The lake spread out before him in a liquid pool of ink.
This small island that his boat was headed for was no longer a piece of imagination.
Two years ago, it hadn’t even existed. Not even as a passing thought.
Things had been going well back then. Money had stopped being a concern. His wife was everything a man could want. And business had never been better.
And yet what had taken twenty years of hard work to achieve, took only five short seconds for its cables to snap, its brakes to fail and for it to crash headlong into emergency wards, liquidation and trauma.
After his release from hospital, he wandered far and wide in search of something. What that was, he didn’t know. And no matter where he went, he couldn’t find it either. Not in the bullshit of bars, not in the cleansing beach sunsets, nor on the long cold mountain retreats.
But now he had found what he was looking for.
Now he was here, bringing the boat in to land.
He’d found the location on a torn piece of paper in a small hut in the woods.
There was no map. There was no photograph. There were only some words.
They read:
“People eat dirt, dirt eats people.
No matter what you do, you must return to this earth.
None of this is real, everything returns to this.
If you see through this world and let go of it, this is wisdom.
If you see through it but don’t let go, that is just ‘talking Chan’.”
Sat on the bank of the island, he nodded to himself and smiled. Kicking the boat away, he watched it drift across the lake and dissolve into its liquid pool of ink.
J H Martin is from London, England but has no fixed abode. His writing has appeared in a number of places in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Website: acoatforamonkey.wordpress.com IG: @jhmartin72 / Twitter: @acoatforamonkey