Two Islands

Looking towards, and not away, never away.

In the middle of limitless blue ocean water meeting blue sky combed with slow drifting clouds there are two islands that rise out of the surf like enormous petrified tree stumps roughly circular, flat, topped with hardy stubborn muted green grass and rough ragged sandy cliffs falling precipitously down onto crashing waves throwing ceaseless foamy sea against their jagged blocks. Two ragged discs of muted green and on the one a cemetery, and on the other another cemetery entirely distinct and insoluble, each taking up only a small portion of each island leaving the rest as simple grassland undeveloped and between the two, each the same size as the other and a quarter mile apart, is stretched a narrow footbridge made with four ropes two to walk upon with old salt-cured wooden slats like boards from an ancient ship a few splintered and hanging loose but most firmly affixed between them for a floor and two above for trembling handrails useful only to the very careful and the whole thing sagging towards the middle like an overloaded sack, a curve under the sky swaying halfheartedly in the afternoon breeze. Pale fish swim through the channel beneath, passing between the islands blinking with mouths agape in lazy looping spirals, sleek scaly bodies remembering the shape of the whirlpool that had once been formed nearby, that had once been a smear on the surface out in the water and was no longer.