Mutated Corals
At first it did not matter that I did not make any friends. It was all very transient by nature, there was no way of telling who you were going to be paired with on the next island. My name would be picked up along with a bunch of others, to be ferried to remote islands. ‘Free Travel in the name of science,’ the advertisement had proclaimed in big block letters. That was six weeks ago. The money was good, and I constantly checked my accounts on the bank’s app in the beginning, to make sure they were not swindling.
It was on the third island that I felt the need. I was going to the toilet when I saw a lizard the size of my laptop. It had a blue tongue, serrated like a knife, and it walked like a chameleon in training, its colour always a notch above or below what one would expect in camouflage. There were no locals on this island, and some of the flora and fauna was endemic to this area, having evolved unimpeded for great lengths of time. The lizard, apart from its menacing looks and size, seemed innocuous, so I went closer to take a few pictures on the phone. But it opened its mouth to shoot a perfectly aimed ball of spit at my left cheek. I washed my face with soap after I came back to the tent, scrubbed the cheek like it was a washerwoman’s stone.
On the next island I exchanged chocolates with one of the girls for hair-ties. Combing in the ship’s bathroom we apprasied each other through the mirror. She said I had good hair, long and voluminous. I thanked her but could not reciprocate with something positive about her right away. Later when the ship had left and we were back to living in the tents I sneaked into her tent with two cups of warm coffee. Her name was Pyrah, and she was about Sixteen. She said she went to the same college as I did which I found odd. I had not seen her before.
Pyrah wounded herself in the swim, her elbow landing on one of the boulders in the fall she took. It was the corals she said, they were sharp and protuberant, like spikes and needles. I said I had found strange things myself, like the pillars of salt jutting out on the embankment — what were they for? I made her coffee and tied the hand into a sling, massaged her hip where the bruise puffed like bread.
On the next island we were given a choice, to go back home or extend the science project for another six weeks. I chose to stay and Pyrah stayed with me. We slept together in the tent and in the night when it was cold, we lay like spoons, hugging titghtly. By the middle of the night her sleep carried her away from me; she slept like an octopus, her limbs splayed as if on their own accord. I, on the other hand, slept like a caterpillar, crumpling into myself, my hands tucked between my thighs where it was warm.
The trees on this island had hollow trunks, as we found out when we foraged for food. The nuts and fruits were nothing like what we found in supermarkets, just callused and denuded, as if life vamoosed from within before we got to them. We made soup with something that resembled eggplant, and we cracked a few nuts open by tossing them in embers afterward. Sometimes we sat with the others, around the fire, watching the sparks float up into the dark nothingness above. There were no stars anymore in the sky, all of them having retreated beyond the Event Horizon. There was a sudden acceleration event few years ago — it expanded the space in the universe, the fabric never needing to limit itself to the speed of light, had pulled itself awry, peeling the galaxies and stars away from each other. We still saw some of the stars for a few months, but it was only residual light — the stars were physically not there at all. In the end it was all over. The telescopes from the Lower Earth Orbits could not pick up electromagnetic radiation of any kind, not the visible, not the infrared, not even radio…
Pyrah was vomiting outside the tent. Her eyes were bloodhsot, veins bulging and feet swollen. She mumbled something under her breath. I went closer and she scratched my arm with her nails, and spat a gobbet of something slimy. Her tongue was turning bluish. I went back into the tent while she muttered incoherently behind me. I loaded the gun and kept it by my side. It was only a precaution, I was not going to use it.
The ship did not return the next day at its appointed time. We panicked. I checked my phone and the satellite connection was broken. In the night when we sat around the fire we were all silent, save for the occasional grunting vomit that spewed out of Pyrah and others like her. We called them Blue Lizards because they stopped talking to us, only spitting if we went close to them. They lounged on the rocks by the beach, their skin puckered everywhere, discoloured, purplish. They reeked like festered stuff.
We mistrusted each other, the island, and everything on it. Someone found desiccated nuts on the shore, and yet someone found yellowed, ripe fruits elsewhere. We told each other it must be the solar flare again, interfering with the satelites. The electronics onboard the ship’s cruising console were not immune as well. The sun had began ballooning since the rapid expansion of space, devouring Mercury in its path. At first, when it got hot suddenly we all dove into the water — lakes, rivers, ocean, whatever was nearer. But that was not very practical, so we built lead-encased pools of water in our houses. Sub tropics were fuming, so we all ran to the poles, where we sought shelter. New islands emerged as the planet dried, water all but leaking into the space as vapour, along with atmosphere that was thinning rapidly.
We shot Pyrah and others like her. We tossed them all into the ocean. The mutated Corals could eat them if they like.
