ISLAND - Part 2

The water felt good on Jerry's skin, almost good enough to make him forget how much it stung his eyes.

The lagoon just down the beach from his sleeping spot was shallow and warm like a bathtub. Unlike a bathtub it was filled with little black crabs that made little clicking noises when they came up onto the beach. Jerry could see them scatter before him as he waded into the water.

The lagoon was also possibly the bluest thing Jerry had ever seen. He didn't know what that meant, exactly. He just knew that every time he looked at it from any angle he thought, 'Holy Shit! That's blue!' Which had never happened when he had looked at blue things in the past.

It was also a puzzle - which may or may not be why Jerry chose to burrow out his sleeping hole so close to it.

No, that wasn't true...he bunked on the beach because of the snakes. Stupid fucking snakes.

It still twisted Jerry that he couldn't figure the lagoon out. It was circular, about a quarter mile across and it was closed off to the ocean on its outward edge by a thin sandbar. The water of the ocean outside was rough, choppy and cold, and often raged with swells and frothy whitecaps. It was inhospitable and intimidating, and Jerry, not surprisingly, wanted nothing to do with it.

The lagoon however was always placid and warm - a perfect blue lens, unfazed by the weather or conditions in the ocean not more than ten feet away. Day after day, rain or shine, come hell or, quite literally, high water, the lagoon remained a polished opal. Not a drop of the ocean outside the sandbar ever seemed to intrude on it nor did a drop of the falling rain ever appear to disturb its polished surface.

It was amazing, it was astounding, it was miraculous -
It made Jerry very, very mad.
It made him pissed, in fact.

Jerry didn't undersand the lagoon and he didn't like things he didn't understand.

Far from awakening in him any sense of wonder or curiosity, they tensed him up like the sound of nails on a chalkboard; like the bracing cold of the water in the ocean that Jerry made it his business to avoid.

They reminded him of when people would whisper to each other when he was a boy on the schoolyard.
They reminded him of people making plans behind his back.

The last of the salt water dried on Jerry's skin and left a fine dust of salt on his shoulders...
Looking up at the height to which the sun had climbed, Jerry started.

"My stick!"

He charged out of the water towards the fringe of the jungle, leaving a wake behind him.
As he dissappeared into the trees, the waves were swallowed just an instant too quickly by the lagoon.