It’s cold and dark here, so for this week’s piece of flash fiction, I let my imagination take me away to a tropical island. Join me?
My guess is: it was some sort of WWII installation. A tiny island – only 15 metres at its widest point – and smooth red rock rather than the sandy beach, those cartoons about a man stranded on a desert island would lead you to expect.
And a huge pylon antenna right in the middle.
My guess is: I was going to die here.
A lot more rain than you’d expect, too. I sat under the antenna, wishing it provided some shelter, listening to the raindrops sizzle as they fell through the metal struts. Microwaved castaway: like that joke about only needing five minutes to get a full eight-hour sleep in the microwave bed. I’d be dead of thirst, exposure, or pure boredom in hours rather than days. Fine.
The rain sounded like music after a while, cheap 80s synth beats.
Then it sounded like voices: “This is an emergency broadcast, this is not a test. If you can hear this…”
That’s when the storm let up and it cut out. Murphy’s Law.
Was that how I came to be here? I couldn’t remember, the antenna must have fried my brain already. I left the psychological shelter of the antenna’s iron legs to search for my boat for answers.
#
No boat. No supplies. Was WWII still going on? Was I a prisoner of war?
Dummy, I’d learned about WWII in school. How could it still be going on?
Unless that’s what they wanted me to think. But who were they?
I didn’t really fancy touching the antenna in case I got electrocuted, but I had no more options, so I climbed to search for a clue as to what was going on.
And I found it. There was a little steel plate screwed to the back of the antenna – or brainwashing machine, or whatever it was. “Made in China” was stamped into the metal in block capitals.
They couldn’t do this to me. I was an American citizen.
Wasn’t I?
Looking at my hands didn’t help. I could have been American. Or anything else, really. Maybe I was a God? Of this whole island. And unless someone else came along – if there was anybody else, which seemed unlikely at the moment – I was God of everything else, too. I clambered away from my metal totem pole down the slippery rocks to the shore. There were crabs there.
I let the ones who worshipped me escape and ate the non-believers.
Some butter would have been nice to fry the meat under my microwave tower.
If you’re a subscriber, then watch out for my newsletter this Saturday, featuring your exclusive tarot reading for 2022! Not a subscriber? Shame, it’s going to be a tough year, apparently…
Phantastisch-wunderbar erzähltes Erlebnis-man ist gespannt auf jedes Wort was da kommt.
Wie Robinson-nur in anderer Welt.
Gedanken sind gefordert-prima!
Danke für die lebendige Idee und die “farbige” Wortgestaltung.
Danke Siggi, freut mich sehr, dass es Dir gefallen hat!