The Island of the Day Before

by Zuni Chopra

  They slam through the façade, crashing right through it. The whole structure creaks, wobbles, and suddenly whooshes down, right to your feet, upturning leaves and dust and dreams in one fell swoop. It lands just a centimetre away from your calloused toes.

  Your breath steadies and you look up. It’s taken away just as quickly. For behind the house, oh behind it, there is a universe. Galaxies upon galaxies, deepest ocean blue with fiery spots of red and gold, sprinkled with shining silver stars, spread out before you. It’s as if a chunk of the earth has simply been cut away, and you’re standing at the very edge of it. It’s beautiful and wondrous and mysterious, and it’s filling you to the brim with something you can’t quite explain. You move your hand through the air to find it floats. You smile. And then, with a deep and final inhale, you push off the ground, into the universe beyond.

  The Little Matchstick Girl

  Once there lived a little matchstick girl in a little matchstick house. A young boy – she knew not his name – had built her long ago and forgotten to take her apart once he had finished, for his mother’s call for dinner had been sharp and unwavering. And that night, with a dusty mist swirling about her and her little matchstick skirt, and the moon glancing curiously down through the window, something had changed about the matchstick girl. She had seen. And she had stood. And she had smiled.

  She had built herself a lovely house out of the old burnt matches – a chocolate black house with a deep scent of home. She’d loved it since the day she’d declared it complete. It was small, but then so was she. And it was lonely too; but then, she realized one day, so was she. She thought about this, caught quite off guard by the realization. She rubbed her smooth wooden arms and hugged herself. She hadn’t been made to be alone, she was sure. If she had, she wouldn’t be feeling this way now. This feeling was gradually replaced by an indignant and fiery determination. There was no reason at all why she shouldn’t have friends! But then, she resolved, there’d be no more of this wallowing about in self-pity. She had to take charge.

  And so she did. Every day after, when she heard the familiar rustling of the matchbox, she’d scurry up, hidden, along the leg of the table (which had taken a few failed attempts) and swipe as many matches as she could before the boy was done lighting the candle, stealthy and unnoticed.

  She’d piece them together gently, creating a little friend. It would take her several weeks; with splinters and ashes, she bent and twirled the wood around itself to build a companion, colouring in their blank eyes with a bit of charcoal she’d found beneath the table. She tried a matchstick boy. A matchstick girl. A matchstick puppy. A matchstick kitten. But no matter what she made, the result never changed: her friends would not come alive the way she had. This frustrated her, for she could not tell why this was. Months passed in this way, each attempt bringing her a fresh wave of disappointment. She wondered at herself now, at the wood that made her. How had this happened to her? Why was she not simply a stack of matchsticks? What right did she have to life?

  One day, she scampered up the table a little too late. The boy had lit the candle already, and was putting the box away. She noted that he was older now: there were little brown pinpricks dotting his chin and lines like train tracks circling his eyes. Absentmindedly, she noticed the faded grey photograph behind the candle. The woman seemed familiar. ‘Excuse me,’ she piped up, for she sensed that today, of all days, was the right one, ‘but I have a question for you, little human boy.’

  The boy saw her, and remembered her, and laughed aloud in shock. His laugh was hoarse, scratchy, rough from being woken so suddenly.

  ‘Hello, little matchstick girl,’ he murmured, eyes wide as two large buckets, astonishment and wonder reflected in their depths once again. ‘I … I remember you, I think … I made you out of Mum’s matches, didn’t I? Yes … long ago…’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you remember me, because I need your help with that, actually.’

  He chuckled to himself, shaking his head in disbelief.

  ‘Am I dreaming?’

  ‘Listen to me. I’m lonely. It’s a terrible feeling.’

  He glanced towards the picture on the wall, swallowing hard.

  ‘It is. I know it.’

  ‘So … I’ve been trying to make myself a friend, you see. Someone I can share my life with. Anyone at all.’

  ‘Great idea, good luck.’

  ‘No, but it hasn’t worked, you see. I build them and it takes me ever so long but the result never changes.’

  ‘I see. So … what would you have me do?’

  ‘Tell me what you did to me to make me come alive, of course! Was it a special fruit? Magic water? Lightning?’

  He barked a laugh at this once more. ‘My dear, it was a very long time ago. I really don’t remem—’

  ‘Oh please, little boy! You must try to remember!’

  He let out a long breath, rather taken aback at being referred to as a little boy, but wanting to help her nonetheless. There was a long pause; it hung in the air, eager and waiting, sewing itself into corners of the room till the silence was suffocating.

  ‘I’m sorry … I just don’t know.’

  Undeterred, the little matchstick girl thrust a few burnt-out matches from the table into his calloused hands.

  ‘Then build me again!’ she demanded at once. ‘If you can’t tell me what you did, simply make me once more!’

  He clutched at the matches, nodding slowly, as though attempting to remember a language that had long left his tired tongue. With patience and measured movements, he began to put the pieces together. She watched him breathlessly, watching her own face take shape beneath her.

  He’d finished. They waited, staring at the little matchstick sculpture … but she did not move.

  The little matchstick girl lost heart, nearly sobbing at the sight, biting her wooden lip to the point of scratching it. It hurt the boy terribly to see her this way. He did, after all, want to help.

  ‘You know,’ he began, patting her gently on the back, ‘I think I now realize what made you special.’

  She looked up at him, hardly daring to believe it.

  ‘When I built you, I was only five years old. I built you because I, too, wanted a friend. But when I built you, little matchstick girl, I had always believed that you were alive. From the moment I coloured your eyes in with a little black crayon, I felt deep within me that you were truly magical.’ He smiled at the memory, letting it wash over him. ‘Now, I am afraid I have grown old. Time has taken whatever was left of my heart, and I can no longer believe in things such as fairies and magic in the night. Whatever matchstick people I make now … they will be nothing more than matchsticks, for I have no life in me any more to give them.’

  She swallowed sharply.

  ‘So you … when you were building, just ask yourself … did you truly believe?’

  She stared at the ground, remembering every minute, recalling every beat of her trembling heart.

  ‘No,’ she gasped, understanding at last. ‘I wished for it to work, badly, but I … I had my doubts, always.’

  The boy sighed sadly. ‘I suppose in the end, we all grow up, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, drooping lower as she said it. ‘I suppose we do.’

  The Island of the Day Before

  Her lush green tail glinted in the glow of the moonlight, the bloody scales of a thousand fish sewn into her skin. She cried out. It was a primal cry, a cry that spoke of a ruined victory, and it rang out into the night air like a bullet. The waves were surrounding her, salt scraping into her wounds like the claws of something sunken into the water, pulling her in, in, deeper till her screams became gurgles of shattered misery.

  It had been twelve days since the town of Emerest had last seen a ship. The storm was brewing silently around the island, refusing to make a choice about whether to stay or to leave. So there it sulked, milling about like the out-of-work fishermen, shuffling its feet into the ocean and making the waves wrack the tat
tered shore. No boats could be seen about the sun-dusted horizon, and the sea seemed to take offence at this, making itself known with the deepest of thundering in the gloomy evening. The people became as the weather, dragging themselves along with little to do and little to say, at a loss even to comment on the unchanging sky. The water, after all, was the true heart of the island; the water was the spirit of the people, the water was their bread and circus, the water was what ran beneath their homes. Without it, their town became a dry rock, moon craters revealing themselves against chalky sand. Several townspeople had, in fact, returned to the water once their time on land was done.

  And this was another popular story around the sheltered, fiery homes: the Mermaids of Emerest. They were so rare, so deadly, so horrific that to see them was to become them solely through a shattering of the mind. Many a fisherman had lost himself to this siren of the devil. To the town, she was not a saintly, kindly light, but a fanged, toxic beast. No one had ever really seen one, but as it often goes with these things, no one really had to.

  Now, however, in the midst of such dull murkiness, these fables seemed to have smudged in the town’s memory. They would sit at the stewing sand-filled beaches and wait for the sea to come home.

  A dog trotted along the shores. He walked there every day, and the town knew him and loved him, so he was fed by all and hunted by none. His tail bobbed through the wind behind him, paws squelching shattered shells, nose all gritty from sniffing through sand. He looked at the sea, a large, torrential flood, sinister in its swift movements. He wished he could swim again. He felt his matted clumps of fur growing on him like heavy overripe fruit and, tentatively, he dipped a paw into the chilling foam.

  Something blinked on the horizon. Shimmering, jagged, swift. He froze, every sense on hyper drive, heart skipping and flopping and twisting inside-out. His bark, alone and small, echoed across the empty universe, and the sea responded with a dragon’s roar that shattered the glass on his rose-tinted eyes; his tail between his wasted legs, he ran from the beast.

  The first sign of the occult was when school was cancelled. School was never cancelled; not for storms, not for mourning, sometimes not even for holidays. The last time a holiday had been declared in Emerest was during the deadly breakout of a near-lethal epidemic, and that had been twenty-seven years ago. Siblings clutched at each other gleefully within their tilted homes, spilling out onto the streets like beads of a broken necklace, starting up a game of tag almost immediately. The adults stood on their doorsteps, as befitted such wise and dignified parents, before beginning the process of osmosis to neighbours’ porches, all discussing the official ‘reason of cancellation’ put up on frail torn-paper notices around town. The school building, it declared, had been ‘damaged’. ‘Well,’ one fisherman muttered to his friend, his splattered face and swollen, scratched legs revealing he’d just returned from across the island, ‘they aren’t wrong.’ His friend looked at him questioningly and he curled his blackened lips to reveal chunky, bleeding gums and shrivelled teeth. ‘Not just damaged,’ he grunted. ‘It’s completely destroyed.’

  The schoolmaster stood beside the wreckage, watching as the last bits of wood twisted from the shell of the structure, completely at a loss for what to say. He was at the best of times a quiet man, and now he had fallen completely silent, the wind blowing what was left of his hair around his tattered glasses. ‘What should we do?’ the professor beside him murmured, and he stared at her, now pushed even further into a state of shock. She never asked him what to do. Never. She never needed to. She was straight-backed and strong-willed, smart, creative, practical, and not all the gold in the world could make her admit she didn’t know. And yet now she gazed at him, wide-eyed, hoping there was something, anything they could salvage. He swallowed sharply before replying, ‘Round up any strong townsfolk willing to help. Tell them the full extent of … damage. I’ll be back, I just need to … I’ve got to … I’m going to take a walk.’

  She nodded, swift as a robot being woken up for its first task, and zipped away into the fog. He turned, sniffling, wishing he had a hanky, then losing himself in the chilled, flaky mist.

  To its credit, the town grasped the situation very quickly. Indeed, the adults had already begun to suspect that for their children to receive a holiday, there must be not a single classroom left in the ragged school building. A group of seven – four men, three women, all parents but one – joined the professor with her brisk and quickened strides to return to the school. She’d realized she really had no idea how they were going to fix it, and part of her was now beginning to wish she could return home to scrub the grace off her face. They’d brought with them wood and nails and brick. Still, to her it seemed like placing a hot pink Band-Aid over a shark bite. As they drew closer, audible gasps escaped the crowd.

  By the time they were standing within the wreckage, dust swirling through the air like some demented ballerina, every face betrayed a sense of hopelessness at the task. They stepped cautiously over logs of jagged wood, occasionally crunching glass.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ murmured a concerned father. ‘Who knew the storm would cause all this?’

  Someone cleared their throat; the tall, gangly woman at the back of the group whose jaw was always tight and whose home was always empty.

  ‘It wasn’t the storm,’ she whispered. ‘There’s teeth marks in the wood.’

  They began throwing together some bricks, rebuilding the foundation of the structure bit by bit. They seemed focused, determined. Yet their eyes kept darting around to each other, too terrified to ask an unspoken question. One-fifth of the bricks had been laid down in an orderly fashion, neat straight rows; too straight and neat for comfort. That’s when the father spoke again. ‘I … can’t seem to get this beam out of the ground …’ he muttered, apologetic at having broken the promised comfort of silence. Two other men walked around to help him, digging charred nails into the splinters to haul it up. Something was sticking in it like hardened mud, stopping it from breaking free. Finally, they hoisted a large rock onto its peak, and with a sudden crack, it came free. All three men fell back, slicing through the air before toppling onto the dirt. There was the explosive cursing, the dusting of patched-up jeans, the swallowing of sudden alarm, and then there was a scream. Everyone looked around, confused. A scream was not really part of the plan. And yet the professor had just cried out loud, for the sticky residue at the end of the limp beam was radiating a deep, murky crimson. ‘Blood!’ she wailed again.

  The eight of them moved stiffly, slowly, down to the mouth of the wreckage. The stench of fresh meat grew too much for some of the fishermen to bear. Their pace quickened, and, moving aside some rocks, they found their hidden prize.

  The body of the schoolmaster, gazing off with a widened, cross-eyed glare into the ocean, neck ripped open like a bag of sweets, was lying beneath the debris. His torso was missing, shredded so violently from his frail body that blood was still forming a small oasis in the gunk. His legs, however, twisted and ravaged, had been left beneath the rest of him; nothing more than a little doll left broken from rough playtime.

  One fainted. One vomited deep vermillion into the pool of blood. Another stumbled away, out into the haze. And once again, none but the lanky woman, frail bones and pale flesh, took note of the jagged bite marks dotting every surface of his torn flesh. On impulse, she leaned forward … and pulled something drowning in red to the surface of the horror. No, not just a jagged bite mark. A jagged tooth.

  The town committee was immediately called into session. The nature of the incident meant this session was outside, a half-circle of orderly women in suits in the brewing eye of the storm. Townsfolk gathered around the makeshift, wobbly tables, intent on demystifying the horrific murder. By the time the committee began, there was no space for a path through the crowd. The occasional flash of brick shone up through the shoes of the murmuring congregation. They did not understand, and the less they understood, the more they spoke, and wasted words flowed
over them like a blanket, easing their worries.

  The chief cleared her throat loudly and crisply, and at once, silence swooped down like a fallen crow.

  ‘This committee will now come into session,’ she declared for maybe the fortieth time in her life, ‘to discuss the cause of Mr … er … the schoolmaster’s death, as well as to debate what must be done in its wake.’

  She sat down, embarrassed for a reason she didn’t know. And the talking began.

  The crowd were silent spectators, a grunt or a wail their only response to the action. The committee was sharp and precise, quick with its somewhat tangled words, and immediately declared that it wasn’t just murder; whatever had done this to the schoolmaster must have done so for food. Half of his corpse was missing, after all, and a tooth had been recovered from the remains. This made it clear that there was some sort of animal involved, and all human occupants of the town were relieved of charges. A sigh rose up from the crowd, danced above them in the air, then raced off on the wind.

  ‘Now,’ the chief continued, her voice wavering and slowing, for in truth she knew not what she’d say next, ‘I think the next step is for us to define … why the creature … I mean animal … why it—’

  ‘It’s obvious!’ came the exasperated bark of the tailor. His shirt was a maze of patchwork, his eyes somehow every colour at once. ‘A mermaid did this.’

  But he was young, too young to make such a declaration, and he sent the town into a whirl of chatter.

  ‘The boy is right!’ cried his mother. ‘I saw one just the other day!’

  ‘Bollocks!’ came the rebuttal of a fisherman, nervous at being challenged so. ‘The only ones who’ve ever seen one is us.’