Oyster Island Chapter 1

As I stepped out of the car I couldn’t hear or see anything in the dark night except the faint rustling of leaves high above and the light of my parents’ house up on the ridge. Behind the house to the west, I knew, was a steep dropoff, ending in several hundred acres of wheat below. I remembered my childhood haunted by the ever present danger of falling off the anterior balcony to one’s death in what my parents called the “Golden Sea”. The Sea consumed—that’s what it did. Toys, stuffed animals, wine glasses, dollar bills. Even people, as I’d witnessed for myself, once or twice.

Tomorrow was my father’s eighty-eighth birthday—his favorite number since he was a boy, which is why he insisted that I come. I’d hardly seen him in nineteen years, not since my eighth birthday—his second favorite number—when he had sent me to live with my aunt Carolyn in the city and learn the trade of banking. The trip was a nuisance, but not an altogether useless one. It would be nice to see my mother again after so long.

I opened the trunk and slung my pack over my shoulder. I started up the trail to the house.

The trail was unlit, and the way was overgrown with vines and grass, and I could tell that no one had walked this way for many years. An ominous feeling seeped into my gut as I passed an ancient, rusted minivan abandoned and nearly hidden in the brush beside the path. My unease only grew when I finally glimpsed the house through a break in the trees. It stood far above me, and it would have looked regal in the moonlight had it not been for the boarded windows, toppled chimney, and the roof that was collapsing in on itself.

My parents had left the key under the mat. It was almost two in the morning, and they went to sleep at nine. I opened the door as softly as I could and ascended to my room, the same one I’d had when I was little. Other than a precarious stack of rotting boxes rapidly collecting dust in the corner, it was the same as I’d left it, down to the action figures strewn across the floor and jam stains on the walls. Everything was the same—except the smell. As I remembered it, the evergreen trees surrounding the house filled it with a peculiar tartness. Now, the room smelled dimly of smoke, coming presumably from the wildfires I’d heard about up north, and mildewy comic books, the source of which lay in a stack in the corner.

I brushed my teeth, undressed, and fell asleep scrolling through one star App Store reviews.