January, 1997 - Crystal Sands Beach, Prosperine
Sarah awoke the morning after the storm very confused. The night before was a blur of out-of-focus images, noise, and much screaming. She remembered that she was on a flight and that they passed through a storm cloud. After a jostle, she could remember nothing. In whatever had caused the confusion, she must have bumped her head fairly hard.
"How'd I get here?" Sarah sat up slowly, putting a hand to her throbbing forehead.
"Us." A high voice chirupped.
Wondering aloud,
"Who was that?" She turned her head to look around, only to be met with a sharp pain and the inability to move her neck. "AIYA!," She yelped. "Note to self, don't turn head."
Sarah tried to stand but fell back to the sand quickly. Her legs were weak, and her left ankle throbbed. Inspecting it, she found the beginnings of an infection from a cut. Her ankle was swollen, and painful. Whatever happened the night before, if indeed it had only been one night, was very rough, almost as if she had suffered an accident.
"Gotta get that checked out." She reached for the pen that usually resided in her back pocket but found nothing. Not even her wallet. "Well crap. I hope THAT'S not at the bottom of the ocean. Or some native ran off with it. Wherever I am." She drew her right knee to her chest and rested her chin on it. She was facing a palm tree. Rather boring, so she spun ever so gently around to face the ocean, and was greeted by dolphins laughing and playing just beyond the breakers.
Then a moment of clarity hit her. She had a friend. Frances.
"Frances!" Sarah yelled at the top of her lungs. She desperately wanted to stand but was afraid that it would hurt. The need to find her friend overtook this fear and she slowly, and easily rose, resting a majority of her weight on her good ankle. Her new height gave her a slightly better vantage point. However, still no sight of her friend, and more importantly, no answer.
Hobbling a few feet, she called out her friend's name more, but to no avail, there was no answer. By this point in the morning, her fair, Irish-American skin was quite burnt, her non-functioning watch giving her a "watch tan" and she had wonderful tan-lines from the straps and neck-line of her tank top. Shade was good. She struggled through the sand, because anyone who has walked a loose sand beach has found how utterly difficult it is, especially with an injury such as her, to a shady spot under a clump of palm trees. Conveniently, there was a stream running down to the sea. Sitting next to the stream, her feet in the cool, comforting water, she cupped her hands and dipped water out. She alternately drank the water and splashed it over her hair, washing the salt out, and splashed it on her skin, cooling the burns.
Satisfied, she went to work on her ankle, rubbing the grit out, much to her pain. She felt something poke her from within the swollen injury. Prodding further, she found the something to move freely. Pulling out her handy Swiss army knife, she removed the tweezers and took hold of the end of the foreign object. With a yank, she produced a shard of shell that had become embedded within her wound. With the removal of the object, the blood poured forth. Tearing off the bottom of her top, she wrapped the make-shift bandage tightly around her ankle. Still, blood seeped through and turned the white strip into a red one, but, for now, it was protected against any other shell intrusions.
Exhaustion set in, and she curled into a ball on the sand next to the stream. The babbling of the water helped her fall into an exhausted sleep once more.
Contents|1|2|3|
home