Any given Sunday

Just your average Sunday in these parts, what with the New York Times crossword puzzle, getting caught up on Eureka, and my weekly writing group. This week, we took as our prompt a pair of sentences picked at random from two random books, and the result, for me, was this:

The man on the beach was not moving. The slave looked at him and thought that he was one of the shipwrecked, who had made his way to the island. But if that was the case, where were the others, the man’s compatriots, and where was the wreckage of their ship? Where, moreover, were the shadowmen, who usually kept close watch over the shores and made quick work of any castaways unlucky enough to wash up on them?

The slave stared for a moment, then began to climb down the cliff to the rocky beach. It would not do to wonder. Dr. Kidder would be angry if he did not investigate; if a body had somehow escaped the attention of the shadowmen and their bloody rituals, that alone was worth any danger the slave might face. And if the man were somehow still alive…

But no, best to put that thought out of his head entirely. No one shipwrecked on the island had survived more than a single hour in almost forty years. The slave himself had been the last of them.

And yet, there the man was, his back to the slave and to the cliff, still facing the ocean. He was sitting up, but if he was breathing, the slave could not tell. Dr. Kidder had made many adjustments to the slave over the years, but so far eyesight had remained oddly resistant to the woman’s genetic manipulations. He had carried with him through the jungle a spyglass, but the man’s position on the beach made it difficult to tell if he was alive, even through its scope. The slave would need to examine the body up close to learn why it was still there.

“You needn’t come any further if you intend to kill me,” the man shocked him by saying. “I’m afraid I’ve already beaten you to it by being gutshot.”

And so it was. Coming around the rock, it was now clear to the slave that the man was still alive, but also that he would not be for much longer. Blood was everywhere, and the wound in the man’s stomach was obviously beyond repair. Even if the slave could somehow transport the man to Dr. Kidder’s laboratory, and he somehow survived the journey across the island, there was little hope that her science would be of any use. More likely, it would kill the man if the initial wound did not. And then he would belong completely to the shadowmen, and the slave would not wish that on anyone.

Perhaps he could lie to Dr. Kidder, say that he had not found anything. The vultures would get the man’s body before long, if the scavengers among the shadowmen did not. But the idea of lying to the woman…

Yeah, I think that story has some legs on it. I’ll be interested to keep working on it some.

Meanwhile, Heather has a really good story in the current issue of Bartleby Snopes. You should definitely check it out.