Chatterbox: Inkwell

The Lost Island

The man was wearing a black jacket; a size or two too big. The wrinkles of fabric along the back of rectangular body were easy to see, but the rest of him came together in patches and blips, like the pixelated screen of a faulty c-com. His face was all blurry, except for a traingular, pointed nose. He was wearing fingerless gloves in an odd color. Green, maybe. His hands were doing something, but it was too difficult to make out. There must have been something there. Anything at all. Some loud thought pulsing in his mind; some displacement around him that would garuntee a location. Some connection...it was getting closer, closer now. It had a sound, a shape. A letter? No, a word, a—

"Kennedy? We found the—" 

"Shhhh," the sudden interuption was cut off by another voice, but it was too late. The word was gone.

Kennedy banged his fist on his desk. The handmade wooden carvings of circles, squares, traingles, rhobmuses, and countless other geometrical shapes that lined his desk jumped. 

"Is five minutes of silence really that hard? Does every second of every day have to be filled with so much noise? I think that the world would be a better place if NO ONE talked at all!" He swatted a rectangle off of the table, which hit the floor near the doorway where his two friends were standing.

"For the record. It's been twenty minutes," piped up Laura.

"And you were just sitting there at your desk. You didn't look very busy," chimed in Justin.

"For the record," Kennedy retorted, "I was VERY busy. Where's Nadia?"

"I'm here! I'm here." Nadia Erdilaya's low, soothing voice dominated the room as she slipped into Kennedy's "office." Her petit form made her the shortest of the group, but she was the only one everyone listened to. Laura and Justin jokingly called her "Mom" behind her back. Nadia only dressed in one color at a time, and today, it was pale pink. There were pink lotuses flowering across her pants, and a matching headband tied back her short, dark hair. 

"I'm sorry, I tried to stop them," she continued her fingers straying up to her head to adjust a short, wide ringlet, "but they just wanted to tell you they found the man who was stealing from the dockworker's district." 

"Yeah, he was exactly where you said he would be. How did you even know about—"

Kennedy cut Justin off.

"That's not important. What's important is absolute silence. Why don't you two go home and we can meet again tomorrow?" He looked at Nadia, who easily took over. 

"That's a good idea. Laura, are you okay sailing home alone? It's getting dark. Maybe Justin could go with you."

"No way! I'm good to go," Laura replied, shaking her chin-length hair out of her face to reveal two bandaids crossed over her chin.

"If we got into trouble, I'd probably be more help than Justin. No offence," she said, giving a sideways smirk to her friend.

"None taken," Justin replied. But he rolled his eyes nevertheless as walked out of the room and tramped down the creaking stairs of the rickety house. Nadia softly closed the door behind them. Kennedy sat back heavily in his chair, playing with the edge of his white button-up shirt.

"I was so close this time," he sighed.

"To what, the island?" Nadia asked.

"A clue," he clarified, "something about the island, something about where to find it. It was some sort of—" he gasped and clenched his fist to the bridge of his nose, knuckles driving into the lines of pain around his eyebrows.

"I went too deep that time...but I was so close," he repeated.

"Kennedy, what if they're gone? What if the island really was destroyed?" Nadia had asked the question countless times. She asked it on the orphan's ship as days were filled with endless sea. She'd asked on dark nights while they moved from home to home, on the ferry boats, the long bus rides, or by windowsills in the moonlight. How many times had she asked in this very office, while staring at decrepid copies of the poems of Horace and the diagrams and shapes straight out of a Geometry text book that filled the room? 

Kennedy never answered. And as long as he didn't have an answer, Nadia promised to believe him until he did.

"Tell me about the island," she said suddenly.

"No. I can't."

"Don't tell me about that day," she replied, "just tell me something about your island. About the school. About the things you did there."

He was silent, and for a second Nadia wondered if she'd gone too far.

But then he spoke, slowly, without looking at her.

"We had a group...a club of sorts, my friends and I. A writer's club. We called ourselves The Chatterboxers."