Another quick writing challenge I did and the topic was being stuck somewhere with someone annoying.

The Island

I woke with a start.  My body was both burning and wet.  What was going on?  Where was I?  Slowly I began to recognise the environment I now found myself in.  Wet damp sand that clumped on my skin.  The ebb and flow of a tidal edge washing up over the lower half of my body and the heat from a blazing tropical sun beating down on my back and my head, burning and itching.

            

I groaned and wanted to be back in the unconscious state I had just come out of.  The reality was too much to bear.  I pushed myself up with my arms and shifted into a sitting position to see where I was.  A golden sandy beach stretched out either side of me.  Palms and scrubby trees and bushes lined the top of the beach behind me, hiding the land that lay beyond.  All I could see was sea, sky and sand...

            

And the bulk of another human laid out at the water’s edge a few metres from me.

            

I got up and unsteadily made my way over.  The bulk transformed into the huge mass that was my sister.  She opened her eyes and stared at me and immediately began to complain, just like she always did.
            

‘Oh my God, what’s happened to me?’ she wailed and I helped her to sit up because she didn’t have the energy to do it herself.

            

‘Looks like we survived the wreck.  God knows if anyone else did, there’s only you and I on this beach,’ I told her.

            

‘What are we going to do?’ she screeched.

            

I inwardly laughed.  The collective ‘we’ being ‘me’ and what she expected me to do to get us out of this mess.  I sighed.

            

‘First thing’s first, we should build some shelter and find water.’

            

‘But how are we going to do that?’

            

The day progressed just as I had predicted.  My sister sat and complained all day, whilst I built a makeshift shelter and braved the unknown beyond the beach with all its dangerous-looking insects to find fresh water.  I had fortunately found debris from the shipwreck and gathered it up to the spot we had picked as our new temporary home.  I took a pitcher and came back from the scrubby jungle with fresh water that I had found at a waterfall about a half a mile inland.  And you know what, the greedy bitch drank the lot.

            

‘Well you can go back and get some more, can’t you?’ she said, flopping back against the soft sand under a palm tree.

            

‘Fine, but why don’t you weave together some of those rushes and we can use it as a roof for our shelter’s frame.

            

‘I can’t weave,’ she pouted.

            

This went on for ten days.  Me collecting water.  Me getting a fire going.  Me spending hours and hours to catch and cook one small fish, which she ate, saying it tasted a little too fishy for her liking.

            

‘Well, didn’t you catch two fish?’ she asked me in disbelief as if I was the stupid one.

            

When a tropical storm blew in and wrecked our shelter, guess who rebuilt it.  Guess who complained it wasn’t as good as the first one I had built.

Then one day a ship appeared on the horizon.

            

‘Well, do something!’ my sister screeched, waving her arms in the air from her seated position under the shelter.  

So, I built up the permanent fire I kept going, because to keep relighting it was a pain in the backside... I built it up until it was roaring then I ran up and down the beach, waving my hands in the air.

            

The ship slunk away beyond the horizon and I stared out to sea with my hands on my head, feeling hopeless.

            

‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ my sister griped. ‘You should have built a bigger fire.’

            

‘You could have helped,’ I shot back at her.

            

‘Me?’  She looked at me as if I had lost my marbles.  And I was losing them because dark thoughts not only invaded my dreams now, but they played out scenarios in my head during the day too.

            

‘We need more food,’ I said the next day. ‘The fish are so hard to catch.’

            

‘Well, can’t you go and hunt for something, you now, in the jungle, wild pig or something,’ my sister suggested.

            

I looked at her.  I didn’t think I could do it, go and hunt for a mammal and kill it.  What if I didn’t kill it outright?  It would be suffering.  I couldn’t do that to a living mammal. And then I’d have to drag it back to camp, and skin it and cook it.  No, I couldn’t do that.

            

‘Well?’ my sister pushed.  ‘Go on then, go and find something to kill.’

            

My sister flopped backwards on the sand.  Her eyes stared up at the sky through the woven rushes I had made a roof out of.  I dropped the tree branch on the floor and stared down at her.

            

‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least she didn’t suffer’.