prompt: Begin your story with somebody watching the sunrise, or sunset.
available at Reedsy
Something woke me before dawn. I hoped it was a ship, but I couldn’t see any lights. Instead, I watched the sun rise over the ocean. Low chop, there would be no merciful breeze today.
A whale breached and blew, and then another and another. If they were this close to the island on their migration, I knew there must be a shoal of fish out there. I readied my net and hoped they would drive the fish toward me.
I waded out to where the water was just above my knees, the waves reaching just below my chest. How long I stood there, net at the ready, I don’t know. When the whales herded the shoal using bubbles, a portion of them broke off, and swam straight towards the shore in their panic. I caught thirteen on the first cast, waded back out and caught another eight. They weren’t big fish, but they’d be a nice supplement to coconut, roots and leaves of whatever didn’t make me sick, and the tiny crabs that I sometimes roasted and crunched up shells and all.
The island was, I figured, about an acre, give or take. There were plenty of coconut palms, some sparse grass, and a few plants growing in the shade of the palms. Every now and then, a coconut would wash ashore with the high tide, explaining where they came from. The other plants must have hitchhiked in on them as seeds.
Smallish grey and white gulls returned every year to nest. The noise and stink were nearly unbearable at first, but by the time they left I was used to it. It gave me the opportunity to gather eggs, and the weak chicks that were either hatched too late, or too slow to develop and were left behind. The eggs were far tastier than the chicks, but I couldn’t afford to be picky.
I had stopped keeping track of the days a couple of years before, so it was always a pleasant surprise when the gulls showed up to nest. With the whales passing through, it should be sometime in the next few weeks. I replaced the palm fronds on my hut’s roof. I didn’t mind the rain so much, when it came, but could do without being covered in guano while I slept.
I gutted the fish and hung them to dry in the salt air. Fire was a luxury, and not one I employed often. My fuel was limited to coconut husks and dried guano, unless I wanted to cook; then I’d leave out the guano, as the flavor it imparted was horrendous.
The only things left of my sailboat were the now tattered and faded flags that flapped on a pole strapped to one of the palms, my logbook, and the few tools I had rescued before the broken hull washed out to the deep water. A machete that was noticeably thinner of blade than when I had started, a hatchet, now in need of a handle, fifty feet of nylon rope that I had unwound and worked into a net, and a titanium spork that had been a joke birthday gift.
With the fish hung to dry there was little to do for the rest of the day, so I checked the state of my palm skirt. I’d been living nude for at least the last seven years, but I figured out how to make a skirt like I’d seen in travel brochures, in case I was rescued. My skin had gone leathery and dark, and I probably had skin cancer by now, but that was a concern for another day. The skirt was starting to get brittle, so I mentally added replacing it to my to-do list and lay down to a nap in the shade.
A stiff, damp breeze woke me in the late afternoon. It was coming from the west, rather than the east. A storm was brewing, and the dark skies to the west confirmed it. There wasn’t much I could do, besides ride it out. Everything that could blow away was gathered and secured to one of the posts of the hut. It swayed in the wind, and I knew the roof would be blown away again, but that was just normal. I hadn’t seen a storm quite like this one since the one that had stranded me here, though.
I carried the logbook, machete, hatchet, and spork with me to the center of the island to get as much protection from the storm as possible. The tops of the palms were already bending toward the east, dropping coconuts and losing fronds to the high winds. The rain started, coming in sideways, and I had to sit, lest I be blown over. I watched as the flags, and the pole they were tied to, flew away in the winds. Now there was nothing to differentiate this island to passing ships.
I knew, at least intellectually, that the flags made no difference. I’d been here for over ten years and never saw a ship. The shipping lanes were far away from here. Still, it snuffed out the little hope I’d had for rescue.
The ground grew muddy, and rivulets of water flowed in crazy directions all around me, driven by the shifting winds at ground level. The island was nearly flat, and the wind strong enough to push the water up whatever small gradient there was.
It was perhaps an hour later that the winds and rain stopped, and the noon sky cleared. I expected to see that I was in the eye of the storm, but it had passed me by, hitting me with the northern-most part of it. When I rose, the last foot of my braid was muddy from the point where it passed my hips.
The hut was in a shambles, only the corner posts, sturdy driftwood logs sunk deep in the earth, still standing. What I at first thought was my little catch of fish strewn across the beach turned out to be hundreds of live fish, flopping about where they’d been washed ashore.
Not one to turn down a free meal or ten, I gathered them all up, gutted them, and strung them up along with my original catch. “Thank you, storm,” I croaked. I hadn’t spoken in ages and my voice sounded foreign and strange to me.
The fish strung up, and the sun getting low on the horizon, I decided to leave rebuilding the hut for another day. I walked the island perimeter, combing the beach for anything useful that might have washed ashore. The first find was a hunk of plastic netting, brittle and degraded. I’d save that for a signal fire, as it would smoke terribly, but had no other use to me.
It was on the south side of the island that I found a treasure. A heavy-duty, waterproof, plastic box of the sort that one would carry electronics or a gun. It felt heavy enough to have something in it, possibly even a pistol. Rather than open it there, I carried it with me as I made my way back to the hut.
Exhaustion overtook me, and I set the box aside, to open in the morning. My sleep was deep, no dreams, and I woke to the rising sun far too soon. I checked on the fish, which would be sufficiently dried by the next day.
Finally, I opened the box, expecting to be disappointed. Instead, I found a small solar panel, and a satellite phone. The phone had no power, but the solar panel had a cable for charging it, so I plugged it in to do its thing. I would be rescued. All I needed to do was wait a few hours for a charge and then call…somebody.
I looked at the state of the hut. It wouldn’t matter once I made the call, but my skirt was gone, blown away in the storm. “Well,” I said aloud, my voice still croaky and unfamiliar, “I need to get ready for company.”
I spent the day gathering fronds for a skirt, and the hut, and then making the skirt. Once that was finished, I checked the sat phone’s charge. It was nearly half charged, and I figured I should let it charge all the way, so I started repairing the hut, taking a break only to chew on some mostly dried fish and a coconut.
The hut’s roof was finished, but I hadn’t started on the walls. The sun was setting, and the phone was completely charged. I picked up the phone and saw a button labeled “SOS.” I set the phone down and lay on the pile of remaining fronds. I ran a hand down my side, feeling my ribs. When they first started showing up, I worried that I was starving to death, but I’d gotten along just fine since then.
Am I really fine, though? The satellite phone sat next to me, untouched, and I wondered what was holding me back. Was it fear? Would I miss my little island? Why?
Some other part of me took over, turned on the phone, and pressed the SOS button. There was a beep, and then for a few tense seconds, no other sound.
“Maritime emergency response, do you require assistance?” The voice on the other end so surprised me that I was unable to speak for a moment. I hadn’t heard another human in so long. Tears ran down my face and I began to sob. “Emergency response, can you speak?”
“I—yes,” I croaked. “Hello.”
