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I WAKE ON MY FEET, wind tangled in my hair. The sand is cold beneath my arches and the tide is rising, white foam and gray water frothing around my ankles before fizzing through my toes.
My bare toes.
That alone wouldn’t be a problem. But I’m also in M.M.’s cargo pants, the softest pair in her moth-eaten closet. I wore them to bed last night, the same night, apparently, I sleepwalked to the shore. Again.
“Shit.”
“Shit,” repeats a voice—monotone, compared to the waveforms rising from the sea before me. My sleep-soaked eyes swivel over my shoulder and spot U-me as she rolls through the morning mist enshrouding the beach. Her belted wheels leave behind triangles like paw prints. Her boxy head, perched atop a canister body, comes halfway up my thigh when she reaches my side. “Shit: fecal matter, noun; to expel feces from the body, verb; to deceive—”
“I locked the door.”
U-me switches gears at the declarative. “Strongly agree.”
“You hid the key in the house.”
“Strongly agree.”
The surf surges forward, forcing me back onto the beach. As I retreat, a glint on the ground snags my eye.
The house key, embedded like a shell in the gray sand.
I scoop it up. “Shit.”
The one-worder sends U-me down dictionary lane a second time. I barely hear her over the sea’s drone.
Every other sleep, I dream of swimming to the horizon and finding my sister at the edge of the world. She takes me by the hand and leads us home. Home means a city in the sky, sometimes. Or another island. Home could be here, for all I care, if she were with me. She’s not. I don’t know what separated us, just that waking up really sucks, especially when my body is hell-bent on miming the dreams no matter how many doors I lock. My solution? Turn dreams into reality. Find my sister, sooner preferably to later.
“Come on, love,” I say to U-me, turning my back to the tide. “Let’s try to beat the sun.”
I stalk up the beach. My shoulders still ache from the last trip inland, but recovery can wait. The first of my nighttime escapades never took me into the water. Today, I’m ankle-deep. Tomorrow? Finish Hubert today, and I won’t stick around to find out.
In fifty strides, I’m upon M.M.’s house. It sits daredevilishly close to the coastline, a squat little shack overlooking the ocean from atop a bed of rocks, half-sunken into the sand. Stuff’s everywhere. On the porch steps. The deck. Prized possessions, like M.M.’s fanny pack, must be stored above sand level. I tear the pack off the porch rail, then loop to the house side, where Hubert is lounging.
“Morning, Bert.” I shoulder the pack. “Feeling lucky today?”
No reply. Hubert’s not very chatty, which is fine by me. I make the small talk; he keeps me sane by existing.
You see, I’ve divided my time on this island into life-before-Hubert and life after. Life-before-Hubert … Joules, I hardly remember what I did to pass the days. Probably planting taro, fixing M.M.’s water pipes. Standard survival stuff.
Then I successfully completed my first journey inland and met Hubert. He was in pieces. Now he’s one propeller short of his normal self, and I have to say, I’m proud of how far we’ve come. Sure, bringing back his body almost broke mine, and a freaky situation involving his hull, some rope, and gravity nearly tourniqueted off my leg, but he’s relying on me and that gives me strength. I’m relying on him, too. I wish I could swim to my sister like I do in my dreams. The problem with oceans? They always seem smaller from the shore.
“Just you wait, love,” I say to Hubert, nudging him with my foot. “You. Me. The sea. This evening.”
One propeller.
I won’t return without it.
U-me rolls over and together we set off inland. We outstrip the sounds of the sea and gulls, until it’s just the crunch of rock under U-me’s wheels, the squish of gray mud under my rubber clogs—compliments of M.M.—and foggy silence for kilometers on end. Eventually, the mud calcifies to shale. Pools of rainwater form little shallow, sterile ponds. Shrubs lean in the direction of the wind, their roots crawling like veins along the rock. This side of the island—shore side—is mostly flat in elevation. If not for the fog, you’d be able to see straight to the ridge. It bisects the island, a wall of stone that can’t be circumnavigated, only climbed.
In the shadow of the towering ridge face, I unzip my pack, remove the coil of nylon rope, and drape it around U-me’s neck. “You know what to do.”
“Strongly agree.” She rolls over the ridge’s crumbling base and up, shrinking to a speck. At the top, she sends the now-fastened rope back to me. All one hundred meters tumble down.
I catch the end and yank, checking that it’s secure before knotting it around my waist. I get as good a grip as I can around the slick nylon, breathe in, and push off the ground.
Foothold. Handhold. Repeat. The rising sun warms my shoulders as I hit the final stretch. I heave myself onto the narrow ridgetop, drenched beneath M.M.’s sweater, and catch my breath while surveying the land on the other side. Meadow-side. Grayscale like the rest of the island, trees growing in scraggly bunches. Brick mounds swell through the waist-high grass like tumors. I have yet to figure out what they are. Shrines, maybe. Very mossy, neglected shrines.
Shaking out my arms, I start the descent. U-me rolls beside me, occasionally beeping out a “Strongly disagree” in response to my foothold choices. But I’ve memorized most of the soft spots in the ridge, and I order her back up top when I’m halfway down.
The untied rope drops just as my feet hit the ground. I stuff it into my pack and pat U-me’s head when she rejoins me. “Good work, love.”
Aside from us, the mist is the only moving thing in the meadow this morning. I try my best to ignore the shrines and attribute my goose bumps to the sweat cooling on my back. Hunger stabs my stomach, but I don’t stop for a taro biscuit. Not here. Doesn’t feel right to eat here.
The meadow ends with a sparse forest of pines. Several are fused along the trunk like conjoined twins. Infiltrating the pines are eight-point-leaf trees. They dominate the forest deeper in. Branches clasp above our heads, leaves strewing the path with rotting mulch. A beetle darts in front of us—and ends up under U-me’s wheels.
Crunch.
I flinch. The taking of a life—however small—seems bigger when there’s so little of it on this island already. “Heartless.”
“Heartless: without feeling, adjective; cruel, adjective.”
“Or literally without a heart.”
“Neutral.”
“Okay, what do you even mean by that? Neutral to the definition? Or to the idea of not having a heart?”
U-me’s fans whir.
I duck under a low-hanging branch. “Right. Sorry, love. Forgot you don’t do direct questions.” Along with a bajillion other things.
When I first found U-me in the cupboard under M.M.’s sink, in need of some sun juice, I’d danced around the house. A bot could help me build the boat. Or map out the waters in my vicinity. Or simply provide me critical intel, like where I’m from and how to find my sister.
Except U-me isn’t your average bot. She’s a mash-up of a dictionary and a questionnaire rating scale, about as useful to me as … well, a dictionary or questionnaire rating scale. It helps that she can tie ropes, dig holes, and follow my lead, like roll over in the general direction of the junk piles when we finally arrive at the Shipyard, my name for the clearing in the forest, where there’s another little shrine and something that looks a lot like a swimming pool. The rim is overgrown with moss and surrounded by heaps of scrap metal. Most of the scraps are oxidized, deformed, and unsalvageable, especially now that I’ve used what was salvageable on Hubert.
Still, I crouch and go through the piles, methodically at first, then less so. The odds of finding a propeller are slim. But so were the odds of finding any boat parts and yet, here we are: hull, rudder, tiller, motor, bolt, all accounted for. Just when I think, That’s it, my luck’s run out, I find another piece. What’s more, each piece seems to come from the same boat. It’s kind of magical. Everything about Hubert is. He came to me at a time when I needed him most. Don’t give up, the universe seemed to be saying on the day I met him. And I haven’t. I’m so close to finding Kay. My breath shortens as I think of her. A flash of sequins. A shriek of a laugh. A cherry-ice pop stained smile, the color red fleeting. Two hands joined, mine and hers. An impossibly white ladder, connecting sky to sea. We splash in and float for days.
When I linger in the memory, though, the water around us trembles. I see a boat, carried away by the waves. I hear a whisper—I’m sorry—laced with the sorrow of a goodbye.
Positive thoughts. It’s better to focus on the present. To break things down into manageable tasks. Build Hubert. Find Kay.
Build.
Find.
Build.
Find.
But dread poisons my thoughts anyway.
Copyright © 2021 by Joan He
