//------------------------------//
// Thand 
// Story: Washed Up 
// by ambion 
//------------------------------//

The island wasn’t much. An errant pin-prick on the map. But it had trees, and that was enough for a ship in distress. They were palms, which the crew didn’t like on principle, but they’d be enough to affect something in lieu of the mast until the next port of call. Various mares felled, others hauled, still more did any number of strange little nautical rituals for work. Mostly those amounted to arguments, swearing and grumbling.

There was no getting lost here, any more than a pony could get lost in a bathroom. There wasn’t the space for it. It hadn’t bothered them much to give Flotsam his leave of the island which was, he thought, a nice consideration to his circumstance. Even this small token of land, surely the Captain had considered, was a welcome respite in the trials of a lost and wayward stallion.

He stopped lying to himself: he was cluelessly inept with their ship-righting shipwright-ing and therefore allowed to get out from under their collective hooves.

At present he was under one of the hapless palms, curled up on his legs and feeling rather humbled by the sea and the sky and the baffling big world that in no small part was excluded from his head. 

Patches, actually competent with some of the tasks, was given a similar free ride.

She wasn’t as happy with this change of things – albeit only temporary – as he’d hoped. She’d stopped crying, yes, eaten and slept and all such things. Now she was fine. Only it was fine said like this in low wistful montone monosyllable.

The crew, he’d realized with an unexpected jaundice didn’t do very well by her. Since the filly wasn’t actively starving, drowning or bleeding they regarded her as fine, and left it at that.

Patches was fine. Fine and terribly disinterested in goings-on. She was off making sandcastles with a sort of quiet, joyless purpose.

“Oi! Creampuff, yer looking well, ‘aven’t ye, love!” called a voice in as strange an accent as Flotsam could imagine.

This was the front half of two mares shouldering between them a length of timber.

“Oh! Pay her no mind,” said the rear of the two, kicking sand ineffectually forwards. “This is why you never ‘old onto a colt more’n a night’s worth.”

“Wide I want to? Eyes always use ‘em up by morning!”  

They laughed and drifted away. Flotsam had never heard laughter that warm and filthy before, but this was it.

He decided on shade, excusing himself from the shoreline. Even amidst the trees and rakish grass the sand never really went away. What soil there was seemed to be made entirely of what had been trees and grasses in former lives, laid unconvincingly over the island. Sunlight was cut to pretty ribbons in the fronds. He had a few minutes relative silence. Insects made friendly with his eyes and ears.

And just like that… the far side of the island. That was it. Any lurking tigers or forgotten civilizations would have to be quite small ones.

Patches was sitting on the hot sand patting a mound together. At the water’s white edge an early effort was almost completely dissolved.

“Hey, Patches,” said Flotsam in that voice of brittle optimism reserved for inexperienced adults when dealing with children’s emotions.

“Hey.”

“Still making sand castles I see?”

Pat-pat. Scoop. “ ’m.”

“Want to…go get something to eat? Or go in the water?”

Pat. Pat-pat-pat. “ ‘n.”

“Oh. Okay.” Flotsam’s eyes had that pinched-tightness from the shimmering light on the water, and his back itched with precursor to sunburn. He sat down stoically to take it.

Pat-pat. Pat-pat.

“It’s a very nice castle,” he hazarded.

Pat-pat. Swipe. The filly gave him the glare of an angry scrunchie. 

It said, and is paraphrased here: 

I might be smaller and younger than you and by extension of that fact it follows that you must therefore be older and bigger then me, and I take it (with a pinch of salt, of course) that those bigger and older then me are possibly wiser, but I would have to be so young as to have been born during this paragraph and so small as to be microscopic for you to have any hope at all of me accepting the statement as truth that the castle, this castle here, is, in fact, very nice. 

It is not. 

That is what we might call the literary essence of that look. It was accompanied with a sigh and sudden departure.

Flotsam felt a bit rooted to the spot. The castle really wasn’t really nice, it really wasn’t. He felt dumb for having said it. It was one of those efforts that got the architectural title of castle purely on the merit that it had been assembled from sand and had a general hopeful concept of going upwards. 

It was a lump, with slightly varied lumps on top. It was in fact the very heap to be dismantled one grain at a time by a philosopher (to determine at which point it ceases to be a heap) so that said pony might realize just what a stupid and pedantic exercise that would be.

It did not inspire.

He pushed his hoof slowly into the mound and hummed aloud in caricature of thought.

He carefully levelled the top smooth, tangently aware that his thinking was operating on a level largely unconscious. Strange, yes, but you had to see where it would take you. What it might reveal.

A castle should look like a castle, he mused for starters…