May Charles's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

May Charles read the sky and knew she was out of time. Dark clouds pushed in off the water, low and fast. She had washed up on this island days ago with salt in her gold hair and a bad call behind her. Now she had four days of surviving to lose. The storm would take her rainwater and soak the dry patch of sand where she slept. If she wanted to make it home, she had to build a wall between herself and the rain. She checked the time on her watch. The strap was worn soft, the face scratched, but the second hand still ticked. Someone back home had watched her wear it a hundred times, and did not yet know she was gone. She meant to make it back to them. She snapped the watch shut against her wrist and got to work. May ran the tree line and gathered what the island gave her. She dragged three long branches to a rock face and leaned them against it like ribs. Wind ripped the first two loose. She wedged them deeper, packing sand around the ends until they held. Her hands shook from hunger and effort. She kept going. The first rain hit while she layered broad leaves across the branches. Each leaf was the kind that had saved her life once, holding water when her throat was closing. Now she used them to hold the water out. She weighted the roof with stones. Water ran off the edge instead of onto her. Then the wind changed. A gust drove under the open side and threw rain across her small hollow of dry sand. Her collected rainwater tipped and spilled into the wet ground. May cursed and threw her body against the branches to keep the shelter standing. It held. But her drinking water was gone. She crawled inside and pressed her back to the rock. The storm hammered the leaf roof. Wind found the gaps and chilled her wet clothes, but the branches did not fall. Above her the roof sagged and dripped, and still it stood. She had a wall between herself and the rain. That was more than she'd had an hour ago. May checked her watch again out of habit. The face had fogged under the glass from the wet, the numbers dim. She wiped it against her arm and it cleared. The second hand ticked on, steady in the noise. She pulled her knees to her chest and listened to the water she could no longer drink pour down all around her. The shelter would keep her dry through the night. But she'd traded her only water to get it. When the storm passed, she would be under a roof with nothing left to drink. She closed her hand over the watch and waited for morning.