What Had Once Been and Never Was (An Authorial Lament)

Damn this island and everything that lives upon it, thought the woman, as she again wandered its perimeter in the noonday glare, tripping across a shoreline composed of enormous black stones whose haphazard arrangement suggested the work of some feckless and distractible divinity, the seams between these stones easily large enough to swallow a child, which perhaps they had, long ago at the beginning of the woman’s tenure here, a time before memory when she was presumably still a creature of substance and not whatever empty shadow-thing she was now. The sun hung in the sky like a dollop of liquid butter though soon it would again dip into the ocean in a smoldering explosion of blood-mist, the enormous fins of the enormous sharks that circled the island in perpetuity silhouetted against this molten disc like the teeth of an inverted sawblade.

How long had the woman lived this way? Alone on this tiny island? An island she could (and did) circle hundreds of times from sun to sun? Well, what did it matter how long? the woman thought. What matters is that I am here now and will be here tomorrow.

But this was her mistake. She would not be here tomorrow for there was no tomorrow. The woman and her island were in fact nothing more than a splintered thought in the mind of a punishing God, one who had taken everything from the woman before failing to believe in her any longer. In the seams of her black-stone island was the stripped detritus of this life that had once been and now never was. The man she had loved. The child she had nursed to her soft breast. The automobile that had held them both at that sublime moment of impact. The white gown in which she had been married and the black dress in which she had buried them. The crooked home she had inhabited, through whose hidden pipes their voices had continued to hiss and gurgle even as their flesh decayed beneath the soft and wretched earth. The flowers that had withered in their pots. All the stuff that had made her real, to the extent that anything can be said to make us real. This world’s life chattel is merely a bookmark in time; what we are is far less than the sum of what we once were. What we are is alone on an island of black stone, pacing, eyes fixed on the wavering horizon. Damn this island and everything on it, thought the woman, and in this, at least, she was correct.