No Different Than The Other Animals

Dirty fingers ripped the worn fabric in two. The stitches were barely holding the stained linen shirt together anyway. It was the last piece of the world that he had left. Everything else was broken or eaten or at the bottom of the ocean.

Those same dirty fingers, bruised and bloody at the knuckles, gripped the large rock he had been using for weeks. He had expected his grip to get better, his arms to get stronger, but without food and restful nights, of course this wasn’t going to happen.

He smashed the large rock against the trunk of a fallen palm tree. His hands reverberated painfully with each hit, but the trunk barely had a dent. It didn’t matter how long it would take, it’s not like he had somewhere else to be.

He clawed at loose bark, stripping it slowly in as long of pieces as he could manage. A fingernail on his right hand snapped off. He bit his lip and kept going.

The isle he was stranded on was almost cartoonishly small. If had a football, and his old strength, he could easily throw it from one end of the island to the other. He just had coconuts, and he didn’t want to throw those. There was a small band of rhesus monkeys that would steal things from him when he wasn’t looking. At first he thought they were cute and possibly a sign that he would get rescued. Someone had to have brought the monkeys here. Maybe that someone would come back. Or maybe the island was close enough to a larger island were more monkeys, and even people, lived. Maybe someone would go boating one day and see him, save him, stop this endless nightmare.

At the end of the second month on the isle, he started to like them a lot less. Their creepy beady black eyes. Their fingers like elongated maggots. Their nighttime screeching. There was one in particular that would follow him around. He caught that one picking through his beard when he was sleeping one night. It disgusted him, to be treated no different than the other animals. He gave that one a name, so he could curse at it better. Morgan. The name of his first long term girlfriend. She was a real bitch.

He lost count of the days after three and a half months. It wasn’t that he got lazy or forgot to mark it in his rock piles, his system was good and it made him feel like he was living in the same world as all the people he hadn’t seen since the accident. He would pick specific rocks, smooth ones, the kind that are nice to hold in the hand. He would carry it with him all day, then at the end of the day, he put it in a pile. One pile for bad days. One pile for okay days. One pile for really bad days. One morning, coming back from the southern beach where he could sometimes catch a crab, he saw Morgan gathering rocks into its arms. He screamed at it. Morgan screeched back then ran, the rocks still in its arms. He followed Morgan into the brush, yelling the whole way, that fucking bitch. When he caught up to it, Morgan threw a rock at his head. Then another. He bent down to pick it up and throw it back, but froze when he finally looked down at the ground. There were small smooth rocks everywhere, the kind that are nice to hold in the hand. He stopped counting the days after that.

Today he felt great. He had finally finished the raft. All that bark stripping and trunk smashing and beach grass braiding was done. He stepped back to admire his vessel. It was, technically, a sailboat. There was a deck. There was a hull. It had a small compartment where he could store food and even partially take cover should it rain if he backed in, crouched, and had his legs stick out. There was a mast and a boom and a mainsail. The stains on the mainsail, his old linen shirt, kind of looked like Argentina. Nothing about the sailboat was big. But it would get him off this tiny isle, back to civilization, away from fucking Morgan.

The boat sat on the rocky shore next to the southern tide pool. The sun was setting and the ocean was calm. He almost wanted to leave right then. Why not? That would make him that much closer to other people again. He could have a beer. A hot shower! Fresh underwear. He paused. He had forgotten about underwear. He was fully naked. His entire body was over tanned. His skin was like cheap jerky stretched over bone. He scratched his beard. His beard! It was so wiry and yet greasy. He stepped closer to the tide pool, leaning over to catch his reflection. At first, he couldn’t make out what he saw. Had he really not looked at himself for so long. This creature that looked back at him looked so foreign. And so weak. And so dirty.

He cut his greying beard and mousey brown hair with the edge of a broken shell. He scrubbed every part of his body he could reach with the husk of a hairy coconut. He chewed his long fingernails, the ones that hadn’t been ripped off, down to a respectable length. His toenails too. He slept very well that night, feeling like a million bucks. He had dreams about an arcade game that he hadn’t play since he was a kid. He was going to buy that arcade game when he got back.

The rain was pummeling down. He had been out to sea for three hours, at the mercy of the winds. He couldn’t see the isle anymore. Lightning struck. It was close. He started to shiver. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe he should have waited longer for someone to come save him. The waves were tossing the little sailboat back and forth and under and around. He couldn’t tell which way was North anymore.

Raindrops pelted him now. The wind ripped around him. His linen shirt mainsail torn to shreds. He scoot his butt backwards and into the hull and bumped into something furry.

It scampered out of the hull, on to his ducked head and screeched at him. Fucking Morgan. It had snuck on the boat and been hiding behind his storage of coconut and dried crab meat. He was too cold and scared to do anything but scoot as far into the hull as could. He let Morgan settle on to his lap as the waves grew larger and angrier.

There was a CRACK of lightning that lit up the small sailboat and massive waves around him. His eyes were pried wide open by the sight of the incoming wave the size of a New York City skyscraper.

Coughing, his left eye peeled open then shut again tight from the bright sun. The sand here was so fine, so soft. Not like the rocky beach of the isle. He heard voices around him. He didn’t know the language. He didn’t know if could speak anyway. His throat burned. He felt hands grabbing him, pulling him away from the water. Someone threw a towel around him. Someone gave him a glass bottle. A beer!

They left, running away, shouting. They would come back, he was sure of it. He put the bottle to his mouth, threw his head back, took a giant swig. And immediately spit out. Had beer always been so awful? Is this what he had been missing?

He looked down the beach. It was nice. Dawn on a tourist beach, no one had arrived for their day at the beach just yet. Just the few beach rental crew who had arrived early to set out the chairs and umbrellas and funny little pedal boats.

He put the beer bottle down and stood up. There was something on top of one of the pedal boats, something small and brown and furry. Something with elongated maggot fingers. Fucking Morgan.

He stroked its back gently. Morgan stirred, it looked so weak, but it was alive.

The waves clapped against the little pedal boat. Like an old man slapping his knee at a good joke. He smiled and pet Morgan across the back as it sat in his lap, curled up and sleepily watching the horizon. They both had their eyes on the endless sea.