schematicdreams | Entries tagged with fortunately/unfortunately

Despite the stench, his stomach pined for food. He was tempted to carve out the least rotten chunks of meat--no, carrion--but he wasn't sure he wanted to risk inviting parasites or bugs into his gut. He wondered if he could sterilize his food somehow, but, without a pot or pan, he didn't think he could even boil water. Still, it seemed an incredible waste to leave the demon bird meat to the beetles and maggots.

One of the demon chicks pecked at his foot, continuing its constant search for food. The orphans had spread out from his shelter meandering as they had when he'd first encountered them. Some of them had begun poking at their parents' bodies, which he at first regarded as a gesture of mourning, but on closer inspection as one of hunger; they had discovered that the creeping crawlers dining on their former guardians made for a passable breakfast. Some of them may also have been gobbling the occasional strip of flesh, whether on purpose or by accident. He admired how practical the chicks could be in the face of their recent loss.

A similarly practical decision might have been to kill one of the chicks for his own breakfast, but, for all the encouragement his stomach offered, his heart recoiled. He'd already taken their parents, sibling, and nest; killing another would be excessive. They'd made a decent heated blanket, even they probably did poop all around his shelter. If he killed another, they'd shriek up a storm, and maybe another adult would come charging in, who knows? On the other hand, if he let them live . . . they might make a decent alarm system for his camp! They were, uh, a good homing beacon in case he got lost in the woods, what with all the squeaking.

Okay, he admitted. They were kinda cute.

His manlier side scoffed at him. The chicks could live, it conceded, for now. But he would eat them before he starved and before they had a chance to grow up. And he'd have to start looking for other, manlier foods right away.

He picked up his demon bird-slaying spear. It had looked better yesterday. Even as he wiped the grime from its point, he could see that this implement wouldn't last; the water and dirt had softened its wood and dulled its tip. He prodded the point into the nearby carcass and was pleased that it could still at least impale flesh. With modest effort, the shaft buried itself a few inches deep before butting up against some less yielding structure inside. A bone, most likely.

Come to think of it, there was probably a lot of bone in these corpses. Even if the meat was a putrid mess, he could still use the bones for tools. And they'd be waterproof, which would certainly be a plus.

He decided he'd start with the legs, since they almost certainly had some of the largest bones, and he wouldn't have to contend with any fragrant internal organs while cleaning them. He dragged one of the previously severed limbs to a nearby log, seated himself, and began working at it with his pocketknife. Guts or no, the aroma was still overwhelming, and he found himself wishing for a kitchen sink. In lieu of modern plumbing, he dragged the leg through the undergrowth, across the beach, and down to the water, where he let the ocean wash away the rotten flesh.

After a few minutes of work, however, the waves became more of a nuisance than an aid. The force of the incoming water shook the leg under his knife and forced him to brace himself between each impact. He stood up in frustration and searched for a better place to work.

He eventually sighted the rocky outcroppings down the beach. At their farthest point, they presented a flat stone surface, only inches above the water, but still protected from the passing crests and troughs. Here, he began again, dipping his hands and dropping chunks of meat when he willed it rather than when the ocean did. The flesh did not loose itself easily. Even in its decaying state, the tissue clung to its frame, and his knife, though sharp, was slow to expose the underlying bone.

As he peeled away muscle and sinew, he planned his next task. He wasn't sure exactly what he would do with the skeleton of a demon bird; for all the apparent usefulness of the material, he had little concept of how to shape it. While his wooden spear had taken him only minutes to whittle and harden, bone implements would surely require more trial and error. He had never carved bone before, and he didn't know that his knife was up to the task. For all he knew, he might instead have to grind it into shape with a stout rock. But maybe that was for the best; the less he used his knife, the longer it would last him.

A splash in the water disrupted his concentration. He hadn't tossed in any chunk of flesh, so he looked around to see if perhaps he had accidentally displaced a loose rock. Finding none, he stared into the blood-stained surf. A scaled face broke surface, then vanished with a splash. An incoming wave diluted the obscuring crimson, and he began to make out the silhouettes of hand-sized fish, darting back and forth.

He set the hunk of demon bird aside and carved off a thumb sized chunk. Holding his knife in his right hand and raw poultry in his left, he knelt down close to the water. Slowly, he extended his arm, then gingerly released the bait. A shadow approached, and the morsel bobbed up and down on the surface. He leaned low, then lunged forward with the knife. Blood and saltwater exploded from where his hand met the water, clenched around the knife handle. Something tugged against the blade and slapped his knuckles. He pulled his arm up in a hooking motion, and brought it to his side.

A silvery-green fish thrashed beside him, even as his knife pinned it to the rockface. A pair of slimy green lips hinged open next to a dull yellow eye on each side. Its gills flapped futilely for absent seawater, and its tail slapped the ground. He dug his knife further into its entry point behind one of the creature's pectoral fins. The fight faded from his catch, and at last it lay dead.

( Turn information )

Something warm and fluffy pressed on his head. His neck, too, felt a strange, bristly pressure, and even his arms and chest sensed a weight and warmth he could not identify.

At first, he thought he was still dreaming. Strange sensations were the language of dreams. But then, he remembered that his dreams had featured his ex-girlfriend yelling at him for not turning off the stove in his old apartment, and neither his stove nor his ex had felt anything like whatever had spread itself over his upper body. Also, he realized, his eyes were closed, and he seldom dreamt of keeping his eyes closed.

He opened his eyes. An unfocused brown blur covered his field of vision, the image of something too close to his face for him to see properly. He shut his eyes again and shook his head, lifted his arms from their fuzzy prisons, and shoved the brown blur off of his head.

A chorus of peeps and shrieks blared in his ears, concentrated by the walls of his shelter. He pushed himself up by his elbows and looked toward his feet but saw only his uninvited guests, nearly the entire demon bird brood, nestled against his legs, pecking at the interior of his shelter, and screeching at the sudden disturbance. During the night, they must have returned to what had once been their parents' nest, only to find a structure that held the only dry spot in the forest. What luck for them that there was even a heater inside, albeit one that had recently killed their parents and one of their siblings.

He pulled himself out of the feather-filled chamber and into the mud outside. A pungent, earthy smell permeated the forest. The leaves hung low on their branches, releasing droplets onto the moist ground. His shelter had held up fairly well, all things considered, though he could already see some spots on the roof he'd want to shore up soon.

The remains of his cooking were less uplifting. The storm had reduced his rotisserie to a pile of sticks beside his extinguished fire, and the torso of the demon bird had sunk several inches into the dirt. The intact corpse had fared no better, its matted feathers muddied and buzzing with flies. A repulsive smell intensified as he approached, and the bloated belly of his would-be meal confirmed that putrefaction had set in. He nudged at the body with his foot, lifting it from the dirt. Thin swarms of buzzing, winged specks exited the openings where its neck and legs had been, and their subterranean cousins tunneled in and out of the demon bird where its flesh had met the ground. He withdrew his foot and let them resume their meal.

( Turn information )

His first instinct was to restore his makeshift kitchen to its former glory--well, perhaps "glory" was the wrong word--but his good sense politely informed him that the rain would undo any such efforts. He would have to wait for the storm to abate.

He shivered. Splotches of rain impacted every square inch of his body, cold pinpricks robbing him of his body heat. He walked back to the shore, if only to warm himself up, and surveyed the coast.

The ocean had blurred into a vast collision of fresh and brackish water. Droplets bounced in tiny arcs, interrupted the arcs of their neighbors, and merged in split seconds. Lightning arced on the horizon, outshining the last of the day's sunlight. He retreated back into the comparative shelter of the forest.

Animals endured storms with fur and feathers to protect them, and while a man could do the same without, it was his birthright to do better. He would have to build himself a house.

He set about searching for materials. Some of the largest, waxiest fronds available appealed to him as potential roofing; he pulled at these until their owners surrendered them. With his knife, he appropriated some long branches and sharpened their ends. He ferried his armful of foliage to the clearing that had been the nest of the demon birds and started assembling his fort.

He had formulated only vague plans in his mind, and that was probably for the best, since those plans failed at the outset. He plunged four of his sturdiest branches into the wet ground in a square, intent on balancing a grid of twigs and leaves upon them until he had a pavilion of sorts. Before he had added more than four branches to his starting columns, they tilted and collapsed. He bent over to examine the base of his structure. The dirt, he noted, was not firm enough to resist the leverage of so much weight so far from its fulcrum. Unless he could buttress it somehow, his house would not stay vertical.

For his second try, he dug up ground under each branch before staking it in, hoping to gain more traction. Lacking a shovel, he clawed at the ground with his fingers, then a stick, but even with rain-softened dirt it was slow going. Any depression he made in the forest floor quickly filled with water, and his hands had numbed under the bombardment of cold water. He stabbed the branches into the ground, but still they would not remain upright.

Hey, he thought. He was doing this the hard way. Weren't trees already rooted in the ground?

He scooped up his construction materials and plopped them down next to the nearest tree. Wiping the rain from his eyes with the backs of his grimy hands, he rested a long branch in the crook of one of the tree's lower limbs, its other end meeting the ground at a shallow angle. He laid several branches leaning perpendicular upon this first one, starting with very short ones near the lower end and working his way upward, alternating from which side the sticks met the main support. When he'd finished, he had created a shape like an oddly like triangular ribcage; the central stick was the backbone to an widening set of wooden ribs that ended in an opening near the base of the tree.

To this he began adding his collection of leaves, again starting at the base and slowly working his way upward. The waxy fronds he'd collected did an excellent job of blocking rainfall, though it took many attempts and all the finesse he could muster to shingle the entire structure with them. He took advantage of the natural creases in the leaves and the rough edges of the bark in balancing the first layer of greenery, and, after adding an extra layer, he found himself with a lopsided, muddy tent. Though it was by no means watertight, the rain did not enter it directly, and, for now, the winds had not threatened to dismantle it. He had only to try it out.

He crawled inside, feet first. His head rested between two of the tree's roots, and his feet stopped just shy of the branches at the low end of the shelter. It smelled like a freshly cut lawn in here, and the enclosure did little to muffle the sound of the storm. He pulled off his muck-soaked shirt and wadded it up under his head. His skin, though wet, was not getting any wetter.

It seemed to be working.

He closed his eyes. Though his stomach was still empty, his clothes still soaked, and his plane still underwater, exhaustion pushed all thoughts from his mind. He listened to rain drum upon his roof until he fell asleep.

( Turn information )

* * *

He would have to name his island, he thought, as he plucked the last ragged feathers from the first demon bird. He didn't want a name that was merely descriptive, like, "Plane Crash Island" or "Poison Berry Rock," and he definitely wouldn't accept "Island of the Demon Birds"--it wasn't their island, anymore; it was his. He needed a triumphant name, indicative of its new owner. Something like "Isle of Man," but less familiar-sounding. He decided he could let the problem drop for now. He'd either be rescued before it mattered or be stranded long enough to give him time to think.

Instead, he refocused on the task of cooking his dinner. It'd been a long time since he'd last skinned a chicken on his grandparents' farm, but he'd managed to get as far as cutting off the legs, removing what he hoped was the gizzard, hacking off the neck, and impaling the whole thing on a sturdy spit. The legs had looked like more of a challenge than they were, but pulling out the gizzard had involved being up to his armpit in more blood and viscera than he had thought a single creature should hold. He had vaguely remembered his grandfather explaining the incisions he needed to make before pulling out a bird's neck, but his method had involved more blind stabs and a furious yanking than Gramps might have appreciated; he'd had to brace his feet against the bird's body as he tugged at the neck taut. Combined with the awkward maneuvers involved in forcing an eight foot stake through the body cavity of a five hundred pound bird, the process had left his dinner coated in quite a lot of dirt. He supposed he wouldn't be eating the skin.

Twice he had to hunt for new branches when the load of the bird's torso snapped the mounts of his rotisserie. Even with the spit as a lever arm, it took all his strength to place the axle above the fireplace. When he lit the kindling, the dried leaves and twigs clinging to the sides of the carcass ignited.

A sudden onslaught of raindrops graciously extinguished the corpse. He looked up at the canopy and the darkening sky. More raindrops accepted his invitation and pelted his eyes while their friends put out the fire below his dinner. The trees shook under the growing downpour, and the gentle patter grew into a continuous roar. Sheets of water cleaned the remaining grit from his dinner, washed the blood from his clothes, and formed streams about his feet and extending seaward.

A blue flash illuminated his waterlogged meal so brightly that the image lingered in front of him long after the ensuing thunder rumbled past. A support sunk into the softening dirt, and the rotisserie tumbled onto the ground.

( Turn information )

To his frustration, however, Squawk-Click could not so much as draw the gaze of the creature from the Water Not To Drink. It carried on, indifferent to Squawk-Click's hostility.

Squawk-Click and Mate, apparently to do anything but think and feel, tried every variety of thought and feeling they could muster. Squawk-Click tried imagining the creature dying of starvation and thirst; Mate tried to convey pure pain. Together they tried feeling the hurt of having left the young behind, recalling the fear of their last moments in their bodies, and the gamut of every sensation they had ever perceived, but still the creature paid them no heed.

Squawk-Click felt Mate's desperation growing. Squawk-Click had a thought that he had never had before: that, just as young change into grown males and females, he and Mate had changed from a grown male and female into something else entirely. Something he had never seen, something that could not be seen, something he could never have known was there.

In the same way, the creature from the Water Not To Drink could not know that he and Mate were there. Even Squawk-Click and Mate did not really know where "there" was, and, in accepting this, Squawk-Click understood another new thought: though he could see and hear the creature, he was not where the creature was.

Many such new ideas started to form in Squawk-Click's mind. Mate, too, could feel this expansion; it was as if, without their bodies, their comprehension could expand and envelop new things, like a pair of raindrops falling from the back of a leaf and into the vastness of the Water Not To Drink.

( Turn information )

***

Squawk-Click had met Mate before yesterday's yesterday's yesterday. Their courtship had been so long ago that Squawk-Click couldn't say how old it was, only that it was older than most of the things he remembered. Sometime after he had fought for his share of his mother's attention, after he had become strong enough to leave her, but before he had provided for the young. All of these memories rested sometime before yesterday's yesterday's yesterday, but he somehow knew that they had not always been.

Squawk-Click had chosen his place at the edge of the trees, near the Water Not To Drink. It was a good place, because it was full of growing food and and easy to keep his, since the Water Not To Drink guarded one of its borders. He could sit in the middle of it and do all of his favorite things, like bellow his favorite call, eat his favorite leaves, and stretch his neck around and try to preen the feathers behind his head. He slept there, feeling safe, because he bellowed his bellow for a long time every day, and no one else would enter because they would know that it was his. If anyone ever did enter, he would show them his big wings and bellow louder, and they'd have to go away. And if *that* didn't work, he could always kick them.

But one day, someone had entered Squawk-Click's place. He'd been munching on a clump of growing food when something made a noise nearby, and he'd known then and there that he'd have to go confront whoever it was right away, or his place wouldn't be his place anymore. With his wings spread and his head raised, he ran toward the intruder, calling out his own name.

The intruder had been Mate! But Mate was not Mate then; she was still new. When he saw her standing there, at the edge of his place, Squawk-Click became very excited. But he was not excited the way he normally was when strangers entered his place. He felt good about this female being in his place. He wanted to show her more of it, and to make her stay.

So Squawk-Click got her attention with his favorite bellow. He spread out his wings as much as he could and showed her how big he was, how brown his feathers were, and how loud his call was. He strutted around the edge of his entire place to show much was his, beating his wings the whole way to make sure she was watching. And when he was done, he bellowed even louder, because she had walked even further into his place.

Squawk-Click collected some of his favorite foods in his place for her, like the long green ones under his scratching tree and the little round ones that hung from the bush by his sitting spot. He offered these to her, and she took them, which made him feel even better, because he liked her very much, especially when he looked at her long tail feathers and bright beak.

After she had eaten all that Squawk-Click had brought her, she made a call of her own, more beautiful than anything Squawk-Click had ever heard before. Squawk-Click repeated his own call, and she bowed her head and made the motion that Squawk-Click knew meant she was his now, and she became Mate.

Mate was a very good mate, too. When he built her a nest, she filled it with many eggs. Squawk-Click valued these more than anything else in his place, the entire forest even. When the young emerged from these same eggs, he and Mate spent almost all of their time on them, finding them food and keeping them safe. They listened intently to their tiny squeaks; they were, to their parents' ears, the loudest sounds in the forest, even during the clatter of the heaviest rain.

But today, while Squawk-Click and Mate had been away from the nest, foraging, the young made a sound that they had never heard before. It made Squawk-Click feel very uncomfortable, painful in a part of himself he couldn't usually feel, a part that wanted to make sure they never made that sound again. He and Mate abandoned the hunt for food and started running back to the nest, screaming as loud as they could.

A strange creature was standing in the nest. It had no feathers, only a patchwork of different colored hides, dirty and dripping wet. It stood on two stubby, backward-bent legs, ending in a single bulbous toe each. They thickened as they extended upward, then merged into a wide column, eventually joined yet again by another appendage on each side. The side-appendages hung down, angled, tapered, and ended in sets of grasping claws. Atop it all, the creature's abbreviated neck supported a bulbous pink head, covered on top and back with something that looked like slender, black grass. The head lacked a beak; instead, there was an open horizontal slit on its front, just below a pair of raised, downward-facing holes. Just above and on either side of this, two tiny eyes with too much white stared up at Squawk-Click.

Already, Squawk-Click hated this creature for entering his place and his nest. He hated this creature for scattering the young which still chattered their unsettling yelps. But Squawk-Click hated this creature most of all when he saw one of the young hanging in its bunched claws, and when he saw that the young was not moving, only swinging by its neck as the intruder shook.

Squawk-Click and Mate bounded toward the intruder, ready to break it with a snap of any of their powerful legs. The creature ran, but its tiny legs could not step as high or as far as Squawk-Click's. Only a little ahead of Squawk-Click and Mate, it fled to the edge of the forest and away from Squawk-Click's place. Normally, that would be enough for Squawk-Click, but this creature, still holding one of the young, was too abhorrent to let slink away. Mate and Squawk-Click pursued it across the sand and all the way to the edge of the Water Not To Drink, where it hurled the young to the sand where Squawk-Click stood. Mate pushed it with her beak, but the young did not move from where it landed, and somehow Squawk-Click knew it never would.

Squawk-Click and Mate bellowed at the creature as it moved off and vanished, floating on the surface of the Water Not To Drink. Squawk-Click had never known any creature to emerge from the Water Not To Drink, and, if he had, he might not have chosen his place right beside it. He and Mate waited for a long time in case the creature returned, but eventually they heard the young calling again and returned to the nest to gather and guard them once more.

Because he and Mate had not finished foraging, Squawk-Click did not eat as much as he usually did that day, which never felt good. Neither he nor Mate could ignore the urge to watch the nest and the young, and he did not think that would change soon. For a time, it didn't.

But then he heard the creature, back from the Water Not To Drink. It was shouting, a puny shout from a puny being. Mate was already running toward the sound. Squawk-Click took one final look at the nest and the young before springing up after her.

He heard Mate's bellow ahead. Squawk-Click wanted to be there with her, adding his volume to hers, but her call was cut short, replaced with a loud thump. Squawk-Click hastened his step and arrived on at the sand, glaring down once again at the creature from the Water Not To Drink.

The creature looked different. Its side-appendages did not end in soft claws anymore, but a long piece of tree, pointed at one end and splattered with red. The creature was not running; instead it hunched even smaller, its piece of tree directed at Squawk-Click. Beside it, on the sand, was Mate, as still as the young it had taken earlier. Her tail feathers did not puff in excitement; her wings did not beat. Red liquid drained from a hole below her neck.

Squawk-Click bellowed with a rage he did not think would ever leave him. If he shouted until he could not shout, if he ate until he could not eat, if he ran until he could not run, he could not have exhausted the anger he felt at this creature. Even as he kicked and whooped at the intruder, he knew that calm was gone from him forever, that, if he broke the creature with his next kick, if today became yesterday's yesterday's yesterday, he would still hate this creature, still want to break it again for all that it had done to Squawk-Click's life.

He never got that chance. Squawk-Click slipped on the sand, and the creature from the Water Not To Drink lurched forward with the piece of tree. Squawk-Click felt pain, then numbness, then darkness.

***

Squawk-Click did not know where he was. He could not see his surroundings, only a brightness like staring at the sun. He could not feel the ground. His legs would not bend; in fact, he could not feel anything there to bend. He could feel no wings to beat, and no neck to turn. He could not even bellow, because he couldn't find a beak to open.

After what seemed like a very long time, Squawk-Click felt something, though he didn't know how. The something was not a part of his body or even really a thing at all; a thought, a warm presence was with him, and though it was not easy without the sight of her plumage or the sound of her call, Squawk-Click recognized the sensation of Mate.

Mate! Squawk-Click felt her, and he knew that she felt him, too. They were not anywhere or anything they had been before, but Squawk-Click felt some relief to know they were together.

Squawk-Click also felt hatred. He sensed the same in Mate, and she in him. A concentrated ire built in them both, more substantial than they themselves had become, toward the cause of all their loss.

Squawk-Click saw the creature from the Water Not To Drink. It was still standing on the sand by the edge of the forest, still clutching to a piece of tree. He did not see the creature from any one perspective as his eyes would have; he viewed the object of his bitterness from all directions at once, even some he did not know existed. Mate, too, honed in on the scourge of their beings.

A thought passed from Squawk-Click to Mate, and Mate's presence heated in agreement. They would devote themselves to the task they had not finished, would assault this creature, in whatever way they could for as long as it breathed.

( Turn information )

His legs found their wits first. Branches clawed at his face, and thorns tugged at his clothes as he sprinted away. He shielded his face with his arms and barreled forward, desperate to put distance between him and the towering terrors behind him. Just below the berserk bellows of the adults, he could hear the chicks squeaking at their parents' pursuit. He dared not look back.

He sighted the shore ahead. At the prospect of escaping this obtrusive terrain, he picked up yet more speed, and seconds later his shoes touched down on open sand. He slid into a sharp right turn and started making tracks down the length of the beach, hoping to himself that Big Bird's demonic brethren had reservations about leaving the tree cover.

They didn't. Rather, they took advantage of the clear ground as much as he did, closing the distance to the focus of their feathery rage. Without thinking, he angled gradually downhill to the wet sand and water. Out of options, he waded as quickly as he could out to sea.

Only when he was up to his hips did he realize that the remains of their least fortunate child still flailed from his white-knuckled fist. He swung his arm around and willed his hand to release, then jumped back into a furious sidestroke. The ragged corpse spun head over foot in a shallow arc, then landed with a thump at the feet of the demon birds. One of them bent over to nudge the corpse while the other squawked what he assumed were avian death threats. Neither continued into the water.

He rolled into a front crawl and pressed on until the demon birds quieted from distance and, he hoped, exhaustion. He veered to the side and crawled ashore for the second time today. It was hard to pinpoint how far he'd come exactly, but he could just make out the two figures in the distance as they returned to the tree cover.

A tiny peninsula of angular grey rock split the waves ahead. He carried himself over to a high, flat slab and sat. His stomach grumbled again.

He wondered how cavemen had dealt with situations like these. Humanity had once been as wild as the rest of the animals, and not unsuccessful, either. As apex predators, humans had not suffered the mammoths or saber-toothed tigers to bully them over food. Prehistoric people--his ancestors--had hunted these creatures to extinction before computers or televisions or automobiles or guns. But he could not feel such prowess in his veins when he compared his flimsy fingernails to the razor-like claws of a tiger's paw. He did not feel fierce when he compared his flimsy arms to the muscular girth of a gorilla, or when he contrasted his modest incisors to a lion's intimidating fangs. He felt, instead, like an undeserving heir. Weak. Unarmed.

Unarmed!? An indignant voice cried out in his mind. A true human arms himself, it chided. Millions of years of evolution had equipped him with the brains to make fists out of rocks, claws out of steel, and all manner of other tools out of things tougher than flesh. It was his birthright to conquer this island and whatever other wilderness he pleased!

Renewed determination launched him from his seat and to the nearest edge of the brush, where he scouted for materials. He claimed for himself a long branch, thick and straight, an armful of leaves and twigs, and several stones. He laid out his prizes back on the rock slab and set to work.

Ten minutes later, and with the help of his Zippo, he had a lively fire burning inside a circle of stones. With his pocketknife, he set about carving the head of what was to be his spear, the first tool of his conquest of this island. When he was satisfied with the sharpness of his weapon, he held its point over the fire to harden. He felt, at this moment, more manly than he had ever felt in his life.

He stalked back along the treeline in the direction of the nest. With his knees bent, his head crouched, and his hands gripping his spear, he regarded the shadows between the trees and dared his opponents to emerge. He hollered a wordless, carnal shout.

Movement in the trees. A familiar shudder of the canopy. A column of feathers emerged, and he charged forward.

The first demon bird stepped forward, sound spilling forth from its beak as it lowered toward him. He lunged forward, putting all of his weight behind his spear as its tip pressed into the beast's breast, then through it. The behemoth kicked, but its leg went wide, just grazing his shoulder. He yanked hard, reclaiming his weapon, and blood poured out of the resulting wound. The creature stumbled, fell, and landed on its side.

Its partner sprang out of the brush and to his left side. It advanced in halting steps as he stabbed the air in front of it. He surrendered ground in calculated increments, just enough to keep out of its reach but not enough to signal his retreat. The two of them danced along the sand until one of the demon bird's feet landed on unexpectedly loose ground; he seized his opportunity with teeth borne, rushing forward and impaling the avian freak as he had its mate. He stared his foe down for the length of its last heartbeat, then wrenched the wood from its chest and let it collapse.

( Turn information )

The football-birds erupted in shrieks as he claimed the body of their fallen kin. Their traipsing picked up speed but not direction, like a stampede of bumper cars. They collided with each other, the brush, and even still his ankles in their aimless hysteria. Eventually, the birds at the periphery of the horde wandered further outward, and the crowd thinned.

He took this opportunity to amble forward on the vacated ground. He might as well search for kindling in all this growth, now that he had a meal in hand. Even without the swarm, he had to step cautiously about the uneven terrain, hopping from one leg to another over high obstacles. The snapping of twigs and fallen leaves punctuated his first several strides, but one anomalous footstep over a high fern coincided with a loud crunch.

He recoiled at first, waiting for his foot to signal some pain of pressure or impalement. When it didn't, he navigated around the plant to investigate. A circular clearing, padded in dead grass and leaves, hid here; inside it, there rested the remains of several dozen eggshells that, when whole, had been the size of his head. Where his foot had landed, one of them had flattened into fingernail-sized fragments; the rest were mostly in halves or thirds, large chunks he inferred had split when their former owners had hatched.

He eyed the lifeless creature in his hand. Its size matched the eggshells well-enough, and the number of eggshells he guessed was about right for the flock he'd seen before. But if this was a chick, it was the largest one he'd ever seen; only an enormous bird could have--

A deafening wail in the insufficiently distant distance. The foliage rustled and crunched in a succession of ever-closer steps. Two simultaneous screeches drowned out all other sounds. Large, angry somethings pushed through the high branches. A dim-witted bipedal primate stood dumfounded in their nest, one of their dead chicks in its shaking hand.

It was as if someone had inflated the symbol for quarter note to the size of a phone booth, tarred it, feathered it, glued a broad orange beak to the top of it, and mounted the whole thing on stilts. One of them raised its telephone-pole-thick leg with a flex of its backward-bending knee and plunged its enormous foot down on the ground a few feet from where he stood. The other flapped its useless wings and snaked its neck forward, opening its maw and repeating its cry.

( Turn information )

After what felt like an hour of baking in the sun, his desire for shade won out against his self-pity. He put on his shoes and socks, wet and gritty though they were, and trudged inland.

The island's interior was unlike any other forest he had seen. He had walked through forests in parks and countryside backyards but all of those forests had been tamed in some fashion, whether by landscapers or sheer volume of foot traffic. This forest, however, isolated from humanity, was truly wild. It offered neither footpaths nor clearings. The undergrowth resented his intrusion, blocking his passage with dense shrubs and curtains of vines and stalks. The trees looked down at their guest with indifference and stretched sunward as this foreign primate clambered over their roots and around their mighty trunks. He tripped over rotting logs and spiny bushes and swatted away insects and spiderwebs. Glancing backward, he saw the scant sum of his labored steps was only a dozen feet at best.

A high pitched, descending noise rang out from in front of him. It was close by, and in short order it repeated itself. More of the voices joined the first, and soon a shrill chorus erupted somewhere ahead. He pulled up his legs in high strides and thrust them toward the source of the cacophony. As he rounded a particularly wide bramble, he spotted them.

There were several dozen birds pacing about the forest floor. Each was a foot or so in height, strutting around on two skinny, leathery legs ending in three long toes splayed out in front an a short one facing back. Their bodies stood at an angle to their legs, brown-feathered footballs angling upward and forward to their short necks. The feathers on their stunted wings were a mahogany brown, surrounded by a tan color that ended at their dusty, greyish-white faces. Their large, brown eyes bulged slightly from the sides of their tiny heads, and their long, finger-sized bills led the way as they meandered from one place to the next, intermittently pecking at the ground.

None of them paid him any attention, even as he walked into the throng of yapping birds. The most distraction they would allow themselves from the businesses of calling, preening, pecking, and wandering in circles was to peck at his shoestrings and pant cuffs, as if checking them for anything edible.

His stomach rumbled, empty and unappeased.

He tiptoed back to the edge of the crowd and scanned his surroundings for something heavy. He pried a fist-sized rock up from the dirt and hefted it between his hands. Gingerly, he knelt down and raised the stone high. One of the oblivious bundles of feathers stopped in front of him to probe its beak into a nearby shrub.

An instant later, he smashed the rock into its head, and it went limp.

( Turn information )

Sated for the moment, he allowed himself to do nothing for a spell. He regarded the oncoming waves with some disdain, having not yet forgiven them for taking his plane and nearly his life. He directed his gaze upward, searched idly for any contrails in the sky, and, finding none, wondered if he should try to set up a signal of some kind. It occurred to him that his situation was a dire one, and he should have been busy feeling bad about it rather than wasting time staring into space.

He scratched his head, freeing globs of sand from his scalp and hair. He wondered if the plane's ELT could still function when submerged and, if so, for how long. He wasn't sure if radio signals could get through all that water, anyhow. His hand scratched lower on his face.

Hey, his face itched. A lot, actually. And had his lips always been this big? They felt kind of engorged.

Oh, no.

He lept to his feet, frantic. He looked around for a mirror, remembered that he was on a desert island, then put his hands to his face. His lips and mouth were hot and sensitive, and now that he held them in front of him, he could see that his hands had sprouted bright red bumps. His throat and stomach began to burn.

He ran back into the waves and vomited. A slurry of berry juices mixed with this morning's coffee dyed the water a swirl of red, brown, and green. He knelt down and held his stomach as his body pumped it clean. His mouth and throat stung with stomach acid as the last of the offending substances left him. The waves accepted his donation as they receded, then tossed it back to him as they returned. When he was sure he had finished, he waded away from the mess and wrung his shirt out in cleaner water.

When he returned to his spot on the beach, he lay back and breathed deep. His inflamed palate made this difficult at first, but, as he willed himself to calm down, he realized how lucky he was to be breathing at all. He wondered if there was an EpiPen somewhere in the plane's wreckage, but decided he'd rather lie here than gather the energy to fetch it. He closed his eyes and waited for his day to improve.

( Turn information )

He lay there, dripping with seawater and coated in sand, for minutes before getting up. The tense descent and violent landing had been over faster than his frenzied muscles could accept, and only with great reservation did his heartbeat slow its pace and his limbs relax under the heat of the afternoon sun. Convinced that the greatest danger had passed, his body permitted him to rise and walk a few paces inland.

The island jutted up from the ocean, a tiny mountain blanketed in trees and shrubs. The shoreline curved inward quickly in either direction, interrupted by the occasional rocky outcropping. The waxy leaves of palm trees and ferns rustled in the breeze, and a the waves batted idly at the beach.

He felt, for the most part, intact. His knees and elbows still bent the right way, he couldn't find any broken bones, and his insides were still inside him. He had a sore spot on his head from his landing on the plane's ceiling, and he had a few cuts here and there he didn't remember from before the crash. He figured he could probably inspect himself better if he took off his sand-crusted clothes, but for now he just wrenched off his sopping shoes and laid his socks to dry out next to them.

He walked a ways up and down the beach, staying close to the greenery of the island's interior but not yet willing to walk through it in his bare feet. He took note of several coconut palms; he wasn't sure he had a way to reach the bunches--was that the word, "bunches?" Maybe "clutches?"--or even to break them open if he did, but he was sure he'd be glad they were there if help didn't arrive soon. He spotted some pinkish-white golf ball-sized fruits growing on one variety of tree of orange-yellow blossoms. He plucked a few couple of these, pocketed them, and did the same with some green almond-shaped pods he found on the lower branches of a towering tree. He also found a shrub dotted with dark red berries. He couldn't decide if red was a good color for edible berries or a poisonous one, but he picked a few of these, too.

He turned back when he was just about to lose sight of his shoes. He reminded himself that there was no real importance to this spot other than that it happened to be where he came ashore, but decided to settle here for the moment, anyhow. He decided that he might want to keep track of the shoreline closest to his plane's wreck, submerged though it was. After all, it wasn't technically his plane, and he might need to explain where he left it someday.

He sat beside his soggy shoes and pulled his harvest out from his pockets. Whether or not any of his finds were toxic, he guessed that none of them were toxic enough that he couldn't stomach one bite. He might be here a long time, and he wanted to find a food source sooner than later.

He started with the golf-ball fruits, really shaped more like jellybeans on closer inspection. He bit into it and was surprised when his teeth clamped down on a tough seed. The skin wasn't very palatable but hid a surprisingly sweet flesh the color and consistency of snot. He plucked out the seed with two sandy fingers and squeezed the rest of the meat into his eager mouth. He swallowed and waited patiently for any ill signs. He wasn't sure what being poisoned felt like, but this fruit was so far pleasant, and poisons weren't pleasant, right?

He moved on to the green almond-shaped pods. They were hard, and pondering them now he suspected he'd taken something unripe. He bit this one carefully, peeling back the thin skin to discover a nut that looked like tiny, purple, elongated football. It was soft enough to chew, and oddly milky in taste. Its texture wasn't dissimilar from a macadamia nut. He wondered if he'd eaten this before in one of those cans of mixed nuts he bought at the supermarket.

The red berries resembled cranberries, both in color and taste. He wouldn't mind eating a lot of these, though he suspected he couldn't survive on them very long. He ate all the ones he'd picked.

( Turn information )

His first and greatest mistake was becoming a ferry pilot.

It had been a hard offer to refuse. Rich folks too lazy to take care of their own toys would pay him to fly their planes, light aircraft so packed with ferry tanks and extra gear that he had to fly solo. No boss breathing down his shoulder, not even a copilot to force him into smalltalk. He could scratch his privates with impunity and fart into the wind at 10,000 feet, all while enjoying a view of creation the envy of just about everyone short of the ISS crew. Oh, and he got all the hours he could clock.

Those had all seemed like selling points, at first. But a few twenty-hour flights in cramped cockpits quickly took the magic out of the job. Packed between steel boxes full of fuel, a thermos of thick coffee, and a control column, he spent hours over the oceans, bumping his knees on the instrument panel, radioing dull reports to Control, and pissing in a bottle that spent most of the flight jammed next to his chair. An endless blue carpet of waves sloshed beneath him in daylight, and, at night, it vanished into a darkness broken only by the glow of his flight instruments.

He was constantly occupied by nothing. He scanned in all directions at nothing. He listened intently to nothing on the emergency frequencies. He ate nothing for hours on end. He concentrated on the nothing on his indicators, thought of nothing for as long as he could take, and, when he got bored, talked to nothing while it said nothing back.

Now, flying a Piper PA-28 Cherokee through the purgatory of the upper troposphere, he kicked himself for ever seeking solitude in the skies. Or, he would have, had his legs had enough space and freedom to so.

And then, suddenly, he felt a kick from something else entirely. The plane lurched around him, rattling him against the side of the cockpit. Damn, he thought. He'd hit an air-pocket. Had he let his altitude drift? The altimeter didn't seem to think so. He tapped at the analog dial, as if it mattered.

Again, the plane jerked under him, tossing his thermos from his lap. He clung tight to the control column and wrestled with the wind shear. He fought to control the plane, and the sky fought back. The ferry tanks rattled in their restraints, and the horizon bobbed up and down in the distance. He pressed the plane to descend.

All at once, the turbulence stopped, and the plane returned to nothing. Too much nothing. In fact, there was so much nothing that he now realized he had lost something. The abrupt quiet hinted at what his indicators confirmed: his engine had died.

He clawed at the ignition. What the hell was this? How does a little turbulence knock out the engines? He was no mechanic, but he was pretty sure this kind of thing was something designed out of most aircraft. He fumbled at the controls, but the engine ignored him, and the propeller waved lifelessly in front of him.

Okay, keep your head. This could be worse. He was just thousands of feet above the middle of an ocean, strapped to a hunk of slowly falling metal along with several tanks of fuel. He'd be fine.

He tried to recall the specs on this plane. It had a glide ratio of, what, nine to one? That meant he could go at least a dozen miles before he hit the water. Maybe he'd get lucky and the engine would spring back to life before then. That could happen, right?

He though he felt the return of turbulence, but he realized that he was the one trembling this time, not the plane. He remembered his training. Radio his Mayday signal. Soar as long as he can.

Time passed. The horizon crept slowly higher, and he began to make out the troughs and crests of the waves below. No contact on the radio, despite his repeated calls. Nothing had held him on its tongue for too long, and now it would swallow him.

A dot appeared in the distance, on the water. It lay almost dead ahead, growing slowly as he approached. He banked gently toward the whatever-it-was, hoping he had enough altitude left to reach it. The dot became a speck became a blob became a smudge of green and brown.

An island! A small one, yes, but even small islands featured the marvelous perk that you couldn't drown on them. Since the ocean could produce no better counter-offer, he committed his remaining time in the air to reaching the isle.

As the island grew ever larger, he considered his plan of action. He'd never had to ditch before, and the fact that he hadn't had always felt like a good thing until this moment. Now he felt he could have used the practice, though he couldn't think of any safe way he could have gotten it. In principle, a water landing (more of a "watering" than a "landing," really) wasn't too different from a runway landing, up until the part where the plane made contact with the ocean. The tricky part only started right after the plane stopped flying.

Palm trees dotted the coasts of the tiny island. The whole thing couldn't have been more than a half mile in diameter, and there were no signs of man-made structures anywhere. He looked for a clearing large enough to land on. There were none.

He wondered if he would die in this cockpit, trapped between containers of fuel, coffee, and his own urine. The water was getting awfully close, now, and he thought he could smell the salt below him. He veered slightly away from the island so as to touch down next to it, not into it, estimating based on nothing in particular what a safe distance from the shore would be. He had the urge to use the urine bottle one last time, but decided there would be time for that later.

He pulled the brake lever and nosed up. The stall warning went off, and he braced himself.

The cockpit quaked as the plane skimmed the water. The drag of the ocean surface threw him forward in his seat, and a curtain of saltwater threw itself against the glass. The plane tipped forward, and the propeller submerged itself under the now vertical fuselage. The sky and ocean traded places, and he hung by his seat restraints as the unfastened contents of the plane bolted to the ceiling.

Water entered the cabin. His hands scrambled furiously at his safety belt as the ocean seeped into the mangled flyer. He freed himself, cracked his head against the ceiling, and righted himself to the new orientation of the plane. He tore off his headset and threw his weight against the door, every cell in his body determined not to drown in this tiny room. The door swung slowly open, and water rushed in at the opportunity. The water line rose against the windows. He pulled himself through the opening and into the open sea.

He grabbed on to the overturned wing beside him and thrashed his legs to stay afloat. He gasped for air, though he had only been submerged for a moment, and searched his surroundings. The island was no more than a hundred yards away, an easy distance for any frequent patron of a community swimming pool, but an impossible-looking one for the panicked survivor of an only moments-old plane crash. Still, the wing sank under his grasp, leaving him with no other choice.

He pushed off against the wing and swam shoreward. He tried to maintain a straight frontstroke, but his execution was sloppy and furious, creating high splashes as he slapped the water with his arms and legs in only piecemeal coordination. His sneakers, waterlogged and heavy, resisted the motion of his legs, and the cuffs of his khaki pants dragged through the water like loose sails. Saltwater stung at his eyes and invaded his mouth and nose. He couldn't keep his bearings with his face submerged, so he raised his head from the water every few strokes to reorient himself; the water took these opportunities to envelop the rest of him, and he would flail harder to return himself to the surface. The island was still a hundred feet distant, and he could feel nothing solid beneath him.

A wave lifted him, and, for a moment, he felt optimistic that the current might bring him closer to his goal, but then the wave crashed down on him, and he realized that, while the waves might eventually take him to shore, they had no intention of keeping his head above water. He writhed underwater for a moment, found the surface in an unexpected direction, then, righted himself just in time for another wave to pummel him back down. Several times over, this cycle continued, oscillating between breath and brine until at last the waves flung him against a wall of wet sand.

Not a wall, but a floor, he thought, as the water receded again. He crawled forward on the wet, grainy terrain. The waves slammed him down, a little less fiercely this time, and he continued forward and upward. Under his palms, he felt the sand transition to a dry, hot gravel, and the waves licked his heels one final time as he collapsed on the beach.

( Turn information )

One of my long-time favorite "stuck in a car and didn't think to bring any other entertainment" games is called "Fortunately/Unfortunately." It's a game of joint improvisational story-telling; two or more narrators trade off with the story of the sole survivor of a plane crash on a desert island. Each player takes turn adding a line to the story, each line starting alternately with either "fortunately" or "unfortunately." The players advance the story by adding some detail that benefits or impedes the survivor. So a typical game might start:

"Unfortunately, a man's plane crash-lands on a desert island, and he is the sole survivor."
"Fortunately, he pulls a radio from the plane's wreckage."
"Unfortunately, the radio is out of batteries, and he has none to replace it."

And so on. The only restriction on narrator is that no narration can undo a previous one's contribution, so the next line to this example couldn't be, "Fortunately, he really does have batteries." The goal of the game is to create and work around conflicts, not to debate over what conflicts exist. It's important that players remember that there's an infinitude of options open at any point, and creative or silly responses are welcome. So a proper follow-up to the above might be:

"Fortunately, an spacecraft full of friendly aliens descends on the island and offers him help."
"Unfortunately, they accidentally introduce hostile microbes to Earth's atmosphere, infecting him and potentially all of humanity with a deadly contagion."

In this game, such twists and deus-ex-machina are not failures of the narrator but creative successes.

Unfortunately (haw!), game narratives seldom endure for very long. Games end early due to frustrated players, plots too complex for the players to remember, or, quite commonly, time constraints. Even the most determined players will find that the stories of Fortunately/Unfortunately sprawl in scope while their available time and memory for the game dwindle.

Luckily, most cultures have invented the written word some time in the last few thousand years. Using this cutting edge technology, I'm going to endeavor to adapt this game to something more sustainable, or at least to keep a solid record of a game. Here's the format I foresee:

Melissa and I will play a game, as described above, playing no more than one turn a day, and (perhaps) no fewer than one a week. As normal, each turn will consist of a sentence advancing the story.

I'll expand and dramatize each entry into novel-style prose. I'll shoot for at least 250 words on most entries, but I may radically depart from this goal depending on intended dramatic (or humorous) effect.

Both of us will have access to the entire history of turns and dramatizations. Only the turns themselves will be canon (so as not to unfairly bias the game in my favor). If new canon should contradict previous dramatizations, the dramatizations will be either edited or severely lampshaded.

We may occasionally trade roles as "unfortunately" and "fortunately" narrators.

I'll post all the results here. I'll hide the turn itself (the original, short version of the narration) behind an lj-cut, along with a record of whose turn it was, and any other relevant notes on game progress.