The Other Islander
Flash fiction
He couldn’t believe there still was a place on earth without fire. That too an island set deep in so desolate a nook and harried by freezing southerlies round the year. Sailors since the 17th century had reported such an island, which the slaves used to call what in their language meant ‘the lightless eye.’
There lingered an even queerer legend. On this island lived just two humans, both male. Forever. Some believed it was the same men all along.
As an anthropologist, he would have laughed it off hadn’t the story recurred in some totally unrelated sources, decades apart. The island was too small to escape any decent spying. In most accounts, telescopes picked out a pair of heads peering back from over a low rock and, at the slightest threat to privacy, turning and dissolving into the thicket behind.
The island cropped up in his team’s lunchtime talk as the crew of an Uruguayan coal-carrier had just discovered there a human skeleton sprawling ashore, supine and sand-crusted.
‘So the island must now have a single resident.’
‘Yes.’ The anthropologist tapped a nail on his Coke can. ‘And I’ll visit him and show him the fire.’
He snubbed the colleagues’ skeptic glances — some adulatory, most derisive.
‘This very Friday,’ he said.
That very Friday, haloed by the drowning sun, he found himself grappling with a clunky oar to steer his little canoe toward the island. Far in the west, the boat that had brought him till there was receding to a scar on the skyline. Mentally he kept rehearsing the planned sequence of actions. He patted the trouser pocket, on that taut bump of a lighter. Once disembarked, he’d flick it on in front of the islander. It’d be his chance to witness a grown human seeing fire for the first time.
What would dominate the response? Fear? Ecstasy?
The islander turned out to be a balding Caucasoid, browning from freedom. With a huge pink grin he emerged from the brushes and waved a friendly hand at the visitor. Save the stark nakedness he seemed civilized. His expression was one of joyous relief.
The anthropologist set about his business. The moment the lighter was taken out and held aloft, the islander hopped in to snatch it. He then went down on knees, picked up a desiccated palm frond lying about, and set it alight. The anthropologist gawked as the islander pitched the blazing frond off into the canoe.
The fire held its breath for a moment and then the canoe was all heat and light and smoke and smell and coal.
The guest and the host shared a grin, which grew steadily into a giggle. They came close and hugged and swiveled on their feet like a single beast before trudging mirthly off toward the island’s rock, arms thrown over each other’s shoulder.
All night the sea lapped at the burnt wood.
© Sethuraj Nair, September 2021
