Moving Day

For a precious child of God, Mamie, on her birthday.

As I wake on the island I’ve grown to know as loneliness, I hear the raging red waters swirl around the desolate island I’ve grown comfortable on. A faint call echoes across the waters.

And I know I’m on the island because my eyelids feel sewn shut, and it takes a great effort to pry them loose with my thumb and forefinger. When the sliver of sun pushes through the slit I’ve made, they sting and I roll to my side beneath the shade of a single briny palm left on the lone, decaying tree.

As if it had a mind of its own, the sun speeds across the sky and my shade joins the dance—the perfect partner in a dance against my slumber. I wake and curse myself, “the sluggard” but I roll once more into the shade.

Other days I wake before the sun on my island. I climb the tree to inspect the growing coconut, hoping that tomorrow it will be ripe enough to eat. I inspect the knotted net I’ve tied to my palm tree and see that I’ve caught nothing. I curse myself, “the fool” because even my passive endeavors leave me hungry.

An echo of a voice carried along by the wind pierces my cracked and bleeding ears. My chest races and I run to the water as a crescent of the sun beams across. The hairs on my neck rise and warm as my hard-cracked feet sting, wandering into wet sand toward the sea.

The voice is drowned by my cries from the paint between the bleeding cracks in my feet. Two crabs I don’t have the strength to catch fight over the drips of blood undulating from the shore to the sea with each passing wave. I fall to my bottom and punch the sand after I realize I don’t have a wet tear to shed in my scorched body.

“Impossible!” I yell in my mind. My parched tongue doesn’t have a drop to spare for such anger. I’ve been here so long I’ve learned to keep it inside on my island. I can’t stomach strength wasted. I can’t leave. “Impossible!”

I curse myself “the doubter” and huddle beneath the broken palm tree. Cracked from when I had the strength to use the net as a rope to curse myself, (once and for all) “the damned.”

Three ships visit my lonely island. The first, a great ship promising wealth, but they throw me overboard and I wake up again on my island. My coconut, my net and a single ration of crackers I buried have been stolen.

The voice across the water is drowned out by the motor of a yacht that arrives on my island. Alas, I’m saved from spending time with my wretched self! But they only stay long enough to unload an unusual cargo. They take me onboard with trepidation but are tickled at themselves after they clothe, feed and booze me. “You are much easier now!” They cry. But as soon as my wounds bleed through their fine clothing, I wash up again on the island.

I drown myself in sorrow on booze. “I don’t believe you!” I yell at the voice and crack open another crate of the strange cargo. I hope this drink is stronger than the last. It is. The voice grows faint again.

Each morning I am numb to my cuts in the briny sea as I wash the vomit from what’s left of my fine clothes, now threadless where I sit out my days. The only thing keeping them from falling off my body is the threads woven into my scars where cracked wounds once bled.

I lament and curse myself, “the alcoholic” as I shake in the night at the bottom of the empty crate. My eyes flit open. Sweat drips down my face and I howl at the moon for being so bright and damn it unless it gives me another drink.

The moon shines bright, twinkling like a faraway star, but says nothing. My body convulses, the veins in my neck bulge, my hardened muscles cramp as I extend my shaking fist as high as I can before collapsing in the high corner of the crate where vomit has not yet collected and hardened.

As I lay shivering in my sweaty threadless rags, my ear cranes up from a chunk of palm tree I’ve named pillow. A faint voice I haven’t heard in what seems like ages calls for me across the water.

“Impossible!” I yell, curled on my side. “You ask too much!” But I listen for a response. A trickle of light shines into the crate. Deep down, I always knew the voice would respond, which is why I didn’t bother to listen. If the first thing seemed a lie, then why should I listen to such a voice at all? “I am hopeless!” I curse myself. Nothing else helped you off your island. It is yours, after all. Who will take care of it when you are gone? You own it. Where’s your responsibility?

I bury my head in the crook of my arm and sob dry tears. “Come!” I yell. “Come! I dare!...” But my words are choked out and all is still. The red sea calms so that I can hear fish jump from and splash back into the water. Water splashes like crystal beneath the iron-hot moon.

My battered body hoists itself from weathered hands that grip the sides of the crate. Curiosity defeating aching joints as I hear… is it fish in the net? No, something I’ve never heard before. Quiet, yes, but they are like gentle splashes, like footsteps across the water.

I don’t see them, but for the first time I know there is someone there. Out on the water, waiting for me. I feel the light of the moon on my face. A gust of wind whips my long matted hair into a frenzy behind me, followed by a smell so sweet it must be honeyed oil mixed with blackberries on a warm breezy summer night.

Dumbfounded, I nod toward the voice. Toward the steps on the water and scramble from my crate, falling in rocky dirt to my hands and knees. I feel my frailty for the first time in ages. I think to curse myself, but before I utter the thought, the voice whispers. I find my courage and crawl on hands and knees through the coarse sand, to the fine sand where my shaking body gives out. I collapse in dry powder. The still warm sand clings to my sweating face as I wish for another inch closer to my last hope. “Just go,” I tell myself, but I don’t. How can I?

I raise my cracked lips and whisper, sputtering sand from the cracks of my mouth, “help.”

In words that cannot explain, I feel myself led to the wet sand where the light of the moon reflects from the water to my eyes and I feel my arms and legs crawling into the water.

I shake my head. How could I be so stupid? But I remember that I am a dead man, anyway. At the end of his life. My hands tremble toward the sweet breeze and dip into the stinging waters. I lift a mirror of water I hold in my hand beneath my face. The moon gives enough light for me to see the wrinkled wretch my island created; I created.

With a sigh, I bring the water to my lips and lick it with my dry tongue. Fresh life surges through my body. From my mouth I feel the faint twitch of a dying heart beat steadily like a drum. My aches vanish. Disturbed at a foreign sensation in my face, I probe my mouth with hands, smooth and new. My lips have formed a smile. A smile. A smile on lips once damned! It pains my face to feel it widen, but I don’t stop my lips. I don’t dare!

“It’s true!” I mutter and realize my voice has returned. “It’s true!” I yell as I look across the trail of light the moon has left, pointing toward the invisible voice. I reach back for more water, but as I do, the island shakes. Instinctively, I reach back for my crate but stop short of a wondrous sight.

A dark line emerges from the center of the moonlight, growing closer and closer. I gasp in horror as the darkness grows wider toward me until it is nearly upon me. The water pulls apart at my feet and they discover dry and solid ground where I once fell into shifting dampness. I hear the voice once more say a little louder than a whisper, “Come.”

I nod and walk down between the parted water. The moon lights my path once again. The darkness that seemed to rip the light in two had vanished, defeated by the light. I looked at the water at first for fear but then at horror as I expected to see fish and sea life but only saw death and decay. Skeletons piled beneath crates filled with stones and other horrors I wish to forget.

The voice spoke clearly, as if we sat across a table from one another as I walked toward an unfamiliar shore. “Never will I leave you nor forsake you. Come. Follow me.”

I nodded with a strength I didn’t know I could have. A strength I knew I didn’t deserve, but I was so thankful I didn’t mention it to my new friend for fear they would take it back. Finally, I believed the voice. What a merciful voice it is.

Copyright © 2022 by Matt Antis. Originally published on November 10, 2022 by Ink Jot Kingdom.