Post by ~Sapphire~ on Apr 12, 2017 14:32:25 GMT -5
Originally written for the Tuesday Challenges contest about a year ago. Enjoy!
[1]
The lifespan of the island was finite, we all knew that.
Twenty cats living on a small island far, far out to sea - of course we knew what erosion was. Our great great grandparents, the ones who came to the island in the first place after the fabled Twoleg shipwreck, were probably the first cats to discover it. You can't live on an island not a horizon across without noticing how the beaches shrink every storm, how waves nibble away at the low cliffs. There was a tall, limpet-covered rock, quite far out when I knew it, that was at the top of the beach in our ancestors’ day.
The island grew smaller every season, every moon, every day. And I guess we were used to it. We all knew the island would crumble away some day, but that didn't stop the prey running now. It was such an inevitable force that there was no point stopping it - so we ignored it. Lived out our lives in the hope that our generation wouldn't be the one to get it, that the next generation would be the ones to figure out some kind of solution. We shoved the problem to the back of our minds, but few could forget it entirely.
It was surprising, though, how used one got to the idea of almost certain doom.
[2]
The year I was born, at the beginning of new-leaf, the island measured five thousand paces across, end to end. Three thousand if you walked across widthways. It was the first thing they told my father after my mother went into labour: “The kits should be born around sunhigh, and we've lost another couple of paces from the south beach.”
As kits, my two littermates and I memorised the numbers that came back from patrol, begged the older cats for stories about what would happen if the island did collapse into the sea. The answers ranged from the optimistic “Twolegs will come back to rescue us” from our mother; to the gloomy “We're all going to die, stupids” from our crazy old grandfather Garth; to the blithe “Don't worry, darlings, that's not going to happen anytime soon” from almost everyone else. Oddly enough, I found Garth's the most reassuring. At that age, I prized honesty above all things, and I suspected he was the only cat on the island willing to give us a straight answer.
I spent a lot of time with Garth when I was a kit; I was the only tom kit on the island, and quickly grew bored of my sisters’ endless games about dramatic Twoleg rescues and the mysterious mainland. Primrose and Mayflower were always closer to each other than they were to me, anyway. I guess that was natural. But I was the only one who had a special friendship with an adult, and I'd often abandon my sisters’ playing to go and talk with Garth and the other elder, Linnie.
“How's it going, Eagle?” he'd ask. “Thought of any grand schemes lately?”
“Oh, hundreds,” I'd reply. They were mostly about challenging my sisters to races or climbing the huge boulder at the back of camp or sneaking off to visit the sea on my own. “How about you?”
“Hundreds,” Garth would say softly. “Hundreds and thousands and millions. More schemes than can possibly fit on just this one island.”
[3]
All of greenleaf passed in that peaceful fashion, and all of leaf-fall. The copse of trees at the north end of the island gained their new-season colours almost on the same day, a kaleidoscope of fiery reds and oranges and yellows. I was coming up to nine moons old now, old enough to explore outside camp by myself as long as I remembered to bring back some prey, and I spent an entire afternoon lying on my back on the carpet of discarded leaves, marvelling at the brightness and intensity of these new colours. There wasn't much colour on the island, otherwise; the landscape was painted in muted greens and browns, and all us cats’ pelts were black or white or grey.
I still remember the day a piece of Twoleg junk washed up onto the south beach and it was bright raw violet, a colour so rare we barely had a word for it.
I remember thinking, one of the many days I spent in the copse - sometimes with my sisters, sometimes with Garth, but mostly alone - that it was almost the only place on the island where you couldn't see the horizon. Everywhere else was so flat, so open: you could watch a patrol of cats from the other end of the island. It was really a very small island, I thought. I knew Garth shared the same opinion.
It was a small island, and shrinking all the time, but as I said, no-one really gave it that much thought. At least, not until the storm came.
I was with my sisters that day, showing off our fighting moves on the wide expanse of the beach at the southern tip of the island, and despite the wide horizon and empty troubled sea none of us spotted the warning signs that bad weather was about to arrive. Mayflower had just tipped me flat onto the sand during our third bout, and I’d shaken the sand from my fluffy pelt all over her in revenge, and we were all laughing so hard that none of us even noticed that it had begun to rain.
We came so close to not noticing at all, so close to being swept away by the sudden force of the wind and the waves and the grasping undersea currents, so close to being dashed against the western cliffs or sucked beneath the surface and nobody ever knowing what had happened to us.
“Run!” Primrose screamed suddenly, and the fear in her voice was such a strange contrast to the laughter that had been there moments ago that I obeyed her instantly, sprinting forward even before I looked around to see the enormous, peaked wave bearing down on us, high tide multiplied by a thousand. I tasted salt in my mouth, felt the spray on my face and my chest. Breathing hard, I turned and began to run again, my paws slipping in sand and then in mud, my pelt heavy with rain and dragging me down. I could hear Mayflower panting behind me, could hear Primrose -
No, I couldn’t hear Primrose. Couldn’t see her, when I turned round to look. I could see Mayflower looking as well, her amber eyes slits against the lashing rain… I couldn’t see my other sister anywhere. And then I could, and I wished I couldn’t, because she was caught up in the trough of a retreating wave, and her mouth was open, screaming, and I hadn’t heard her, neither of us had, and now it was all too late. We couldn’t go back for her.
4]
Later, they told us that almost all the south beach had been swallowed by the storm, and some of the lower-lying grasslands above it. One thousand eight hundred paces lost.
“There was nothing you could’ve done,” Garth said to me later. “Bad things happen. Cats die. You know how many of us were living on the island when I was born? Forty-two. You know how many of us are living here now?”
For some reason, I didn’t find Garth’s straight-talking as comforting as usual.
One thousand eight hundred paces. That was a lot on an island as small as ours, bringing the remainder to just over three thousand square. Water lapped where grass used to be. The adults were talking about moving the camp further to the north and the west; the dens had been damaged so badly by the storm that moving them wouldn’t take any more work than rebuilding where we were.
There was another storm that same moon, and another the moon after. Not as fierce as the first, but the cliffs were already so damaged that the rock crumbled as soon as the first waves hit. Two and a half thousand square. Two and a half by two.
Suddenly, the steadily receding shoreline stopped being the problem we all pushed to the back of our minds, and started being the problem we all frantically tried to solve.
“You know what, Eagle?” Garth said the day after the third storm, when we were gathering driftwood and washed-up junk from the shoreline to begin repairing the dens yet again. “I think we’re the last of us. The last generations. The ones who’ll live to see it all end.”
[5]
One unexpected upshot of the storm was that I ended up spending a whole lot more time with Mayflower. She’d taken losing Primrose much worse than I had, or even our parents had. I was angry, tear-streaked, guilt-ridden. She was devastated.
It was worse once our father died after a clifftop gave way beneath him.
That leaf-bare, she took to following me places, spending all the time with me that she’d used to spend giggling with Primrose and I’d spent alone. I never had the heart to turn her away. She’d talk a lot, and I’d try to listen, all about our kithoods and Primrose and the world before the storm hit. Sometimes Garth would be there, and he’d chime in with stories about the early days of the island, and Mayflower would seem lulled for once, and we’d be three cats huddled in the copse or on the beach or under the boulder in camp, sharing a small moment of respite from our awful reality.
But mostly it was just me, and her, and her grief, and no matter what I said there was no way to make it better.
I hated the island then, really hated it. It was my home and my prison and the only place I knew and the only place I could ever know, all at once. I’d lie in the copse and stare up at the bare, bare branches just like I’d done in leaf-fall and vow that if I ever could, I would find a way off this forsaken island.
I couldn’t, though.
No-one could.
[6]
Garth was right.
We were the last generations, the last cats ever to see the island before it disappeared for good. All that leaf-bare, into new-leaf, the storms kept coming and the land was powerless to resist. Two and a half by two thousand paces turned into two by one thousand, seven hundred by four hundred. We drowned. The prey drowned. We were all so hungry.
It was about then that cats started leaving the island, just jumping into the waves and swimming away. They all swore that if they found land, they’d come back and show us. They didn’t. But that didn't stop more cats from going.
I couldn't, somehow. I hated the island, hated it more every day, but- somehow-
It was me and Garth and Mayflower and our mother.
Then it was me and Garth and Mayflower.
Then it was just me and Garth.
We stayed until almost the end, eking out the last prey, drinking rainwater, eating leaves and grass when there was nothing else to fill our stomachs. We lived in the copse; that was all that was left of the island that had been our entire world. We didn't talk much.
I remember the last day as if it were yesterday, the images scars on my retina. The wind, the tide, the rapidly rising sea… Garth still refused to leave.
I'd chosen a dead branch that had fallen off its tree in one of the earlier storms and dragged it out past the start of the water, grabbing onto it tightly and waiting for the waves to take me away. I begged Garth to do the same. But he wouldn't. The cat who'd once bragged that he had more schemes than could fill an island had chosen to confine them all to a patch of land not ten paces square.
“Don't be a fool,” I said to him. “At least try and save yourself. Come on!”
But he wouldn't.
He watched as the sea took me, kept eye contact as I was swept further and further away. Back over where the old camp had been, back over the grassland where I'd learnt to catch my first prey, back past the rock off the end of the south beach. And further, over territory that I'd never walked but maybe my ancestors had. And further, out into the deep blue sea.
I lost eye contact then, and couldn't find it again. Tears splashed from my eyes straight into the sea, salt into salt. Suspended by my frail grip over bottomless ocean, I imagined that I was floating over the drowned corpse of every cat I’d ever loved.
I don't think I was expecting to ever reach land, if there was even any land to hit. I think I just reckoned that this was a better, less futile death than the way Garth had chosen. Lulled by the death cold of the seawater, I slowly relaxed my grip on the branch.
I was on the cusp of letting go when I felt the grittiness of sand under me, the surety of solid ground, the sea's hold on me loosening at last.
[1]
The lifespan of the island was finite, we all knew that.
Twenty cats living on a small island far, far out to sea - of course we knew what erosion was. Our great great grandparents, the ones who came to the island in the first place after the fabled Twoleg shipwreck, were probably the first cats to discover it. You can't live on an island not a horizon across without noticing how the beaches shrink every storm, how waves nibble away at the low cliffs. There was a tall, limpet-covered rock, quite far out when I knew it, that was at the top of the beach in our ancestors’ day.
The island grew smaller every season, every moon, every day. And I guess we were used to it. We all knew the island would crumble away some day, but that didn't stop the prey running now. It was such an inevitable force that there was no point stopping it - so we ignored it. Lived out our lives in the hope that our generation wouldn't be the one to get it, that the next generation would be the ones to figure out some kind of solution. We shoved the problem to the back of our minds, but few could forget it entirely.
It was surprising, though, how used one got to the idea of almost certain doom.
[2]
The year I was born, at the beginning of new-leaf, the island measured five thousand paces across, end to end. Three thousand if you walked across widthways. It was the first thing they told my father after my mother went into labour: “The kits should be born around sunhigh, and we've lost another couple of paces from the south beach.”
As kits, my two littermates and I memorised the numbers that came back from patrol, begged the older cats for stories about what would happen if the island did collapse into the sea. The answers ranged from the optimistic “Twolegs will come back to rescue us” from our mother; to the gloomy “We're all going to die, stupids” from our crazy old grandfather Garth; to the blithe “Don't worry, darlings, that's not going to happen anytime soon” from almost everyone else. Oddly enough, I found Garth's the most reassuring. At that age, I prized honesty above all things, and I suspected he was the only cat on the island willing to give us a straight answer.
I spent a lot of time with Garth when I was a kit; I was the only tom kit on the island, and quickly grew bored of my sisters’ endless games about dramatic Twoleg rescues and the mysterious mainland. Primrose and Mayflower were always closer to each other than they were to me, anyway. I guess that was natural. But I was the only one who had a special friendship with an adult, and I'd often abandon my sisters’ playing to go and talk with Garth and the other elder, Linnie.
“How's it going, Eagle?” he'd ask. “Thought of any grand schemes lately?”
“Oh, hundreds,” I'd reply. They were mostly about challenging my sisters to races or climbing the huge boulder at the back of camp or sneaking off to visit the sea on my own. “How about you?”
“Hundreds,” Garth would say softly. “Hundreds and thousands and millions. More schemes than can possibly fit on just this one island.”
[3]
All of greenleaf passed in that peaceful fashion, and all of leaf-fall. The copse of trees at the north end of the island gained their new-season colours almost on the same day, a kaleidoscope of fiery reds and oranges and yellows. I was coming up to nine moons old now, old enough to explore outside camp by myself as long as I remembered to bring back some prey, and I spent an entire afternoon lying on my back on the carpet of discarded leaves, marvelling at the brightness and intensity of these new colours. There wasn't much colour on the island, otherwise; the landscape was painted in muted greens and browns, and all us cats’ pelts were black or white or grey.
I still remember the day a piece of Twoleg junk washed up onto the south beach and it was bright raw violet, a colour so rare we barely had a word for it.
I remember thinking, one of the many days I spent in the copse - sometimes with my sisters, sometimes with Garth, but mostly alone - that it was almost the only place on the island where you couldn't see the horizon. Everywhere else was so flat, so open: you could watch a patrol of cats from the other end of the island. It was really a very small island, I thought. I knew Garth shared the same opinion.
It was a small island, and shrinking all the time, but as I said, no-one really gave it that much thought. At least, not until the storm came.
I was with my sisters that day, showing off our fighting moves on the wide expanse of the beach at the southern tip of the island, and despite the wide horizon and empty troubled sea none of us spotted the warning signs that bad weather was about to arrive. Mayflower had just tipped me flat onto the sand during our third bout, and I’d shaken the sand from my fluffy pelt all over her in revenge, and we were all laughing so hard that none of us even noticed that it had begun to rain.
We came so close to not noticing at all, so close to being swept away by the sudden force of the wind and the waves and the grasping undersea currents, so close to being dashed against the western cliffs or sucked beneath the surface and nobody ever knowing what had happened to us.
“Run!” Primrose screamed suddenly, and the fear in her voice was such a strange contrast to the laughter that had been there moments ago that I obeyed her instantly, sprinting forward even before I looked around to see the enormous, peaked wave bearing down on us, high tide multiplied by a thousand. I tasted salt in my mouth, felt the spray on my face and my chest. Breathing hard, I turned and began to run again, my paws slipping in sand and then in mud, my pelt heavy with rain and dragging me down. I could hear Mayflower panting behind me, could hear Primrose -
No, I couldn’t hear Primrose. Couldn’t see her, when I turned round to look. I could see Mayflower looking as well, her amber eyes slits against the lashing rain… I couldn’t see my other sister anywhere. And then I could, and I wished I couldn’t, because she was caught up in the trough of a retreating wave, and her mouth was open, screaming, and I hadn’t heard her, neither of us had, and now it was all too late. We couldn’t go back for her.
4]
Later, they told us that almost all the south beach had been swallowed by the storm, and some of the lower-lying grasslands above it. One thousand eight hundred paces lost.
“There was nothing you could’ve done,” Garth said to me later. “Bad things happen. Cats die. You know how many of us were living on the island when I was born? Forty-two. You know how many of us are living here now?”
For some reason, I didn’t find Garth’s straight-talking as comforting as usual.
One thousand eight hundred paces. That was a lot on an island as small as ours, bringing the remainder to just over three thousand square. Water lapped where grass used to be. The adults were talking about moving the camp further to the north and the west; the dens had been damaged so badly by the storm that moving them wouldn’t take any more work than rebuilding where we were.
There was another storm that same moon, and another the moon after. Not as fierce as the first, but the cliffs were already so damaged that the rock crumbled as soon as the first waves hit. Two and a half thousand square. Two and a half by two.
Suddenly, the steadily receding shoreline stopped being the problem we all pushed to the back of our minds, and started being the problem we all frantically tried to solve.
“You know what, Eagle?” Garth said the day after the third storm, when we were gathering driftwood and washed-up junk from the shoreline to begin repairing the dens yet again. “I think we’re the last of us. The last generations. The ones who’ll live to see it all end.”
[5]
One unexpected upshot of the storm was that I ended up spending a whole lot more time with Mayflower. She’d taken losing Primrose much worse than I had, or even our parents had. I was angry, tear-streaked, guilt-ridden. She was devastated.
It was worse once our father died after a clifftop gave way beneath him.
That leaf-bare, she took to following me places, spending all the time with me that she’d used to spend giggling with Primrose and I’d spent alone. I never had the heart to turn her away. She’d talk a lot, and I’d try to listen, all about our kithoods and Primrose and the world before the storm hit. Sometimes Garth would be there, and he’d chime in with stories about the early days of the island, and Mayflower would seem lulled for once, and we’d be three cats huddled in the copse or on the beach or under the boulder in camp, sharing a small moment of respite from our awful reality.
But mostly it was just me, and her, and her grief, and no matter what I said there was no way to make it better.
I hated the island then, really hated it. It was my home and my prison and the only place I knew and the only place I could ever know, all at once. I’d lie in the copse and stare up at the bare, bare branches just like I’d done in leaf-fall and vow that if I ever could, I would find a way off this forsaken island.
I couldn’t, though.
No-one could.
[6]
Garth was right.
We were the last generations, the last cats ever to see the island before it disappeared for good. All that leaf-bare, into new-leaf, the storms kept coming and the land was powerless to resist. Two and a half by two thousand paces turned into two by one thousand, seven hundred by four hundred. We drowned. The prey drowned. We were all so hungry.
It was about then that cats started leaving the island, just jumping into the waves and swimming away. They all swore that if they found land, they’d come back and show us. They didn’t. But that didn't stop more cats from going.
I couldn't, somehow. I hated the island, hated it more every day, but- somehow-
It was me and Garth and Mayflower and our mother.
Then it was me and Garth and Mayflower.
Then it was just me and Garth.
We stayed until almost the end, eking out the last prey, drinking rainwater, eating leaves and grass when there was nothing else to fill our stomachs. We lived in the copse; that was all that was left of the island that had been our entire world. We didn't talk much.
I remember the last day as if it were yesterday, the images scars on my retina. The wind, the tide, the rapidly rising sea… Garth still refused to leave.
I'd chosen a dead branch that had fallen off its tree in one of the earlier storms and dragged it out past the start of the water, grabbing onto it tightly and waiting for the waves to take me away. I begged Garth to do the same. But he wouldn't. The cat who'd once bragged that he had more schemes than could fill an island had chosen to confine them all to a patch of land not ten paces square.
“Don't be a fool,” I said to him. “At least try and save yourself. Come on!”
But he wouldn't.
He watched as the sea took me, kept eye contact as I was swept further and further away. Back over where the old camp had been, back over the grassland where I'd learnt to catch my first prey, back past the rock off the end of the south beach. And further, over territory that I'd never walked but maybe my ancestors had. And further, out into the deep blue sea.
I lost eye contact then, and couldn't find it again. Tears splashed from my eyes straight into the sea, salt into salt. Suspended by my frail grip over bottomless ocean, I imagined that I was floating over the drowned corpse of every cat I’d ever loved.
I don't think I was expecting to ever reach land, if there was even any land to hit. I think I just reckoned that this was a better, less futile death than the way Garth had chosen. Lulled by the death cold of the seawater, I slowly relaxed my grip on the branch.
I was on the cusp of letting go when I felt the grittiness of sand under me, the surety of solid ground, the sea's hold on me loosening at last.