Sunset 301

Willow was woken by the cracking of twigs in the clearing outside her shelter, the same noise that woke her up most nights. She scrambled herself to standing, picked up her stick and crept towards the entrance. There was no-one there of course, not that she could see anything on this moonless night.

‘Hello?,’ she shouted at the top of her voice, then ‘Where are you?’ But her words were swallowed up by the dark.

‘I hate you, and I hate this place!,’ she screamed, demolishing a nearby bush with her stick, until eventually, panting and frustrated, she returned to her sleeping mat.

Three hundred sunsets. That’s how long Willow had been on the island. She wasn’t sure why she was there, and had no idea where she’d come from or even who she was. Willow was just a whimsical name she’d chosen so she had something to write in the sand. Sometimes she’d try to search her dreams for clues, but even if she found some, by the time she came to her senses they’d slipped away, back into the inaccessible recesses of her mind. She’d checked every inch of her body too, but apart from a few scars that she’d picked up during her time on the island, there was nothing unique, nothing to give her a backstory. As for her face, she’d caught a reflection of it once in a stream, but she’d quickly muddied the waters. She neither liked nor recognised the person staring back.

There was no way of working out where she was either, and no way to leave. The island was surrounded by the vast nothingness of the ocean, and not a single boat had passed by in all her time here, though she religiously climbed all three of its peaks twice a day, just in case.

Despite being completely lost in space, Willow at least tried to keep herself oriented in time. Every evening she scored a line on a piece of paper that she kept tucked in her sleeping bag, one for every sunset, even though she despised sunsets like she despised everything else about this place. She guessed she could have chosen to count sunrises, but back in those early days they had seemed too hopeful. No, sunsets it was, each one marking the end of another solitary day and the beginning of another long and lonely night.

Yet Willow knew she was not alone. The day after sunset 300, she awoke to a new pair of sandals, set neatly outside her shelter. It had only been the afternoon before, at the bottom of the second peak, that her old pair had finally succumbed to the harsh terrain and she’d tossed them into the sea in a fit of frustration, knowing how painful it would be to climb the third peak barefoot. Still, she had gone ahead and done it, motivated by the fear of missing a distant boat, then afterwards she had soothed her lacerated feet in the salty sea water. Someone must have been watching her, because whoever had left her the shoes had left ointment and bandages as well.

Willow sat in front of her rudimentary shelter, dressed her wounds, and glanced at the bush she’d obliterated the previous night. Her face reddened and she touched her cheeks. Was this shame? Perhaps, but it had been so long since she’d felt any emotions other than rage and frustration that it was difficult to tell.

‘Thank you!,’ she shouted to no-one. Also a first. Willow had had many gifts, all of which had bailed her out at desperate times, but not once had she felt gratitude, least of all expressed it. She half hoped to hear a distant ‘You’re welcome,’ in return, but the only noise came from the waves slapping onto the beach, so she shrugged, gathered together a few belongings, and set off to climb the peaks. She stopped along the way to drink from a stream, and held the gaze of the bright-eyed woman looking back at her.

Willow took some food with her today, intending to witness the sunset from the top of the third peak for a change, and scribble some notes in her shabby diary. Well they were letters, really, written to whoever was on the island with her. It helped her feel less isolated somehow. She flicked through to some of her older entries, her handwriting scrawled and almost illegible, a reflection of the total helplessness she had felt in those early days, a helplessness that had turned to anger and bitterness. ‘Why the hell did you give me paper and a pen?,’ her first letter had said. ‘My mind is blank. I have nothing to write about only how much I hate you for doing this to me.’ Then she’d tossed the pen and notebook to the back of her shelter.

But despite herself, Willow had written three hundred letters, one at each sunset, and over time her words reflected less anger than loss, loneliness, and pain. ‘Is anyone missing me?’, she wrote at sunset 250 after a terrifying storm. The tracks of her teardrops streaked the page.

Biting into her homemade loaf of bread, Willow neatly printed the date at the top of the clean page, ‘Sunset 301.’ It was the last page of her notebook too, and she hoped beyond hope that whoever it was that was watching her would bring her a new one overnight.

‘Got the shoes today,’ she wrote. ‘They fit perfectly. Oh, and I noticed something, too. That you only bring me things after I’ve suffered pain. The shoes when my feet were bleeding, food when I was dizzy with hunger, a sleeping bag after a night shivering with cold. But I can’t live without my notebook. The pain of having no-one to write to, even for one day, would be something I couldn’t possibly bear. And sometimes I think I’ve suffered enough.’ She tucked the book into her bag. Before going to bed she would leave it outside her shelter like she had every night since sunset 2, in the hope that someone would read it.

For now, though, Willow turned her face to sunset 301. Most nights she scarcely paid attention, not wishing to dwell on the night ahead. But this evening was different. Even the sea, usually an impenetrable barrier to her freedom, held a beauty that she hadn’t appreciated before, the peaks in its gentle waves twinkling in the fading sun. And why had she never before realised how awesome the sunset was? And how much more it was than just a hastily scribbled mark on a piece of scrap paper? A tear slid down her face, then another, and then floods of tears, for the wasted sunsets. Not just the three hundred and one that she could remember, but the thousands of others that she couldn’t.

Willow stood up and dried her eyes. The light was growing dim as the sun melted to dark red on the horizon, and she needed to get down the mountain before nightfall. She cast a final glance out to sea, expecting, as usual, for it to reveal nothing. Then her stomach lurched. Was that a light? In the not so far distance? She rubbed her eyes again. Could it be? Yes, she was almost certain. Then she spotted a dark figure on the beach, running in the direction of her shelter. ‘Wait! Come back!,’ she screamed, but the figure kept running.

Willow hesitated for a second, her eyes drawn back to the light just off the shore, then she half-ran, half-slid down the mountain. She was on autopilot, every path so familiar to her that she could have made it back to her shelter with her eyes closed.

She stumbled into the clearing, and froze, her eyes darting every which way. The shelter. It was gone. Her food, her water, her sleeping bag. All the little oddities she’d picked up on her explorations of the island that she’d decorated the clearing with. All gone. And in their place a bag, which she opened with shaking hands. New clothes, soft and warm, which she put on straight away, and a brand new notebook, which she opened. The heading on the first page was already filled in: Sunrise 1. And then, a letter, addressed to her, to Willow. She tore it open and sank to her knees, at the same time feeling the reassuring touch of a human hand on her shoulder.

‘Prisoner 781,’ the letter read, ‘sentenced to 301 sunsets. You are free to go.’