Stranded

  

Writing Prompt: Alone on a Deserted Island

The Sailor awoke upon a hot, sandy beach with eyelids that had been sealed shut by crust. His body ached and was golden baked from the burning rays of the sun. His mouth was parched and his lips cracked from prolonged chapness. The confused Sailor wondered how long he had been out. "I must have been asleep for a long time?" He almost didn't recognize his voice due to the severity of hoarseness. "How on Mother Gaia did I even get here?" The Sailor was overcome with terror once he realized the grim gravity of his predicament.

He was stranded on a deserted island. 

The Sailor had no idea how he had arrived there. His hazy memories offered no answers either. The Sailor's boat or crew were nowhere to be seen. The squawking seagulls, the skittering crabs, and the dolphins were the only signs of life around.

"This is a prank!" He said, straining to a stand. "This has got to be some cruel, sick prank." Surely, the man's crew wouldn't have left him behind. No way they would abandon him without food, water, and shelter. "It's just...a prank..." The Sailor searched the island for his crew, though he didn't have to search long. The island was small with very few trees. "This-this isn't funny!" He shouted. His words echoed in all directions. "Where are you assholes?" The Sailor angrily kicked up sand. 

Realizing that he had been abandoned and that no one would return for him, the Sailor flew into a nasty fit of rage. He continued kicking up sand, flung crabs at seagulls, and hurled obscenities at the sea. 

The defeated Sailor cursed everything and everyone. He cursed his crew. He cursed his situation. He cursed his life as he had chosen the sea in favor of the mines. But most of all, he cursed the gods for his suffering. They held the most blame above all else. 

"Why me?" The Sailor was not a bad man nor had he ever been. He lived an honest life and treated everyone fairly. "I don't understand..." He wept into his hands, sliding down against a palm tree. "Why did this have to happen to me?" He would receive no answer to his question. "Wait! Wait a second! Maybe... Maybe this is a dream!"

The Sailor made a pallet under the shade from palm leaves and tried to sleep. He believed that upon waking a second time, he would be back on the boat. Unfortunately, the Sailor's predicament was no dream for when he opened his eyes a second time, he found himself still stranded on the island. "Damn Devil Bird!" The Sailor flung a crab at a seagull he swore mocked him. "Damn island! Damn everything!" That was merely the onset of his delusions. 

The defeated man fell backwards onto the pallet and stared up through the palm leaves. "I'm going to die here..." Suddenly, an idea dawned on the Sailor. he could build his own raft. There were enough felled palm trees around the island he could use. It would take hours, possibly days with the dagger he always kept in his pocket. Regardless, the Sailor was determined to get off that island by any means necessary.

The first raft he constructed fell apart a couple yards out from the island which forced the Sailor to swim back to shore. The second raft sank under the Sailor's weight. On the Sailor's third attempt, he succeeded.

The Sailor screamed triumphantly. "You see this, gods of the sea? I did it! I did it!" He nearly jumped for joy as he watched the island vanish into the distance. The poor Sailor was not out of danger yet. 

Displeased with his hubris, the gods of the sea conjured up a mighty storm. The violent waves knocked the raft back and forth. The Sailor struggled to hold on but the gods of the sea intended to make an example out of him. A giant wave knocked the Sailor from his raft, plunging him into the dark ocean depths.

The last thing the Sailor saw before he blacked out was the debris from his broken raft.

To the Sailor's surprise, however, he survived the terrifying incident. The ocean had spat him back out near the island. Finally defeated, the Sailor whispered, "The ocean should have taken me instead" because death would have been less cruel. He made peace with his fate and laid back down on the pallet, awaiting his slow death.

Several days passed and death had not yet come for the Sailor. The terrible thirst and pangs of hunger no longer bothered the Sailor nor did the heat from the sun. Every sensation and function that made the Sailor human had ceased to exist. He thought it quite unusual. The Sailor wondered if he had actually died a long time ago but was doomed to spend his eternity bound to that island.

“Hey there, Good Sailor! Good Sailor?!” He thought the woman’s voice was another hallucination conjured up by his isolation. The Sailor tried to ignore the persistent woman. 

He rolled over, turning his back to the direction of her voice. "Go away! Leave me alone..." He demanded in a soft voice. The Sailor had forgotten how to express anger. 

A second woman's voice called to him. "Good Sailor, we don't mean to annoy you. We only want to help. You look terribly lonely on that island by yourself." The Sailor immediately sat upright and turned around when he heard the word help. 

He couldn't believe his eyes. Resting on the shore were two beautiful merwomen. The Sailor rubbed his eyes with disbelief. “Are-are you two really merwomen?” The pair looked at each other and giggled.

“What else would we be?” The first merwomen answered. The pair beckoned the Sailor to come with them. "Come with us and we'll take you down to the Palace Under the Sea. We'll save you from this lonely island." The Sailor asked how that would be possible. He was human and could not breathe under the sea. 

The second merwoman beckoned the Sailor to the shore with a wave. “I will show you, come here." The Sailor obeyed her command with reservation. He had nothing more to lose. The Sailor was certain the merwomen were byproducts of his broken mind but none of that mattered. All the weary man wanted was to get off that damned island. 

The first merwoman placed her scaly hands around the Sailor's neck which made him sprout gills. "Impossible!" The baffled Sailor exclaimed. He struggled to accept the transformation. "What is this? mer-people magic?" He said with awe. 

The merwomen giggled again. "You could call it that." They winked. 

The Sailor touched his gills. "This-this is amazing!" He said with excitement. It had been too long since he last felt that way. The emotion felt like an opium high. 

The merwomen each offered the Sailor a hand. "Are you ready to leave?" They said in eerie unison. The elated man took their hands. They whisked the Sailor away to their underwater kingdom. In time, the Sailor took one of the merwomen as his wife and lived out the rest of his life under the sea.

It was such a beautiful ending. Unfortunately, that "happily ever after" was nothing more than the dream of a dying man. The Sailor never left that island. 

While his soul rested peacefully under the sea with the mer-folk, the crabs and seagulls picked a part his corpse on the beach.