Exit Kingdom

whatever evil she’s perpetrated her own self, and whatever series of cursed misfortunes brought her down here to this island to beharboured
away from the order of mankind, well, all those things are what put her there that night to stand amid the Daylight Moon and the Miracle of the Fish, which she wouldn’t of got to see
otherwise.
    See, God is a slick god. He makes it so you don’t miss out on nothing you’re supposed to witness firsthand.
    *
    She sleeps in an abandoned lighthouse at the top of a bluff.At the base there’s a circular room with a fireplace where she cooks fish in a blackened iron pot. The first
night she discovered the hatch in the floor that opens into a dank storage room. There she found candles, fishhooks, a first-aid kit and a flare gun with a box of oxidized rounds. She tried one,
but it was dead.
    In the mornings she digs for pignuts in the underbrush and checks hernets for fish. She leaves her sneakers in the lighthouse; she likes the feel of the hot sand on the soles of her feet, the
Florida beach grass between her toes. The palm trees are like bushes in the air, their brittle, dead fronds like a skirt of bones around the tall trunks, rattling in the breeze.
    At noon every day, she climbs the spiral stairs to the top of the signal tower, pausing atthe middle landing to catch her breath and feel the sun on her face from the grimy window. At the top,
she walks the catwalk once around, gazing out over the illimitable sea, and then, towards the mainland coast, the rocky cusp of the blight continent. Sometimes she stops to look at the inverted
hemisphere of the light itself, that blind glass optic, like a cauldron turned on its side and coveredwith a thousand square mirrors.
    She can see her reflection there, clear and multifarious. An army of her.
    Afternoons, she looks through the unrotted magazines she found lining some boxes of kerosene. The words mean nothing to her, but the pictures she likes. They evoke places she has never been
– crowds of the sharply dressed hailing the arrival of someone in a long black car, peoplein white suits reclining on couches in homes where there’s no blood crusted on the walls,
women in undergarments on backdrops of seamless white. Abstract heaven, that white – where could such a white exist? If she had all the white paint left in the world, what would go untouched
by her brush? She closes her eyes and thinks about it.
    It can be cold at night. She keeps the fire going andpulls her army jacket tighter around her torso and listens to the ocean wind whistling loud through the hollow flute of her tall home.
    *
    Miracle, or augury maybe – because the morning after the glowing fish, she finds the body on the beach. She sees it during her morning walk around the island to check the
nets; she finds it on the north point of the teardrop land mass, nearthe shoal.
    At first it is a black shape against the white sand, and she studies it from a distance, measures it with her fingers up to her eye.
    Too small to be a person, unless it’s folded double or half buried. Which it could be.
    She looks around. The wind blowing through the grass above the shore makes a peaceful sound.
    She sits and studies the thing and waits for movement.

    The shoal is bigger today. It keeps getting bigger. When she first came the island seemed like a long way off from the mainland. She swam to it, using an empty red and white cooler to help keep
her afloat in the currents. That was months ago. Since then the island has got bigger, the season pulling the water out further and further every night, drawing the island closer to the mainland.There is a spit of reefy rock extending out from the shore of the mainland and pointing towards the island, and there are large fragments of jutting coral reaching in the other direction from the
island. Like the fingers of God and Adam, and each day they come closer to touching as the water retreats and gets shallower along the shoal.
    But it still seems safe. The breakers on the reef areviolent and thunderous. You wouldn’t be able to get across the shoal without busting yourself to pieces on the rock. Not yet at
least.
    The shape doesn’t move, so she stands and approaches it carefully.
    It’s a man, buried face down in the sand, the tail of his flannel shirt whipping back and forth in the wind. There’s something about the way his legs are arranged, one knee up by thesmall of his back, that tells her his back is broken.