Far From the Kitchen

The instructions were simple: three tablespoons of salt, a cup of ash and seventeen ground tomato seeds, spread in a circle the width of your index finger. Ben made the mess on the countertop, between his cup of apple juice and the dirty dishes, and uttered the incantation as it was described on the printed email.

"Hexam lacunae disperse!"

At first nothing happened, but he knew it had worked when the circle of powder caught alight and the apple juice turned back into an apple and popped right out of the cup. It hit the roof and bounced once on the floor beside him. Quickly he took off his glasses and clutched them in his hand.

Vanishing feels strange, he thought. It's like waking up. However sure you were that you were in a kitchen, you're now even more certain that the kitchen was a vague hallucination and you're really lying on the white sand of a beach, the palm jungle hooting to your left and the waves crushing over a reef somewhere far to the right.

He stood up and brushed the sand from his back and shook his legs to get it from his trousers. He walked up to the edge of the dense plantlife and kicked aside a coconut. There was a path which led straight to the other side of the island.

"Am I stuck, then?" he asked aloud.

He circled the island. It took less than five minutes. He spent an hour breaking through the leaves and bushes until he was sure he'd stepped every step it was possible to take. The only interesting thing he found the whole time was a bean plant growing up a metal spike, its fat pods ready to be plucked.

"I'm stuck," he said.

After a while of lying on the sand, he realized he still had two dry tomato seeds in the pocket of his trousers. He quickly walked to the centre of the island, the point of the path from which he could see both sides of the sandy beach, and dug a hole the depth of his thumb. He dropped the seeds in, spat on them, and covered the hole back up with the dry dirt. For now all he could do was chew on a couple of bean pods and hope for rain.

"Cooee," called someone from the other side of the trees. "Anybody about?"

Ben ran across the island again, careful to not stamp on the freshly dug hole in the path.

"Hey!" he cried. "Help!"

"Ah! I thought I saw something land!" The grown-up was standing at the front of a canoe. He was wearing shorts and a patterned shirt and he had his hands on his hips. "Hello there kiddo! Come aboard then, there's not much to do here."

Ben waded out through the clear water and pulled himself up onto the canoe.

"You ready to go the the Crystal City, then? Or there's a hot meal waiting at the old McMahon's homestead, if you like farms, that is. Just let me know before we get to Spring Island because I need to change my course accordingly."

"I've never been on a farm before."

"Very well then, McMahon's it is." He moved the boat in broad strokes quickly through the water, jutting up and over the incoming waves at the perfect moment between breaks. Soon the water settled again, and it was a smooth and relaxing ride despite the ocean's growing depth.

"Look over there - a colossal sea turtle!"

The hump breached the surface of the water, its rock-like surface wide enough to be an island of its own. Ben watched it cascade back below the water.

"Hey mister, can I get back there? To that island?"

"Sure!" said the man. "I bring the ferry over once every year or so."

Ben smiled, and leant to scoop his hand through the cold water as they moved on towards a growing island in the distance.