Yam Island

The island was doomed the second Charlie washed ashore.

When the young banker woke up on tranquil sand, he stared up in dazed amazement and couldn’t believe he was alive. Just hours ago, he was hurtling toward the ocean, with his boss screaming prayers and tax forms flying around the cabin.

Charlie took stock of the chunks of shrapnel surrounding him. He remembered flying over a ring of Mediterranean islands, so perhaps he was now on the coast of Italy. Or Spain. He squinted into the verdant jungle, hoping to see a seaside town or fishing outpost.

“Hi there! Are you friend, or are you foe?”

A voice called out from the tree line. Charlie, who was shy but not stupid, timidly replied that he was a friend. A crinkled yet sturdy man walked into view. He held no weapons, and because they shared the same accent, Charlie immediately trusted him. (The junior banker was young and naive in that way.)

This stranger had the body of a well-rested retiree and possessed the gravitas of a pastor. However, distrust sat behind his eyes. The island had not welcomed anyone for years, and its people remained cut off not through ignorance, but because it was simply too small and out of the way for any nation to bother conquering it.

“Are you hurt? You looked pretty banged up there, my friend,” the stranger said.

“I’m fine, I think. My plane crashed out at sea,” Charlie said. His head pounded and his arms were bruised terribly. “Who are you?”

“Adam,”he replied. Adam picked up various metal surrounding Charlie and appraised the pieces with a careful eye. These slabs could patch up huts that hadn’t seen new roofs in decades. “And what should I call you?”

“Charlie is fine,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone was here. Is there a town nearby?”

“It’s an island,” Adam said. “There’s some of us here,”

“How many?” Charlie asked. He pictured an unassuming cobblestone-lined town with the occasional Vespa. Certainly not enough people to justify highways and legitimate roads, but maybe there was a seaplane or boat that could take him towards home.

“A good number,” Adam said. “It’s not lonely,”

What a strange thing to say, Charlie thought.

“Is there any way off? Maybe a plane to come get me or a phone to dial home?” he asked.

“No,” Adam said. He knew at some point he’d have to tell him the truth about the island, but he didn’t want to overwhelm Charlie with that burden yet. Not before he could meet the rest. “You should come with me, it’ll be dark soon,”

Adam went into the thicket and Charlie followed with the innocence of a lamb.

The trees, bushy and overwhelming, looked the same to the newcomer. Orbs of pink fruit stuck to their sides, and Adam plucked several as they walked by. There was no buzz of mosquitos, thank God, but nevertheless the humidity made the jungle trek hell. Adam walked expertly amongst the tangles. He’d stop and sniff like a dog, tap Charlie’s arm as if to remind him to follow, and then go off in another direction.

Charlie was glad they walked in silence. He needed time to think about how awful the crash had been. The dip had come out of nowhere, as if the pilot fell asleep at the wheel. Strangely enough, he remembered nothing about the impact — only the terrifying free fall. He felt the ghost of his boss’s midair grip and grit his teeth.

Without warning, the thicket opened up into an expansive field dotted with makeshift huts. A ring of crops sat around the village, and several people tending to them waved to the pair. They acknowledged Adam with reverence, the same way Charlie would look at his own boss at work.

“So what is this place?” Charlie asked. The farming atmosphere was peaceful, and the simplicity startled him. Everyone here must’ve washed up like he did, because he didn’t see any sign of modern life whatsoever. Even some of their clothes looked aged, as if from different times.

“Home,” Adam said. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I know you’d rather I say that we’re some lovely island off the coast of a bustling mainland, but we have no name. We’re all just cobbled together from where we came from,”

The more they walked, Charlie saw what Adam meant. The wooden planks that made the village’s fencing were all mismatched like crooked teeth. They were multi-colored and sported the text of several languages. Metal flats from various ships, airplanes and sea debris formed the huts, and none were the same.

People who looked like they could be Charlie’s neighbors back home lounged around happily. Life had a slow pace here, and if one wasn’t preparing food or fixing up their house, they hammock’ed under the Sun or played games in the dirt.

Charlie marveled at the little society, which contrasted severely with the hustle of even his neighborhood park. Back home, nobody sat around and fed the ducks. The dirt paths inside were just shortcuts to work, and anybody who attempted to walk leisurely would’ve been trampled in an instant. Comparatively, this place was truly timeless. It did not exist on any known map or belong to any known country. But something was missing.

Any town across the globe had this, and it wasn’t until Charlie sat at dinner that he realized who the village lacked.

“Where are the children?” he asked, putting the stale question out into the air. The youngest were a pair of blond twins who had survived a shipwreck that had claimed their parents. The two were around Charlie’s age and gathered around a fire pit, poking at the yams smoldering within the embers.

Everyone at the table deferred to Adam, who sat at the head. He was not the oldest person there, but he’d been on the island the longest, and therefore commanded the community’s respect. He broke open a yam before answering Charlie.

“There’s something in the water we suppose,” he said. “We can’t have children. Believe me, we’ve tried,”

The table laughed, but there was an uncomfortable element to it. The people of the island were confused about how time worked. They had a feeling that things were moving slower than usual. Nobody had died yet, and nobody was born. That was life here, and they accepted that fact like it was the Sun, the moon or the air.

Even Adam didn’t grasp the island’s magic completely, but he accepted it fully.

Charlie sensed that kids were a bad topic, so he tried to parlay into another thing on his mind. The yams sat uneaten on his plate. He hated vegetables, and in his mind, tubers counted.

“Are there no chickens?” he asked, slightly annoyed at the lack of meat in the meal. “Certainly you must fish,”

He spoke too forcefully for the people’s kind nature and was too unaware to realized he’d offended them with this query. Several villagers chuckled softly. They realized that Charlie would have trouble acclimating to life here.

“We don’t kill, and even if we did, there aren’t any animals on the land,” Adam said.

He didn’t like how Charlie assumed that nobody had tried to fish before. Leave it to a brash young man, untempered by life, to propose an idea previous generations had already tried. Bad things happened when death was introduced to the island, and Adam learned many years ago not to rebel against the rule.

Unlike the rest of the people who had washed ashore, Charlie didn’t just accept the truths laid out to him. Everyone else had disliked some elements of their lives before and were eager to escape their mortal worries, whether it be debt, heartache or general hopelessness. They were happy knowing that taxes and murder didn’t exist here.

Over the next few weeks, the island folk tried to welcome Charlie into their ways. He was given a hammock and taught how to unearth edible roots. He reluctantly peeled fruit and dried their skins to create sweet jerky. Once he recovered from his crash injuries, he spent every bit of free time walking the lengthy perimeter of the island, wishing he were back home.

He was angry at the world for stripping him down. Sure, he was a low level banker. He had no girlfriend and only a handful of schoolmates in a bar trivia rotation. But he was scheduled to start fencing lessons just next month. And receive a new desk for his promotion. While at work, he occasionally dreamed of island vacations, but never wanted it for eternity. Charlie refused to accept that this was his finish line. That he would eat yams, laze about and watch the stars for the rest of his life. He was unsatisfied, and he made this known.

“I saw some fish near the beach I landed in,” Charlie said at the eating table one afternoon, after picking fruit flesh from under his fingernails. Several people who had been discussing the brightness of Jupiter last night quieted and turned to him, curious about his plan. “I’m going to catch some and cook up a lovely fish dinner,” he continued.

Charlie didn’t look at Adam, but could feel the group leader’s eyes on him.

Adam’s chest tightened. He saw his younger self in Charlie and knew that the young man couldn’t be stopped. Decades ago, it was Adam who rejected the island people and their rules. While coming home from a convention, he crashed-landed on the shore and was humbled by nature. A group of people welcomed him to the restful lifestyle with open arms, but he couldn’t forget the exciting life he left behind.

He missed the drunken nights out and the electric feeling of closing a lucrative deal. And because he couldn’t find that adrenaline on the island, he sought it through the violent sport of fishing, an arena where he could prove his dominance on another being. It took losing everything and more for Adam to learn the island’s lesson, and now his punishment had finally come in the shape of a brash, ambitious young banker.

“You’re an adult. I can’t stop you, but I ask that you look around and wonder if this is enough,” Adam said. “It’s slow, yes. But it’s safe. Don’t throw all this away for some fish. It’s not worth it,”

Charlie dismissed Adam completely. The leader must be crazy to think that eating a fish would jeopardize life on the island.

“Oh yeah? Well I think you’re just hell-bent on being in charge. Give me one good reason not to kill a damn fish,” Charlie said. He thought of how his own boss, the one who went down screaming on the flight, would dole out instructions without explaining his reasoning behind them. Charlie incorrectly believed that Adam was the same sort of man. It was a power move, and Charlie was sick of submitting to that.

“If you kill a fish, you kill us. As long as death stays away from the island, we live,” Adam said with a resigned look on his face. He knew it was too late to stop Charlie. The truth sounded crazy.

The others at the table started murmuring. The others had suspected this secret, but never had the bravery to ask Adam or prove him right. They loved their lengthy lives, even if they could only eat yams and stare at the stars. For them, a fish wasn’t worth breaking the magic. Charlie snorted.

“Really? That’s the best lie that you could come up with? God, you suck,” he said. He then turned to the rest of the group.

“You all are idiots for believing this guy. Wait till I come back with some salmon. We’ll have sashimi for dinner, thanks to me, ” he said before storming off with a yam in hand.

The group tittered in his absence. None of them felt betrayed by Adam even though he had kept them in the dark. Their curiosity was strong, but each member respected their savior enough to follow his rules, and nothing bad had ever happened to them for it.

On the shore, Charlie stuffed mushed yam into the ankles of his trousers and tied off the ends. One of the twins, fueled by youthful curiosity, had followed him down to the shore.

“Why are you doing that?” she asked, crouching over his shoulder.

“To catch some fish,” he said. The pounded yams were baby’s food, and he was tired of eating them. He dropped the pants where the river met the sea and watched as a few flounders waddle against the current to reach the bread.

Charlie was impatient, and as soon as one slipped inside, he hauling the sopping wet pair of slacks up, holding it triumphantly as he grinned. Finally, some meat. It wasn’t a steak, nor was it a chicken nugget. But the fish was meat, and his canines were bared appropriately. The animal thrashed around in the corduroy trap, making it seem as if a shirtless ghost was dancing.

“Oh, don’t hurt him!” the young woman wailed, tugging on Charlie’s sleeve. She had never seen a fish out of water, and even though the scaled creature couldn’t scream, she saw the violent, desperate thrashing and knew it to be frightened. He disregarded her, raised a heavy stone, and whacked the animal with a brutal crunch.

The fabric of his pants crimsoned with blood.

It was the first death the island had seen, and the destruction of its innocence broke its timelessness. The island that the world had forgotten was pulled back onto the correct timeline, and it was as if a spiritual tsunami had washed over the community. The cluster of huts erupted in wails as the years hit each person at once.

Elders who were chortling over roasted yams keeled over and turned to rot. Adults serving the classic dinner saw arthritis, dementia and death within a second. Charlie nearly passed out from shock when he turned to the girl and instead saw a woman at least twice his age kneeling in the sand. She screamed as she stared at her skin, which was now weathered and cracked like the that of an elephant. The few young who lived on the formerly idyllic home groaned as their youthful bodies and mind morphed into mirror images of their grandparents, who were mortal and long gone. They were husks of people, and many spent their last days crawling across the sand as confused as newborns.

Charlie felt a sense of dread grow in his stomach as he realized that Adam, who was now dead, was telling the truth. He braced himself in anticipation of time hitting him in the face, but nothing came. He hadn’t been here for long, so at most he grew older by a couple of months. The aging came quick, and only sagged his face slightly. The withered grandma put her hands on his shoulders, looking to steady herself in her anger. She was confused by the sudden weakness of her body, and she felt betrayed by this arrogant stranger.

“Don’t kill me!” Charlie waved his hands in surrender, but the old woman just scowled. She may have been jaded by his wizened hands and her sudden loss of youth, but with the little time she had left, she didn’t want to waste any time bickering with him.

“If you think I’m going to kill you, then you don’t know anything about this place,” she replied, echoing Adam’s sobering wisdom as if his spirit lingered a couple seconds more. She herself lasted a day before succumbing to time.

It was another decade before a storm threw a family onto shore.

By then, Charlie had gained a respect for the island’s magic. He had taken each body and buried it under the yam gardens. He also salvaged debris from his own crash and patched up various homes, spreading the materials until a piece of him lay in each hut. Now, when he dug up the tubers, he felt weathered in his heart and soul. But when he washed his face over water, he saw the same brash young man who had killed the fish, and subsequently, the island.

Upon seeing this, he didn’t know how much time exactly had passed, but he knew that it was once again stuck. He kept himself occupied with made-up games of dirt and stone, but the loneliness eventually forced him to meditate on what he had done. It was unforgivable, the wiping out of that many people at once. He should’ve listened to Adam and not let his hunger ruin the island’s magic.

So when the newcomers washed ashore, dazed by the unforgiving Sun, Charlie knew that this was his redemption. He watched the disoriented family stumble across the beach, hands outstretched for help.

One father, a mother, two sons and a daughter. Hopefully none too rebellious.