Sandy’s Island Paradise.

Sandy Alexander no longer knew what day it was, or what month, or what year, and he didn’t much care, for it didn’t much matter. Picture a thin man with long, thin hair and a long gray beard sitting alone under a palm tree on a white sand beach staring out at a blue-green ocean, and you might think, hell, that doesn’t sound so bad.

And you might have been right, once.

After his boat sank, the tide spilled Sandy onto the beach of this little nameless spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Sandy had been holding onto a Styrofoam ice chest for three days. He felt lucky to be alive. He named the island, “Sandy’s Island Paradise and Fishing Club.” This was back in 1969, when he was thirty-one and still young, and still had a sense of humor and some hope. Now, at sixty, sixty-five, (he doubted he had reached seventy yet,) he had lost his sense of humor, his sense of time, and any hope of ever getting off this tiny, ridiculous island with its one palm tree.

To survive, he collected rainwater, caught fish, and occasionally turtles that emerged from the ocean. Every day was the same. The sun came up, and the sun went down, and the moon came out, and the stars, and on most days, it rained, and sometimes at night too. He had no clothes left, but he had a hat he had woven from the fronds of the palm tree. Sandy was proud of his hat and considered weaving himself a pair of matching sandals, but never quite worked up the energy.

To not go insane, he gave the palm tree a name and used to talk to it, but that was a long time ago. These days he lived his life in silence. He tried to be happy, and sometimes he was, but mostly he was not. One would think that Sandy Alexander had simply given up, but he had a signal fire ready to be lit at a moment’s notice, so maybe he had not given up. Not completely. It’s true he often thought about killing himself and even gave it a go a time or two, but then found out, along with all his other failings, he was a coward too, which surprised him not at all.

What did surprise him, if that’s the right word—which it isn’t, what astonished him, what completely blew the man’s mind, was today, when sitting under the palm tree staring out at the ocean, and the USS Enterprise came twirling down out of the heavens to crash into the ocean in spectacular fashion, not three hundred yards from where Sandy was sitting.

He was instantly on his feet, mouth open, eyes wide, watching as an enormous ball of fire erupted, and smoke rose high into the sky. The following explosion knocked him on his ass. He sat on the sand watching the smoke, knowing there could be no survivors. “They’re all dead,” he told the palm tree. “James Kirk and the entire crew, they’re all gone, right?” He now checked the sky for Klingon vessels, but none appeared.

“Wouldn’t that be something?” he asked the tree. “To see James Kirk and Spock come walking out of the ocean? Or Lieutenant Uhura? Ho, buddy-boy! Now that would be really something!”

Sandy put his hands up to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. He searched the ocean for Lieutenant Uhura, wishing for a glimpse of her waving from a yellow life raft filled with cases of Romulan ale. They would take long walks on the beach together, holding hands. He pictured them both rolling around on the wet sand, kissing like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. They would laugh and sing, and they would braid each other’s hair and make elaborate necklaces out of seashells as gifts to one another.

It took a few hours for Sandy’s fuzzy brain to realize that the USS Enterprise was a starship from a tv show and didn’t really exist. Nor did Uhura and Romulan ale. But the smoke! The smoke is real, isn’t it? He could see it still rising from the sea. “It must be real. I can smell it!” He told the tree. “Don’t tell me I can’t smell it!”

Then he saw them swimming. There were six, maybe seven, of them. Sandy’s heart soured. He stood to his feet, waving his arms, urging them on.

And on they came. They were remarkably quick swimmers. Before he knew it, they were crawling out of the water, and Sandy realized Uhura was not among them. Nor was Captain Kirk.

These were not people he knew or had ever seen before. These were not people. They each had three long arms and three short legs, and in the center of their face, one enormous yellow eye.

Sandy watched as they crawled toward him like huge misshapen bugs. He thought about running, but his feet wouldn’t move, and he stood by his palm tree, watching them all getting closer and closer, until they were on him, on top of him, all over him, and all he could see were yellow eyes.

—881 Words—