coconut over his head. The rich, bittersweet milk filled his mouth with wet relief. He passed the fruit to his friend and leaned back against the shaded sand to savour his drink.
“That’s good,” Gamden sighed. “Oh, that’s good.”
Arn nodded and reached out for his turn again. Once they finished the milk, they broke the shell open to crack apart the course fiber inside. The thick pulp was hard to eat with their infected mouths and rotting teeth, but they needed every nutrient it held. This part was far less enjoyable than the liquid.
As Gamden took a turn with the brown shell, Arn looked wistfully across the waves. “I tried to lead people once,” he said. “I thought I knew what was best for them, but I did more damage than I fixed.”
Gamden looked up. They didn’t have a relationship of sharing. Their lives off this island were no more. There was no point dwelling on the past.
But Arn was not a thinker like Jorik, the old herbalist back home. He was a man who acted. Saying this out loud was the only way for him to make it true. “If I had followed, instead of led… I wouldn’t be here.”
“But then what would be the point?” Gamden asked.
He had taken the question right off Arn’s tongue. He inhaled deeply. “I don’t know,” he said, and reached out for the coconut once more.
It was the most they had eaten in days and they decided to save most of the nut for the next day. They were lucky if they caught two little fish a day. Prowling the waves with a spear was growing harder and harder as their bodies shrivelled. The truth, which Arn was afraid to put into words, was that their days were very numbered. True starvation would be upon them before the next Moon waxed.
“I really don’t know,” Arn repeated, as he laid back on the sand.