Summer Shorts - Anthology

Be Careful What You Wish For by Avrettos

Be Careful What You Wish For by Avrettos

I watched a TV program once that informed me that early organisms were only able to see the colours blue and yellow before they left the oceans as those colours were all they needed to know how deep in the water they were and therefore how far from the sun's energizing rays. Life became able to see reds and greens only once it had ventured onto land as this helped determine what was food and what was not. I felt like I was back in the oceans a few million years earlier down my on evolutionary thread as all I could see now was blue and yellow.

My time marooned on this island had often found me reflecting back to times at home where I would crave a bright summer's day. What had made those yellow and blue days glow like jewels among the battered pebbles that better described the majority of days during Britain's summer? What was it about the sun that made smiles bloom on people's faces like flowers in a bustling bed? How had this celebratory atmosphere brushed over the unpleasant prickly sensation of moisture being coaxed from our skin to soak our clothes? How had Nature's merciless oven become picnics in the park? Why had I with so many others sought even more spectacular jewels in faraway places the way King Midas had craved his gold?

Every morning now I awoke to a classic paradise tableaux. I felt like I could see both forever and nowhere at all by looking into the endless blue of the sky that was so free of features that it was like looking into the empty eternity that my soul had become. My eyes followed the perfect yellow curve of the sand where it cradled the gentle lapping of an iridescent sea that teased the thirst that pierced my consciousness like a fish hook delivering death in the guise of sustenance. The waves served as a constant reminder of the repetition of my eternity with the rhythm of a clock that refused to stop. The sand glowed and sparkled in the warm light from the majestic yellow orb sitting alone above. The sun was worshiped as a god in human history, a giver of life, but here it just baked the moisture from my skin.

There was a light distribution of palm trees standing around like individual guests at a party, all regretting arriving early. My arrival had done nothing to change the dynamic; if anything they seemed more self-conscious.

Brochures and websites use views like my own to sell holidays. Such vistas had lured me regularly from my life so that I would ferret away spare cash to buy passage to such surroundings for a couple of weeks at a time, but it was not the same without the constant supply of mojitos from friendly waiting staff, without the refreshing plunge pool and the soft linen of a manicured room with air conditioning. Without the man made amenities I knew now that paradise was hell.

My hotel was a shattered life boat wedged above my head with the leaves from the palm trees imitating walls. Similar leaves formed bowls in which I caught rain water and dew, but my tongue was still swollen and lips drier than the sand that seemed to grind between every cell of my body.

My menu consisted largely of bugs – ants that crawled up out of the sand to investigate this strange larger life form. I had moved past pity now when I felt their desperate search for a way out as they ran over my tongue just before I crushed the protein from them and swallowed their flat carcasses into the cavernous starvation on the edge of which I teetered every second of every day without actually falling in. When I first found beetles I tried to remove the shells, but this just highlighted how little flesh there really was so now I just crunched, imagining that I was eating a bigger meal than I was. Worms were the best – succulent protein spaghetti. I collected them in bowls and ate a few at a time.

Every now and again a bounty landed in my lap when a fish got caught in my V shaped trap when the tide went out. I had never liked raw fish, but each one now reduced the cavern inside to a small cave with euphoria echoing like music in the darkness for a few hours.

This was my life – day in and day out scanning the horizon's flat-line wishing it was my own. I was King Midas presiding over my own personal summer kingdom wishing that I had been more careful about what I had been wishing for.

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