The Green-Eyed Monster…Times Two
~KSR~
Well, at least she’s lookin’ at me again. Or she was….
It’s been a week now, since our…our…’contact’. Maybe I should say my contact. Anyway, the shyness or embarrassment or whatever looked like it was going away. She would even grin a little at my attempts at humor. Then she started getting pissy. I don’t know what brought that on. I thought everything was okay until supper yesterday.
Last night, Liz – the wool merchant, came and sat down next to
me during supper. She’s a nice woman, probably in her mid thirties.
Pretty funny. Anyway, she and I are talking away. She’s askin’ about
I’m watchin’ and she and Gary are talking away. Well, he’s talking away, smilin’ and all, and she’s pulling a tablet of paper and pencil out of her pocket - the paper and pencil I got her - and writing stuff to him. I’m thinkin’ ‘What the fuck?’, ‘ya know? So meanwhile, Liz is chatting away and then she asks me to retie the necklace thing she wears, ‘cause she says it’s come loose. She bends forward, moves her hair and I tie the necklace. No big deal.
I look over at Glynnis, and she’s staring. Looks pissed.
To top it off, I glance around and there’s AJ lookin’ back and
forth between us like he’s at
I hear Liz askin’ if anything’s wrong, so I put on my smile and
turn to her, shakin’ my head. Then she pats my shoulder and scrapes
her plaintains into my bowl, sayin’ she’s full. I tell her ‘No, I’m
fine. You need to eat these’ And she giggles and stuffs one in my
mouth. While I’m chewin’, I look back across the firepit and Glynn
is scowling at me again. Then she pushed a slice of something into
I felt this knot of tension in my neck and rolled my shoulder.
“Got a kink in your neck?” Liz asks.
“Kinda,” I say.
“Shall I try to rub it out?” she asks me.
I had to think about that for a second ‘cause the phrase ‘rub it out’ usually had a different meaning for me. Glynnis is looking again.
“Sure,” I said.
So Liz gets on her knees behind me and starts kneadin’ away. Felt pretty damn good…. Felt even better when I saw the look on Glynn’s face.
AJ’s rollin’ his eyes and shakin’ his head. Les looks like somebody’s goosed him and now, a new face has entered my peripheral vision. Brad. I think he must have been takin’ all of this in, too. He glanced at me and then went back to his food, sort of smilin’ to himself. Asshole.
I closed my eyes for a minute, until I heard Liz say, ‘Does that feel better?’.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
When I opened my eyes, Glynnis was stomping off. I don’t know where she went. I was unbelievably pissed and wasn’t sure why. I think we’d just had a wordless fight.
“If you need for me to….take care of anything later…. just let me know.”
I don’t think Liz was talking about my sore neck….
Glynnis didn’t come back to her hut last night. I know that because I hardly slept at all and I checked. I near ‘bout went crazy wondering where she was and bein’ scared of where she might be. I didn’t really think she was ‘with’ anybody, if you know what I mean, but the possibility played games with my brain. I finally found her early this morning on the beach.
*****
~GCS~
Kevin and I had been getting along okay. Work in the camp went on as usual. I admit that I was actually feeling pretty good about him. I’m not too good at the flirting stuff so I didn’t really try that but I was nice. Sometimes, I think he was the only thing that kept me sane.
No doubt about it, he was an attractive man. Any woman would think so but thinking it and actually hearing it from another woman really hit me in a bad way. My own reaction surprised me when I heard Liz make a comment about him yesterday. I had already noticed that she had taken a surprising interest in goats and farming and clearing. It was surprising because she was the needlework expert and there was plenty of that she could have been doing. I had headed towards her shack to pick up a couple of skeins of cotton that she’d been drying when I heard her comment to Mrs. Miller, an older woman with a flair for crochet, about Kevin. Mrs. Miller had made a remark about some green wool and then mentioned Kevin’s eyes and how you hardly ever saw eyes that color. “Beautiful….” Mrs. Miller said simply. Liz starts laughing.
“That isn’t the only thing about him that’s beautiful. God, I think he’s pretty damn hot….” Then she says: “He can needle my wool anytine…”
Well… I froze. Mrs. Miller turned a little red, mumbled something and left. I left, too. Her interest in goats suddenly made sense. By suppertime last night, I had just about convinced myself that I was being silly. Of course, Kevin was attractive. Liz was probably just trying to be funny. She was always joking around and when the goats were first discovered, she had remarked that, if we had to, we could always spin goat hair into yard. I was probably being overly sensitive.
Then, later on, I go over to the fire pit and scoop up a bowl of soup and get some fruit. I’m looking for Kevin because we’d been eating together just about every night. I didn’t think anything about it until I found him and saw Liz practically sitting in his lap. She’s laughing and being all cute. Flirty. Something I wasn’t good at. And he’s just grinning away. Lapping it up like cream. I tell you, I literally saw red. It did occur to me that I had no right to react at all but I couldn’t help it. I felt like a fishwife. I could have slapped the shit out of both of them.
So I look around and see
Then I look up and Liz is leaning over while Kevin plays with something on her neck. Looks like he’s fastening this necklace thing she wears. She’s turning her head, making doe eyes at him. You’d think he was trying to crack a safe or something. It’s taking him forever to tie that thing. Then Liz scrapes something into his bowl, Kevin shakes his head and she picks something up and puts it in his mouth. She was kind of leaning into him, ‘ya know? He wasn’t exactly inching away.
When he looked up, I gave
That was the last straw for me. I got up and left. I didn’t even go back to my shelter that night, but froze my ass off on the beach instead. I was mad. I tried hard to convince myself that Kevin had just decided to be an asshole but the fact was that I was jealous. It’s hard for me to admit that. It hurt my feelings and made me feel stupid to think that I was making more of our relationship than there actually was. Worse, for the first time, I felt lonely.
When I woke up this morning, the sun was coming up. I walked down to the water at stared at the horizon, thinking about….well, everything, I guess. Would we ever get off of this island? Were we destined to be here forever? Selfishly, I began to wonder if I would always be alone. Up until now, I had fought the depression that many had already experienced. I had busied myself and tired not to think in terms of the future.
I was still standing at the edge of the surf, staring, when I felt someone beside me. Kevin. He didn’t say anything. He just took my hand. We were quiet for a long time as his thumb moved back and forth over my skin. It’s hard to explain the measure of comfort I felt from such a simple gesture. Last night’s pettiness seemed a million miles away and during those minutes on the beach I believed we shared the same brain – the same heart.
Politics and Body Odor
~GCS~
It’s open knowledge that things have been missing from the supply house. No one can be spared to watch it full time and the question rises – ‘Who do you ask when you don’t know who’s stealing?’ Perhaps the person keeping watch is the very person responsible for missing items. There’s no way to lock anything up. Les is missing some Tylenol and bandages, as well an antibiotic ointment. Some tools are gone and one rifle is missing, along with some ammunition. An aura of distrust permeates the camp. No one is above suspicion but the consuming question is ‘Why?’.
Other things are starting to be missed, too. Bowls, a pot or two… One person is missing their blanket. Two goats are gone. Almost everyday someone misses something. I have a bad feeling.
Kevin is upset, too. Several people have gone to him asking what’s going on and what they should do. Like it or not, he’s become a leader. He’s frustrated.
The pissing contest with Brad and his ‘followers’ continues. Discussions about how the camp should be run, who should have which assignments and what rules should be set in place rapidly turn into arguments at the turn of a hat. Brad feels like there should be one consummate leader for the group who makes final decisions based on his or own take and opinion of any given situation. Kevin favors a democratic approach to running things. Brad wants to assign island ‘police’. Kevin doesn’t think it’s necessary. Brad thinks we should treat our predicament as permanent and form a quasi-legal society on the presumption that it will grow – that we are colonists, in a sense. Kevin feels that there are too few of us to take that step – that we should prepare ourselves for a possible future here, but that a formal, enforced government is unnecessary.
The camp is splitting. There are about seven people who have expressed no opinion and those seven include Sam. That leaves forty-seven, all of whom lean one way or the other. The tension is thick and the survivors are increasingly edgy. Now, a week later, three more rifles have disappeared, as well as two machetes and I’m beginning to imagine what may be happening. I don’t think that only one person is taking things. I wonder if it’s some kind of group effort. It’s only a guess, based on nothing but intuition and the uneasy feeling I get when I approach some people and their talking stops. I’d like to talk to Kevin about this but things are already tense. I think I need more to go on before I say anything.
~~~
Sidenote: I must have seen a dozen or more ‘castaway’ movies in
my lifetime. Some of these films had both male and female characters.
Most of time, the movies deal with some of the same things we’ve had
to deal with here: finding food and shelter. In many ways we’ve been
more fortunate than those characters because we managed to save some
vital supplies and because there are many of us to take on many tasks.
This island had been inhabited before and supplies and tools were
left behind. We miss our families and worry about them but you couldn’t
really say we were lonely. Romances and relationships have bloomed,
just like they do in pulp fiction and
There is no deodorant here. Despite the obvious hardships and trauma we’ve been through, many have been embarrassed by the fact that they ooze body odor. Stuart, bless his little herbal heart, has managed to concoct a very primitive soap using pot ash from the fire, pig fat, herbs and fruits. It isn’t exactly Camay but it does get the dirt and stink off – at least temporarily. B.O. didn’t seem to be a problem in ‘Blue Lagoon’….
I’ve already touched on the inconvenience of ‘feminine’ supplies. ‘Nuff said.
Did you ever wonder about those romantic castaways and the fact that the women always had smooth legs and armpits? We don’t really have much time to consider vanity here but as things have shifted into more of a routine, these little concerns have gained more prominence. I’m one of the lucky ones. I come from fair Celtic stock and my ‘hairiness’ isn’t much of a problem, but I’ve seen some women trying to shave their legs using Stuart’s soap and a pocket knife or even a machete. Hair doesn’t grow on scabs.
I hate to sound indelicate, but what about toenails? Believe it or not, they can be hazardous as well as uncomfortable. Some have thin nails that can be soaked, softened and peeled away. Others, whose nails are more like horn, aren’t so lucky.
There are no tissues, no toilet paper, no toothpaste. Teeth are cleaned with makeshift brushes made from twigs and straw or with fingers. Again, ash from the fire is used and people chew on mint-like herbs and gargle with salt water.
Forget make-up and hair preparations. Poor Leighanne has taken to wearing a permanent dew-rag. Nick was teasing her the other day and made the mistake of pulling it off of her head. Reminded me of a tarred highway in the desert, not that Nick’s is any better. He just doesn’t give a shit. Leighanne definitely gives a shit….
I guess my point is that, if I ever see another movie that features historical romance, deserted island fantasies or jungle love ( like Tarzan and Jane), I’ll probably be thinking about periods, bad breath, out-of-control toenails and B.O.
Of course, I’ll also probably be thinking about Kevin, not that these things are related. At least I don’t think so. I’ve been around him enough to wonder about the ‘period’ part.
*******
~KSR~
Goddamn – all I can smell today is goats and goat shit. I gotta get to the lagoon and wash some of this crap off me. I know that Howie’s still got some fuckin’ shampoo. I think the little shit has hidden it or something. That’s alright. He’ll be using Stuart’s ‘pig bars’ soon enough. I actually tried to shave yesterday. Thought I’d cut my damn nose and lips off with that machete. I did manage to get rid of some hair, though – along with a few square inches of skin.
This ‘getting back to nature’ crap really sucks, although some seem to manage better than others. Nature is a lot better when you know you have canned peas and running water at home. Leighanne isn’t doing so well. Gynnis seems to be making out just fine. She didn’t wear a lot of make-up and crap anyway. She really is a beautiful woman even if she doesn’t seem to think so.
It’s amazing how you begin to covet the simple pleasures. When Glynn is in the field, she usually puts her hair up in a knot on her head and holds it place with some kind of stick. Then, at the end of the day, she’ll slip that stick out and her hair will tumble down past her shoulders as she shakes it loose. I look forward to that every day and get really pissed if I miss seeing her so it. When that happens, it’s all I can do not to ask her to put it back up just so I can watch her take it down again. It’s become a small fetish. It makes me hard.
I’m going to have to do something about her. I think about her almost all of the time. I watch her sleep and remember what it felt like to touch her – to slip my fingers inside of her. I wonder if she ever thinks about that?
I have a present for her. It’s stupid and I probably won’t give it to her. It seems like nothing. I found a small shell on the beach. It’s shaped like the half of some sort of mollusk but the inside is coated with a pink, pearl-like substance – kinda like one of those abalone shells, but pink. It had a natural hole near the hinge spot, so I cut a real thin piece of pig hide and strung the shell on it, like a necklace. I imagined it resting between her breasts – breasts I haven’t seen – not really, anyway. I want to see them. I want to see them real bad. I wonder if the pink shell is the same color of her nipples or if they’re darker, like her tongue…
I’ve seen women roll their eyes about mens’ obsession with breasts. I don’t think they understand. Sure, they’re sexual but it’s more than that. They also offer comfort – if they’re attached to the right woman. I could sure use some comfort and Glynn’s the right woman. It’s hard to explain.
Hell, I think I ‘think’ too much…
~~~
I’m trying to ignore Brad and not let him get to me but it’s like trying to ignore jock-itch. I fully expect him to start wearing a crown any day. Linda waits on him like some kind of servant. He expects her to and so, she does. He’s passing himself off as ‘The Great Protector’ and people like feeling protected. From what, I don’t know.
He wants to rule, without question. He’s forceful, arrogant and dangerously confident. Some are attracted to that, especially the ‘confident’ part. I think he’s crazy…
His mentality is tribal, which might make some sense if we had enemies here, but we don’t. My fear is that our enemies are within the group. There’s an undercurrent here. People are choosing sides – to what end, I don’t know. Brad considers this settlement permanent. I don’t think that most are ready to accept that but, at the same time, need to consider that possibility. He says our ‘society’ needs enforceable rules and laws. He doesn’t say how these laws would be enforced.
He’s gone so far as to consider population growth. AJ told me he overheard two of Brad’s ‘soldiers’ discussing the women and the dangers of inbreeding, for God’s sake. He said they used the phrase ‘staking a claim by force, if necessary’.
To me, that sounds like rape.
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