1
The Wise Woman of Elety was taking her young grandson along on a boat trip to Joramca, the island of flowers. This was the peak season for the rarest blooms. Though she wasn’t sure they would interest him, she thought she’d take a chance. She had told him about the rarest flower, so bright it hurt one’s eyes to look at it, and the blossom so big it dwarfs humans, and the flower that blooms only once every thirty-three years.
They were passing the island of Uami when he asked, “Who lives there?”
“Liars,” she replied. “Uami is the island of liars.”
“What’s a liar Grandma?”
“Someone who doesn’t tell the truth.”
“What is truth Grandma?”
“When something is true, it’s the way things really are in the world.”
“Can we go see the liars?” her grandson asked.
“No, the island is so overcrowded there’s not even standing room. The liars are squeezed so tightly together they can barely breathe but that doesn’t stop them from lying nonstop until their final breaths, so it’s very noisy. They die upright, crushed against each other. The stench is unbearable. Even though there’s no space for any more liars, they continue to arrive, lured by false promises.”
“Oh,” the boy said, as they drew near to the island of Joramca.
2
He must have a death wish, the Wise Woman of Omasa told herself. Why else would her nephew, who was only eighteen, think of going to Tobun, which everyone knew was the island of insects. There were plenty of other ways to impress his girlfriend.
Decades earlier, a violent explosion had decimated Tobun. No one knows exactly what caused it, but the Omasians believe nature was taking its revenge on the Tobunese for polluting the land with waste of all kinds.
Only insects survived and reproduced like never before, but they had mutated. Their wings and antennae, legs and feet were deformed. Abnormal shapes and patterns made them almost unrecognizable. Spider webs were messy and chaotic. But what they all had in common was size. Dragonflies had five-foot wing spreads. Many insects, six feet tall, were dangerous, some deadly, including mosquitoes, hornets, human botflies, bullet ants, bees, scorpions and wasps.
“What are you trying to prove?” the Wise Woman asked him. “No girlfriend is worth dying for.”
Of course, her nephew didn’t listen. He was headstrong, so she decided to use her power to place an invisible wall between him and the shore of Tobun. When he tried to step foot on the island from his boat, he bumped into what felt like a sheet of glass, cool and smooth. Trying to go around it didn’t work. He couldn’t crawl beneath it or climb over it either. Feeling like a failure, he was forced to return to Omasa.
“What can I tell my girlfriend?” he asked the Wise Woman.
“Lie,” she said, amused. “She won’t know the difference. Make up some insects you met. Tell her you killed them with your bare hands.”
“I can’t do that!” he said.
“Why not? It’s better than being eaten alive!”
“It’s wrong!” her nephew said.
“Many things are wrong,” said the Wise Woman. “But some things are more wrong than others. It’s wrong to kill, to cheat, to steal, to torture. What good will come from telling her the truth?”
Her nephew was silent.
~
A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books, including three story collections. The Traveling Woman and Certain People were well received in The New York Times Book Review. Her other books include a novel, a novella-in-flash, a memoir and writing guides. Well over two-hundred stories have appeared in such magazines as Conjunctions. Also, a conceptual artist in the collections of The Met and MoMA, most of her works on paper have been acquired by The Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her writing papers have been acquired by the Fales Archive of NYU.