Island

The sun beat down, a great sleepless eye, hot and bloodshot and glaring. Far below, an old man sat, shaded by a lonely tree on a lonely island. The old man was not glaring at anything. He was planted, resigned, as the wind pushed by his papery skin on its relentless and unending quest to find someplace better to be. The old man didn't have any place better to be, or at least he didn't think he did. He sat and listened to the seeking breeze, and the hungry ocean that was lapping up the sand of the island, and he listened to the goat.

The goat wasn't listening to anything, or didn't seem to. The man could hear it eating the grass, hear strings and tiny molecular mechanisms snapping and shattering as the goat wrenched the plants from their home by the roots. The goat was eating the grass with a sort of single minded determination, as though the grass had done something to offend it or as though there was an infinite amount of grass available to eat, which was, in fact, not the case.

The man could remember when his world was large. He thought that perhaps there were many goats then, but that it didn't matter once, or maybe nobody had thought it had, when people were drunk on wishes and wants, when the sweet lie of infinite possibilities was dripped in their ears as a lullaby while they slept. The ravenous ocean had come. It was without mercy, and without partiality, and it did not care about the lullabies or the dreams of men. It swallowed up hovels and mansions and the finest machines ever made and it was still hollow and hungry. The island had escaped its cold embrace so far, but the ocean was constantly at work, licking away at the grains of sand that the goat and the grass had left behind.

The old man sat and watched, as the patch of open and bleeding earth grew, as the goat ate and so did the sea. Soon, there would be no more grass for the goat to eat, and then the man would eat the goat, and then there would be nothing left for the man to eat, and then the sea would eat him, while the sun glared overhead and the tree stood a lonely sentinel.

He had thought to cut the tree down, and built a raft, because maybe there were more islands, and more grass, but he had no way of knowing if that were true, and the gaping uncertainty was too much. Perhaps he would find he could not build rafts, and then there would be no friendly tree to shield him from the angry sun. Perhaps if he did build a raft, he would sail and sail forever, and there would be no islands. Perhaps he would build a raft and the goat, in its relentless quest, would eat it, and so would the sea. No, the tree was too familiar and comforting to cut down.

He sat under the tree and waited, and watched. He had carved something into it. The tree read: “Nihil novi sub sole” He wasn't sure what it meant, but he liked it. Someday, the sea would eat the tree too, and the words on it, and the meaning would be gone. But for the moment, he sat and enjoyed the shade.