ROBINSON II - flash fiction

ROBINSON II

Ethan’s voice dripped scorn. “That’s not proper treasure!”

“Is too!” exclaimed Henry, “Tell him, Grandad.”

Albert lifted down the box. “These are souvenirs of my shipwreck. Sixty years ago I washed up half-drowned on an island, and I’d have died of cold but for that Zippo. Kindling and driftwood like this made a fire, then I searched the beach.” He touched the coins reverently. “There’s one of these for each body I buried.” After a moment his back straightened. “But I also found a fishing net, so I survived.”

“What’s that bird for?”

“To remind me never again to eat a seagull.”

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Thanks to Rochelle at https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/  for posting Claire Fuller's photo as a prompt for this week's Friday Fictioneers. To read other takes on the prompt, follow the links on her blog. After commenting on mine, of course, and please feel free to scroll back to read my earlier stories.

SEA GLASS - a story in 100 words

SEA GLASS

Kanet had ruled for sixteen years, but when he saw his cousin’s army approaching he fled the island, leaving his daughter to be captured. Izobella cursed him as she threw her crown at his departing sail, and the gods blew up a storm which swamped the boat, sending Kanet to his death.

Izobella married the invading cousin.

Centuries later Bella, playing on the beach, found a sea-glass jewel, its wave-tossed surface dulled but still holding inner fire. She took it home and stuck it to a cardboard crown. 

“See, Mummy, I knew I was a real princess!”

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The photograph which prompted my story was taken by Janet Webb and posted on Rochelle's blog  https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/  Follow the link from her blog to read other interpretations of the photo prompts that are posted each week. You can also read more of my stories by browsing my archives which are listed on the right.

I spent some of my childhood scouring Brighton beach for pieces of sea-glass among the pebbles, and to me they were always jewels.

ISLAND PICNIC - a 100 word story

ISLAND PICNIC

When Tom was young his parents used to take him over the reed-bed to picnic in the summer-house.

“Walk quietly,” his father would warn, “Don’t wake the troll,” and Tom would tiptoe across in delighted terror.

Later, Tom played the troll game with his own children, and even his worldly-wise grandchildren trod softly over the bridge.

One afternoon, at an island picnic, Tom collapsed. His sons raced homewards carrying him, their footsteps loud on the bridge, and they were halfway across when a massive arm reached up and snatched the body.

 “It’s what Tom would have wanted,” they said at his coffin-less wake.

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Firstly I am proud to tell you that I have had a poem accepted for World Poetry Day, which you can read under the 'Melting Pot' tab on Liz Brownlee's blog at:  https://messagepoemstotheplanet.wordpress.com/
Secondly I would like to say 'Welcome' to another two followers who have appeared out of the blue - thank you for your interest in my blog!

And thirdly, this week's photo was taken by Adam Ickes. I remember the photo, so presumably I have written a story about it before, but I can't remember when or what, so here's a new one! The prompt was posted for Friday Fictioneers on Rochelle's blog  https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/  To read other stories, follow the Blue Frog trail from there.

ROCKS, RUINS & RBL

RUINED buildings have always fascinated me – they leave so much to the imagination. The holes in a castle wall where joists used to be conjure up images of floors and furniture, spiral stairs make me wonder how servants carried trays of food up to their masters. The skeleton of a shed in a French field was so striking that I took several photos and wrote it into a novel.

Until a firm of speculative builders scraped the surface from the former agricultural land around us, I could explore ROUGH-WALLED terraces and imagine the fields filled with potatoes or cabbages. There was a one-room house too – a ROOF-BEAM leaning against one wall and a tangle of herbs that was once a kitchen garden.

Overlooking the nearest banana plantation is a ROW of workers’ cottages, roofs and doors long gone and walls collapsed. Older locals remember when they were occupied by agricultural workers. If someone had bought them before the roofs fell in they could have made a lovely home with a grand view of the sea.

The builder’s ROADS are now as abandoned as those fields were, and are already going back to nature – I wonder what future generations will make of them?

ROUNDABOUTS

Tenerife has only had roundabouts for a few years. Before that, if you wanted to turn left you turned RIGHT, drove ROUND an island, and ended up having to cross traffic from both directions. The roads weren’t wide enough for feeder lanes.

Then the government discovered roundabouts and put them everywhere. Drivers who had lived on the island all their lives didn’t know what they were or how to use them. Each roundabout was soon strewn with glass, the number of cars with bashed-in doors increased, articles appeared in newspapers, and heated arguments RAGED in every café and bar. The Cabildo sent every household a letter explaining, with diagrams, how to drive round a roundabout. It appeared to have been written by someone who had only READ the theory.

And those striped triangular patches on the approach roads – the cross-hatching that indicates “Do not drive on this bit” – are considered a great place to park if you need to visit a nearby shop.

Things have settled down now, but any sensible driver avoids what the Brits call “The Magic Roundabout” in Los Cristianos. It has two lanes, which are always a RECIPE for disaster here - the local drivers regard the inner circle as an overtaking opportunity for those in a hurry. If you take the inside lane to turn left you could be stuck there all day, and if you opt for the outer circle you can practically guarantee that someone will carve you up by shooting across your bows to turn right.

And mini roundabouts? I saw a van yesterday approaching a mini-roundabout in Guaza from the wrong angle. Sensing danger, I waited. White van man overshot his left turn, slammed on his brakes, REVERSED practically onto my bonnet, and shot off up the road he’d been aiming for. You need to keep your wits about you, driving in Tenerife.

ROCKS

I had never really thought about rocks until we came to Tenerife, and was surprised by the different colours, textures and formations. Simply driving along the motorway, where the rock has been chipped away for cuttings, is a mobile lesson in how the layers of lava overlaid each other when the island was formed. There is rock so porous that bees can build hives in it, and rock so hard that a chipped edge is like a knife. There is blue rock and green rock, black and white rock layered like a cake, brown and red, yellow and orange, terracotta and cream.

No wonder my series of fantasy books is called “Living Rock”.

ROYAL BRITISH LEGION

We transferred our membership to the Tenerife branch of the Royal British Legion soon after we arrived. There were about 25 members then and, due to what is euphemistically called “natural wastage” we now number 17 – the youngsters don’t join, which is a shame.

For the past 5 years we have won the Noel Rogers Trophy for the overseas branch that raises the most Poppy Appeal money per member. Last year we got €11,000 and change – around €500 per member – our nearest rivals raised €44. Big is not always better! The photo was taken at Westhaven Bay in Costa del Silencio, where we hold our service, with (L-R) the British Ambassador to Spain, the OH who is Chairman. Paul our Vice-Chairman and Welfare Officer and his wife, and the previous Canary Islands Consul.

We exist mainly to deal with any welfare cases that come our way, which have ranged from the widow of an RAF pilot not being able to afford a new fridge to a young serviceman and his wife severely injured in a car accident and stuck in hospital for months. We also have a Remembrance Service each year, in the open air overlooking the sea, which is attended by about 350 people, some of whom book their annual holiday around that date. One year the crew of a Royal Navy vessel, in Santa Cruz on its way home from the Antarctic, joined us. That was a particularly emotional morning, the young sailors’ voices loud in the hymns and even louder later at the barbecue with karaoke!

IDIOMAS & ITALIANS

IDIOMAS = LANGUAGES. When we arrived here to live we had to learn INSTANT Spanish, because we were buying our apartment privately from a couple who spoke no English. If we were meeting Juan and Carmen to discuss our purchase I would write it all down in advance – that way I could read them my notes if we got stuck.

It was a tense time, renting in Las Galletas and knowing we’d shot our bolt financially if it all went wrong. I bought a set of flash-cards that reminded me of teaching my son to read, and we tested each other in the evenings. Ayuntamiento was our first long word – it means Town Hall, where we had to go for some of our paperwork. INTERESTINGLY, it also means sexual INTERCOURSE, according to my dictionary! Many words have two or more meanings, and often only an accent differentiates between them. The OH learned the hard way to say “Feliz Año” – Happy New Year – with the ñ as in España. Without the accent, ano means arse! At times we regretted not opting for France, where we already spoke the language, but we got our Residencias and signed up for our apartment without any problems.

Old gits we may be, but when there’s a strong enough motive we can do anything.

Some of our first neighbours when we moved into our own apartment were a young ITALIAN man and his Ecuadorean wife. Paola spoke South American Spanish as well as Italian, but Massimiliano only spoke Italian, so we went through some of the Spanish-learning process together.

At my 60^th birthday party they announced they were pregnant, amid great rejoicing. When the date was IMMINENT we discovered that their entire family INTENDED to descend on them for the birth – Paola’s mother, Massi’s parents and grandmother, and his uncle and aunt and cousin, and his best friend from Milan. For a whole month! How would they all fit into a two-bed apartment, I asked. Massi shrugged – they’d manage somehow for such an IMPORTANT occasion.

So we offered them our spare room. We got the uncle and aunt. A lovely couple about our own age with whom the OH and I communicated, in their Italian and our limited Spanish, with the aid of a ‘Seis-idiomas dictionario’ I’d picked up at a car boot sale. It’s INCREDIBLE what you can achieve if you set your mind to it.

The baby was beautiful - an olive-skinned, black-haired dumpling - and how the young mother coped with such a houseful, and the large dog her husband acquired before they met, I shall never know. When the family had all gone back to ITALY we became substitute grandparents. My Spanish IMPROVED in leaps and bounds, discussing breast-feeding and nappy rash and IN-LAWS with Paola.

Then a year later there was another INVASION when they all came back for the christening. There were about twenty children all being baptised in the IGLESIA at the same time, each of them with their own entourage of camera-wielding family and friends. It was total mayhem but the priest managed somehow, then we lined up for INNUMERABLE photos on the church steps, piled into whichever car was nearest, and went to a restaurant for a party that seemed more like a wedding reception than a baptism.

Roberta’s seven now and she calls me “Leez”. She makes allowances for my stumbling Spanish and brings crowds of her friends Trick-or-treating at Halloween - and I love it. She's the one on the left.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION is a problem that hits the newspapers at about the same time each year, presumably when the prevailing winds are right for crossing the hundred miles of open ocean between Africa and here. Desperate people pay large sums of money to be crammed into pateras (open wooden boats that are far from sea-worthy) and towed out into the Atlantic. If they are lucky, the owners of the motor boats set them adrift within sight of land. They are usually picked up by the Coastguard radar and escorted to a harbour, where the Cruz Roja checks their health and then they are bussed to a detention centre. Most of them are sent back, but they keep coming.

I have witnessed the arrival of two pateras in my time here – one actually came into Las Galletas harbour while I was shopping. On another occasion we were celebrating a friend’s birthday in Los Abrigos when, around ten pm, we saw lights approaching. An orange rescue boat escorted a patera into the harbour, and the restaurant owners sent down bread and bottles of water for the exhausted people in the boat. We watched the whole drama from mere yards away – Police, Ambulances, coaches. The patera itself was a wreck, half-full of water and food scraps, and brightly painted with a hopeful face and a saint’s name which must have been the only things that got it safely ashore.

We heard of one patera that didn’t get here at all. The human traffickers pushed the boat out to sea with no engine and it missed the Canaries entirely. The passengers wrote pathetic notes to their families as they died one by one. Weeks later the patera ended up in Bermuda. I believe it started out with 50 on board – they found 11 bodies.

ISLAND WEATHER. We live on an island you can drive round in a day, and the climate is odd. It could be raining in our village and sunny a kilometre away. We have been standing on our terrace in the sun and watched a curtain of rain sweep towards us across the swimming pool. That’s microclimates for you!

GRANDSONS & GOATS

There have been a lot of photos of my GRANDSONS on Facebook this week. Their other GRANDMOTHER is visiting from Slovakia, so my daughter-in-law is camera-happy. So are the boys, judging by their happy GRINS. Me - jealous? Don't even GO there!

Las GALLETAS. The name means “The Biscuits”(!) and it is the fishing village where we lived when we first settled in Tenerife. We rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment overlooking some waste GROUND. On Sundays we had a GRANDSTAND view as local men and boys raced their off-road motos (motorbikes) and on Mondays we would wipe and mop up all the dust.

We had no TV, but the beach was round the corner, the shops 5 minutes’ walk, and we could sit at Amadeo’s bar with a GLASS of vino tinto to watch the sunset. One evening the western sky darkened unusually quickly, and we watched in amazement, with hands protecting our drinks, as millions of huge dragonflies flew in on the wind from Africa. Many of them landed on the wall nearby, clearly exhausted, poor things, and their colours were GORGEOUS.

Our next door neighbours were Indians. One hot day their door was open and such a wonderful smell wafted out that I commented on it. Ten minutes later the two elder children knocked on our door and GAVE us a plate of food! When we returned the plate, with GRATEFUL thanks, we were invited in and shown round. In that two-bedroom apartment, with parents and three children, there was a whole room lined with tall shelves for their household GODS – awesome devotion.

LA GOMERA. Sometimes when we’re driving into Los Cristianos we can see this island so clearly it looks as if you could swim across. At other times it is so shrouded in cloud that it disappears completely – La Isla Magica. It’s well worth the ferry ride. It’s shaped like a dried and shrunken starfish, with deep barrancos divided by steep lava flows, but the local taxi- and bus-drivers are accustomed to the character-forming roads and the scenery is spectacular. GREENERY spills down from the laurel forest on its flat crown, farms cling to slopes as steep as staircases, every path is a series of steps, and the natural domestic animals to keep there are GOATS. They even have their own language of whistles –sifle – which can communicate from one hill to another such simple things as "Dinner's ready" or "I'm going for a drink with the lads.".

I’m GENERALLY a GOOD-NATURED GIRL, as anyone will tell you (if they know what’s GOOD for them!) but some things really GET my GOAT.

People whose idea of conversation is to talk exclusively about themselves.

Drivers who zoom past hooting their horns because I’m keeping to the speed limit.

Ordering a GRILLED meal and having it arrive swimming in GREASE.

GREED – either personal or national – there’d be enough to go round if we were less selfish.

GADGETS that do things you can do quicker by hand.

And the word GENRE that wants to stick me – and you – in categories with fences.

GEOFFREY. My father, my brother and my children’s father were all called Geoffrey. Please share a moment of Gratitude for their lives – one life that was longer than average and the other two far too short.

GEE! GOLLY! GOSH! A day off tomorrow - what WILL I do with myself?

CALIMA!

Half our island has disappeared!
A calima came in yesterday - at first just a haze in the air. Sitting outside the bar at 7pm we could see Las Galletas on the coast 5 kilometres directly south, and Mt Teide to the north. By 7.30 they had gone, smothered in a thick brownish fog of fine sand that had blown in on an easterly wind from Africa.
Every surface was gritty, our eyes stung, sinuses ached from breathing dust, and we had to buy another drink to wash the taste from our throats.
Today, on my morning walk, if I looked straight up the sky was blue, but the horizontal view told a different story. Cho mountain, 500 metres away, was hazy, a further kilometre along the road, Guaza mountain was only a murky outline, and Mt Teide might as well not have existed.
It was a weird feeling driving to the shops later. Most familiar landmarks were missing, leaving me and my little car isolated in an eerie, shrunken world.
There used to be only two or three calimas a year - now we get two or three a month. Apparently it's due to vehicles replacing camels and breaking up the surface of the Sahara. Heavy lorries with huge wheels, careless mining practices, adventure tourism and cross-desert races in 4x4s are destroying the fragile balance of nature.
When you fly into Tenerife you will see beige areas that look like concrete bases for some vast building. These are the plastic covers to keep the sun off and the moisture in banana plantations, every acre of them covered in layer after layer of African dirt.
We can see the top of the calima now, which means it's settling, clogging the pores of every leaf.
We washed our car on Wednesday - you wouldn't think so now.

A holiday with a hint of danger.

From the local paper this morning -
El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, has had its red flag replaced by a yellow one.
La Restinga, a tiny fishing village on the south coast, woke up in October to discover a stain on the sea and dead fish floating - a volcano was erupting under the sea only two kilometers beyond their small harbour. (See my earlier posts.)
Since then the inhabitants have been struggling to survive with two of their main sources of income banned - fishing and dive-schools - and the tourists stopped coming.
Last month the Crown Prince of Spain made a well-reported visit, so show solidarity with the beleaguered herrenos and to demonstrate the lack of danger. Ticket and accommodation prices were cut to encourage tourism, and now the local government is publicizing volcanic holidays.
The massive stain over the eruption is fading and the tremors are now too faint to feel. At least for now. The volcano is only sleeping, not dead. A yellow flag is not an "All clear". Fishing and diving are still banned, so you won't be able to eat local-caught fish, but goat stew is delicious, wine is cheap, and you might - just might - experience an earthquake.
But that's the attraction - an island holiday in the sun, with a hint of danger. Maybe I'll go and see for myself.