Island Vacation

TW: Sexual and physical violence, self-harm, and generally unpleasant things.

Dressed in a faux leopard skin pant suit, Karen Teale watched despondently as glittering singles became intimate pairings, their insistent hands touching, eyes flashing, faces flushed with new love.  She stared sadly at her empty wine glass while trying to ignore the sloppy drunk with whom she’d been seated at the gala. A steward poured another glass of Chardonnay, and two sequined dancers razzle-dazzled across the ballroom floor.  Karen slapped the drunk’s hand away, made an excuse, and retired alone to her budget-class cabin aboard the cruise ship.

The following day, at the gym, the spandex and thong women, sculpted with teen glutes and sinewy thighs, pounded out the miles along a row of treadmills. Karen envied these women, their grim unmade faces and casually tousled hair. She made desultory visits to the mystifying gym machines until the towel boy confronted her. “Perhaps you are lost, madam?”, he suggested, corralling her through the glass exit door and into the corridor.

The notice board revealed that Primitive Living Will Change Your Life. Karen sat in the back row of the conference room and listened to a pretty young woman promote a self-help company. An episode of a TV program, Naked and Afraid, suddenly projected onto a screen, and it revealed a tough-looking amazon, her face smeared red with blood, her body scratched and bruised, brazenly naked, eyes aflame; she appeared to be leading a limping man through the African bush. “This could be you, too”, said the young woman in a hollow tone coinciding with a long-distance shot of the warrior woman standing triumphant atop a remote ridge mountain somewhere in East Africa, but when the video finished and the seminar ended, the young woman was reluctant to answer Karen’s questions, “It’s not recommended for people over forty, and you really need to be super fit”, she said. Karen took a glossy brochure anyway.

The sloppy drunk reappeared at the bar that night, “I know you”, he said, slurry with booze, “you’re the bitchy cat lady”. His breath stank of alcohol and cigarettes, and of rotting gut. “Leave me alone, please” she urged, but he pantomimed the motion of cat claws with his hands, “Pussy cat pussy cat, I love you”, a ghastly lilting parody. He placed his hand on her stockinged knee, and she kicked him in the shin. “Ugly old bitch”, spat the drunk spitefully, “I know your type”.

She left the lounge bar. The cruise ship had Karen trapped. On the empty promenade deck, she imagined lunging into the darkness beyond the railing. Death would be quick; her body would be lost at sea. That would be it.

In Karen’s cabin, the warrior woman stared fearlessly back at her from the cover of the Primitive Living brochure. She made a phone call.

Two days later, the cruise ship passengers disembarked for the afternoon at a quaint New England, two by two. At the bottom of the aluminum ramp Karen donned a cheap pair of plastic shades and turned right onto a spur, a floating dock. She cast a glance back at the shuffling holidaymakers.

Karen was greeted by a bronzed young man, dressed nautically; the Primitive Living logo embroidered onto his shirt pocket. He seemed confused by her appearance, skeptical, he looked past her at the nearby crowd of people. “Mrs. Teale?" he quizzed. She affirmed, and he stiffened to attention, “I am Captain Mike Greaves” he said, gesturing to the red-liveried motorboat that idled dockside., “Just the one bag, ma’am?”. His manner made Karen feel ancient. She paused unsteadily before stepping down from the dock onto the platform at the stern of the boat, but with the offer of a reassuring hand she lunged across the gap. “Thank you, Mike”. 

“Captain, if you don’t mind”, he replied pleasantly, “Are we ready, Mrs. Teale?” 

“Can anyone be ready for something like this?” Karen said, losing confidence fast.   She felt large, and ugly standing next to this lean and handsome man, the sort of man to whom she ordinarily appeared invisible. She brushed down her clothing as if trying to smooth out the wrinkles, “I thought you’d be a woman” she said, and almost giggled.

Captain Greaves ignored her comment, grabbed a clipboard from the cockpit dashboard. “Formalities first. I need you to sign the contract, waivers, et cetera” he said “if you’re sure you want to proceed, that is” he added.

Karen removed her sunglasses revealing red-rimmed eyes and a puffy face. This was the point of no-return. Over her shoulder, she could see the cruise ship passengers ambling aimlessly along the waterfront, lingering at tacky tourist shops.  “Oh, let’s just get on with it!” she said, impetuously handing over her credit card and signing the documents.

Captain Greaves gave her a mock salute, stepped into the cockpit, and turned on the ignition. The motorboat throbbed beneath their feet. “I know it sounds strange”, Karen said, fishing for a connection with this man, “but I feel like I’m in the wrong body. I’m hoping the island will change things for me”. He nodded agreement but busied himself with untying the boat from the dock. “I guess for you the strange must seem ordinary?” she declared. Captain Greaves pushed the throttle forward, the boat slid from the dock, then accelerated across the bay toward the distant archipelago. He handed her a small first-aid kit and shouted, “the emergency beacon is attached to a pole near the drop-off location, you can’t miss it. Just hit the red button”.

“What about sunscreen” shouted Karen, a bit sheepish.

“It’s best to stay out of the sun in the beginning”, he replied loudly.

Karen watched the mainland recede into the distance. She was feeling hopeful, and untethered when the boat drifted to a halt near a black sand beach in a cove of a small tree-covered island. “Fisher Isle”, declared Captain Greaves. 

 “I’m not sure I can do this?”, said Karen.

“It’s only about twenty-five yards to the beach, and I can get a bit closer if that helps”.

“No, I mean go naked” she replied, “the website and TV show made it all seem so easy, but I don’t think I can strip in front of a stranger, a man that is”.

“Of course, no problem. I can wait in the cabin, if you prefer”, he started to clear up the deck. She was a little bit disappointed.

“Oh, blow it!” said Karen, “Here goes nothing”, and in a whirl of abandoned motion, she undressed with her back to him, threw her clothing to the deck, smiled coyly over her shoulder, and then plunged stark-naked into the water. The cold was exhilarating, and so was the rushed striptease, but when she looked back at the boat, Captain Greaves was all business, apparently unmoved, offering not even a convivial smile, which made Karen feel like a desperate and clumsy fool. He threw the first-aid kit into the water, “I’ll be back in twenty-one days, but you can activate the beacon anytime.” He fired up the engine, gave her two thumbs up, and the boat began to slide through the water. 

Ashore, Karen drip-dried in the late afternoon sun, the gentle sea-breeze licking at her body. She walked awkwardly on delicate feet across the rough-edged rocks, found the emergency beacon, then swished through thigh-high brambles and ferns to the elevated outcrop of granite, Fisher Island cave, and the promised freshwater spring.  Atop the outcrop, watching the sun set over the mainland, she surveyed the small, deserted island in an expanse of shimmering sea. For a moment she felt like the warrior woman.

Dusk encroached, Karen retreated to the cave pursued by swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes, which attacked every inch of exposed skin. It was pitch-black, cold, damp, her teeth chattered, her limbs ached, her head throbbed, she scratched at her thighs and arms until they bled. It was a night of unrelenting torment, interrupted only by fleeting hallucinations that quickened her heart and addled her mind.

At first light, Karen sipped water from the spring, picked and ate some berries from a bush, and she stumbled back to the black-sand beach, to the emergency beacon. She was about to admit defeat, but the early morning warmth, and a small pulse of energy gave her a glimmer of hope. She returned to the cave, to the cloud of flying insects, resolved to take action. She scratched a tally-mark onto the wall of the cave, drank liberally from the spring, then smothered her body with slime-green mud and moss that she scooped from a damp hollow.

Karen explored the island, foraging for berries, beachcombing for tools, scavenging the forest floor and tidal pools for food. The mirror-like surface of a rock pool offered her an unfamiliar reflection of her naked body, which she examined with a mixture of disgust and prurient interest. Night approached, she returned to the cave dragging a rotting burlap sack in one hand, and an assortment of mollusks, crustaceans and kelp in the other.  She applied another layer of muddy slime to her body, then rolled in a carpet of harvested sorrel and fern fronds, and crudely protected in this manner, she curled into a ball on the sandy floor of the cave, and partially covered by the stinking burlap sack, she grimly endured a second sleepless, freezing night. Tomorrow she would activate the beacon.

But the sun, water and a handful of berries restored her spirits again. Karen saluted the rising sun at the eastern end of the island and its warmth caked the burlap and mud thick and hard like a shell, so that it would not wash off when she walked neck-high into the ocean. Emerging from the waves, confounded by this strangeness, she scarcely noticed as tiny squid swam between her legs and penetrated into her body cavities, attracted by the scent of her urine. 

That night she slept. In the morning she picked ticks and leeches from her legs and flicked them into the undergrowth, then etched another tally-mark into the wall of the cave.

A seagull, wounded, dying on the strand. She crushed its skull with her heel. It tasted fishy. We are what we eat, she observed. 

A spider crept through a fissure in her mud cocoon and laid eggs along her spine. He skin felt like it was on fire.

The next tally mark was inscribed with blood.

On the black sand beach, Karen’s stomach spasmed, she bent over double and retched, then lay fetal, heaving rhythmically, unsure of which orifice would betray her first. Vomit stuck to her face, neck and breast, diarrhea and menstrual blood to her thighs. She howled in anguish, rocking back and forth, overcome by fever and nausea. The stench of her excrement drifted across the island, attracting feral mammals, crows and lizards, which stood vigil overnight, praying in their own way for resolution.

I should have drowned in the ocean, thought Karen. Another tally mark if she ever got back to the cave.

A vulture eagle gyred downwards, defying the thermals, descending curiously toward the rancid unmoving object. It landed on the sand a stone’s throw from Karen’s supine body, hopped closer, then closer again.  She lashed out, grabbed the bird by the neck, leapt to her feet, and thrashed it against a log until it lay dead, its neck broken. She beheaded the carrion-bird with the serrated edge of a scallop shell and sucked blood from its neck. The plucked feathers she glued into her hair with toad-spawn.

That night she added another tally mark to the cave wall, only she did so with the hoary talon that was forming where there’d previously been a manicured fingernail. 

Karen’s molars loosened, fell from her scurvy-gum mouth. Her face elongated, the cheek bones became sharp and angular, creating permanently grim and unmade face, beneath her toady, tousled hair. She was getting stronger, pounding out the miles.

A red motorboat visited from the mainland. It slowly circumnavigated the island, then left.

Karen’s body shrank, she came unstuck from the inside of the rigid clay carcass. She felt intense motion in her tummy, deep in her bowels and uterus, but not unpleasant, ticklish, in fact not unpleasant at all. That night she dreamed of the captain.

The she-thing shrugged, the shell of burlap and mud cracked and fell from her shoulders, revealing scaley breasts, the hard contours of a ribcage, a spiney ridged-back from which thousands of spiders emerged. Her new body reflected dark green in the still water of the rock pool, and from somewhere between her legs a long pinkish tumescent tail whipped back and forth, independently.  She felt weightless and unfettered. She felt sinuous and reptilian. She felt rampant and feline.

Twenty-one tally marks. The she-thing waited impatiently on the black sand beach, her tail flopping to-and-fro.

From the aboard the red boat, Captain Greaves was astounded; she was slender, lithe and tan, and moved with strange and sensuous ease from the shore to the ocean. She slipped, serpentine, through the water toward the boat, then out of sight. 

Captain Greaves was leaning over the gunwale, searching the shadowy depths for Mrs. Teale, when the iridescent she-thing erupted into the air and landed in a muscular crouch on the transom, it stared at her, its eyes aflame. She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, but with one kiss she consumed his manhood, and with the next she silenced his scream and sucked the lungs from his chest.