Island of the Forgotten

In Which Cal Plays A Counting Game

As he flicked the ashes clumsily off the tip of his cigarette, the slender figure couldn’t help but ask himself why ‘Cinderella’ hadn’t come to the ball. He’d been occupying the otherwise abandoned street corner for the last half hour, completely immobile save for when the occasional twitch made him stumble from his place, and still she’d had the nerve not to show. Two watery blue eyes continued their lookout, wandering over the cracked pavement and catching even the smallest flutter of movement within their eerie depths. Ten more minutes. That was all the longer he’d wait. The ringing in his ears increased, blocking out the other sounds of the city altogether. Nine more minutes. The frigid air bit at his grubby fingers and well-defined nose. Eight more minutes. The snowmelt from the ground began to soak through his shoes, making them instantly uncomfortable. His wiry form gave an involuntary shiver. Seven more minutes.
The man glanced at his watch for what might have been the hundredth time of the night and instantly regretted it. It occurred to him that he was an idiot for having waited around so long. Bt why had he insisted on waiting?
Because it’s only the second real deal you’ve ever had, the first being something you stolen, and you felt important-like since you’d actually gone and bought this little baggie of pixie dust trash. You thought you were some great drug lord all of a sudden.
His conscience, when he listened to it, made him feel stupid as well as another feeling that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He promptly turned to leave. It didn’t really matter anyway, though he could have used the money. After running his fingers through a mess of raven-black hair, which apparently hadn’t been washed in quite a few days as it hadn’t fallen back into place, he threw down his cigarette without bothering to stomp it out. What did it matter? It was snowing anyway. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his ratty navy blue coat and lowered his head against the wind, trying to navigate through the streets. He wasn’t a far distance away from his place but the cold made it seem like miles instead of blocks.
A delicate peppering of snow-fluff covered every inch of the city block, disguising the ground for what it really was: tightly packed powder as slick as ice. Apart from the pleasant sugar-coating of snow, the block itself looked absolutely forsaken. Tall ramshackle apartment buildings rose up like rocky crags around the deserted street, casting the inhabitants in a near twenty-four hour shadow of depression and self-loathing. It was like many other blocks in the city. Such living conditions seemed to bring the people together, at least in a ‘I hope it gets better than this pretty damn soon’ sense.
But though Cal had given up his task for the night, a shady group of night-lifers hadn’t yet become so wise. Here and there along his way home a respectable couple would walk by hand in hand. However, for the most part, Cal crosses paths with people like himself as he headed toward his destination.
Men with pale skin and large, staring eyes watched him and cooed to him while they loitered around apartment building doors. Imposing figures in dark overcoats made him feel even more shift as they passed by, barely granting him a glance. Girls, slips of girls, wandered by with chattering teeth, covered only enough to keep them dropping from the cold. Were they the pale men’s girls? Did they belong to the men in the overcoasts? Or was he completely misjudging them?
It didn’t occur to him until this minute, while he was making his short trek home, that perhaps this wasn’t the way real drug deals were made. Maybe it wasn’t about standing on a dark corner or in a lonely alley with your hood pulled up so only a shadow of your face could be seen, or calling all of the scantily-clad girls you’d ever met in clubs to see if they’d be interested in what you had for sale. Maybe real drug lords didn’t sell one bag of cocaine a week to people they knew. Maybe he was trying to hard too make his life into a movie.
Four more blocks. His finger poked a hole through the thinning material of his jacket and was attacked even more by the wind that tore viciously at every part of his body that wasn’t covered. Three more blocks. A few strands of hair escaped from the rest of the greasy melee and fell into his line of vision, making it virtually impossible to see where he was going. No matter. His vision was blurry anyway and being too lazy to even move the hair from his face, let alone go and get a prescription for glasses, he’d naturally learned to function somewhat well without perfect sight. Headaches, however, were punishment for his idleness. Two more blocks. The ringing in his ears began to calm, although it was still there, as always. One more block. His legs became hard to lift and his arms hung dead at his sides.
Upon reaching the apartment building the man gave an almost inaudible sigh and began to make his way up the crumbling steps.
“Hullo Cally,” came a voice from behind him. It was dark and threatening, though soft at the same time. The delicate tones held a gentle caress. The next words, however, fell from the frowning lips with a hint of biting sarcasm. “Have anything for me tonight, friend?” And Cal knew he was in for nothing but pain. He slowly shook his head no. Cal had been, for two years now, selling a concoction he called ‘devil’ to anyone that was gullible enough to buy it. In reality it was only Advil tablets with the ‘A’ scratched off, but to those that bought it, it was the expectation of a night of escape. Fortunately most of the people he sold to were inexperienced and either tricked themselves into feeling what they thought they should feel or assumed that they were immune to the effects. His ‘dvil’, or devil, was simply keeping people away from the real thing. He considered it his contribution to society. Apparently Roman didn’t feel the same way.
Roman was on him before Cal could fumble his keys from his pocket. Hit one broke the skin above Cal’s eye and caused it to bruise and swell immediately. Punch two found his nose and, though the nose lost none of it’s prominence, it no longer sat as straight as it had before. A flurry of fists was all that Cal could see out of his uninjured eye as Roman let testosterone take over. Three, four, five, six, seven…Cal lost count, something that rarely happened. When Roman stood after wiping his blood-covered hands on his victim’s coat he held a small, clear bag in one clenched fist, triumphant. He stared down at the undecipherable face beneath him, a grin engraved on his own features as he held the prize out.
“Something a little more potent than Nyquil, huh?”
Cal’s world went black.


- - - - -


He could feel the blood pounding through his head as he opened his eyes. They seemed to force themselves back shut as if they were afraid of the green-tinted light outside. Outside? Why outside? Putting a hand up to his throbbing head, Cal tried sitting up. As he attempted this he realized for the first time that the ground he was lying on was soft, not like the pavement he remembered at all. In fact, it was springy, almost comfortable. He moved himself to an upright position and opened his eyes to look around. He wasn’t on a city block. Somehow he was in a dense forest-like place. Suddenly it was all too much for him and he raised a hand to his head, then withdrew it gingerly as he felt something congealed on his skin. His fingers were covered with a dark red stain and were somewhat sticky. Such an injury surely meant something awful. Cal’s breathing instantly became a ragged ordeal and he nearly fainted from the sight.
He’d almost worked himself into a state of shock when suddenly a gleaming, pink-scaled creature came diving out of the sky and fluttered directly above his head. It was a slender animal about ten inches long and built much like a snake, though its back was graced with a set of sturdy looking wings of a lighter hue than its scales. As soon as Cal looked up to examine it, the thing made a circlet of it’s body and fell onto his head, sitting like a crown, it’s wings folded out to look like an ornate decoration. A high pitched shriek echoed in the forest around the two, creature and man, and it wasn’t until several seconds later that Cal realized it had issued from his own mouth. Without further hesitation he took the slithery body from his head and threw it. It arched gracefully in the air and the little serpent unfolded her wings, catching herself only moments before she hit the ground. Zooming forward she tickled Cal’s nose with the tip of her pronged tongue and Cal, bent on getting away from what he thought was probably a demon, turned and fled into the thick growth of the trees.


- - - - -


He was only three minutes into his flight when Cal heard a crash in the forest directly behind him. Assuming that he was now being stalked by the small yet ‘terrifying’ creature that had teased him, he increased his pace, though forgot that it was necessary to breath when doing something so physical. It was inevitable that something should happen while he insisted on holding his breath yet both running and becoming hysterical, and something did. As Cal broke out in a cold sweat and his advances weaved first to the right, then to the left, he sped his retreat to an even quicker pace. It wasn’t until a veil of black enveloped him that he discovered his legs were no longer carrying him. Instead they were pumping uselessly as he lay on his side, once again feeling the soft ground spring pleasantly beneath him.