Plastic Girl

Day 2,374

Day 2,374

EVA SAT UPRIGHT ON a wooden cot, chest heaving in one of her now chronic and violent coughing fits. Abel, a tiny green flat plastic worm, Eva’s constant companion since they met, nuzzled her ear. The fits were the worst at night. Eva hadn’t wanted her sister, Iris, to realize just how bad they had gotten, and had been able to hide their severity until three days ago. Three days ago, Eva had celebrated turning 16 by jumping into the lake for the first time. Three days ago, she had experienced a moment where she was not completely terrified of her world for the first time. Three days ago, everything changed when her boat went missing, leaving her stranded on this island with hardly any food or water. Before then, she had always spent her evenings on the mainland in her cabin while Iris stayed out here on the island. Three days ago, she had still been in control of her life. But, now...

Eva stared down at her blood splattered hands. She grabbed a purple handkerchief from her bag on the floor and wiped her face and hands. The coughing subsided, and she flopped back onto the sleeping pad, exhausted, tugging her red quilt up around her chin and adjusting her pillow. She had brought these camping items out to the island in case of an emergency, in case there was a storm and she couldn’t get back to the mainland for the night. She never thought she would have to use them, but now watching the sun set on her third night stranded on the island as the wind blasted sand and debris across the shore, Eva feared she would never return home.

From her second story window, Eva could peer over the beach and the lake, and just make out the dark outline of the mainland. Iris and the others worked on the beach tonight like every night, constructing several new creatures—moles, fish, dragonflies, squirrels, and bees, lots of bees.

Eva’s plastic sister and the other five plastic people they had built together never ate, never stopped moving and working, never slept. They were seemingly immortal, born with the ability to bring forth life, demigods. Eva had created the first creatures and then Iris, her sister. Together, they created the others. Eva wondered if that made her a god. She sure didn’t feel like one, definitely not immortal, just connected to this strange miracle somehow. The people born of plastic rarely came inside the house they had built unless the wind threatened to blow them off the island across the lake. Their perpetual activity hadn’t felt so strange when Eva only spent a third of her time with them, but now, their wakefulness terrified her, made her long for her cabin and the comfort of her couch.

CREAK.

Eva froze in her bed as someone opened her door. She closed her eyes.

Thud. Thud.

Clumsy footsteps crept further into her room from the hallway. She could feel someone staring at her. Her throat tickled.

Don’t cough, not now, not now, please.

It was Cain. Eva knew it before she even opened her eyes. No one else would come up to her room except for Iris, and she would knock. She opened her eyes, and through the large window visible from her cot, Eva spotted Iris at the shore, looking out across the water. Definitely Cain at her back then. Eva felt the anger boil up as the phlegm rose in her throat. He was constantly watching her, leering at her. She hated him. Just as she moved to scream at Cain, her voice sucked back into her throat, replaced by a rattling hacking. Her whole body shuddered and shook. Tears stung her cheeks. She barely heard the footsteps retreat and the door closing quietly behind them.

As her coughing subsided, Eva rose from her bed and wrapped the quilt around her shivering body. It was still too cold at night for her out on the island. Eva padded across the room to the window to peer out at the others. Dee, a tall, slim woman with brown hair stood next to Iris, a few feet taller; both concentrated on building a half-formed wild pig. Iris was still a child, and it seemed she would remain one. She hadn’t grown or changed in the couple years they had been creating together. Iris had insisted on making the rest adults. Eva wished she had considered that Iris might never grow up to become an adult like the others. She hadn’t meant to make her unnatural, she had just always wanted a little sister more than anything, and now, it seemed, she would have one forever.

Iris had then made Cain without Eva’s help, and, to Eva, he had come out strange, different than the rest that came after him; he fixated more on the external than the internal, preferring to create inanimate objects rather than animate objects. Eva had never felt comfortable around him because of that difference but more because Iris had built him without her; his existence was an immediate wedge between the sisters. After him, the girls had agreed to only make people as a team. Dee was the next person born of plastic after Cain and the first one the girls made together. Dee sprang to life with a strong passion for the island’s flora and fauna, and from her first day, she focused primarily on creating creatures that lived in and nurtured the wooded areas. Hundreds of the plastic worms, the building blocks of life on the island, floated in the air around Iris and Dee, diving toward the partial pig, adhering together to slowly build its snout, and finally melding into this new being. As Eva watched them work, the familiar sting of jealousy hit her hard.

Eva fretted that Iris trusted the others more, because, unlike her, the others were made of the same stuff. They were neither human nor damaged. She had created Iris to be her sister, but she couldn’t force her to love her above the others.

Eva watched as the final plastic worms absorbed into the pig’s snout and its little hooves came to life on the moonlit sand, awkwardly kicking and stepping into the mushy sand. The plastic sheen muted completely, and its haunches were living flesh and muscle. Its brown hair blew in the wind as the creature snorted snot out of its nose. This part of the process was truly magical and completely unknown – this singular moment when the plastic creatures took on every bit of the animal they were designed to be and took their first breath as something real and living. Eva had been surprised last fall when the bear had swatted at a bluegill, accidently slicing its belly open. The poor fish had bled a bluish fluid while flopping helplessly on the rocks. Where the body had torn open, its flesh rapidly unraveled like rows of a knitted sock, plastic worms falling like dropped stitches. Eva’s nimble and skilled fingers were able to quickly use the plastic worms to mend the wound. With some difficulty, she patched the fish back together, almost good as new, leaving her wondering if it was the same fish that woke up after her efforts or if she had brought a slightly different fish back to life.

Iris glanced up toward the window and locked eyes with Eva. She smiled and waved at her. Eva waved back. Cain walked across the beach, joining the others, and peered up at Eva’s window. She glared at him and shifted her attention to the woods. He wouldn’t scare her away. This was her island. She had started this new world and she would be part of it, no matter how hard he tried to push her out.

In the dark, the island’s trees took on the appearance of twisted, wicked warriors brandishing broken branches as weapons of war as the wind whispered war chants through them. Eva still feared those woods at night, almost as much as she feared the wasting, the disease, that had taken both her parents and almost everyone else on the planet except for a few remaining children like her. The wasting hunted the remaining children relentlessly, allowing only a few to survive into their twenties. If she couldn’t find her boat soon, she was unlikely to endure the final stages of the wasting but would rather suffer a slightly more painful death by starvation and dehydration.

As she wiped away a tear, she spotted a faint flickering light dancing through the trees, deep in the forest. She squinted and found the light again, now a few trees over. It darted through the woods, disappearing and reappearing. Quickly, it disappeared behind the cabin, out of Eva’s sight from her window.

Eva, clutching her blanket, flung open her door and ran downstairs, leaping down the last three steps and landing hard in front of the door leading out to the porch. She peered out the window into the forest, searching for the light, but saw only branches swaying sporadically, whipped about by the winds like arms and hands reaching out toward her, then up to the sky and back into the woods. For the next several hours, Eva watched the woods until she could no longer keep her eyes open. The light never returned that night. When Eva finally dragged herself back up the stairs, she worried that delirium from lack of water and food was starting to set in. She didn’t want to lose her mind, her last thoughts on Earth being fever dreams and fairytale fragments.