Alicia watched as the sand-covered hydraulic platform was adjusted outward until it sat level with the waterline and the floating island of pumice. A slight crack in the island began to form where the bow wave of the large pleasure cruiser shifted the island. The water now settled back to its glassy stillness.
Travis stepped out of Carpe Diem’s portside door, crossed the narrow, sandy platform and squatted down at the edge where sand now mingled with the pumice shore. He picked up a piece of pumice. It felt warm in his hand, but not too hot to touch. He threw it onto the island. The stone skipped along the top of the island for a few feet and then came to rest.
He smiled. It was a big movie star type of smile — full of evenly spaced teeth. Travis looked so happy. For a moment Alicia felt a pang of loss as she considered how beautiful their kids would have been if she did go against her own reservations and married the man. He then picked up a bigger stone and through it onto the shore right next to them. It made her smile. He was just a big kid at heart. She took a step back, waiting for the splash.
The stone struck the floating island hard, but it didn’t fall through as they were both expecting. Alicia glanced at Travis. His eyes were wide and his mouth open, as though he had discovered some tremendous idea, but wasn’t quite certain how to put it into words yet.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
Travis grinned. “It looks stable.”
“Stable enough for what?”
“To walk on of course!”
Alicia frowned. “Are you sure that’s safe?”
He spread his hands. “Sure, why not?”
“It might not be stable.”
Travis shrugged.
“It’s not like I can’t swim. If I fall through I’ll just swim back to you.”
“Okay,” she said, surprised by her own feelings of concern.
She watched as Travis moved along the artificial sandy beach looking for the thickest section of pumice shore. He paused after about ten seconds, and then jumped. His feet struck the pumice. The shore dipped a little and he wobbled, coming close to falling, but then balanced. Travis looked more like someone learning to surf for the first time. He was standing upright, but something about his posture gave her the impression it wouldn’t be for very long.
The edge of the shore started to break apart, and he jumped further inland. This time the ground appeared as solid as any real island.
Travis grinned.
Alicia said, “Well?”
“Look at that, it holds my weight!”
“That’s great.” Alicia had only known the man for about two weeks, but sometimes she wondered how someone so rich could be so enrapt by something as simple as a pile of floating debris. She smiled; it was somehow a cross between coy and lascivious. “Now what?”
Travis made a show of standing up proudly to make a salute to an imaginary flag. “I claim this island in the name of the king, and call it, Macintyre Island.”
She smiled genuinely now. Boys. So predictable. “So what does that make you?”
“The king,” he said. “Are you going to join me?”
She eyed the strange floating island, her eyes darting between the shore and the newly proclaimed king. “And then, pray tell, what does that make me?”
“My queen.”
She clapped her hands. “In that case, I accept.”
Alicia stepped lithely onto the island, skipping between the larger stones until she reached the deeper section where Travis now walked freely on thick layers of pumice. She caught up with the king, and he embraced her passionately. Their mouths met, and he kissed her. He could be dominating and commanding, but at the same time gentle, timid and unsure of himself. She felt him caress her back, running his fingers down her spine.
He stopped just short of her derriere and whispered in her ear, “Now, what shall we do on our island?”
She opened her eyes and met his sky gray colored eyes. “Anything you like. The island belongs to you, and so does everything on it.”
Travis stepped back. “Good. In that case, I would like to explore my kingdom.”
She laughed. It was like dating a child. Alicia glanced around the island. “The place looks pretty barren to me. Did you have any ideas?”
“Over there!” He pointed toward the largest section of the island, where the pumice was at least ten feet thick, creating a small mound. “Let’s climb it.”
“Okay, you’re the king.”
“Race you to it!” Travis yelled, and started to run.
Alicia sprinted after him. It didn’t take long, maybe a little under a minute to reach the small hill and race to the top. She trailed only a few feet behind him until he increased the gap as he pushed on through the thicker piles of pumice, and disappeared over the crest.
Her thighs burned as she climbed to the top, clearing the crest at a run. A split-second later, she felt Travis’s muscular arms grab her and force her to the ground. There was no playfulness in his motion, nor was their malice. He’d done it to protect her. She fought him as he tried to keep her on the ground. But she’d been sunbaking before they’d discovered the island, so she wore sunscreen all over her body.
Travis struggled to keep a grip on her. She slipped away and faced him. “What the hell is it?”
“Don’t look!” he shouted.
It was the sort of thing that inevitably made anyone look. Her eyes turned from his handsome face, into the opening at the center of the island. Alicia tried to comprehend what she was staring at. She tried to be strong, and keep her eyes fixed on it — but instead she found herself screaming, like some heroine in a badly acted seventies era horror film.
“It’s okay,” he was quick to comfort her.
She felt his warm arms wrap around her body, and in an instant she buried her head in his chest. She could have stayed there forever, protected from the sight, but instead she faced him, looking straight into his eyes. “No it’s not. Nothing will ever be okay, again… will it?”
Alicia closed her eyes, but the image burned in her mind. The mound formed a hollowed crater like the inside of a volcano. It had a diameter of about forty feet and was at least ten deep. At the center were approximately five hundred birds. They were white all over with a black scalp. If either of them knew anything about migratory birds, they would recognize them as Arctic terns.
The birds had recently been made famous after the recognition of their lengthy migration. Arctic terns fly from their Arctic breeding grounds to the Antarctic and back again each year, across a minimal distance of 12,000 miles. They were amazing creatures, and right now, every one of them was dead. Not just dead — grotesquely damaged. Their eyes bulging out of their sockets, their bodies hideously deformed, blisters formed over their once cute little faces.
She opened her eyes and met Travis with a direct stare. “What do you think killed them?”
“I don’t know. Most likely the gases. This is obviously some sort of volcanic ash, from an underwater volcano. It’s pretty rare, but not unheard of. Maybe when it came up the gases killed the birds?”
“Do you think we’re safe?”
“Of course we are,” he said. “I remember hearing somewhere, probably on one of those Planet Earth documentaries or something, that pumice is formed by gas bubbles that were trapped in the rock during the rapid cooling of a gas-rich frothy magma. The material cools so quickly that atoms in the smelt are not able to arrange themselves into a crystalline structure. Thus, pumice is an amorphous volcanic glass. During the process of floating to the surface, the pumice would have been surrounded by intensely heated gas. The flock of birds must have been unlucky enough to be flying over at the time.”