Temptation

The sand was coarse and rough in her hands. It scraped across her palm, getting stuck in the crevices between her fingers and trapping itself under her fingernails. Its reflective pale yellow colour hid its nefarious intentions. This was not the island paradise that the beautiful yellow sand suggested. It was harsh, cruel and dangerous.

The water was cool but not cold. It was pleasant: the cool water lapping over the very tips of her toes. Occasionally it would rise further, washing over her legs and soaking her dirty grey tracksuit bottoms. It was refreshing and it soothed the rough layer of sand beneath, but it was simply another deception. The water was just as cruel, taunting her with something that she couldn’t have. Water. She needed water, but she could not have that water.

The soft lapping of the waves were soothing, so much so that she could easily fall asleep where she lay but she mustn’t. That was very important, she knew that, she must NOT fall asleep on the beach, no matter how tempting it was.

The sun was shining down on the island, warming the sand to almost unbearable levels. It reddened her skin and she could feel the heat emitting from the areas of bare skin that were exposed to the sun. She would have to move soon. The cool water soothed the burning skin but it was just another deception. She was still burning.

A groan escaped her mouth as she sat up, her body protesting the movement: her bones clicking and her muscles screaming. One hand, with coarse sand still stuck to the skin, reached up and rubbed the back of her sore neck. It rubbed firmly, attempting to rub the lingering aches and pain out of her body.

The sand where her head had been lay was red and a small stream of red was pouring into the sea from her right ankle. They didn’t hurt but the blood was a flashing red light that something was wrong. She pulled her right leg into her body so she could look closer at the wound on her ankle. It was deep, her flesh ripped cleanly from heel to ankle. She wondered what she had caught it on. Her seat? A piece of coral? She would have to find something to cover it with and water to clean it. There it was again. Water. She needed water, but she could not have that water.

The blood in the sand where her head had been was slightly more concerning. She could feel a distorted bump on the back of her head and it was sensitive and painful to touch. She was sure that lying down on the sand was probably not a smart thing to do. She could feel the coarse sand mixing with her blood and matting her hair over the wound.

She glanced out across the sea. It was quiet, steady. Tiny waves splashed where the sea met the sand bank, but otherwise the water was calm. A beachside paradise. Nothing gave away the truth. The truth that there was a plane’s fuselage under that calm sea, mostly intact, drifting further and further down until it reaches the sand and dirt bottom in the hidden dark depths of the ocean. The truth that the calm sea had once been a raging monster threatening to drown every living being that floated on its surface.

It was a large storm that had brought down her plane. She’d escaped the fuselage as it had filled with water, her flat life jacket allowing her enough movement to slip out of the hole created from the impact, before she inflated it and let it pull her up to the surface. As the howling wind and buckets of rain slowed and calmed, she had flung herself out of the water and onto the sand. The sun had appeared and in its light, the evidence of the accident hid from sight like the sun was incapable of viewing such horror and destruction.

As she climbed her way up onto her feet, she pondered: the past and who she was; the present and what had happened; and the future and what awaited her. There were so many questions that went unanswered in the silence of the island and it was an island, a small island. From her spot on the shore she could see the island from edge to edge. It was perhaps the same length as a football pitch. There were more islands in the distance, some smaller, some larger, but none of them occupied by another human being – at least she thought so.

She walked around the coast, hugging the shady treeline, unwilling to step into the luscious green forest that covered the island. She was sure that the luscious green cover was simply another deception. What horror and dangers lingered behind the leafy cover, like a plot twist hiding behind a page in a book? Would a monster jump out with the same scripted precision of the mass murderer on page eighty-three?

A steadily flowing stream finally tempted her in like the bait on the end of a fishing line. She needed water, but she still could not have that water. She followed the rapidly growing river inland, climbing upwards as the terrain tilted. Her bare feet gave her little traction on the ground, the sticks and stones irritating the soft skin underneath, and her right ankle left a trackable trail of blood.

At the source of the water, she finally found water that she could use. She cleaned herself the best she could, paying special attention to her ankle and the back of her head. She let the dirt and sand simply wash away downstream, back towards the beach that it came from.

Deep in the forest where the sunlight was barely reaching the ground she found the first evidence of the accident, besides her. High in the trees, sitting on a mass of thick and sturdy branches and a blanket of leaves, was a piece of the plane, obviously jettisoned before the plane crashed. It was matte white like the rest of the aircraft. A single beam of light was shining down onto it like some all-powerful being had blessed it, though in reality the light was coming from the gaping hole in the canopy of leaves that it had created when it landed.

It wasn’t until the sun dawned on the next morning that she found anything else from the crashed plane. Items, small and large, were being swept ashore as the tide rolled in and then rolled back out. She had slept on the beach, under the shade of the trees. She daren’t sleep in the trees and she daren’t sleep any further out on the beach in case she got a salty and wet surprise. She had woken up to see the beach had been littered overnight.

Soggy books; magazines; bottles of water, which she kept; blankets, which she also kept. There were also a few spare lifejackets floating in the little waves. An interesting find was a keychain with little keyrings on it. One of the keyrings had a picture of two women. One was her and the other – the face was familiar, but she couldn’t place the name. Another keyring had a name, Tillie. Was that her name? It was familiar but somehow it didn’t feel right.

Her best find on the beach was the food trunk. She wasn’t sure how the food trunk had ended up on the beach rather than sinking to the bottom of the ocean, but she wasn’t about to complain. The trunk was light, more like a fabric bag than a box but that didn’t matter to her. The inside was dry and so was the food. She hadn’t eaten since she had arrived on the shores of this island from hell and she could feel the painful pings of hunger in her stomach.

She had eaten half of one tub before she remembered the situation that she was in and began eating slower. Part of her wanted to shove it all in and fill herself up but who knew when she would next find food. She couldn’t eat it all now. The box only had limited supplies; three tubs of food, a few apples and a small lightweight box. She peaked inside the box. It was a slice of chocolate cake. Gooey spongy chocolate cake decorated with chocolate icing that had partially melted in the heat. It had three layers of sponge between which was a thick and partially melted layer of chocolate fudge. The sight and the smell of chocolate goodness made her mouth water. No! She quickly closed the box back up. No, she couldn’t eat the chocolate temptress, yet. She needed to save it and make all the food last.

After finishing the tub of food and sipping at the warm water that had washed up, she created a sign out of sticks on the ground, spelling out the word HELP. Surely somebody would have noticed a plane going down and would come and look for her, right?

As the sun reached its hottest point, she had no choice but retreat to the shade of the trees. She collapsed in a heap on the ground, spreading herself out like a star fish to stay cool. She glanced over to where she had placed the food box and thought back to the gorgeous chocolatey delight that was inside.

No! She turned her eyes back to the clear blue sky. There were two vapor trails of planes that were flying far too high to see her desperate cry for help. She turned to her food box twice more. Once she gripped the cake box before returning it to its spot. The second time she didn’t open the food box at all, diverting herself away at the very last second. She was hungry but she didn’t have enough food. She needed to ration it, but her hunger pains were not helped by the boredom that had swept over her. Here she was still, laying in the shade of the trees, her arms and legs spread out like an eagle, trying desperately to think of something other than the delicious smelling chocolate cake in the box. She had had enough of this island, of this hell. She wanted to go home, wherever that was. She wanted heaven, not hell, and she knew exactly how to get there, for a few minutes at least!

She went to the box, fished out the cake and wasted no time in taking a bite. It was glorious. It was heaven in a messy and gooey pile of chocolate sponge. Delicious. The chocolate melted in the mouth, dancing on her taste buds. The taste was worth it. The cake was worth the risk of starving later on. It had tempted her and it had won, but it was soooooo worth it.

.

‘Are you actually tasting it?’

Maya’s head shot over to the seat next to her as she pulled the plastic spoon out of her mouth, smudges of chocolate frosting remained on the spoon. ‘Huh?’

Tilly giggled, ‘Seriously, Maya, you could be trapped on a dessert island with a choice of cake or water, and you’d still eat the cake.’

Maya shook away the strange sense of Deja-vu that Tilly’s comment gave her and glanced down at the cake. ‘But it’s delicious. It’s heaven. It’s–’

Maya’s words were cut off by a large bang. The plane shook in the strong wind. Face masks fell from the ceiling and there was a mad scramble for the life jackets. Maya placed hers on but didn’t inflate it, unlike Tilly and the three other passengers. The plane shuddered and Maya could have sworn something sheared off the wing. But there was no time to worry about that. Maya’s stomach dropped as the plane plummeted towards the dark and foreboding ocean below.