by Ellen Datlow
Jaden licked the side of his finger.
Fresh water.
So he wasn’t going to have to drink his own urine.
Things were looking up.
DAY 3
Jaden was writing H-E-L-P not in the sand—there were no branches, no rocks—but on the sunburned skin of his thigh. Over and over. Each time he got to L, the H was fading away.
Passing the hours was turning out to be the hardest part.
His feet were in the water, hanging off into the sharp drop-off all round the edge of the island. His toes were wiggly bait for anything down there.
“Teach a man to fish,” he said, and then couldn’t find the end of it. It had been going to be funny, though. Killer funny. Something about a mermaid. But, had a mermaid beached herself right then, Jaden would have bitten into her tail, he knew, even eaten the fin.
All the hunger he’d felt before in his life, it had just been mild discomfort. An inconvenience.
What he was feeling now, it was real, and it hurt. He’d already pulled all the frayed strings off his shorts, chewed them to paste, swallowed them. Could you eat your own hair? It was some sort of protein, wasn’t it?
Then, like he’d been hoping for, something brushed his shin.
He stabbed his hand down what he considered to be ninja-fast, and what he pulled up was … what? It was cold, and solid, and kind of square.
He crawled back from the water, in case he dropped it.
He’d been expecting debris from the wreck to wash up. That always happens in the movies. You get a rope, a trunk of goodies, and, if it was a plane you’d gone down in, maybe some flotation seats or mini-bottles of vodka.
What Jaden got was a double-stick popsicle.
He ceremoniously peeled the waxy wrapper and buried it under the sand near his water hole.
The popsicle was chocolate.
And … was it familiar? Had there been any of these on-board?
Probably there had been. Popsicles are great. Especially fudge ones.
Jaden applied his tongue to a top corner delicately, like he was worried the ice cream might have gone past its expiration date.
It was delicious. His first food in three days.
He made himself go slow, to savor it.
Who knew when the next one might come floating in.
DAY 4
Jaden’s tongue was sore. He was still licking the popsicle.
It wouldn’t go away. It was more rounded on the corners, but he was pretty sure the rounding was only because he’d moved some of the cold fudge over to the side, with all his licking.
Still? He was full.
He’d gone to sleep with the magic popsicle still in his hand, then woke frantic and panicked. It had been right there in the sand, though. No crabs stealing away with it, no sand bugs crawling all over it. The sun didn’t even seem to touch it.
The popsicle couldn’t be cold, either, but it was.
Jaden started to dip it into the ocean, but saw himself dropping it, or a shark surging up to steal it. So, even though it clouded up his drinking water, he swirled it around in there, holding each stick with a different hand, and pulled it back up, clean again
He closed his eyes, applied tongue to chocolate.
Just as delicious as before. Just as good as the ones his aunt—
That was it! The summer he’d spent with Aunt Jolie, when his mom and dad were doing their figuring out their relationship thing, a Schwann’s truck or something had lumbered down her street every two weeks, and—“special for her favorite nephew”—she would buy a case of double-barreled Fudgsicles.
It didn’t make up for his parents acting like children, but they had been good popsicles.
When Jaden couldn’t possibly lick one lick more of this one, he dug up the paper, wishing pretty hard he’d unwrapped it more carefully, and rewrapped the popsicle, buried it under more sand than was strictly necessary. If you have a magic popsicle, though, you take good care of it, don’t you?
Jaden drank his cloudy chocolate water until his stomach hurt.
For the rest of the afternoon he tried to keep to what he called his fake-n-bake schedule, even though there was nothing fake about it: fifteen minutes lying on his left side, giving his right side up to the hot-hot sun, then fifteen minutes on his back, his front, his other side.
It made the hours go by.
Just before dark he renamed it, too. Not fake-n-bake, but rotisserie. He was the Rotisserie Man.
It was the best reality show ever. It had magic popsicles and everything.
DAY 5
Rotisserie Man was officially dead. Well, “cooked,” Jaden corrected.
He woke with not just his frontside burned, like it had already been, but his whole body.
Nocturnal Man lumbered into being.
Jaden scooped out a sand-angel near shore and snuggled down into it as deep as he could, buried himself as best he could manage. It didn’t cover him completely—he’d imagined himself as a head propped up on the sand, which was going to freak somebody out when he smiled—but it was a lot better than nothing.
He’d wanted to dig up in the middle of the island, lie back into that cool fresh water, but he didn’t want to mess that situation up.
Near shore, it was white sand for as far down as he dug.
And, of course, as soon as he was dozing off, prepping for his long night of watching for passing ships’ lights or beacons or whatever, he had to pee again.
He could go right here in the sand, he figured, in his jean shorts, but just because there’s no civilization doesn’t mean you can’t be civilized. That was something Margo had said once, camping.
She would think this was funny.
Jaden smiled, and then he was crying, and then he was clambering up from the sand, throwing handfuls of it out into the water, kicking it even.
At which point he realized the sand was a limited resource too.
He was living at sea-level, wasn’t he? If he threw enough of his island out into the ocean, then the water would seep up over everything he had.
Not that he even halfway understood why or how there was sand in the first place.
Did the rinse-wash-repeat action of a thousand years of waves pulverize cooled lava into sand like this? But wouldn’t it be black, then?
But maybe this wasn’t volcanic, Jaden figured.
It was igneous. That was a word he remembered from junior high. And another: “Sedimentary!” he screamed out over the water, and then ran to what he considered the other three sides of the island, screamed it out from them as well.
Then, peeing off the down-water side of the island, there was a magazine bobbing on the surface.
It was a Playboy.
DAY 6
Jaden was taking stock. Serious, serious stock: one cistern or aquifer or hand-well or something, one magic popsicle—Fudgsicle—one pair of jean shorts, and one gentleman’s magazine.
It made him shiver in the hundred-plus heat.
How does a magazine survive the open waters of the ocean long enough to end up way out here in the middle? And, had this one been lost eighteen years ago? Either that or the same storm that had wrecked Jaden had dumped somebody’s vintage collection overboard.
Porn. Exactly what he needed, yes.
The centerfold’s name was Peggy.
Jaden read the issue from cover to cover, twice. There was an interview with Tom Cruise about a Vietnam movie Jaden had never seen, there was an excerpt of a Vietnam novel he couldn’t imagine the rest of, there was a Vietnam short story about a river that was in Canada, there was another pictorial of an actress Jaden had never heard of. And there were all the columns. All the stupid, stupid columns.
“Thank you!” Jaden called out to the world anyway.
If you’re not grateful, you don’t get any more.
This was from Jaden’s mom, before she left and got sick and died three states away, not telling Jaden or his father.
But don’t thi
nk about her.
Start thinking about sad things on a desert island, and there’s no one to pull you out of that spiral.
Jaden licked his popsicle until he was full and drank from his hole in the ground and peed in the ocean and buried himself in the sand again.
Soon his hair would grow long enough to shade his face. Until then, he would keep arranging his jean shorts over his head.
Survival was pretty stupid, really.
DAY 7
Well, night. And maybe it was kind of still day six—Jaden wasn’t super sure anymore.
If he was going to turn into a creature of the night in order to preserve his skin, though, then he had to start doing it like this: pinching himself awake all night, burrowing down into the sand during the day.
The sky was a big blue bowl turned over him, it felt like. And he’d been living here for ten thousand years, and had an endless supply of BBs for his rifle, had been pumping it up and taking aim up at that bowl forever, making stars.
“This one’s for you, Margo,” he said, and aimed his imaginary rifle up, poked another hole in the sky.
He was spelling her name, connecting the dots. He was drawing pictures. Squares and triangles at first, but then he’d leveled up, was on to Dr. Seuss versions of tall, spindly buildings. He couldn’t do animals yet, couldn’t imagine how the Greeks or Egyptians or Inca or whoever had done all that. Buildings, though, those he could do.
His plan was to get enough going to have a real city up there. Except the stars kept moving. All together, but on their own, too, some of them.
It was only because he’d poked so many holes in the night sky—because he’d let this much light into his upside-down bowl—that he saw the shimmer out in the water. It was different from the white that surged at the top of the waves.
“Don’t do it, don’t do it,” Jaden told himself, but he already was: running out to that shimmer, falling into the water, dog-paddling out to it.
It was flat and hard—another magazine?—but he couldn’t look, had to get back to the island.
Out in the ocean, he had the sudden certainty he wasn’t going to find shore again in the dark. That some current was going to grab him, swish him around the side of the island, push him out farther than he could swim back. That a whale was going to nibble at his feet, take his whole leg into his mouth to see if he was a big plankton. Even a vine of seaweed brushing him would probably stop his heart.
The island was still there.
Jaden clambered back up, panicking and scrambling when it was more like swinging up onto a roof than walking up a slope—what kind of beach was this?—then tried to angle whatever he’d found up to see it.
He had to wait until morning to be sure. Until sunup.
No trumpets played in glory when he could finally make out the picture: a man in a tasteful suit, leaning to his right.
An album, a record.
Vinyl.
MC Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em.
DAY 9
Jaden was buried in the sand with his popsicle in his mouth.
Just staring. At nothing. He wasn’t super sure it was the ninth day, but he was pretty sure he’d skipped the eighth day. Hadn’t eaten, hadn’t drank. Had just laid there. With Peggy.
Her turn-ons were white roses and children and animals, and her turnoffs were cigarettes and traffic. To be honest, Jaden was confusing her with Margo, some.
His plan was, when he was rescued, to leave the Playboy buried in the sand, for the next tenant.
Without meaning to, his tongue worrying over that cold chocolate, he bit into the meat of the popsicle. Into the fudge. The cold hurt his teeth and the popsicle tumbled down into the sand on his chest, but he still had a big chunk of it in his mouth.
He chewed it, swallowed it.
He kind of wanted to look down, see what might or might not be happening with the popsicle, but he also kind of didn’t want to watch the goose do its golden egg thing.
But then he remembered: there’d been words on the popsicle sticks that summer with his aunt, hadn’t there?
He sat up, sand caking off him, covering the popsicle even more. He dug it up, shook the sand off, rolled over to wash it clean and then bit in again, deeper, faster, more and more, all on one side, enough to free up the stick on what he was calling the right.
He licked it clean, squinted to read the scrolly red font.
TRY AGAIN.
And now he just had half a popsicle.
DAY 10
Night again.
Jaden didn’t quite have a city in the night sky yet, but he had picked out three kind-of columns of stars he could build three different-height buildings from, and those stars all stayed together, mostly.
Now he was making up a story for why this light on the seventeenth floor was off, why that one was migrating sideways, or to a lower floor. The stories mostly had to do with candles and a blackout. He called the wandering stars elevators.
Jaden wondered what if he bit off a piece of his calf and ate it.
The popsicle stick he’d denuded—had never got its fudge iciness back. Jaden wore the naked popsicle stick behind his ear now. His first impulse had been to chew it, but that was the kind of indulgence you allowed yourself when there were more than two popsicle sticks in the whole entire world. Or, the world Jaden had access to.
The MC Hammer record was useless. The sleeve was just a sleeve, the record just a record, the tiny print on the label just what Jaden would have expected, had he ever got that record.
And, related: why that record? More to the point, why that Playboy? He’d never even owned a single issue, had only ever sneak-looked at his uncle’s, that one summer.
He threaded the popsicle stick from behind his ear and set it under his nose like a mustache and pooched his lips up to keep it there.
It was the current contest: how long until his lips cramped, and the coach—it was either a coach or a drill sergeant, Jaden wasn’t completely committed yet—how long until that coach or drill sergeant would pull him from the game or the battle, and Jaden would say no, no, he could do it, just give him time.
One of the lights of his buildings in the sky winked out and Jaden blew it a kiss, letting the popsicle stick tumble down his chest.
Game over.
DAY 11
Bright, bright sun. The only kind anymore.
But there were a lot of kinds of island, evidently.
Until the other night, getting the MC Hammer record, when he’d had to lunge up onto the island instead of just walk, he’d assumed all islands were the crowns of vast majestic never-seen underwater mountains. But mountains have slopes, don’t they? Even unmajestic ones? They don’t have walls or cliffs leading straight up to the tip-top.
Jaden was no geology major or island-ologist, but this island wasn’t quite tracking.
He’d been pondering it all morning, like figuring out the nature of the island might give him, the clue he needed to escape. Finally he planted the popsicle stick straight up and down by the water hole, made sure the Playboy and the record were buried together, checked the wrapper on the half a popsicle he had left, and, like a flag he was leaving behind to tell somebody he’d been here, he stripped out of his shorts, laid them out by the upright popsicle stick.
They wouldn’t blow away. No clouds, no wind.
And then he walked to the non-urinal side of the island, sat on the edge, and slipped into the … not exactly the cold, more like the great empty lukewarm.
Still touching—holding on—he treaded water with his legs, he heavy-breathed, getting his lungs to capacity, and then he ducked under, keeping his hand in constant contact, but going down, and down.
As deep down as he went, and all the way around, the rocky underwater part of the island was the same width as the overwater part of the island, as near as he could tell. Like it was a column thrusting up from the ocean floor, thousands of feet below. Not some conglomeration or stack of rocks, but … a lava tube? Craggy but not
cracked.
It was stupid. This wasn’t a mountain. It was a post. It was a column.
And there was a hand-sized, irregular piece of thin plastic bobbing against the underwater cliff.
Jaden started to put it down the front of his pants, but he wasn’t wearing any, so he clamped it in his teeth, let himself float up.
DAY 12
The plastic he’d found on his brave and useless dive was a blister pack. The cardboard still attached showed what had been in the blister pack: a werewolf action figure.
Jaden had all his items laid out by the water hole: popsicle, popsicle stick, album, magazine, action figure. Well, action figure case.
Counting the popsicle and the popsicle stick as one, that was four things. Four things from what Jaden knew was a list of ten. What Ten Things Would You Have on Your Desert Island?
It had been a contest in a magazine, that summer he spent with Aunt Jolie.
Up in the treehouse his older cousins had built years ago, before they grew up and moved out, Jaden had carefully written down what ten things he would have on his desert island.
He would need food, so why not have the best food ever?
He would definitely want his uncle’s magazine.
MC Hammer was amazing.
And he’d always wanted to see a werewolf.
Only, he must have been sleeping when the werewolf bobbed up against shore. So the glue keeping the blister pack to the cardboard had given way, and the action figure had tumbled down to the ocean floor.
Jaden stood, walked over to the edge.
“What about the record player!” he screamed out over the water.
It had been the next item on his list. Followed, he was pretty sure, by a power outlet, with power. He’d underlined “with power” three or four times, to be sure.
All so he could sit on his island and listen to MC Hammer. Maybe practice some dance moves.
DAY 13
Slurping water up from the hole like a sunburned caveman, it hit Jaden that the record player had probably been there, but, like the werewolf’s blister pack, it had sunk. The popsicle and magazine had floated, because they were wood and paper. The record had floated because it was still in its cellophane, or because it was grooved plastic and cardboard.
