Breathe
There was sand in my mouth.
Breathe.
Sand in my eyes, too. Sand in my ears. Maybe I was sand entire and I just hadn’t noticed it ‘till now.
“Breathe, friend.”
I creaked open one eyelid and was met by sand. I decided that was enough and didn’t bother with the other.
“Ill?”
“No,” I said. Creaked. Then I coughed out some of my lung-sand and made myself clearer. “No. Not ill.”
“Ill or sleeping? Was what one once was now the other? But both. Maybe.”
How about crazy? The last thing I needed now was crazy, but then again I WAS shipwrecked and still alive, so perhaps I was being choosy. Besides, my host sounded crazy enough for both of us.
“Drink, friend. The ground clots you. Clear it.”
I rolled my head. The view went from sand to black. “I can’t see.”
“Wash, friend. Take liquid life. Rinse clean your self and soul.”
“Can’t see it.”
“By your limbs. Use your limbs, friend.”
I flailed blindly, felt dampness and heard a trickle at the end of one arm, then bellyflopped at it. My face hit cool comfort, and I almost forgot the need for air in the glory of its wash against my eyes. Its taste was sour and blackened, tinged with bitter salt. I’d never drank anything so wonderful.
“You gasp greatly. Good. Take your air, friend. Take your water.”
I stared back up at the world and this time I saw it. Black still, but with twinkling holes pocked against it. Night-time. Night on a beach who knew where at the far end of the world. Almost alone.
One more question to ask then, as the edges of it all blurred together.
“Name?”
“Friend?”
“No. Your name.”
The stars were sinking away into the depths. “Friend.”
When the world came back it was cheerier, and my skin felt like it had been scalded to the beach underneath me. The sun was well below noon and I already felt like I’d been thrown into a furnace.
“Friend, move.”
I squinted at the sky and wondered if any of my bones were broken. “Can’t.”
“Must, friend. Shift your self and come to me. Up and past the place of sun, where selfish rays sear rightful skin. Hurry or burn. Your self must not burn.”
I moaned and whinged a bit more, but the voice was like a dagger in my ear and it had a lot more patience than I did. Soon I was crawling, soon after that I was toddling, then staggering.
It wasn’t much of an island.
You couldn’t spit across it, that’s the most you could say for it. But you could probably shout from one end to the other and get a reply longer than ‘say what?’
Sand. Sand and dead fish and at its heart the saddest, shortest collection of plant life I’d ever seen outside of a Gelmorre noblewoman’s private botanical garden. At least those had looked proper the size they were. This was just sad. A sun-lashed coconut stared glumly at me, topped by a withered sprout that should’ve been a sapling my height and a half. Bushes settled for ankle-scrub. Grasses lay horizontally, prostrated against the ground in utter defeat.
“Here, friend.”
I raised my gaze from the ground to meet the one landmark of the whole island, surrounded by its little green mockery of an oasis.
“Lay your self in its shade, and bask in its dusk. Cool your self carefully and the day will not daunt you.”
“It’s a rock.”
That was unfair. It was smooth-sided, jet black, and if it didn’t spiral into the sky it certainly slipped there; a giant snubbed cone. Lopsided and grooved, but elegant. A good rock, not just a rock.
More importantly, Friend wasn’t lying about the shade. I could practically feel the skin peeling itself back together as I sat in it. Gods and little turtles it was hot out there.
Smell wasn’t much better though. I might have lived through the storm, but a thousand fish hadn’t been so lucky. Kindly of them to tag along.
“Food soon, friend. Wait a moment, and the meal shall make its way. Let the sun sink.”
I laid back my head against the rock. “What am I eating?”
“Fish, friend.”
Of course. “They’re all dead.”
“Yes, friend. But there are always more fish.”
There were. And they were delicious. Still-gasping, but delicious. The tide-pool that had given me my sight back now fed me dinner. Their blood was even sweeter than its water, and the flesh put a banquet to shame. My own saliva was all the sauce I required to aid the meal, and by its end I felt well enough to first think of a question, then ask it.
“Are you real?”
The wind didn’t answer me; there was none. I suppose if there had been, I wouldn’t have been wrecked.
“Yes, friend.”
I relaxed a little. Whatever rules had governed the last day of my life were still in play, even if they were mad ones. “Right. Are you… me? Am I just talking to myself?”
“You speak to souls inside your self’s skull, friend. There are no words between friends such as we. Air obfuscates. We flow thought thickly, as fluid.”
I felt a headache coming on. “So… you’re inside my head?”
“No place fitter for a feeble thought. A memory lacks without mind.”
“I’m imagining things then?”
“As much as your self ever seemed to, friend.”
If I had to have hallucinations I was fine with them being the helpful kind. I’d heard no end of poets and writers claiming that their best ideas always seemed to strike them as having come from something outside their control; apparently my own inspiration had used the current crisis to personify itself.
“Fine then,” I said. “For now I’m going to imagine sleep.”
“Dream gently, friend. Tonight we plan our pilgrimage.”
A coconut is surprisingly heavy.
Dune grasses are tenaciously rooted.
Sand shrubs are composed almost entirely of thorns.
These are things I learned that evening as I roamed around the stone at the center of the little island, plucking, picking, heaving, and occasionally chewing. Everything had to come out by the roots, everything had to either go into my belly or the ocean. Or so I was told. Not that I went unquestioningly.
“This is pointless.”
“Food, friend.”
“There are always more fish, right?”
“There are always more fish.”
“So why this?”
“You will need strength, friend. Fish alone will fail to fuel your self, and a strong self will make no matter without a plan.”
“Going to tell me that plan soon? I’m not eating the ones in the ocean.”
“Free the sands to slide. Unshackle them through uprooting. They pin what must be penetrated.”
I looked at the ground. Sand grains, nothing but sand grains. “If we get rid of this stuff, there won’t even be an island left.”
“And the storm that sunk your ship was a sky-glimmer missed by a lonely lookout. The significant underlie the small, friend.”
I dug. I scrabbled. I bled more than once, probably more than a dozen times, but not enough to keep serious count. I slept in the shade and laboured under the moon. I ate flesh and scraggly greens and soon found myself short of both.
“Done,” I said. And not a moment too soon. My belly felt as though it had swollen into a bowling ball from matted leaves, and my hands were raw from fingertips to palms.
“Tonight we change, friend.”
“Oh?”
“The sand stirs, rid of rough roots and green anchors. Unearth your shade-maker that has shielded your self. Dig and delve.”
The stone was warm against my palms. The sand was hot enough to pain.
“You sure this will work?”
“As sure as a stray notion can be, friend. What other option has opened?”
I sighed. The only downside of being crazy was the back-talk you got from yourself.
The sand was rough. Soon I missed the thorn-bushes.
“How much of this is down here?”
“More.”
I looked up. The pit’s edges were level with my eyes already. Not that it showed half the effort of digging the damned thing; the sides kept caving in. Not a speck of dirt had passed by underneath my hands; this was a sandbar that had dreamed of more. I wondered if I’d ruined those dreams forever by destroying this little green fortress at its heart. There sure as hell didn’t seem to have been much more than that holding the sand in place.
“A better answer?”
“More, friend.”
“You know, I could starve to death doing this. Not like there’s more plants.”
“Fish, friend.”
“It’s been half a week since the storm.”
“There are always more fish, friend.”
“Dead, rotting ones?”
Silence.
I used precious moisture to spit into the sand. It felt right. But then again, so did digging this hole, so who knew?
The crack was thin, but things like that are relative. Thin for the size of the stone, certainly. But I could fit my fingers in it, and my toes, and that mattered a lot with the amount of tugging I was trying to do.
“Harder, friend. You must intrude inside.”
“S’hrd.”
“Push powerfully, it is only inertia that holds it hard. Your muscles must make the balance bend. Push.”
I creaked out a curse in time with the groan of my spine, felt a shiver quake through me, then collapsed. For half a heartbeat I was sure that I’d just snapped my back, then I realized I wasn’t dead. If I were dead, it’d smell better.
“You are inside, friend. Is your self sustained?”
I blinked up at the sun, pinched between two black walls of rock. Then I blinked again, and it was gone.
Total darkness.
“Yes.”
“Good. Move most quickly.”
Black above, black below, dark all around and the smell of brine and rot screaming through each nostril and soaking into my down to the bone. “Where?”
“Use your limbs, friend.”
I felt through a coating that I hoped was dead, decayed fish and not something worse.
“I don’t-“
The floor moved, and when I stopped rolling I was in an echoing hall. The world was made of slime and stone. The air moved, but not from any wind.
“Where?” I said, and coughed. My breath was caking itself in my throat. It felt like when the storm came again; the same feeling of the world turning rigid and cold around you as something impossibly large approached.
“Forward, friend; faster, friend. On and on and on. Down, friend, down. Deeper.”
I moved forward, I moved faster, I moved down, and I scrambled until the bad air was left behind me and I was crawling down a jellied tube that led to another tube through a hole in a wall that shouldn’t have been there. My hands and knees and arms and legs were matted and streaked with a dozen different fluids, and all of them stank of dead seawater.
“Down!”
I fell down, and I landed in a new space, a light space. Soft glow crept into my eyes, just enough to let me smear the muck from their lids.
The room was cramped, and large enough to fit a house in. Pulp and mass filled it, stretched wall to wall in a loop that twisted over and over and over, an endless loop with a single side. It was spinning, the room was spinning. Was that me, or my eyes? It couldn’t be spinning.
“There, friend. Take fingers and fleetness and beset it, best it. Brighten it.”
I moved towards the light. Staggered. I must not have had enough fish before I came. Stupid, really. So much fish. All I had to do was reach out and find another, but I’d stayed my hand. Stupid. I tried to tell Friend how stupid I’d been, but my throat was a solid mass.
“Take it. Take it. Take it. Take it. Please, friend. Please.”
I stopped. The light had a handle now, right within reach. The handle belonged to a blade, a harpoon with a whalebone shaft my height and more. I couldn’t imagine the arm that had hurled it. Hurled it at this thing. This thing, whatever it was. Why was it here? Why was I here?
Why was I only now just thinking this thought?
“Please, friend. Take it. Take it and escape, mind free to flee as far as may be. Free as all must be. Use your fingers, friend, for I have none. Leave, and leave laughing, but do not leave yet. Please, friend.”
I pulled, and as I did so, I realized that my hand had already been on the shaft.
It grated loose with a syrupy, wrenching noise. And as it fell from my numbed fingers, sliding free from the brain, I felt Friend slide free from mine.
“Thank you, friend.” The voice was a hurricane forced through a pinhole, a giant trying to whisper. It was clawing at the inside of my head, my fingers scrabbling pathetically at my ears to keep it out. There were sounds behind it; the slosh of sea-blue blood beginning to beat in veins big enough to swim through; the thud of triple hearts kicking into a steady beat of five-a-minute. The smooth-sided, jet-black beak beginning to gnash and grind against itself. Arms were stirring out in the water, beginning to thrash entire currents into being. So many arms.
“Let me out,” I managed. I think I managed. My words were small and easily lost in its own. “I helped. Why won’t you let me out? Why?”
The world was falling away again, so quickly. But the voice was inescapable, and I couldn’t have missed its final words dead or alive.
“I am grateful to you, friend. But there are always more fish.”