INTUNEevolution
03-14-2008, 8:17 PM
This is one of the short stories I'm doing, a collection called Alex's Compendium of Semi-Profoundess.
This one is called Chance, I think you'll like it.
I
“A dog is perhaps the worst companion to be stranded on an island with,” mused Gregory, who wondered for the eleventh time whether it was morally acceptable to eat the one thing that tethered him to modern civilization.
His current residence was a rather smallish island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, covered in vegetation that obscured the contents of the island from the air and sea. The ship Gregory had been lucky to be on, the HMS Medallion, blew off course during an unexpected, but malicious squall and wrecked on a reef. All passengers aboard the vessel drowned, save Gregory. The dog, a little ratter that operated as the ship’s mascot, turned up a day later without explanation of its salvation or so much as an apology. For days it merely shifted it’s attention between Gregory, the sea, and the wildlife that inhabited the borders of the uninviting jungle.
Gregory had been lucky enough to pick up on survival skills that the media had displayed in fantastic scenarios with muscle bound heroes clawing out a living in the most inhospitable of places. Unfortunately, Gregory lived in Reality and had to abide by its mediocrities.
The little bit of shade and defense from the elements, or as the buff action heroes call it, a lean-to, was scrawny and a little depressing. But for Gregory, who had never made something tangible with his hands, it looked like a home and he was fiercely proud of it. He had also spent a good deal of time constructing a small fire. Upon the first sign of smoke, and then flame, Gregory felt the rush of such amazing success that he never had felt before. A substantial, real result to his efforts was a rare occurrence in his other life.
The dog saw all this, that Gregory had his act together, and decided this was reason enough to stay.
II
Around eight days had passed since the sinking of the Medallion. Gregory had become much more adept at rekindling his fire and foraging around for sustenance for himself, and the now two things he had to keep alive: the dog and the fire. The dog wasn’t too much trouble; he found himself enough food each day to stay alive.
The fire was another story. All of the vegetation on the island was, unfortunately, far too oily to burn for any length of time. So it was that, despite his best efforts at collecting a massive amount of nourishment for the flames, each night the fire would go out and a chill would set over the camp.
Gregory was also dealing with the phenomenon that no matter how hard he tried, he could only go so far into the jungle. It wasn’t necessarily some malevolent force that barred his access. It was just that whenever Reality wanted to stretch and get more comfortable, it did, and Gregory would find himself exiting the line of trees, within eyeshot of his camp.
He viewed this new dynamic, not with fear, but with impatience. Testing this natural anomaly and simultaneously his sanity, he set out to count off his steps into the forest, before being rerouted back out. The dog simply observed from his cozy spot in the sun. He returned, once again inadvertently, and exclaimed angrily, “121 paces and here I am again!” He kicked at the sand, startling it into leaping up and around the campsite.
The dog was not impressed by the show and stayed reclined, enjoying his leisurely Sunday warmth.
Gregory threw his tantrum until he was too weary to continue and dozed off, remaining in this state until the next morning.
Unfortunately for Gregory, clouds were gathering.
III
What woke him the next morning was the silence.
Normally, the island he lived on was awash with noises, for all hours. At first it kept him awake, but now he could not foresee falling asleep in a place that was as quiet as he was used to. It was the absence of the waves, though, that startled him into wakefulness.
His first thought was that he had never been on the island, that he was on the ship. But he remembered that there is the sound of water on a ship, too. So he cleared his eyes and stared out from his low-lying place on the beach at the water.
It was not moving.
To the best of his observational skills, he could not detect a single sound he had grown accustomed to. It was as if the island had died overnight.
He picked up on something, though. It was a small, high-pitched howling. He looked up at the unnaturally gray sky overhead and located the source of the island’s pain.
There was a gale force storm brewing and the wind far, far above him, was visible and only barely audible. The clouds were moving very quickly, too quickly to track shapes or symbols.
Gregory noticed the absence of the ship dog, which he had grown to like and care for. Then he noticed the lack of every other form of life around him.
Gregory ran.
IV
Gregory had only been running for a few minutes, before he started recognizing the backsides of things and wound up right back at the camp.
He spun on his heels and ran again.
This time, he was shouting as he ran, inhaling all the air he could reach and then expending it as quickly, in the form of noisy exclamations and pleas.
“For God’s sake, Let. Me. IN!”
The sound of the wind vanished, and he realized he was inside the jungle’s secure embrace. It was as if the whole world turned slightly blue.
The noises he was used to started up again, and the dog, which moved through Reality’s barriers with ease, appeared to be waiting for him at the base of a giant tree. There was something different about this part of the island, Gregory noticed. The air was heavy, as if there was some sort of omnipresent force, bearing down feebly on the ground, but that could at any moment crush everything if it felt like it.
Breaking the stillness, Gregory walked quickly over to the dog. Approaching him, he tripped on a root and fell to his knees. Part of this motion involved looking up into the enormous tree. He saw something that instilled in him a fear he had never felt before. It was a fear he had sampled while the ship was sinking, but now he truly felt what it was to fear for one’s life.
Gregory ran again.
V
Gregory’s stamina was waning. He had been running for an hour before he met with a certain death, and now he was running at a full sprint, not caring that he was going to end up wherever the island wanted him to end up. Apparently the island wanted to give him a break and led him inexplicably back to the campsite. After all, had he not just seen his own corpse hanging in the tranquility, taunting him with the intrinsic terror that only seeing oneself dead can bring?
Gregory sped by the camp, stopping only when he was ankle deep in the water to catch his breath and watch the route he had just taken.
Nothing moved, except the old foliage that swayed in a breeze that was considerably more tame than the weather he fled from. This observation caused him to remember the apocalyptic storm that was on a short course to his island. He looked up and saw that all was normal; the sun was out with few clouds to obscure the blue openness and the ocean was no longer in its sickly immobility. Waves ran deliberately up the beach, relieved that they were given this freedom once more.
Gregory regained his breath.
His heartbeat slowed and found a pace it could maintain.
His muscles stopped quivering with exertion and fear.
Gregory sighed and splashed his way back to his campsite to prepare for the coming night. The dog had not yet returned, but Gregory gathered some extra food for him anyway. He brought back his armload of kindling and nourishment, some items that could operate as either, and dropped it near his lean-to. He had no appetite and simply did the work to keep his mind from the horror he should not have seen. He made a half-hearted attempt to start the fire, which luckily enough for him, did work and threw some of the kindling on it and laid down to rest.
His dreams were haunted by terrible variations of the day he had, and he tossed restlessly in his sleep through all hours of the night.
VI
The next morning, Gregory woke to find that the dog had returned from its little adventure and was sitting in some shade, staring at him expectedly. For Gregory, the dog was now inextricably associated with yesterday’s hallucination, for that was what Gregory had decided it was, but knowing it was not the dog’s fault, he just rolled over and tried to forget the whole incident.
Unfortunately, this new viewpoint yielded some information. For instance, all of the food he had gathered had been consumed or vandalized, presumably by the dog. Gregory heaved a sigh of exasperation and crawled to his feet with the newfound burden of collecting his own breakfast again.
Instead of walking directly into the jungle from the camp, Gregory walked a ways down the beach first, for no real reason, it seemed. Each time he considered turning into the line of trees, something within him or the island repelled his misguided feet back to the line that was parallel to the shore.
So he kept walking. Eventually, he stopped trying to fight himself or the island and simply walked the rutted dunes with a wandering mind that matched his direction.
As Gregory’s journey progressed, the trees along the side of his path gradually began to disappear, as if the inertia of moving a forest around an island was too great and it would eventually slow to a stop.
Gregory’s troubled thoughts did not include the density of greenery, and so it was that he was shocked to return from his musings to see that everything within range of vision was just a cracked and empty landscape. Gregory considered turning around and heading back, but he realized that nothing tied him to his previous camp and wasn’t this place as good as any?
The sun had been beating down on him all day, and since it was setting, Gregory took the moment to relax. His days since the sinking of the ship had been stressful, to say the least, and in his reclined position in front of the water, Gregory could see everything he ever really wanted to.
Inadvertently, Gregory fell asleep.
VII
Gregory was roused into sentience when the early morning tides rose to become intimately acquainted with his feet. It was fortunate for Gregory that on the sunny side of the island, the water was never cold, not even in the mornings. The sun had just barely crested the horizon, but already Gregory could feel the fire of the day.
Gregory had no intention of dealing with the oppressive heat that bore down on him all day yesterday, and so set out in a straight line from the water’s edge into the center of the island again.
The island did not disapprove of this pursuit, and Gregory went unchallenged towards the anonymity that was the hub of his wayward journey.
The sun rose slowly, resenting the monotony of its routine as we all do in the mornings. The heat was unbearable, and Gregory realized he had only hours to find some semblance of shade or he could very well perish in this massive oven.
He stumbled on, blinded by sweat and his salty, unwashed hair. Gregory felt as if he could drown in his perspiration, it blanketed him so thoroughly and relentlessly.
It was still morning.
Gregory was panicking, the urgency of the situation finally setting in. It was relief he needed more than anything, something, some obstruction to the sun’s violent injustice.
He stopped moving as quickly to expend energy screaming and roaring and kicking the hard dirt around him. Anything to show how much he despised this punishment.
And then he stopped, for in front of him was not the shade he so desperately needed, but it was something remarkable nonetheless.
A broken pair of eyeglasses hung from a string, which hung from a frond.
It wasn’t so much that the heat stopped, maybe it did, or maybe Gregory simply stopped feeling it. Either case, it amounts to the same.
He walked over and alleviated the pull of gravity of the fragile device. Turning it over in his hand, he noted a few things about them. They were wide and rectangular, ones a journalist that wanted to fit every stereotype would wear. One of the lenses was missing, the other was perfectly intact. And Gregory, who had no place to put them, simply placed them along his temples and ears and the bridge of his nose.
When he turned around, the sun did not shine nearly as bright and allowed him to return to the shore without any trouble. Gregory feared that he had made the whole predicament up, but the salty crust that lined his forehead coated his whole body was evidence enough that the sun had committed an act of malice.
Gregory made it back to the beach in good time, faster than his trip to the eyeglasses and at half the speed. He felt more exhausted than he ever had in his life. When his body hit the sand, it was less unconscious and more comatose.
His rest was one of a healed pain, and satisfaction.
VIII
When Gregory woke the next morning, it was a drink and a cigarette he wanted more than anything. Vices he had given up long ago suddenly required of him a forgotten dependence. Gregory looked to his left, where a nightstand would have been had he been lying on a mattress, luxuries of a civilized world that had misplaced him. This nightstand would have probably had on it a lukewarm bottle of opened wine, a red no doubt. But Gregory did not have a nightstand, or a mattress, and he certainly did not have a half-empty bottle of red wine. It was the first thing he actually missed, or perhaps the first thing he noticed missing. It amounts to the same.
Gregory did not feel like he had some sort of depth as a person, not when he craved the human weaknesses that marred what could have been a happy time in his life. But he acknowledged that he craved such things, so what more can you want of him?
Gregory tried to take his mind off of the things he had no access to, things that would have ultimately driven him crazy, had he encouraged them.
Distracting his mind with chores and activities seemed the best option, and so it was that he went for a leisurely swim. As he got closer to the shore, his excitement built to the point that he was sprinting into the water, whooping and heaving the greatest of laughs. Despite motivation to the contrary, his glasses stayed on his nose as stable as if they were adhesive. He kicked the water into action and spun in circles, throwing the ocean around him in a circular wall that in turn pitched the light into many different shapes and patterns. After Gregory’s recent trials, this little celebration thrown especially for him seemed like the happiest occasion he ever attended. Gregory had no way of knowing the end of his story. Even if he did, though, it is nice to think that he would still have enjoyed this moment in the same way, free of care and the anxieties he bore.
Gregory woke up depraved that morning.
He went to sleep fulfilled.
Copyright 2008 Alex Fovell
More to the story, I intend to have 11 to 13 chapters.
This one is called Chance, I think you'll like it.
I
“A dog is perhaps the worst companion to be stranded on an island with,” mused Gregory, who wondered for the eleventh time whether it was morally acceptable to eat the one thing that tethered him to modern civilization.
His current residence was a rather smallish island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, covered in vegetation that obscured the contents of the island from the air and sea. The ship Gregory had been lucky to be on, the HMS Medallion, blew off course during an unexpected, but malicious squall and wrecked on a reef. All passengers aboard the vessel drowned, save Gregory. The dog, a little ratter that operated as the ship’s mascot, turned up a day later without explanation of its salvation or so much as an apology. For days it merely shifted it’s attention between Gregory, the sea, and the wildlife that inhabited the borders of the uninviting jungle.
Gregory had been lucky enough to pick up on survival skills that the media had displayed in fantastic scenarios with muscle bound heroes clawing out a living in the most inhospitable of places. Unfortunately, Gregory lived in Reality and had to abide by its mediocrities.
The little bit of shade and defense from the elements, or as the buff action heroes call it, a lean-to, was scrawny and a little depressing. But for Gregory, who had never made something tangible with his hands, it looked like a home and he was fiercely proud of it. He had also spent a good deal of time constructing a small fire. Upon the first sign of smoke, and then flame, Gregory felt the rush of such amazing success that he never had felt before. A substantial, real result to his efforts was a rare occurrence in his other life.
The dog saw all this, that Gregory had his act together, and decided this was reason enough to stay.
II
Around eight days had passed since the sinking of the Medallion. Gregory had become much more adept at rekindling his fire and foraging around for sustenance for himself, and the now two things he had to keep alive: the dog and the fire. The dog wasn’t too much trouble; he found himself enough food each day to stay alive.
The fire was another story. All of the vegetation on the island was, unfortunately, far too oily to burn for any length of time. So it was that, despite his best efforts at collecting a massive amount of nourishment for the flames, each night the fire would go out and a chill would set over the camp.
Gregory was also dealing with the phenomenon that no matter how hard he tried, he could only go so far into the jungle. It wasn’t necessarily some malevolent force that barred his access. It was just that whenever Reality wanted to stretch and get more comfortable, it did, and Gregory would find himself exiting the line of trees, within eyeshot of his camp.
He viewed this new dynamic, not with fear, but with impatience. Testing this natural anomaly and simultaneously his sanity, he set out to count off his steps into the forest, before being rerouted back out. The dog simply observed from his cozy spot in the sun. He returned, once again inadvertently, and exclaimed angrily, “121 paces and here I am again!” He kicked at the sand, startling it into leaping up and around the campsite.
The dog was not impressed by the show and stayed reclined, enjoying his leisurely Sunday warmth.
Gregory threw his tantrum until he was too weary to continue and dozed off, remaining in this state until the next morning.
Unfortunately for Gregory, clouds were gathering.
III
What woke him the next morning was the silence.
Normally, the island he lived on was awash with noises, for all hours. At first it kept him awake, but now he could not foresee falling asleep in a place that was as quiet as he was used to. It was the absence of the waves, though, that startled him into wakefulness.
His first thought was that he had never been on the island, that he was on the ship. But he remembered that there is the sound of water on a ship, too. So he cleared his eyes and stared out from his low-lying place on the beach at the water.
It was not moving.
To the best of his observational skills, he could not detect a single sound he had grown accustomed to. It was as if the island had died overnight.
He picked up on something, though. It was a small, high-pitched howling. He looked up at the unnaturally gray sky overhead and located the source of the island’s pain.
There was a gale force storm brewing and the wind far, far above him, was visible and only barely audible. The clouds were moving very quickly, too quickly to track shapes or symbols.
Gregory noticed the absence of the ship dog, which he had grown to like and care for. Then he noticed the lack of every other form of life around him.
Gregory ran.
IV
Gregory had only been running for a few minutes, before he started recognizing the backsides of things and wound up right back at the camp.
He spun on his heels and ran again.
This time, he was shouting as he ran, inhaling all the air he could reach and then expending it as quickly, in the form of noisy exclamations and pleas.
“For God’s sake, Let. Me. IN!”
The sound of the wind vanished, and he realized he was inside the jungle’s secure embrace. It was as if the whole world turned slightly blue.
The noises he was used to started up again, and the dog, which moved through Reality’s barriers with ease, appeared to be waiting for him at the base of a giant tree. There was something different about this part of the island, Gregory noticed. The air was heavy, as if there was some sort of omnipresent force, bearing down feebly on the ground, but that could at any moment crush everything if it felt like it.
Breaking the stillness, Gregory walked quickly over to the dog. Approaching him, he tripped on a root and fell to his knees. Part of this motion involved looking up into the enormous tree. He saw something that instilled in him a fear he had never felt before. It was a fear he had sampled while the ship was sinking, but now he truly felt what it was to fear for one’s life.
Gregory ran again.
V
Gregory’s stamina was waning. He had been running for an hour before he met with a certain death, and now he was running at a full sprint, not caring that he was going to end up wherever the island wanted him to end up. Apparently the island wanted to give him a break and led him inexplicably back to the campsite. After all, had he not just seen his own corpse hanging in the tranquility, taunting him with the intrinsic terror that only seeing oneself dead can bring?
Gregory sped by the camp, stopping only when he was ankle deep in the water to catch his breath and watch the route he had just taken.
Nothing moved, except the old foliage that swayed in a breeze that was considerably more tame than the weather he fled from. This observation caused him to remember the apocalyptic storm that was on a short course to his island. He looked up and saw that all was normal; the sun was out with few clouds to obscure the blue openness and the ocean was no longer in its sickly immobility. Waves ran deliberately up the beach, relieved that they were given this freedom once more.
Gregory regained his breath.
His heartbeat slowed and found a pace it could maintain.
His muscles stopped quivering with exertion and fear.
Gregory sighed and splashed his way back to his campsite to prepare for the coming night. The dog had not yet returned, but Gregory gathered some extra food for him anyway. He brought back his armload of kindling and nourishment, some items that could operate as either, and dropped it near his lean-to. He had no appetite and simply did the work to keep his mind from the horror he should not have seen. He made a half-hearted attempt to start the fire, which luckily enough for him, did work and threw some of the kindling on it and laid down to rest.
His dreams were haunted by terrible variations of the day he had, and he tossed restlessly in his sleep through all hours of the night.
VI
The next morning, Gregory woke to find that the dog had returned from its little adventure and was sitting in some shade, staring at him expectedly. For Gregory, the dog was now inextricably associated with yesterday’s hallucination, for that was what Gregory had decided it was, but knowing it was not the dog’s fault, he just rolled over and tried to forget the whole incident.
Unfortunately, this new viewpoint yielded some information. For instance, all of the food he had gathered had been consumed or vandalized, presumably by the dog. Gregory heaved a sigh of exasperation and crawled to his feet with the newfound burden of collecting his own breakfast again.
Instead of walking directly into the jungle from the camp, Gregory walked a ways down the beach first, for no real reason, it seemed. Each time he considered turning into the line of trees, something within him or the island repelled his misguided feet back to the line that was parallel to the shore.
So he kept walking. Eventually, he stopped trying to fight himself or the island and simply walked the rutted dunes with a wandering mind that matched his direction.
As Gregory’s journey progressed, the trees along the side of his path gradually began to disappear, as if the inertia of moving a forest around an island was too great and it would eventually slow to a stop.
Gregory’s troubled thoughts did not include the density of greenery, and so it was that he was shocked to return from his musings to see that everything within range of vision was just a cracked and empty landscape. Gregory considered turning around and heading back, but he realized that nothing tied him to his previous camp and wasn’t this place as good as any?
The sun had been beating down on him all day, and since it was setting, Gregory took the moment to relax. His days since the sinking of the ship had been stressful, to say the least, and in his reclined position in front of the water, Gregory could see everything he ever really wanted to.
Inadvertently, Gregory fell asleep.
VII
Gregory was roused into sentience when the early morning tides rose to become intimately acquainted with his feet. It was fortunate for Gregory that on the sunny side of the island, the water was never cold, not even in the mornings. The sun had just barely crested the horizon, but already Gregory could feel the fire of the day.
Gregory had no intention of dealing with the oppressive heat that bore down on him all day yesterday, and so set out in a straight line from the water’s edge into the center of the island again.
The island did not disapprove of this pursuit, and Gregory went unchallenged towards the anonymity that was the hub of his wayward journey.
The sun rose slowly, resenting the monotony of its routine as we all do in the mornings. The heat was unbearable, and Gregory realized he had only hours to find some semblance of shade or he could very well perish in this massive oven.
He stumbled on, blinded by sweat and his salty, unwashed hair. Gregory felt as if he could drown in his perspiration, it blanketed him so thoroughly and relentlessly.
It was still morning.
Gregory was panicking, the urgency of the situation finally setting in. It was relief he needed more than anything, something, some obstruction to the sun’s violent injustice.
He stopped moving as quickly to expend energy screaming and roaring and kicking the hard dirt around him. Anything to show how much he despised this punishment.
And then he stopped, for in front of him was not the shade he so desperately needed, but it was something remarkable nonetheless.
A broken pair of eyeglasses hung from a string, which hung from a frond.
It wasn’t so much that the heat stopped, maybe it did, or maybe Gregory simply stopped feeling it. Either case, it amounts to the same.
He walked over and alleviated the pull of gravity of the fragile device. Turning it over in his hand, he noted a few things about them. They were wide and rectangular, ones a journalist that wanted to fit every stereotype would wear. One of the lenses was missing, the other was perfectly intact. And Gregory, who had no place to put them, simply placed them along his temples and ears and the bridge of his nose.
When he turned around, the sun did not shine nearly as bright and allowed him to return to the shore without any trouble. Gregory feared that he had made the whole predicament up, but the salty crust that lined his forehead coated his whole body was evidence enough that the sun had committed an act of malice.
Gregory made it back to the beach in good time, faster than his trip to the eyeglasses and at half the speed. He felt more exhausted than he ever had in his life. When his body hit the sand, it was less unconscious and more comatose.
His rest was one of a healed pain, and satisfaction.
VIII
When Gregory woke the next morning, it was a drink and a cigarette he wanted more than anything. Vices he had given up long ago suddenly required of him a forgotten dependence. Gregory looked to his left, where a nightstand would have been had he been lying on a mattress, luxuries of a civilized world that had misplaced him. This nightstand would have probably had on it a lukewarm bottle of opened wine, a red no doubt. But Gregory did not have a nightstand, or a mattress, and he certainly did not have a half-empty bottle of red wine. It was the first thing he actually missed, or perhaps the first thing he noticed missing. It amounts to the same.
Gregory did not feel like he had some sort of depth as a person, not when he craved the human weaknesses that marred what could have been a happy time in his life. But he acknowledged that he craved such things, so what more can you want of him?
Gregory tried to take his mind off of the things he had no access to, things that would have ultimately driven him crazy, had he encouraged them.
Distracting his mind with chores and activities seemed the best option, and so it was that he went for a leisurely swim. As he got closer to the shore, his excitement built to the point that he was sprinting into the water, whooping and heaving the greatest of laughs. Despite motivation to the contrary, his glasses stayed on his nose as stable as if they were adhesive. He kicked the water into action and spun in circles, throwing the ocean around him in a circular wall that in turn pitched the light into many different shapes and patterns. After Gregory’s recent trials, this little celebration thrown especially for him seemed like the happiest occasion he ever attended. Gregory had no way of knowing the end of his story. Even if he did, though, it is nice to think that he would still have enjoyed this moment in the same way, free of care and the anxieties he bore.
Gregory woke up depraved that morning.
He went to sleep fulfilled.
Copyright 2008 Alex Fovell
More to the story, I intend to have 11 to 13 chapters.