Challenge Participant To Be Alone With You

[chap]

TO BE ALONE WITH YOU​

The sea carried us here like wreckage and sat us down in the sand, two men with nothing but a grudge between them. The sun is merciless. The palms are few. The silence is far worse. I hear him breathe across the fire at night; shallow, wet. His teeth click when he dreams. Sometimes, I pray he doesn't wake. Other times, I pray that he does.

Each morning we climb the dunes, searching for ships on the horizon, for smoke in the distance, for God on high. None of these things appear. Only him. Only me.

The tide takes the carcass of a fish and spits it out at our feet. He reaches first. I strike his hand. The meat is mine. I gnaw it raw and watch his eyes burn with murderous contempt.

He says nothing for days. Then one evening, as the sky bleeds down into the water and the firelight cracks the dark in twain, he looks across the pit and says it plain.

"Hey. Fuck you."

I don't answer. His words hang like smoke, butter and thick, curling through the dark like little tendrils. The waves hush against the shore, dragging stones back to the deep. I feel the heat of the fire on my face, the cold of his hatred at my back.

I chew the silence, grind it to gristle. My hands curl in the sand. I want to lunge, to bite at his throat with my bare teeth, to scratch at his hands with my nails grown long, to end it here and now. But I don't. The island would still be here, endless and bare, and so would I.

Alone.

He grins like a wolf. He knows I won't strike. Not yet. Tomorrow the tide may spit out another fish. Tomorrow the sun may rise on ships or carrion or nothing at all.

But tonight there is only us and the words between us.

"Hey," I say, at last. "Fuck you too."

The fire snaps. The sea answers. The island bears witness.