C4 antho - Chamber Four

~250~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
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The next morning Munro stayed in their quarters to
nurse his knee. Sharon went alone to the beach. But there
she found the sun blazed and beat down on the sand like a
torch, like a hammer. She left the beach on a path that went
into the trees, a path that led away from their house and toward
the center of the tiny island.
Benefit Island: it wasn’t easy for Sharon to see how the
place could ever have been of much benefit to anyone. She
had expected on Benefit to be surrounded by the green and
flowery growth of Barbados (as much as she’d been able to
glimpse of it from beneath the panting and tireless Neil); but
Benefit seemed to be grown up in a dry, gray vegetation
leaved in cowhide and armed with spines and hooks, which
clung doggedly to the hot sandy earth. The path went under
drab and rattling palms and dark, shaggy evergreens. Benefit?
Maybe the island had been named by shipwrecked sailors
who had floated for weeks, starving, in an open boat, to fetch
up here at last, men so desperate that for them Munro’s arid,
unbountiful refuge would be a benefit, in fact, the saving of
their very lives.
Sharon stopped. Ahead of her a group of people came
around a bend in the path and approached her. Five people.
Sharon looked quickly behind her, and would have turned
and gone back the way she’d come, but when she looked
again, the group was almost upon her.
“Good morning to you,” called one of them. Sharon nodded.
She waited for the five to come up.
A man and a woman in their fifties, and three children:
two girls and a boy. The children looked about ten. The boy
must have had cerebral palsy or some like condition. He lay