The Disputed Island / Statues
by Chris Haven
The Disputed Island
There once were two diplomats from rival countries. Their duties consisted of overseeing a single protectorate, a remote island in disputed waters. Both countries claimed the island for strategic purposes. However, the island was uninhabited, a skerry. Disk-shaped, it was roughly triple the size of a Shakespearian theatre, and each side sloped downward in the fashion of a traverse stage.
The trip to the island took three months for each of them and three months again to return home. The diplomats took alternate turns at the island to lay claim to the rocks and seagrass. Upon arrival the diplomat would remove the flag of the rival country and replace it with the flag of the diplomat’s home country. Then the diplomat would set down a jug of spirits in the place of the jar of spirits left as a gift by the other diplomat. A sip or two now, in preparation for the three-month trip back home. Just as the one diplomat was leaving the island for home, the other diplomat on the other side of the world was setting sail for the island.
The diplomats spent the good portion of their adult lives in this back and forth, claiming and reclaiming, home for only a few days of the year. The one diplomat certainly saw the folly in this arrangement, but learned to look forward to the trips which came to define a life. One might say that the diplomat had fallen in love.
The diplomat rationed the gift of spirits on the home journey so that they might provide a sweet calm on the return trip. This time, though, would be different. This time the diplomat would delay the trip in order, finally, to meet the diplomat’s counterpart.
The diplomat took the boat and went into hiding for three months. This was not hard to do because the island was the diplomat’s sole assignment and therefore the diplomat would not be missed. In that time the diplomat collected supplies including binoculars, a sweet mint plant, a silk scarf and, of course, a jug of spirits.
Time was never difficult to pass for the diplomat, but this trip was different. The time of arrival was urgent and the diplomat cursed the unfavorable winds. What had been plenty of time, time to kill, had become a race against the clock. The diplomat’s worst fear was that the other diplomat would arrive only to find the unaccepted gifts, and the cycle would be broken. What might the other diplomat think had happened? Death? Surrender? A betrayal of their relationship? A relationship surely separate from official duties, having nothing to do with politics.
This was what the diplomat has lived for, these lonely meetings, the flip of the wind, a sip of the drink of the other. The boat must go faster, the diplomat thought, it must.
The days fell away before the diplomat’s eyes, and the stubborn winds would not shift. The island, so small, would not come into sight until hours before arrival. The planned date came and went. The diplomat lost sleep, sailed all night. Another day lost. Finally, two days late, the boat entered its side of the stage. Frantic, the diplomat scrambled from the boat, forgetting to set the anchor. A flag flew in the expected spot, a container set beside.
But which flag? Which spirits? The diplomat could not readily tell.
A closer approach revealed the answer: the diplomat’s own flag, the diplomat’s own spirits.
But how? Had the other diplomat somehow switched the gifts? There could be no other explanation.
Just then the unfavorable winds gusted, sending the boat far from the tiny shore. The diplomat pulled out his binoculars, focused on the boat tossing in the waves. Soon, a figure on the deck came into focus. A person, whose frame looked remarkably like the diplomat’s own, silk scarf flapping in the favorable wind, clutching a sweet mint plant close, sailing hard for home.
Statues
Nobody teaches you how to live alone and anyway she bought the cat. Not a real one which might have made sense but a statue of a cat. In the yard it looked real enough to keep the mice away. So many things a couple does together to keep a house solid and now that he’s gone and her children are hours away, she improvises. After hearing noises around her front porch she put a mannequin by her door. She grew attached to its presence but did not give it a name because that would be too much. Next she put up an actual scarecrow around Halloween and it stood fast through all the wrong holidays. Then a windmill in the shape of a man with arms that shooed intruders away with the wind. Statues accumulated. The yard gave the impression of a party. When drunken teenagers showed up to vandalize the statues and pose them in unspeakable positions, she dismantled and removed all but for the mannequin on the porch, and the cat.
Now she sits at her window and stares out at them. She knows what you think. You think that she is going to turn into a statue herself. That she already has. But that’s not it at all. What she’s doing, what she’s always done, is being a partner. What she’s doing is dancing.
Chris Haven’s prose appears in Electric Literature, Jellyfish Review, Denver Quarterly, Cincinnati Review miCRo, and Kenyon Review. One of his stories is listed in Best American Short Stories 2020, and his debut collection of short stories, Nesting Habits of Flightless Birds, was published by Tailwinds Press in October 2020. He teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
