"On The Wind"
"The Postman Cometh" always bothered me because it was just so out-of-character. This started out as just this first scene and then I just kept babbling. Not sure how it ended up, but I hope you get the point I was trying to make. I really shouldn't write when I'm so busy, because it ends up so scatterbrained like this. I should also try to think up stories for everyone else, haha. Oy.
Rage flooded through her, beginning in the tips of her ears and flowing warmly through her body to settle in her brown leather cowboy boots. She stared at the boy's calm face, her mouth hanging open dumbly. He merely crossed his arms, waiting for her to speak, his nonchalance only enraging her more.
She whirled to her female companion, brown tresses smacking her in the face as she turned. The redhead beside her was staring at their friend in disbelief, eyes popping.
The brunette turned back to the boy, breathing heavily, mouth opening and closing wordlessly. She gripped the leather straps in her hand tighter, white knuckles glowing against her tan skin. She was beginning to see spots, whether they were from anger or the hot midwestern sun she wasn't quite sure.
She opened her mouth once more to retort, confusion flickering briefly over her brow before being quickly replaced with anger once again. Finally, with one great gulp of air, she exploded:
"You're a real creep, Horace Higgenbotham!"
"Yeah!" was the best the redhead could come up with for encouragement. The little dog clenched in her arms gave up his fight for freedom for a moment to bark his support.
He shrugged calmly. "I don't think you should go."
"I don't care what you think!"
"Yeah!"
Bark!
Horace sighed and took off his cowboy hat, wiping his forearm across his sweaty brow. He slowly replaced his hat and stared at her with all the patience he could muster. He sighed again and re-crossed his arms across his plaid shirt. "Mary Ann. If we're going to get married, you're going to have to start listening to me."
Mary Ann gasped noisily, her friend stifling a loud "Ew!" in her dog's fur. Mary Ann advanced on him, finger wagging disapprovingly. "Now you listen to me, Higgen–," she started before being abruptly reminded that her other hand was attached to the reigns of a thousand pound beast. Her horse glanced up at her lazily as she snapped back towards him, but made no move to abandon the delicious clump of grass he had found. She dropped the reigns and strode towards Horace again.
"You listen to me, Higgenbotham, and you listen good." She stood too close to him and glared up at his assured face, hands planted firmly on her hips. "I won this free trip to Hawaii fair and square and I'm going to take advantage of it. Neither one of us has ever been outside the county lines. Don't you want to see what's out there?"
"No. Mary Ann, I just want –."
"Don't touch me!" She pushed away his hands, which he had laid on her arms. "You can't tell me what to do; it's my life. I'm going to Hawaii, Horace!"
He was quiet for a long time and, in her outrage, Mary Ann missed the flicker of heartbreak that settled on his rugged features for the briefest moment. "But I don't want you to go. We're gonna get married. I have my own land now; it just makes sense. Your uncle and I already worked it out!"
Mary Ann gasped again and faintly heard her friend mutter an "uh oh" from behind her. Mary Ann closed her eyes for a moment and took a strengthening breath. When her gaze settled on him again, Horace instinctively took a small step backwards. She no longer looked angry, just determined and even downright scary.
She stepped forward and squinted up at him. When she finally spoke, her voice was eerily calm and he shuddered. "I would never marry someone who doesn't respect me enough to not go behind my back. Goodbye, Horace."
She turned on her heel and strode back to her horse, pulling the reigns over his head and grabbing the saddle to pull herself up.
"Don't go, Mary Ann. You won't come back."
She froze, one boot wedged into the stirrup, eyes unfocused on the horse's soft brown coat. She finally shook her head and hoisted herself into the saddle. "Come on, Dorothy."
Her friend took Mary Ann's outstretched arm and stepped into the stirrup. She slid up behind the saddle and clutched her dog in one arm, hooking the other around Mary Ann's torso.
Mary Ann tugged on the reigns and her horse grunted in annoyance at being pulled from his lunch. "I'll send you a postcard, Horace," she tossed sympathetically over her shoulder.
Horace scoffed as she turned the horse back towards the barn. "Don't fall in love with any sailors while you're there!"
"Maybe I will!" With that, Mary Ann kicked her horse into a gallop and disappeared.
"Mary Ann? Mary Ann!" She flinched and the image of Horace shrinking into the tall prairie grass was replaced with the image of Gilligan emerging from the tall tropical foliage.
"Hi, Gilligan." She busied herself with tearing the pieces of paper in her hands into even tinier pieces as he approached the table with a clear glass bottle.
"I found another one of your letters to ... well, you-know-who. That storm last night washed a whole mess of them back up into the lagoon."
"Thanks, Gilligan." She didn't look up and he stood awkwardly beside the table for a moment before plopping down on the bench opposite her.
Gilligan struggled to remove the cork from the bottle, brow furrowing and tongue poking out the side of his mouth. "Are you okay?" he asked as the bottle released the cork with a satisfying pop and it flew across the clearing. Gilligan watched it go with mild interest as he fished the letter from the bottle.
"No!" Mary Ann's hand clamped around the roll of paper and his head snapped up, eyes wide. "I mean, no, I'm fine. I'll do that." She took the letter from his limp fingers and began furiously adding it to the pile of confetti on the table.
"I wasn't gonna read it," he finally whispered.
"Oh." Mary Ann looked up at him for the first time. He lowered his eyes to the table under her gaze and she frowned. "I know, Gilligan. I'm sorry. It's just so embarrassing; I'd rather do this myself."
"Okay." Gilligan laid the bottle down and watched the light reflect through the glass at odd angles as he rolled it across the woven tabletop. "But, I mean, what does someone write in a letter to someone they don't even like anyway?"
Mary Ann continued to work in silence and Gilligan was sure she was ignoring his prying question. She finished tearing up the letter and laid her palms on the bench, leaning back slightly and staring off into the trees. The gentle drone of the glass bottle rolling across the tabletop echoed through the unusually quiet jungle. "I was so mean to him."
Gilligan looked up and clamped his hand over the rolling bottle. In his mind, this confession was equivalent to the Easter Bunny admitting to manslaughter. "No, you weren't."
"I was. The first letter I wrote was an apology to Horace. The others were like my diary, about life here on the island, you, the others, everything we've experienced. I thought maybe someone would find them and realize we were still alive. I just told you they were all to him after Ginger started her three week lecture series about her hundreds of boyfriends."
"But you said he was a creep."
"Oh, he was!" Mary Ann turned from studying the jungle and nodded vigorously. "But that's no excuse for being so mean. The day before I left for Hawaii, we had a terrible fight. He wanted to get married."
Gilligan opened his mouth to reply, but stopped, brow furrowing in confusion. A guy wanting to marry Mary Ann didn't sound the least bit creepy. In fact, it sounded pretty logical. "That sounds nice," he replied quietly, suddenly finding the bottle very interesting again.
"Oh, I could never marry Horace. He's not the man I'm supposed to end up with." Mary Ann proceeded to arrange the paper scraps into a painstakingly neat pile. "He was so old fashioned. And he just never said quite the right thing."
"It's hard for me to figure out what to say to you most of the time, too." Gilligan froze, then resumed playing with the bottle more intently than before, hoping that if he pretended he didn't say anything, she wouldn't notice either. Gilligan finally peered up cautiously from under his hat. He saw her smiling warmly at him and dropped his head again.
Mary Ann studied the top of his white hat and shrugged. "Well, he's married now. I guess that means he's happy, so I'm happy for him. Besides, if Horace Higgenbotham can find someone to love him, then I guess there's hope for all of us."
Gilligan glanced up and matched her smile across the table. "Yeah, I guess so."
He watched as Mary Ann leaned her chin on her palm and began absently poking through the mountain of paper snow before her. "He told me I wouldn't come back."
Gilligan's smile slid off his face and his eyes widened. "What?"
"Horace said if I left, I wouldn't come back. How did he know?"
"Maybe he meant that you'd come back different." Gilligan held up the bottle and peered at her distorted image through the curved glass. "I came back from the Navy different. We'll all come back from here different."
"I don't want you to be different."
Gilligan shrugged. "You can't help it, it just happens. The Skipper says that sometimes in life you have to go where the wind takes you, even if you end up off-course. You'll get where you're supposed to go eventually, even if it's not where you thought you were going when you left. You can't fight with it. You have to let it go."
Mary Ann smiled at the lovely sentiment and Gilligan's face suddenly lit up. "Or maybe he's psychic!"
Mary Ann sighed. her face falling. "Oh, Gilligan."
"I have an idea!" he continued enthusiastically. He took off his hat and scooped up the remnants of Mary Ann's letters, stowing them away in his overturned sailor's cap. "Come with me." Gilligan folded up the hat and grabbed her hand, pulling her off the bench and into the jungle.
The two castaways climbed up the steepest hill on the island, well off the main trail. Gilligan obviously knew the path inside out and he pulled Mary Ann up behind him. She clung to his hand as she navigated the exposed tree roots and thick underbrush.
When they finally broke from the jungle onto a small patch of thick grass, Mary Ann gasped. They were on the highest point of the island, standing taller than even the volcano rising ominously behind them. The wind whipped her gingham skirt around her knees as Mary Ann gazed around them. They were enveloped in a blanket of clear azure sky, one lone white feathery cloud suspended a few miles to the east. From here they could see everything – the lagoon and the waterfall, the break in the tree line where their camp was nestled, and the luscious green valley and surrounding highlands on the other side of the island.
Around their feet, the grass grew tall and thick, brushing gently against their legs in the breeze. Vibrant wild flowers sprouted around the small plateau, purples and oranges exploding against the rocks forming the top of the cliff directly in front of them. Thousands of feet below, gentle waves lapped against the sharp rocks.
"Gilligan, it's gorgeous."
He grinned at her. "I knew you'd like it."
"Oh, I do. But why are we here now?"
"Oh, yeah! My idea." Gilligan let go of the hand he forgot he had been holding and unfolded his hat, momentarily proud to see that he had managed to climb all the way up there without losing any of the tiny pieces of paper. "This cliff has the best wind," he explained with a lopsided grin and Mary Ann cocked her head inquisitively.
"I can tell." Mary Ann pushed her unruly hair out of her eyes. "But why do we need wind?"
"Because I propose a toast. To Horace Higgenbotham and Cybil What's-Her-Face. May they have a long and happy marriage just like Mr. and Mrs. Howell." Gilligan turned and addressed Mary Ann seriously. "I don't want you to feel bad about it anymore because I know everything worked out the way it was supposed to. If you guys didn't have a fight and you didn't go to Hawaii, they probably still would've gotten married eventually. But that also means that you wouldn't be on the island with me and I couldn't show you this place."
Mary Ann gave him a smile that turned his insides to jelly and his knees to licorice. He fought the urge to turn bright red and suddenly find the ground the most interesting thing he's ever seen. Instead, he bravely cleared his throat and continued: "I also know that he forgives you for whatever it is you think you did, but probably didn't do anyway."
"Thank you, Gilligan." The part of him that was convinced she would hug him and was bracing for impact was disappointed – and a little relieved – when she dropped her head shyly, glowing faintly crimson behind her swinging pigtails.
"Are you ready?" he asked, holding his hat out to her.
"For what?"
"To let it go."
Mary Ann glanced down at her letters, torn up in his hat, and back up at his face, expectant and pure, and smiled. She nodded and took one side of the hat's brim in both hands, he holding onto the other side.
"One. Two. Three!"
The two young castaways flung their arms into the air, the scraps of paper hanging suspended as they pulled the hat back down. After an instant of floating weightless in the sky, the wind took hold. Mary Ann's words swirled above their heads and then out over the cliff like hundreds of petite white petals, cavorting and churning in a wide spiral.
Gilligan and Mary Ann watched as the tiny scraps surrendered to the wind, flying willingly wherever it took them. Some sprinkled down to grace the rock face below, others floating into the jungle canopy behind them. One final great gust of wind pulled the rest straight out to sea before abruptly calming, the last of Mary Ann's words disappearing into the horizon. The tall grass swayed one last time and stillness fell over the tiny plateau.
Mary Ann silently stretched up to kiss the young sailor on the cheek. He shuffled his feet in the tall grass before turning and starting down the path again, keeping a firm grip on her hand as he guided her carefully down the steep incline back into the jungle.