The Island of the Day Before

by Zuni Chopra

  She turned golden, like pure, warm sunlight, her radiance so great, I could barely look at her.

  She rose higher.

  I panicked.

  ‘A ship. I see a ship.’

  I lunged for her, the world flashing around me, and my fingers fell through twisting smoky mist, my breathing the only sound in the still, velvet night.

  The Party

  The shiny brass double doors were ridiculously difficult to heave open. They scraped against the wooden ground, a hungry lion clawing at the bars of a cage. When at last I flung them open, my bursting into the room went quite unnoticed. People – odd people, people with tiny monocles and tight purple scarves and jewellery made of cracking bone – filled up the perfectly rectangular room, pressing a little too close together at its sharp corners and sudden angles. Odd bursts of piano keys were stumbling from the beat-up record player in the corner. Quiet, hushed voices, interrupted by the occasional yelp or gasp, flooded through the thinning air. I heard a disdainful sniff; beside me, a girl with her hair wrestled into a suffocating bun, her skin icier than the diamonds on her chubby fingers, and her left eye a deeper green than her right, stood with her rigid back turned towards me, scowling with disapproval, clutching at a nearly overflowing glass of wine.

  I pressed further into the crowd, feeling the air sink down upon us all like a cyclone waiting to dance. From a darkened corner, shaded by a silvery balloon hanging low in the air, an old woman gave me a dry and chapped smile. It did not feel like a smile at all, rather another curved wrinkle etched into her sunken face. Her hair was clumps of ashy dead snakes, her fangs blunter than a mossy boulder, her gaze no longer any stonier than mine. I turned away.

  At the far end of the room, two girls, one short and the other shorter, seemed to already have made friends. They stood gossiping like neon-pink hummingbirds, cheeks glowing rose, gossiping about people who, with age, they would discover they knew nothing of, but in youth, had been their soul mates. The younger girl stood leaning against the snack table, her mother’s frilly maroon dress a tad big for her, its bells clinking in time with the music cackling past my ears. Her hands moved like a treacherous river, beating against its trampled shores, washing away any trace of a steady stream of thought. Her scarf lay limp and exhausted against her chest, covering up a splatter of dark chocolate.

  Her friend seemed, if possible, even more ecstatic. The floor beneath her was bouncy as rubber, the air around her saturated with perfume. Her voice was the product of squirrels and helium, her laugh causing the tiny sets of glasses on the table to shudder dangerously. Her shirt, too, seemed puffed full of air, glinting with large coral hearts. These two seemed to me to be the only source of free conversation in the room, and their voices rose and grew with the tide of the piano notes, chattering over one another, each pleased with her own story.

  I looked about once more, sensing this discussion was not easily joined. A man in a faded black shirt with a large ivory Japanese symbol splattered on its front was seemingly suffering the same fate. He trailed along, rubbing his rough fingers against a poorly shaved patch of stubble, muttering a made-up story about a girlfriend he’d never had to a group of sleek-haired women oblivious to his existence.

  A clink like that of ice in soda brought me back to myself. A bright clean penny, scratched with the force of the scrubbing it had received, had knocked against my foot. Before I could react, a man thin as a fir tree’s twig snatched it up with a hurried sentence of apology and explanation all at once, though the sentence in itself offered me neither. His eyes glinted far more than his pennies, his back hunched ever so slightly over his weary shoulders, his face long and darkened by the dollar bills around him. I blinked for a moment too long. Before I had a chance to open my eyes, I heard the swish of his too-tight pants, the rustle of coins within their front pockets, and the precise sound of his footsteps as he scuttled away.

  Every man was an island here. Their shores overlapped, waves collided, a greeting exchanged, and yet it seemed no one, not even me, was attending the party. The room grew smaller as the minutes went by, tick ticking past each other into ash. Eventually, I was sure, there’d be nothing left of it at all.

  The Colourless Banshee

  Once, in a land just like this, there lived a woman with riches more than she cared to count. Wrinkles drooped like lazy snakes upon her sunken face; she looked older than she really was. But of course, people are always judged by appearance, so for the time being, let’s just call her old.

  Her youth was a bright and happy thing, wild as a bucking horse. She would trail through flickering leaves in a fading autumn, burst through twinkling sunlight in the rainbow of summer, twirl though the deep violet blossoms in the vivid emerald spring.

  Yet, now she seemed to have drained of all colour, and she sat faded, smudged and grey in her large city home.

  Eating bored her, for the food, to her, had no colour any more, and for food to have flavour, it must have colour; grey would taste of mush, black would taste of ash, yellow would taste of honey draped over a fresh mint leaf … she assumed, for of course, there was no yellow any more. So she stopped eating. Wine was frequent, but it soon began to drain of its blood-red hue as well, and tasted, she was sure, all the same, all of nothing.

  She was normally a calm woman, not from peace of spirit, but from lack of feeling. But one day, she was terrified, frightened in a way she had not known she was capable of being any more. She woke up, yawning with a gusto she did not feel, to rub her wrinkled eyes. She looked down to find that the tips of her ashy fingers had smudged, melding together unrecognizably. She was melting away, like a stain washing out of the deep dark universe.

  Her heart thundered inside her, desperate, alive, awake once more. But she knew it was too late. The colour was gone, and her blood was gone, and she was nothing any more.

  So she fled to the large, open balcony, and used up all the power left in her body: she screamed. Like a man abandoned somewhere between life and death, like a soul lost within a dream it knew not how to wake from, she cried out into the early morning, the remains of her spirit wrenching out from inside of her.

  It was a shrill and horrible scream. It spoke of deep mourning: of a life long lost. It rang sharp and true, shattering the blots of cigarette smoke in the low-hanging sky. It was a scream that seemed to go on forever, on and on, past the horizon, past the cool ocean waves, past the tips of the solar system, past the flood of empty, silky black space, out and out and out. The scream was so powerful that it outlived even her. She faded away, bit by bit, giving everything to the air around her, smoky ash flaking into the breeze. And with a final harsh gust, she was no more than a wisp of wind. But her scream lingered in the air, dodging through tired alleyways and piercing into tainted chapels, forcing the people to listen, forcing them to acknowledge that a life, once wasted, once bled into a dusty pavement, can never be lived again.

  Okkie

  Every day was the same on the prairie, such that a day had no meaning. A herd had a meaning, and a harvest had a meaning, and a song had a meaning, but a day meant nothing at all. Okkie was a part of the prairie, perhaps even more so than the clouds, for the clouds would flutter and gasp and vanish, but she never really seemed to change. Her tiny dress was always white, and her tiny gumboots always yellow upon her tiny feet.

  She’d had a different name once, maybe long ago, but Father said he didn’t know quite how to say it, and Mother had forgotten to mention it before she passed away. But that didn’t make much difference to her. Okkie was just fine.

  She loved life in the open fields: the grass that pooled like water around bare feet, the blossoms blooming beneath weathered rocks, the fish splashing about in the shallows, the nearest neighbour a quarter of an hour away, a golden lump of farmland in the distance. The sky would twist and turn as it pleased, its metamorphosis from sunny to cloudy often just a sign of the times. It would burst into small showers only to disappear into a rainbow; almost as though it had be
en in a rage, but had quickly forgotten what it was angry about. Chill would blow itself about in the winters. It had snowed once, around a hundred rains ago. Okkie didn’t remember.

  She didn’t remember their neighbours too well either. They met almost every month, celebrating festivals she didn’t understand, but their names were odd and heavy on her tongue, so she’d taken to calling them Mr and Mrs. Their faces oddly rectangular, like sculptures of dry Play-Doh, and their voices were far too loud. The baby she had called Drooly. He had never seemed to get any larger, so she never bothered to ask what he should be called when he did. But she hadn’t seen him in a while either.

  So the days carried on like a flimsy scarecrow in the breeze, the sun rising and setting with a certain tired joy.

  One morning, Okkie rose before Father, before the cows, before the horses, before the morning sunrise. She could see the glow on the horizon, a dancing orange flame just beginning to eat its way across the sea-green sky. The door was shut, but only a bit. She didn’t wear her gumboots that day; the grass was wet with crystals that cooled her burning feet.

  The grass swayed with the pull of an ocean, and Okkie was lost in its depths. She found a hundred planets within a few feet of the backyard: an ant planet, a rock planet, a butterfly plant, and her most favourite – a bird feather planet. She tickled her own feet with the feather, but found that she seemed to know when the tickle was coming, so it hardly tickled her any more.

  She went out a little further, the waters deeper now. She heard a gentle rustling beside her. She turned, coming face to face with a fox that was nearly her size. Tripping over a pebble, she stumbled onto her knees, and the fox towered over her like an oak tree. It stared at her, stars erupting in its eyes, nose twitching at a rapid rate, before turning and vanishing into the green.

  She made to follow it.

  ‘Okkie!’ came a call from the house, a sure sign that Father was up and her meal was ready. ‘Your brekky’s on the table, love.’

  ‘Father,’ she called back, standing up and jogging over to the fence, ‘I just saw a fox! It was enormous!’

  ‘Really? How big was it?’

  She pulled her hands as wide apart as they could go.

  ‘Father it was big as a house!’

  ‘No! Was it big as the moon?’

  ‘Definitely!’

  ‘Big as the sun?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Big as the sky?’

  Okkie paused, thinking. ‘Well, maybe not that big!’

  They laughed, walking hand in hand back to the house.

  Many mornings later, Okkie rose early again, cheeks puffing up red at the thought of a new day. Before she left, she felt around in her drawers for something to put up her hair with. Instead, a little blue ribbon fluttered out. It had her name stitched into the corner, in neat cursive. Father didn’t know how to do that. So she must have got it from someone else. Smiling, she tied it round her wrist.

  Out she went once more, tripping at the same places, laughing at the same insects, a little automaton performing its flawless routine. Once again, the patch of grass behind her began quivering at her ear. She turned and, very slowly, an ageing yellow creature crept out of the bushes. She stared at it, not quite understanding. Then she remembered the fox she’d seen the other day. Concluding that this was a relative of the first fox, she smiled at it impishly. Immediately, she felt quite sorry for it; it was so old it could hardly move, fur matted and wrinkled upon its back. She heard a little meow, coming from between its paws. Gasping, she reached down to pet the tiny fox, adoring the way its small black eyelashes framed its tiny furry face. Taking the ribbon from her wrist, she tied it around his neck, the sky-blue clashing wonderfully with his fierce red coat.

  ‘Okkie!’ came the call from the house, and Okkie turned and was gone.

  Okkie’s morning explorations were becoming something of a routine. She didn’t know how often she did it, but it happened often enough for her to notice. Today was no different; out she went, prepared to face the world. Only today, something changed. It was her toes. They were chilly. She didn’t like them to be chilly, so she went to the shoe rack and put on her gumboots before going out again. As she skipped through the very first bursts of flowers, she was already excited to see the fox. She hoped it would be the cute baby fox, the one to whom she’d taken such a liking. In her mind, it had fallen in love with her right back, and they were companions forever. Indeed, the grass began to shiver, and indeed a fox burst out, only for Okkie to groan with disappointment at its clear age and the wild, hungry look in its eye. She reached down to pet it anyway, feeling something silky about its neck as she did so. She looked closer, running her hands along the fabric. It was white, but a faded, dirty white, as though it had known colour centuries ago. As though that colour had been a light, enchanting blue. And in the corner, scratched but visible, was the beginnings of a name. Her name.

  Okkie fell back, tripping over the rock once more, her breath growing faster now. It couldn’t be the same fox. It just couldn’t be. She’d seen it only a few days ago. She stopped to try and count, then realized she’d nothing to count with. What were the days? What were the months? They’d had a calendar in their house, hadn’t they? Where had it gone?

  She felt her whole body growing hot and frightened. She took her shoes off and rubbed her legs. There was something small and black on the bottom of her left shoe, scrawly writing twisting along its centre. ‘To my little Olivia,’ it read, ‘on her sixth birthday.’ It’s from Father, Okkie thought at once, recognizing the curve of his t’s. Her birthday … when had her last one been? Just a few months ago, right? She’d been six … how old was she now? She’d been telling people six, because that had just sounded right. She didn’t really know. But how could she not know? She forced herself to think, to remember the last marker of age, the last marker of time, the last moment when everything about her was blissfully ordinary—

  ‘Okkie!’ Father’s voice rang out across the prairie.

  She walked back, slower this time, hesitating.

  ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I saw something strange today.’

  ‘Your brekky’s on the table, love.’

  ‘Father, I need to know when I turned six. It’s rather important … because I can’t remember. I don’t remember anything. The last day I remember is … the day we came home. From … from the hospital. And that means I—’

  ‘Really? How big was it?’

  Okkie stared at him, noticing for the first time that his golden eyes were glazed over, his hair in a perfect mess, his pupils twinkling at her like those of a mad man, emptiness lurking in their hidden depths.

  ‘Father,’ she said again, tugging at his shirt. It was white, she realized. It was always white. And the same bleached patch of shaving cream was always on his collar. ‘Father, are you listening to me?’

  ‘No! Was it big as the moon?’

  Okkie shuddered, stepping away from him. He grinned at her, horribly, tilting his neck like a broken puppet, strings still swaying madly from the ceiling. He looked somewhere beyond her, locked within his artificial smile, devoid of any feeling but emptiness.

  Tears began to well up in Okkie’s eyes.

  ‘Father … come on … you’re … you’re not feeling well…’

  He’s sick, she thought to herself, watching him lose himself completely. And what was she meant to do when he was sick? Get Mother, she remembered. Get Mother so she can give him the medicine. But Mother wasn’t here. It hit her hard, a blow to the stomach from an invisible fist, leaving her gasping for breath. She hadn’t been here in a lifetime. And, she realized, he hadn’t been sick in a lifetime either. Well … perhaps he had been. Perhaps she just hadn’t noticed.

  Backing away, she turned to the horizon. That little house, almost identical to hers, was waiting in the distance. Turning one last time, she saw her father laugh a cold laugh at the empty air, murmuring about the size of the sky.

  She began to run, mov
ing with all her might towards her neighbours’ home, the little ray of hope in her storm of emotion. She left her father crouching on the doorstep, trapped within a grief she could not break, speaking to a monster made from the mist.

  The house drew closer and closer. Okkie was tired now, and she could feel the scratches creeping up her knee. She was thankful for her gumboots; at least her feet were safe, throbbing from exhaustion rather than pain. Her stomach was beginning to grumble, and she wondered what brekky would have been. Eggs, she remembered. It was always eggs.

  She stumbled across the fence, leaving it wide open behind her. The door was a little trickier; it seemed to have been shut for a hundred years, dust and mould and cobwebs sewing the entrance closed. She burst through it eventually, throwing all of her tiny self against it, a terrible crash echoing as she did so.

  There the family sat, eating at a tilted table, laughing and chattering as though they were deaf to the world. The little mother on a chair too small, legs crossed uncomfortably, mouth a perfect smile; the young boy, beaming at his father, blushing at his freshly ruffled hair; and his father, sitting at the armchair, newspaper spread across his lap, reading the same line over and over with a confused look on his face, moustache fluttering with his shortened breaths.

  ‘Hello,’ Okkie said gravely, announcing herself. No one looked up. She thought this a bit rude; she’d just been through a terrible ordeal, after all. Sure, she hadn’t seen them in a very long time, but they could stand to be a little more caring. They hadn’t been this way the last time she’d met them; it had been the day before her mother had left them, and they were all having pastries and pies in honour of the new life on the prairie.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Okkie went on, ‘I really am sorry to disturb your breakfast. But I think Father is sick, and I need help.’