The Island

It will never stop, as the day follows the day, the grey stone boat cracking towards her through a broken solid sea, spuming through the cast-up showers of pebbles, until it starts to disintegrate down into what it is made of before it reaches her…
They had come to the island, through the tunnel. They had emerged at the chimney on the hill and walked down to the sand of the high beach.
They sat down on the sand, their feet in the water of the foreshore: a shallow lagoon, corrugated as if spat at by the wind.
They gazed out to the sea. The sea was a clattering arrangement of saucered pebbles, wave after pebbled wave rolling over each other, smacking and rattling, splaying the stones out sideways, never fracturing any, retaining the smoothed-out, saucer-shaped form of each one.
The waves seemed to be stitched into each other, interlocked so heavily that eventually nothing seemed to move as the two of them watched and listened from the island shore.
As she squeezed her fingers more tightly against his, the polished granite stones on her rings started to erode the skin from his fingers and dried-white slivers dropped onto the water without making a splash.
She stared out to sea. The stone ship clacked its way from the horizon, a least a hundred oars carved from rock protruding from holes in the sides.
He stood up, picked his way across the lagoon with care, and dived headfirst into the sea of pebbles, disappearing from view instantly, and immediately some of them were thrown up darker, mottled a grubby red, waving a chequered pattern before her eyes.
She picked threads of his discarded skin from the water. Rubbed them between her fingers. Let them drift behind her.
She saw his reflection in the water: flayed to the bones, grinning emptily. She picked up more threads of skin and rubbed them again. His reflection faded.
The pebbles were a uniform dirty brown now; the ship was closer: she could hear muffled drumbeats, their duration as evenly spread as the waving of the oars, but unsynchronised by the distance.
It was close enough now for her to smell the enticing whiff of grilled meat, for the fist of hunger to hit the emptiness of her stomach like a widow’s retaliation.
But as it neared shore, it collapsed back down into the sea of pebbles, breaking up and breaking down, re-energising the patch of brown with a luminous, almost lurid red.
She turned and walked back to the hill on the centre of the island, scaled the chimney, and disappeared back into the dark of the tunnel.
And behind her, the threads of his skin were being sucked back up by the wind from the surface of the water, and blown back towards the mainland to await her.
And following her up the hill, up the outside of the chimney and down into the tunnel, her white shadow, flayed to the bone, grinning emptily.