Burt Peel's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Burt Peel needed to build a raft, but he could not hold the wood. He was a rotten banana with legs, and rot had won. He stood at a heap of driftwood streaked with mushy patches of himself. His last raft was gone. A wave took it while he fought with a beer cap on the beach. He had watched it float off and done nothing. Now the only way off this island was a new raft, and his own hands were the problem. He reached for a long plank. His fingers pressed into it and kept going. The wood slid free and thumped back on the pile. Yellow-brown mush stuck to the bark where he had gripped. "Great," Burt said. "I'm the glue and the mess." He tried again. He hugged a board against his chest and stepped back. The plank slipped through his soft arms and landed on his foot. He barely felt it. That was the worst part. The island had made him soft, and soft could not carry a single log, let alone a raft. Burt slumped against the rotting beach house. Bottles lay scattered by the door. A dirty life preserver hung above him, useless. His own beer bottle sat in his hand, cap still on, still sealed after all this time. He pressed it to the plank just to rest his arm. The glass held. His mush did not push through it. He looked at the bottle, then at the wood, and an idea moved through him slow as sap. He hunted the beach house for anything hard. He found a crumpled cigarette pack near the door, half its smokes gone. He shook out the last ones and pressed the stiff cardboard flat against his palm. Now the wood met paper, not banana. He gripped a plank through the pack. It held. The board did not slip. Burt lifted it clear of the pile and set it down where he wanted it. His hands stayed soft, but the barrier did the holding. He worked one board at a time. Cardboard for small planks. The bottle wedged as a lever for the big ones. Sweat he did not have. Mush he had plenty of. By the time the sun dropped, he had dragged six long planks into a rough line on the sand. Burt stood over them and breathed. Six planks was not a raft. But it was six more than this morning. He had beaten his own rotten hands. He nudged the planks with his foot. They rocked. Loose. Nothing tied them, nothing joined them. Wood alone would not float him anywhere. He needed rope, or something to bind the boards before the next wave came for these too. "Course," Burt muttered. He looked at the pile, then the empty shore. "Solve one thing. Buy yourself a worse one."