I strike a match. I know where it will end. It begins with sunrise, I guess, on the first day. It was hot, and I didn’t want to be here, and I didn’t like Scotty, and that made everything wrong. The sun was only a distant blister of half-baked light swelling above the eastern horizon, melting the water into the sky so that our boat appeared to be nudging slowly forward into a vast and overwhelming heat, like an oven, or a furnace. Only a little closer was a thin line of sand pines, black against the torrid light, that reared above the narrow spine of dunes that made up Okaloosa Island. Behind me was cool darkness. And giggles. When I heard the sound, my heart sank a little. I could feel it shrivelling and dying. Giggles. ‘Not much of an island, is she?’ the boatman said. His voice barely rose above the gurgling mutter of the Evinrude. He was a shape hunched over the wheel, his head bobbing in the gloom.
