As he stood, unmoving, the man tried to recall why he had come to where he had come, but he was unsuccessful. He shifted his feet a little and let out a sigh. He began to walk forward with brisk steps but stopped soon after. The fog was unchanging, and the wild grass, scattered with small white flowers, appeared the same as a few steps prior. The man looked up. He couldn’t see the sun. The sun did not deign to show itself to him, he thought, accursed man that I am.
The man was wearing blue denim jeans and had on some shoes – Jordan 1s – which had had their original release five years prior, at which time the man had just turned thirty-three. He received the shoes as a gift from his girlfriend, at the time seven years his junior. Also at the time she’d had dyed blonde hair – blonde hair that bounced in the wind and reflected the sunlight and stuff. She was very precious to the man.
***
He still wore the jacket to remember this feeling, or so it seemed when he put it on and saw himself in a mirror. But now he was far from a mirror, from quicksilver or any reflective surface, here on this small island with its field and its little forest and coastline, all tucked away and swaddled by fog, which he looked at again.
The day was progressing slowly in the field, so the man became more decisive. He feared the night and wished, like all of us, to do something in the day to ease the burden of what lay ahead. He wanted to wash his hands of the day’s end. The day continued.
He walked perhaps seven hundred metres; the tall grass started to appear in little foggy patches and then the sand began and then the shore was visible and then water was heard and perhaps three metres in front of him it was iced on top by fog.
The sea on this isle was very calm all the days he had been there and he expressed his pleasure for seeing it so on this day by finding a small rock wherever he could and throwing it into the fog that hovered over the water. He heard the plop sound it made in conjunction with the water that remained the same despite its interruption and invasion by a foreign body.
***
He simply kept running because it felt good to and he could control his thoughts although they were beginning to creep back in because the fog looked a little different towards the end of the field and then suddenly he realised he was at the end of the field and shuddering to a stop like a speeding car with the handbrake yanked he looked out over the sea from a small cliff maybe three metres tall and thanked Everything that he had stopped in time and that he hadn’t abandoned all thought entirely totalisingly and completely because he was there, on the other side of the island.
***
It was a ball of foil, nestled in a spot between two rocks which seemed to be intentionally designed for it to sit there for the exact eight day period it had likely remained since the man had tried to throw it away in a fit of joyful rage upon his arrival to the island by means of which he had been trying to recall prior but had neglected to remember because of other concerns which haven’t been described but now were recalled propitiously by the man as his knees made comfort with the earthy rock of the cliff. Many emotions ran through the man like ants which he determined to observe as they motioned him to clasp in his hands his heavy head with its thick singular pulsing vein. This protruded from the left side of his head just at the point where the forehead meets the corner of the hairline.
The ball of foil was not a ball of foil when it arrived on the shore of the island. In fact, it was stationed on the head of the man, and it had resembled a ceramic bowl in its shape, although one that had been inverted and placed to rest comfortably on the dome of the man’s skull. This hat would commonly be referred to as a tinfoil hat. The man was wearing this for complex reasons that he himself could scarcely understand, but which could be compared accurately to the fear of the night that had bothered him with constancy over the last eight days on the island.
***
The man had left home. He had abandoned ship. Not ship. But home. And he had found a little boat on which to row. He had been searching for one place – St Brendan’s Isle. This island, a hallmark of Irish mythology, is very interesting, for numerous reasons, the main one being that no one has ever found it since it was conceived as an idea in the minds of men. Such as it is, the isle was not meant to be found by anyone apart from the man.
***
The man had begun his life with a lovely family around him, that cared for him, that raised him in a way that met all the needs that are there. For example, they showed him love and gave him stickers when he did his homework and they would roll him down the hill when he asked or push him on the swing and he was never left to do it all alone. This smattering of love developed in the man a certain standard for how it was that he felt he ought to be treated by the world. For he was accustomed to having a kind shoulder ever-present at both his left and right side and was never left to his own devices for too long. He went to school and made friends and was the epitome of what a teacher might describe as ‘well-adjusted’, which meant that he caused no problems, did his work as was asked, and also lacked the flame within him that might suggest grander designs for his life than a salaried office gig and another well-to-do family keeping the ball rolling for the family name. This, however, is not the way that life had made his plan.
Each man has a few serious questions of him asked at one or perhaps two points in his life and at these moments both the will of God and the will of man coalesce into an arrow that fires with certainty to force an answer to these questions not riddled with cowardice, or so they say. For some - a rare few - their answer becomes, from I am afraid, something else. That something else takes you places, or so they say.
But that does not always go so well. That is why we have here the man and his island. Take heed from him what you will. Whatever That Is.
notes
- This story was assembled from a much larger block of text. Tried to pare away everything I could and leave it bare and blank
- Really though, it's unfinished. That rancid posturing at the end about 'the questions every man is asked' is hollow
- I avoided finishing this story properly because I have never finished anything. But I get closer with each attempt. One step at a time