Welcome to Tiny Worlds!
We’re shifting our focus to explore Mexico's eastern coast with twelve-year-old George Perez in the serialized novel: ISLA.
For longer fiction visit Stories, and for flash fiction go to Sketchbook.
A face floated in the water—twisted, folding with the waves. Recognizable, then not. Had he noticed the features of his parents in his own face before? He wasn’t sure.
Staring back at George were his own eyes, a copy of his father’s—wistful, but older than he remembered. And tired. His chin, both determined and feminine like Kathryn’s, curved sharply along the jaw. With the slightest tug of stretched light, he saw them both in that reflection, if only for a second, between the edge of a shell and the boat.
George had never been this close to a… turtle. Tortoise? Maybe for the first time, he wished he’d paid more attention in biology class.
Massive boulders, hundreds of them, rocking in unison on the waves. Their leathery fins—stiff at first glance—opened and glided through the water, barely disturbing the surface. It looked like he could step from one to the next, crossing nearly a football field in any direction without ever touching water. A silent flotilla of shells.
Turtles, he decided, since he’d never heard of a sea tortoise.
Every so often, a head would rise slowly for air. But what caught him most was the way their shells shifted—not rigid like the zoo turtles he remembered, but like stretched leather. As each one moved, he could almost see the shape of the creature beneath it, flexing.
Luck dragons with fins, George thought. Falkor in a halfshell. George grinned, imagining what Eastman and Laird could do with an army of sea turtles and an unlimited number of pages.
These quiet beasts, monstrous in scale, had appeared so suddenly and guided the boat, pushing it. George sat still, fearful of breaking whatever spell had just been cast, and wondered for the first time… why? Why had they appeared at exactly that moment? They created a barrier, didn’t they? Protected them from the frenzy of sharks. And what was so special about him—some kid from Chicago—that they would appear at all?
At the front, the two boys gently shifted, taking a spot to either side of the bow. Reaching down, they gently touched the backs of the animal closest to them. George watched, their hands now stretched wide, following the curve of the shell as water slipped over and around their fingers, their palms stroking in a hushed awe.
He hadn’t considered touching them until now. It seemed only right that he, too, should offer some thanks for their appearance. For their protection.
Tentatively, he lowered his hand over the side, his fingertips lightly reaching the bumpy edge. He stretched further, letting his hand glide along the curve, feeling the rise under his fingers. There, he found the skin of the shell—if that’s what it’s called—harder than he imagined and not slick, not slimy like it looked in the water. His fingers instantly tingled at the touch, a gentle buzz of electricity. It flowed up his wrist and into his arm in a subtle vibration under his skin. With it came a low hum in his ears as a long, sustained tone of what might have been the last vibrations of a bell ringing out. Just barely audible.
Seeing his hand on the turtle’s back, an image shot to mind: the second glyph. He’d dreamt of the woman with the star on her palm, but the other image—the one with a hand resting on the turtle—had slipped away until now. His father had seen it in the cave and scribbled it in the journal.
George’s breath caught. He moved his fingers slightly, angling toward the remembered pose.
Could his hand have been the one in the painting?
The thought flickered, strange and sudden. Not a reflection of the past, but a shape from the future.
What if it hadn’t happened yet?
What if it was waiting for him?
But—no. The turtle in the glyph was smaller, and the hand definitely belonged to a woman. Didn’t it have a bracelet?
Yeah. No way.
Still… for a second, it had almost fit.
He shook his head and let go of the turtle. Get over yourself, George.
The thought slipped away, and the world crept back in—lapping water, a hush of voices thin in the air. George could just make out the high-pitched esses of it, broken by the tide. The boys were whispering. He couldn’t understand what they were saying. He squinted the way he’d seen Kathryn do as she turned down the radio in the car, trying to find an address on the side of a building, listening harder.
It wasn’t English. Not Spanish, either. Something else—a local dialect, maybe? Were they thanking them? Saying a prayer?
This was far from his area of expertise. His father had studied some Maya—Yucatec, specifically—but only a phrase or two had ever made it down to George. Just fragments. Not enough to understand. Not enough to hold together a thought.
If you wanted to know how often Peter Gabriel said Biko in the song, he was your guy (26 times). Which pencil was best for sketching? Also him (it’s the one you’ve always got with you—a No. 2).
Still listening, trying to make sense of the whispers, something off in the distance caught George’s attention.
In slow waves, the creatures shifted. One by one, the outer rows started to drift away and descend. Silently, without a huff or splash, the next row turned and disappeared. George watched the beautiful, synchronous dance that seemed so delicate and beyond the hulking shapes of these creatures—swirling and weightless, like the song from that aquarium suite. The kind of music that seemed to barely touch the human world.
Just as quickly as they appeared, the last row was now gone.
George slowly craned his head over the side but couldn’t see them anymore, just his own warbled reflection again. They were gone. Disappeared. And with it, the low vibration of the ringing bell. He rubbed his fingers together—the electricity he’d felt in his fingertips was gone, too. Now all he saw was the blue of the water and below… sand?
Caught up watching the turtles vanish—all worry about sharks long gone—he hadn’t noticed the shape closing in ahead: the island!
There it was. As real as could be—a piece of land that, up to this point, had only been a vague image. The hooked shape: pez doblado. His crayon and colored pencil map was now rendered in Kodachrome in front of him. He was close enough to see birds at the rocky shoreline, the thick trunks of trees and scruff growing all the way to the edge of the water. But through the trees, and what lay behind, was impossible.
This must be the western side—the leeward side—his father had written. George could now feel humidity flowing over the waves, a soft heat pushed by the wind over and through the cracks in the jungle beyond.
George couldn’t tell how long the trip had taken across the few miles to the island, but the sun seemed to be on its descent across the water, throwing long golden light from just over… the mountain. It was there, too—the shape he’d read about in the journal! An almost volcanic shape that sloped down, as far as he could tell, to the water on the far side of the island.
George thought about his short-lived time in the Boy Scouts during the summer in St. Louis. Mostly the boys were interested in smoking cigarettes and goofing off behind the VFW, but they’d made a trip to the countryside, to the Lewis and Clark museum on the banks of the Mississippi River. There, they learned—or tried to learn—about orienteering.
He remembered squinting across a field at a distant ridge while a troop leader explained how you could figure out how far away a mountain was if you knew its real height—something about angles, lines of sight, and the shrinking trick of perspective. It made sense for about five seconds, then vanished, like most math did.
But the trick he’d kept was this: hold up a thumb at arm’s length. If the mountain fit behind his thumbnail, it was probably twenty miles off. If it filled the width of his thumb, maybe ten. Crude, but it gave him something to work with.
He held up his thumb like they’d taught him, bobbing up and down in the boat. The peak didn’t vanish behind it—not even close. It stretched wider than the pad of his thumb, maybe twice as wide. He guessed that meant two miles. Maybe less. The mountain was close enough to touch in under an hour if you could find a path through the jungle.
His eyes drifted, thinking about the math he’d rather not be doing. They followed the water and the hook of the island as the boat drifted closer. He thought about the tide pool his father had been dumped into after escaping the creatures and wondered where it might be. Was it on this side?
Scanning the approaching shore, he saw movement on a tumble of rock extending into the water. At first, he thought it was an animal on all fours. The shape of the body was difficult to make out in the reflected light until it stood, highlighted.
A person. A girl–not a woman, George thought. The form had a different shape.
She seemed to be standing, twisting her body to watch the boat approach. He could almost make out the shape of her face, the dark arms and shoulders below.
Was there a moment when he could see her eyes looking directly at him?
The girl dove headfirst into the water below. George rose in the boat, nearly standing, rocking it. His mind replayed the curve of her body as it compressed and bounded, staying almost infinitely in mid-air before slipping under the water.
He watched for a break in the sun’s reflection—a head surfacing, an arm reaching out—but saw nothing.
Seconds ticked by. He nearly held his breath waiting for her to break through the water. Then minutes passed as the boat drifted around the corner from where she had been on the rocks—her location now out of sight.
Roberto hadn’t managed to tell him if anyone lived on the island. He assumed the curse, whatever it was, kept people away. George turned to the boys, wondering if they’d seen her too, but they were fixed on the approaching shoreline. He thought about saying something but figured his clumsy translation would take forever—and probably just get a shrug.
He could wade to the edge of the island now, as the trees started to tower over the boat. The tide pushed them sideways and into what looked like a long river—the intercoastal. A tideway that snaked further into the island on this side. His father had described it, but nothing in the spec mark in the atlas proved that it existed until now. And now it was all real—nearly touchable if he leaned far enough off the side.
George’s vision started to blur as his eyes clouded over. It wasn’t the heat or a spray of salt water this time, but something else: tears. Of relief? Joy? He wasn’t sure. So much time had gone by wondering if the island was real, if it existed, and if he would ever touch it. And as he sat there in the boat, feeling the waves of heat and cool blowing over the water, George’s chest filled with a kind of sadness.
Tears fell to his lap and onto the backpack he’d been gripping so tightly to his chest.
He wanted to jump from the boat, letting the water wash away the tears on his face—that somehow, dropping into the salty water and making the last distance to the edge of the island would make all of this feel more real. More earned. But why?
He had followed the trail of words in the journal, the seed of images his father had planted now sprouted. At the airport, he’d felt this same steamy heat—vines and roots twisted under his feet. He’d gotten them on a plane, steered their course through luck. And the howl of the island calling to him last night from the rooftop—he’d answered it.
He had chased every clue and pushed into the unknown just to get here. Wouldn’t his father be proud that he had found a way?
Of course he would. He would have done his crazy dance, fingers jutting up like he’d just seen the Lakers win the championship. Hoarsely, he would be chanting like the crowd in the arena: Jorge, Jorge, Jorge.
Then why didn’t it feel earned?
George looked at the two boys, now sitting upright. Their faces were turned away, watching the island as it approached. And it occurred to him: he never thought he’d be here with two strangers when he saw it for the first time. He thought he’d be with Kathryn. And maybe—impossibly—his father.
But getting here—to this spot, the small speck of a boat on a child’s map—wasn’t the end. There was more.
The boy with the satchel looked back as George rubbed his eyes, trying to hide the tears. The boy moved closer, putting a hand on George’s chest, patting him to stay seated. Pulling the satchel from his shoulder, he lowered his head to slip it off and gently over George’s. Instinctively, George put his hand through the sling until the weight of the bag sat low under his arm.
“Cuídalo bien,” the boy whispered, patting him again on the chest.
Without another word, the boy turned and tapped the other on the shoulder. George watched as they leapt from the boat and began to pull it toward a tangle of tall grass. He could feel the boat slow as it ground onto the hidden beach beneath. At once, the movement of the boat stopped.
No more rocking by the waves or being swayed by the bodies in it.
The sharks with their razor teeth—and the calmness of turtles—were somewhere long behind them.
He had made it to the island.
On the shore, the boys stood still for a moment, looking at him. One flashed a wide smile at George, an infectious giggle coming out as his tongue touched his teeth. Their two shapes suddenly doubled over with laughter, a riotous chorus of childlike exuberance. Squinting in the late sunlight, he watched the boys grab each other by the shoulders as they jumped up and down.
George’s face couldn’t help but change as his smile appeared, too. Laughter—like the feeling he had leaving the shore with them—bubbled out and broke free in great whoops. He stood in the boat, now sturdy on the sand, and let out a triumphant yell that soared across the water, over the scrub, through the trees—carried on the air, echoing toward the mountain beyond.
For a moment, the sound belonged to all of them. To the boys. To Kathryn.
And his father.
When he stopped laughing, tears of joy subsided and his cheeks aching, he opened his eyes.
And found himself alone, standing in the boat—the shore empty.
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Music
Carnival of the Animals: VII, Aquarium – Saint Saens
Excellent chapter, J. His guides vanishing at the end was so unexpected and adds to the magic and mystery of the island. And to the tension. For now, George seems to be very much on his own.
This is a wonderful way to start the adventure on the island as George observes the turtles and reflects on the journey that has brought him to this far. Great writing, J.