Alice, or The Wild Girl

Alice sat in the darkness of the cabin, waiting for the door to open. On the island she had not been waiting for anything. She’d walked where she pleased, over sandy shore and through the forest, wandering like an aimless ghost among the trees. She listened to the whistling of birds and spent her days sitting on the shore to regard the unending entertainment of waves that crashed and receded. The cabin possessed few such entertainments. She had felt along every inch of it, mapped every joint in the boards with her fingers. Her days on the island had been divided by the sun and moon, by the brief rains that visited her, by a thousand small features of wind and tide and cloud. Now she was surrounded at all times by the same heavy darkness, the shuffling of boots above and below, incomprehensible voices, the blowing of whistles, and the scratching of rats. She had tried to count the ship’s bell to mark the passage of time, but it did no good. It rang once, and then some while later it rang twice, and then later still it would ring three times . . . it counted up to eight rings and then began its meaningless pattern all over again.