The Island of Excess Love

by Francesca Lia Block

  There’s a fire burning. Black smoke billows up. The smell of charred flesh meets my nostrils. On the pyre I can make out what looks like a man’s body with blackened skin. Then the flames flare up and consume him. On the ground by the fire is a pair of antlers.

  In The Aeneid the queen, Dido, burned herself on a pyre when her lover Aeneas left her to build a new civilization. But I did not leave the king. Someone took him away from me, took his life.

  I reach to touch my left eye socket. There’s a piece of glass there, that’s all. I shut my right eye to test it out and the world goes black. The magic is gone. The king is dead.

  I put one hand to my belly and one to my throat. Other hands catch me from falling. Venice, Ez, Ash, all dressed in rags like me. Argos is with them, too.

  “What happened?” Venice says, biting his lip, fighting tears as he stares into the fire. I draw him to me so he can’t see. I must protect him; I can’t fall apart now.

  “I don’t know. We have to leave, though.”

  It’s hard to know where to go. The entire landscape has changed. It’s just dirt and rubble and rock as far as the eye can see. But the ocean—that’s still there. You can smell it on the cold wind. That’s where we have to go.

  We move as quickly as we can over the ground on our bare feet, trying to avoid broken glass and the sharper rocks.

  In my mind I am calling for Hex, even though it’s too late, even though he can’t hear me. Even though I’ve betrayed him.

  We’re down at the beach now. The sand is littered with bones and glass and bricks and splintered wood. But we’re by the sea at least. Maybe we can get away. How can we get away?

  A body lies broken on the ground. Arms and legs twisted in the wrong directions. Neck risted to the side. Hair and beard matted with blood. Nose cut off, one ear missing. Eyes? Eye sockets. Empty. Birded and beaked.

  My mind is made of one-word shrieks of shock.

  Merk. Merk. Merk.

  My mother is dead, the father who raised me as his own is dead. Much of the world is dead. I held my true love’s body and my own body in my arms. I buried us. I blinded a Giant, killed a man. I saw a man I had made love to, just hours before, burned to death. This death before me should be another horror to face and lock away in my mind. But it’s not that simple. I’ve been torn asunder. Merk, my father, my sometime savior and protector, seemed invincible. Even when he disappeared, I was pretty sure he would turn up when we needed him most. But he’s not turning up anywhere. Someone or something killed him and pecked out his eyes.

  Maybe this is an illusion. Remember your corpse and Hex’s. Maybe this is a sinister spell like that was?

  But I don’t really believe that my father’s corpse is an illusion.

  Then I smell something—a sulfur stench, like wet rot and decaying corpses and raw sewage—and it feels like it’s permeating every single one of my pores. I cover my nose and mouth and struggle to breathe.

  Through my watering eye I see them—three haggard old women. Their skin is so dry it’s sloughing off in scales and they wear bird skulls around their necks, capes made of dirty feathers trailing over their bare shoulders and wrinkled breasts. Each of them holds a crude spear in one hand.

  “You made us do it,” they screech. Their teeth look rotten; some are missing.

  “Do what?”

  “Ruined,” they all say.

  The largest one goes on. “We were ruined. Once we were young and beautiful like you. Once we would have made almost any boy swoon. But not the king, not him. Even then he was saving himself for you.”

  “What happened to you?” I ask them.

  One takes a step forward on her long scaly legs. Her nails are sharp enough to claw out an eye.

  She’s close enough now that I can see the raw red patches on her skin. Her eyes are a sickly yellow color. “We are going to die this way. But you, you’ll find a way to escape and have a family and a life.”

  “Unless you don’t,” the others caw.

  * * *

  I see three girls in bikinis running across the glinting black sand. Their long wet hair—brown, black, red—streams down their sunned backs, almost to their hips. Their nails are painted different pastel colors, the polish chipping off in places; there are strings and strands of shells and beads knotted around their ankles and wrists. They are laughing so hard they’re doubling over as they run. All they want is to grow up and meet a handsome, kind man and get a good job and have a kid or two and stay best friends forever. They want to remain on this island with its tall trees and wildflowers and foxes and squirrels and deer and live in little houses. Maybe they all can be next-door neighbors—that would be perfect—and raise their children here and when they die, which is something they don’t think about, really, but if they did, they would imagine having their ashes scattered on this sea. This blue sea full of bright fish. But none of this will come true, except the part about staying together on the island. There are no husbands for them, or babies.

  The Earth Shaker has struck this island, followed by the waves. A power plant has been destroyed, spilling its toxic waste, poisoning the few people who remain. Their once brown, green, and blue eyes are round and yellow now, their once smooth legs are scaled, their pretty nails are talons, their taut bellies swollen; over their shoulders are capes made of dirty feathers, useless wings that cannot take them away from this place. Until the king with his whims and spells transforms it into paradise and them into the mythical, winged creatures Storm, Dark, and Swift.

  The girls, the way they were, are a lot like three other girls. Like me and my two best friends from Then, Moira and Noey. Moira was a red-haired cheerleader; Noey was a drummer and a photographer with dimples. I was the nerd of the bunch, obsessed with images and words. We were just three girls who loved each other and wanted to be loved and suffered a curse when the world came to an end. If another kind of curse befell us we’d be harpies defecating on ourselves. Instead, two of us are dead and one of us might as well be.

  * * *

  I imagine myself and Moira and Noey as these creatures, here on this island, turned into monsters, shitting ourselves and our food, abandoned, reviled, unable to procreate. I think of the Giants and of the sirens coated in mud in the swamplands back home and the witches and all the stinking, miserable life that is left on this ruined planet. I think of my dead parents and my other father, crazy Merk, my savior, with his eyes pecked out.

  And then I think of the king burning to death, the king who wanted to give me a world of wonders, even if it was as illusory as his love for someone with my name and face, someone whom he never really knew. But still …

  “What did you do?” I rasp.

  In answer, they start to hum, an infernal sound.

  But Venice is shouting my name. I turn and see a small boat in the water. It’s roughly constructed but it seems sound, bobbing there, with two sets of oars. There’s a figure in the boat and he’s calling our names, beckoning us to come to him.

  Hex.

  “Burnt offering,” one of the harpies says. “The king betrayed us. You are our queen. You can make us what we once were.”

  “Pen!” Hex shouts. Ez, Ash, and Venice with Argos are running toward him.

  “If you leave us here you will face famine, fire, and flood. Your hunger will gnaw at you until you eat the furniture and when that is not enough you will eat each other.”

  I turn my back on the harpies and head to the boat.

  But something sharp strikes me in the right shoulder. I stumble and fall to the sand. My arm explodes. I can’t even scream.

  Venice pulls me up. Pain like a volcano. Something whizzes past my ear. A spear lands quivering in the sand beside me and my brother. A spear. Like the one that’s lodged in my shoulder. Bleeding me out. And this second one could have injured Venice.

  There is no room for compassion. These creatures may have once been girls like me and my friends but now they are something else entirely.

  Wit
h my good left arm I reach for the spear in the sand. Blood like lava is spurting, running down my neck and torso.

  I don’t have the king’s bow and arrow but I have the memory of my spear aflame in the sky. I gather all the power left in my body and focus it into my left hand. Then I trap the image of the largest harpy in the crosshairs of my eye and fling the spear across the sand. It skewers the harpy’s breast.

  I’ve killed before, from an even nearer distance. I’ve felt a knife pierce skin, flesh, and organs. It changed me. It destroyed me in some way, the me I was before. A deep vicissitude has been required of me. And now I’m changing again. To what I must become.

  A third spear is launched toward us. Venice knocks me out of the way. He grabs the spear, puts his arm around me, and pulls me along toward the boat. But I’m too heavy for him and he stumbles.

  Now, now, now, Hex is here. He lifts me into his arms and runs. I feel like a child in his arms. So weak. We’re almost at the boat. I look back at Venice. He flings the third spear toward the harpies and the second one shrees and drops to the ground.

  The third harpy, now spearless, is running toward us. “May you be tormented by wars and suffer the loss of your friends. May the blue-eyed child in your belly be served to you as supper. May your corpse go unburied and no one there to witness the bleeding sapling.”

  “Damn,” Hex mutters. “That’s some hard-core shit. Way to come up with it on the fly.”

  All I can think of are the words “the blue-eyed child in your belly.” What does this mean? And, “be served to you as supper.”

  We reach the boat. Ez and Ash help us and I am placed carefully down in the hull.

  “Take it out!” I scream at Hex. The force of my voice sends more eruptions of pain through my arm.

  The boat is starting to move, away from the island, away from my father’s unburied corpse. From my fetal position on the deck I see Ez and Ash at the oars. Venice and Hex are down beside me. Argos is licking my face in methodical strokes.

  Hex tentatively touches the spear lodged in my shoulder but he’s not doing anything. He’s not doing … His face looks so white it’s as if he’s the one who lost all the blood.

  “Pull it out and kill her with it!” I say between clenched teeth. “Don’t fucking miss!”

  “Hold her down,” Hex tells Ez.

  I brace myself, teeth biting into my lip until I taste the iron tang of blood.

  Venice holds me down and Hex pulls. In one executioning blast the spear dislodges from my shoulder with a rip-wrench-crack. The pain is too much, it’s too much.

  Burnt offering.

  The king is dead.

  The world is black.

  The world is red.

  11

  THE ISLAND OF THE SHADES

  “WE CAN’T STOP THERE,” Ez says. “We have to get back.”

  “We have no choice,” Hex shouts. “We need to get her on land. She’s losing blood. There might be someone who can help us there.”

  “Or rip our hearts out and eat them for supper,” says Ash. “I’m kind of over trusting any of these freaks we keep meeting.”

  “That girl wouldn’t just be sitting there if it was that dangerous.” Now it’s Venice speaking.

  “If she’s even a little girl at all.”

  What girl? I can’t tell if I’m dreaming. I try to sit up but the pain in my arm knocks me back down.

  “We’ve dealt with worse.” Hex puts his hand on my forehead. “She’s burning up. We have to stop.”

  Yes, stop.

  I want it all to stop. Once there was a castle made of quartz and a magician king with a stag’s crown. Once there was a fire that burned him to ashes like the pyre on which an epic queen took her life. (But the king did not choose his death.) Once there was a killing woman who betrayed her beloved for an enchantment. Her king died; her lover survived. She does not deserve to live.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Hex leans closer. “What, Pen?”

  “I’m sorry. I … it must have scared you to see us drinking and then you left and he…”

  A shadow crosses Hex’s face. “You don’t really know me that well,” he says, like we’ve been having a pleasant chat over lunch but something tasted just a little off. “And I’m not sure how well I know you anymore.”

  The boat bumps up against some rocks, jolting my arm again. I gasp as Venice—whispering in my ear not to speak, to save my strength—lifts me up so I can see.

  The sun is setting, turning the sea to blood. We’ve reached land, what appears to be a small, rocky island with some very young trees and a smattering of wildflowers and shrubs. It’s not the Island of Excess Love. It’s somewhere else. The girl sits perched on an outcropping of bone-colored rock, staring out to sea. Her dark hair has made a cloak for her body. She’s maybe ten years old. Even from this far away and in my altered state I can see her green eyes like beacons. I’m relieved we’ve stopped here, not only for selfish reasons; I can feel that she needs our help, too.

  “Ready?” Hex and Venice carry me, with Argos following. Ez and Ash moor the boat on the rocks and come behind us.

  The girl doesn’t flinch as we approach her. The air is cold and gray and I can taste salt in it. I’m shivering so hard I feel it reverberating in Hex’s body.

  “We aren’t going to hurt you,” Venice says. “We need to help my sister.”

  The girl stands, still wrapped in her thick hair. She and Venice lock eyes as if no one else is here.

  “Are you all right?” Venice asks.

  She doesn’t answer. She just starts to sing in a low, keening whisper.

  “Can you help us find water and shelter? Maybe food?” Ez asks. “Please. She’s losing blood.”

  When he says the word “water” I realize that my throat is parched and my tongue swollen as if I haven’t had a drink for days. Maybe I haven’t.

  The girl releases her hair so it whips out around her, revealing a frail frame dressed in rags and skin the color of nutmeg.

  * * *

  The earth is shaking when the mother, still wearing her pink scrubs from work, runs to pull her two daughters from their beds and into the kitchen. She tells them to get into the position they’ve learned at school. Duck and cover. Under the biggest table. Furniture slides across the room and the three of them cling to each other as pictures fall from the walls and glass shatters.

  The older one has started to wail first and the little one who always imitates her has joined in, somewhat hollowly, as if she really doesn’t understand why she’s crying. The woman has to shout to be heard over their cries and the sound of their house combusting around them.

  “I love you, my babies,” the woman says. “Acacia. Little Lily. You are deep in my heart and I’m in yours. No matter what happens we will never really be apart.”

  When the older girl comes to, the shaking has stopped. Her house has ceased to exist. The table they hid under is gone. The ceiling is a merciless sky.

  Her mother and sister are bleeding. Their eyes are closed. They lie motionless. She places her hands on her mother’s head, her always carefully styled black hair. The girl’s skin is paler than her mother’s and she wishes it weren’t. She wishes she at least had that reminder sealing her own body forever.

  The blood keeps rivering out while the daughter closes her eyes and focuses every cell of her being on the task of making it stop. Her mother used to say, “Acacia, girl, you have the touch. Someday you’re going to be a doctor, I bet. You can make my headaches go away just by putting your little hands on me, baby.”

  This is not a headache.

  The blood stops. But it’s too late. Her mother and sister are dead.

  The girl rises to her feet and looks around. The water is everywhere. It looks like a sea monster. Leviathan is the word her mother taught her. As the wave comes toward her she clutches a piece of furniture, hauling herself up onto it this time. It’s the kitchen table, the one she and her mother and sister hid und
er as they’d been taught to in the earthquake drills. It hadn’t protected them at all.

  All lies, the way even her mother’s words were lies: We will never really be apart.

  The girl clings to the table that betrayed them as it takes her out to sea.

  * * *

  I return from my unwelcome vision. More devastation. Always. Everywhere. We must help this girl.

  But right now I can’t even walk and she is running up and over the rocks. At the highest point she turns and looks right at Venice, gesturing for him to follow her.

  Hex and Venice carry me over the rocks after the girl. A wind smelling of my wounds makes me shiver and I press myself against Hex.

  He should drop you down from here and let you die.

  * * *

  I wake up on the ground, next to a burning campfire in the shelter of some rocks. My head is in Ez’s lap, Argos is lying somewhere both on and between my feet as he somehow manages to do, and I can hear Ash singing a lullaby. Venice is cross-legged beside me at the entrance to a small cave.

  I try to sit up but pain stabs through me. Someone has bandaged my shoulder and probably cleaned it but the wound feels hot, teeming with bacteria.

  “She’s awake,” Ez says to the others.

  Venice turns toward me and Ash comes over but I don’t see Hex anywhere.

  Ez helps lift my head and offers me water from a small bowl. I gulp at it, spilling some down my chin.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “Some island. I don’t know exactly.”

  “What happened?”

  “That girl ran off and we followed her.”

  “Is she okay?” I say. I feel compelled to find this girl, to help her in some way. Venice’s eyes tell me he’s having the same thought.

  “She disappeared so we found water and some berries and made camp.” Ez holds up a handful of crushed red berries and I let him feed me, trying to be more careful than with the water. They taste bitter but I don’t care. I gulp more water; it seems I’ll never get enough.

  “What happened before, on the king’s island?” The words hurt to pronounce but the silent question in my mind is worse.