We take time for granted, always assume that it's eternally locked in a steady forward march. That's an illusion. Time stops, and starts again, slows down and speeds up, and sometimes runs altogether backward. It's nothing to us, usually, because our thoughts and lives are bound to time, are within it. We are like words on a page; though the paper may be creased and flipped and folded, the letters keep their order. Now and then, however, the page tears.

I should tell you about myself, so you can picture me and maybe understand more; it'll save me from having to awkwardly describe myself by telling you how I looked in a mirror or something. My name was Holly Black. I was a girl, eighteen years old but looking rather younger, very short and a bit too wide. I lifted weights and was thickly muscled for a girl, but there was some fat on the muscle as well, I'll admit. My skin was white and freckled; my eyes were blue-green; my hair was bottle red, short, and curly in a scraggly way.

My story starts nearly three hundred years after it ends, in the year 2004. I was a film major at Whitman College in Walla Walla, the wheat-and-onion flavored armpit of Washington State. My life was ordinary, boring; procrastinating papers, bitching about the dorm food, trying and mostly failing to shoot goofy little student films. Then, one day, I was in the bathroom, shaving my legs in the sink with shorts on, and then I was underwater in the middle of the ocean. There was no swirling portal, no rush of wind, nothing so theatrical. I was just in once place, and then in another.

The sting of the seawater made my eyes and mouth shut reflexively, but it took me a moment to realise that I was drowning. The razor was still in my hand, and I dropped it as I kicked in a direction I hoped was upward. Part of the sink and floor must have come with me as well, because I brushed against something smooth and hard sinking in the water around me.

The swim was taking too long. My ears were in agony from the pressure and I didn't even know if I was even heading toward the surface. I opened my eyes, but it was all a blur and the salt in the water burned. Eventually I had no strength left. I had to take a breath. I was awake enough to know that breathing was suicide, but my body wasn't. Against my will, I gasped, and my lungs filled painfully with water. Just then, my fingertips broke the surface.

I coughed up water, not all of it, but enough to get some air into myself. Enough to live. Treading water, I wiped my eyes, coughed some more, and looked around. I was in the middle of the ocean. And I mean the middle. There was the water in gentle waves, and a bright blue sky, and that was all. With no sign of land or a boat, I could do nothing. So I did.

I floated on my back, legs sunk underwater, keeping afloat with as little effort as possible. Sometimes I thought of sharks, and imagined I felt the sweep of great tails beneath me, the brush of rough scales against my exposed legs. I screamed sometimes, and cried in fear of death, but soon I had neither voice nor tears. My throat burned with thirst.

Night fell. I didn't sleep, but floated in the darkness, so I saw the moment when dawn broke. And it was a beautiful dawn indeed, because when the first soft gray light crept round the horizon it revealed a dark shadow in the distance. I had drifted during the night, drifted within reach of hope. The currents were still carrying me toward the shadow, and I swam along with them.

By the time the day was fully light, the shadow had become an island, tall and rocky. I kept swimming, a slow breaststroke that I hoped wouldn't worsen my thirst too badly. And finally, when the sun was high in the sky, I reached the island. Ridiculously, after all that, I couldn't get on the island. It was all black cliffs that dropped straight down into the water, with no way to climb up. There were a few little ledges in the walls that I could have stood on, but nothing even big enough to sit down.

Terrified that I had gotten my hopes up for nothing, I started swimming around the island. For a long time, there was nothing but the same useless vertical cliff. Then I came to a channel leading not onto, but into the island, into a cave. I could see sharks beneath me as I swam down the channel, but they didn't harass me and, after two days in the sun without food or water, I was beyond caring.

The current washed me up inside the cave, and for the first time in two days I was able to stand up on dry land. Except that I couldn't actually stand; I tried, and thirst and exhaustion made my skin tingle and my vision go blurry. I fell to my knees to keep from fainting. Moving like a lizard on a cold night, slow and low to the ground, I crawled deeper into the cave.

It was full of treasure. There was a huge cavern with heaps of gold and silver, pearls and gems, coins and jewelry. And I didn't give a shit about any of it. But hidden in the mess of useless shiny things was some real treasure. Fresh water.

There were holes in the roof of the cavern, and beneath them, in the hollows of the treasure, were puddles of rainwater. It was foul; it was brackish; there were bugs and algae in it; it was nectar from fucking Heaven. I drank, and slept, and drank again, and slept slightly more, and when I awoke I was lucid.

Reasonably comfortable, no longer in danger of immediate death, I had time to take stock. What did I have? My clothing, though not much of it--I was wearing a baggy blue t-shirt and denim shorts, damp and saturated with salt. In my pocket, my dorm keys and my college ID card. A big stone chest in the middle of the cave, but with a lid too heavy to lift. Mounds of precious metals, fat lot of good they did me. It might have a little use; I could use it to build cisterns under the holes in case it rained again, or maybe make a hook or a spear for catching fish. Funny to think that just the night before I'd skipped dinner because I didn't want to eat fishsticks.

Inevitably, as I sat listlessly in a throne of gold, my mind drifted to the things I didn't have. Food. Enough fresh water for more than three or four more days. A way to call for help. Shoes. Something to do besides wait to die. A clue where I was or how I got there. My mommy.

I'll spare you the description of how I cried and prayed and threw rages and considered suicide and cried again. Just rest assured that I did, and at length. But eventually I came to my senses and realised that self-pity wouldn't fill my stomach. I calmed myself and tried to find food. Fishing proved impossible--I didn't have bait for a hook, and the fish were too small and too quick to spear. I did manage to catch two little rock crabs, and they were delicious, though hardly filling. Night fell again after what seemed like an impossibly short time, and I slept.

I awoke to the sound of splashing out in the channel to the cave. Could there be someone there? I jumped to my feet and ran out, screaming, "Help! In here! Help me! Help!"

There was a boat coming in, a large rowboat full of people. Heart melting with relief, I ran out into the water, wading out to meet the boat rather than wait for it.

A man on the boat saw me and yelled back, in English, which was a blessing since I don't speak anything else, "Who are you and how the blazes did ye get here?" He had a thick accent that might have been Scottish. His accent wasn't my main concern at the time, though.

"My name's Holly, and I don't know why I'm here. I'm stranded, I've been here for days, please God help me!"

The men on the boat talked amongst themselves for a moment, then the man yelled to me again. "Swear on your mother's soul that you're alone and mean us no harm."

That was a bit of an odd request, at least the "mother's soul" part, but I was in no position to argue. It was true, anyway. "I swear."

"Walk out until you're up to your neck and turn your back to us."

I did, putting my hands up on the back of my head for good measure. Strong hands grabbed me under my armpits and hauled me up into the boat. I heard one of the men mutter under his breath, "Lord, she's near to naked."

Sitting up and turning to face them, I looked around. The men were dressed in strange, dirty clothing that looked oddly old-fashioned. Their teeth were bad, and their body odor was locker-room thick and a good bit slimier. Their hair was long and greasy, on the ones who had any. I didn't care about any of that. I just slumped down against the side of the boat and started thanking them profusely.

"My God, I'm so glad you got here. You've honestly saved my life. I don't know how I can thank you enough. I thought I was going to die in there, and now... thank you so much, I'm more grateful than I can tell you." I was only babbling a little.

The man who'd yelled to me before came forward and lay a hand on my shoulder, kindly. He had graying hair and a beard that seemed to be thicker on the sides than in the middle, on a round face that seemed almost jolly, though his expression was stern. "What happened to you, lass?" he asked.

"I really don't know," I said. "I just suddenly was in the water and I don't know how I got there." I told him how I'd floated around and found the island.

"And you don't remember anything before that?" one of the other men joined in and asked, a bit suspiciously.

I shook my head. "I remember being at home, and then I was here. If there was anything in between, I don't know."

"Where's home to you, lass?"

"Washington. Er, Washington State. Walla Walla, if you've heard of it. Where am I now?"

I was greeted with a boatful of blank looks. The Scottish man shrugged, and said, "You're on the Isla de Muerta. Where's Washington State?"

I answered him with a blank look of my own. "In the States, the US. The northwest corner. Where exactly is the Isla de Muerta?"

"In the Caribbean, I shouldn't be telling ye more than that." he said. "You're truly not from these parts, are ye? What States are you speaking of?"

I just shook my head, then asked the question I should have asked much more quickly. "What year is this?"

The men were very kind to me. They took me out of the cavern, and up to a ship. And what a ship. It seemed big enough to be its own island, with a forest of masts and rigging rising from the deck, and the whole thing painted an eerie black. As the sailors hauled the dinghy up to the ship and helped me onto the deck, I was still wrapping my head around one thing. It was 1726.

The Scottish man--he had told me his name was Gibbs--took me down below deck, into a chamber with a barred cell. "I'm sorry, lass," he said, "we're not taking you prisoner, but I can't let you have run of the ship until the captain's allowed it."

"I understand," I said as he shut me into the cell. It was mostly true. They didn't know me and I probably seemed insane, but they had saved my life anyway. I couldn't hold it against them if they were a little cautious. "Can I have some food and water, please?"

He nodded. "Aye."

Not long after, he returned with a canteen full of water, a good-sized hunk of bread, some meaty-looking stuff, and the captain. The captain was thin and somehow stranger than the other sailors, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, long beaded dreadlocks, and a sway in his stance. He wasn't at all what I expected a ship captain to look like. He just didn't seem dangerous. I'd always thought ship captains in those days were men to be reckoned with; men who could order you whipped until your bones were lashed bare, or simply work you until scurvy and the roughness of ship life accomplished the same thing. I had not expected a goofy-looking, cute, harmless sort of guy. I took the food and water from Gibbs and took a gulp of the water before extending my hand out to the captain.

He looked slightly surprised, but shook my hand. "Captain Jack Sparrow, pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Holly Black."

He waved Gibbs away and settled down in front of the cell to talk. "Miss Black, you're putting me in a bit of a situation here. Let me explain: this ship, the Black Pearl, is a pirate vessel."

I jumped a little at that, but composed myself. It wasn't so bad, really. I mean, they hadn't tried to rape me yet. Maybe they weren't that sort of pirates. I didn't know there was any other sort, actually, but I didn't know all that much about pirates anyway. Couldn't hurt to be polite no matter what sort they were, so I nodded and let him go on.

"You've done no harm to us, Miss Black. And we'll return the favor, savvy? But I still can't have you running around loose on me ship. So you'll just spend a few days relaxing down here until we reach a suitable port, and then you can be on your merry way. All right?"

It wasn't really a question, but I answered anyway. "All right."

"Good then. I'll see what we can do about finding you some clothes," he said, chuckling, and left.

I was getting the impression that these people really weren't used to seeing a woman in shorts. But whatever. I could worry about fashion later. Right now, I just wanted to stuff my face with food. Glorious food.