Sally looked out at the horizon. A blue line that separated sky and sea. A line she has been staring at for far too long.
She knew she should check her snares or fishing nets or at least gather some bananas but something told her today was the day.
She had these feelings before. Something big is going to happen. Half the time they amounted to nothing. Sometimes she found an oddity in the sand, others a trove of bananas or berries. Only once did a large wave of destruction, a tsunami came. Thank God, her cave was high up on the hill.
She knew staring wouldn't help. She picked herself off the golden sand and made her way to her fishing nets.
The nets were next to a small rock jutting out to sea. The sand here was a bit grey but every day without fail, fish skinned into the small inlet at high tide and rewarded her with protein for a few weeks. She smoked most of the fish for keeping them for the wet season and ate the rest soon after as fresh fish kept only for a few days.
As she pulled in the nets, she spotted a dark blot out at sea on the horizon. She dropped the nets and stared out at the blob.
Thanks to her bad eyesight, she wasn't so sure if it was a ship or a strange cloud. She couldn't count how many times she would think she saw a ship but it turn out to be a cloud.
She ignore it and went back to pulling in her nets. After she have removed the few fish she caught into a basket, she looked out at sea.
It was definitely a ship or boat of some kind.
And it was headed towards her island.
After what she believed where four years of solitude, for all means of keeping times like clocks and phones were not available to her, a ship with people, actual people onboard, was sighted. She remembered when her friends would ask her 'what would you bring to an deserted island?' she'd replied that she'd bring a speedboat to get back to civilisations or a phone to call for help or something like that. She knew now she would bring a person to talk to, and a survival guide. She has changed a lot since that night.
She sat there, watching the ship. As it got closer to her, she could see that the boat looked like something from the Pirates of the Caribbean. It had sails, masts, the whole shebang. And that's just the silhouette.
She shook her head and forced herself to think, 'What was the plan if I ever saw a ship?". In the first few weeks, she thought that a ship would come any day and sail off into the sunset with her onboard. It was what most people would think.
She remembered her stash of firewood she kept near shore in her old cave. It isn't too far from here, she thought. She left her fishing gear on the ground and ran down the beach. She stopped when she got to a small cave. She spend her first few weeks in this cave. She moved to her current homestead when she realised that the cave flooded regularly.
She arrived to the cave after a short sprint. She pulled back the vines that grew over the entrance of the cave and walked into the cave. The small cave was dark and dreary. The ground was damp due to the recent spring tide and the walls were covered in a green slime. She trudged through the dark cave until she saw what she was looking for.
Next to the remains of a fire laid a pile of wood was piled upon a crude sledge she had fashioned from some driftwood and vines. She had gathered it first as a pile of firewood for regular use but when she moved, it became a emergency pile just in case she:
A: saw a ship and wanted to light a bonfire
B: got the guts to build a ship
C: building materials in general.
She grabbed a vine that had got onto her shoulder when she came in and tied both ends of it the the front of the sledge and put the rope around her waist like she was Rudolph and she was going to deliver the present to all the kids in the world. She then began a journey that was full of agony, pain and face-sands. And that was just out of the cave which wasn't very far.
._._._.
An hour later, an inferno was burning a few metres away from the edge of the thick forest that cover the rest of the hilly island. Sally looked at it, pleased at her work. She just hoped the crew onboard the ship would notice it.
She wondered who was on such a ship. It was defiantly not a cruise ship, or a oil tanker, or a yacht of someone sailing around the world. She guess it was one of those old ships, like an old caravel or something and they were tracing some epic voyage of some explorer like Columbus. She didn't want to think anything else that the ship could be.
The ship looked like it was a hundred from shore but she was terrible at guessing distances like that so for all she knew it was ten kilometres or metres from shore. She looked at the ship with all her might. She saw that the hull of the ship was painted black with a large blue strip and had three big sails and a small triangle shaped one, she wasn't so sure what the proper term was. She never did ships and stuff in school, she hadn't been in school since she was thirteen.
There was a lot of movement onboard the ship. Sadly, because of distance and her bad eyesight she couldn't see what the people onboard the ship looked like. She then saw that the people onboard the ship had put a boat into the water and were rowing towards the beach.
She ran towards to the edge of the water and began waving and jumping. All the time she was doing this she kept looking at the boat. It seemed to have a muscular man wearing beige clothes rowing the boat and a large but tweedy kind of person, she wasn't sure if it was a man or a woman and a large green dog.
She rubbed her eyes but what she saw shook her to her very core. Onboard the small rowing boat were three creatures. They were anything but human.
She hid in the undergrowth, watching the otherworldly creatures come in to land. The boats occupants were close enough for her to see clearly. The beige one appeared to be some kind of humanoid cow creature with two horns on its head and a grey rode covering its torso. The brown one appeared to be a deer with a hat on its head and some thing strapped to its back. The one which scared her the most was the green one. It looked like a horse, talked like a horse and had a royal blue mane and tail with a bright green coat. The most frightening thing about this creature was the horn on its head.
All her life she had a strange relationship with fantasy. She knew that fairies and the such didn't exist but she hoped it did. When she was a four year old, she had a obsession with all things princess. She read magazines about fairies princesses. She would say that her parents weren't her real parents and her real parents lived in a ruin of a castle nearby. She drew pictures of princesses everywhere. Mainly Bella, because she loved Bella.
Even though she loved she loved fantasy, she never really got unicorns. They usually just came out of nowhere to save the main character and rode off into the sunset. And what they really were depended on who you ask. If popular culture was to be believed, they farted rainbow and pooped cinnamon buns and if you drank their blood you were immortal but you wouldn't enjoy it and they didn't like if you stole their liver. Terribly inconsistent. And most of the time bland.
And she never was into horses anyway.
And here, in front of her was a multicoloured unicorn with a tattoo of something on his butt to boot. And it seemed intelligent.
She looked at the humanoid cow creature. Minotaur. She remembered reading some book with a story about a man-eating minotaur in a cave and how a guy and his son escaped it. The son died but it still was a good story.
And she looked at the deer again. Sure, it looked like a bit more like a moose and all but it was still a moose.
So, she, a human, was hiding in undergrowth, watching a moose, a unicorn and a minotaur on a boat, coming towards a beach.
It sounds like a bad joke.