Whispers from Hollow Island
The storm threw me from a battered skiff and left me clinging to a shore that did not belong to any map I’d ever trusted. The island rose like a slow exhale, a crescent of green surrounded by a sea that refused to forget me. It was called Hollow Island by the few fishermen who spoke in hushed tones of its appetite for travelers, and I believed them only when the trees began to whisper back.
I set to surviving the way any castaway would: shelter first, then water, then a plan to leave. I found a hollow between two lava-black boulders and dragged driftwood into a rough lean-to. A rain-soaked coconut collected into a makeshift rain barrel, while a trench carved into the sand caught each incoming wave and sent it away through a tangle of roots. The island supplied what it could—salt spray on my lips, shade when the sun beat down like a hammer, and meatless evenings that tasted of pine and brine.
“You are not alone,” the wind seemed to murmur one night, but the voices did not come from the wind at all.
Night on Hollow Island is a lesson in listening. The whispers began as a soft chorus of voices that sounded like distant memories—my mother’s lullaby, a forgotten friend’s laughter, a child’s squeal I refused to believe I’d ever heard. They came not from the air but from the trees themselves, curling through the branches as if the trunks were throat, lips, and breath. I learned to tell the difference between the rustle of a palm leaf and the cadence of a voice that found my name in the same breath I took to exhale.
- Collect fresh rainwater in a carved shell and keep it away from the shoreline’s salt sting.
- Build a fire in a dry hollow beneath the oldest tree, protected from the night wind that sounds like invisible fingers.
- Map the whispers: note which direction they come from and how they change with the tides.
On the fourth morning, I found a clay tablet half-buried near the shoreline, weathered by salt and time. The runes told a warning I had misread at first: listen to the hollow, but do not become it. The letters seemed to tremble as I traced them with a damp finger, and suddenly the island’s pulse quickened—a heartbeat under the sand, a rhythm that matched my own if I pressed my ear to the ground long enough.
By the fifth dawn, the whispering had a face, or at least the impression of one: a hollowed grin carved into the stone of a cliff, a door that did not lead outward but inward, toward a core where the island kept its victims until they became part of its memory. The decision loomed as heavy as the rainclouds. I could stay and listen, or I could try to leave the way I came, trusting the sea to return me to a world that might forget me—or, worse, remember me too well.
When I finally spoke to the island as one might speak to a patient predator, the whispers answered in a chorus that felt like a surrender and a dare. The hollow beat within my chest, a quiet and intimate reminder that some places do not keep travelers safe—they keep memories alive. And as the last ember dimmed, I understood the truth I had tried not to admit: the island didn’t imprison me to teach fear; it invited me to become a part of its perpetual rumor.