KEEP PLANNING – Perry Ruhland

When we awoke on our own tiny islands, we were made to understand we could not leave. The islands were uniform, each nearly five meters in diameter, each with a pole in its center. The poles were black iron and filigreed. They stretched towards the night and bloomed into jewels: translucent, upturned pyramids illuminated from within. Their light revealed the circles of cracked asphalt. Beyond their borders stood a sea of dark. The islands were all lined up in a row, each spaced perhaps twenty meters apart, shore-to-shore. On my neighboring isles I could see with some distinction the particulars of my fellow castaways: a slender, sharp-nosed woman and a barrel-shaped man with large arms. The light sent glimmers through the woman’s hair and set the man’s scalp aglow. On the islands neighboring theirs I saw the vaguest impressions of figures; on the islands beyond those, only dark shapes. All were dressed in the same gray smocks and slippers. My smock fit poorly, a weak defense against the cold night’s winds. The chills kept me in my body: my back ached, my stomach was bruised, I was starving. I’d last eaten at the office, some hours before my last memory. And how many days had it been since then? It’s doubtful we were fed before being piled unconscious in the vans, after we were stripped and draped in smocks and slippers. Did they intend to feed us? Maybe in the morning. But morning would not come soon. For a castaway, time is not passed, but burned. Every dead moment is by default occupied by awareness of his predicament. At first I looked for interest in my neighbors, the woman whose smock drooped from her shoulders and the man whose garment clung tight to his chest and arms. I tried to imagine them outside the island: the woman in a brown suit with glasses, a book or folder under her arm. Was she a lawyer, a professor? Her back arched in a way that presupposed a podium. The man was a butcher. Sometimes he and she looked at me too, perhaps imagining who I once was, and in brief moments we shared what I believe was eye contact. We did not dare smile, let alone wave. Inevitably, an inward turn. From the particulars of my island’s surface, I developed a private game, one wherein I crawled across the surface on hands and knees, looking for gashes or cracks in the asphalt. Once found, I would run a finger along their surface, and through the shape discover a natural form, the seahorse’s arch or the hummingbird’s wing. The professor -- that was it, surely -- crouched near her island’s shore and watched the sky. It was purple and black; no clouds, stars, or moon, but a few satellites twinkling gold or red above the horizon. Meanwhile the butcher sat cross-legged before his pole and stared at its jewel. Staring at my own revealed swarms of color hidden in its surface, neon hues lilting and spreading across vision and growing even as my eyes ached; persisting as I kept staring still. Occasionally, far down the island chain, a great series of flashes would erupt and in their wake bring rumblings like splintered thunder. Everyone jumped. Then the silence returned, and the private games began anew. Surely we all knew what the light and sounds were. Still, I saw the inhabitant of the island beyond the butcher’s break out sprinting into the dark. He made it two, maybe three paces from his island before the lights flashed and boomed; he fell back into his light with a ruined smock and head. He lay there for a moment, then the jewel on his pole went out and he was gone in the dark. The butcher knelt with his head against his pole and covered his ears. The professor looked past him into the negative space where the body lay. I looked at her. Momentarily, our eyes met; out of mutual fear, we turned away. My shapes were dead, evoking nothing as I traced them anyways with trembling hands. I don’t think I was in shock; the hunger spread from my stomach to my skull, it took the reins of my nerves. If only there were ants on the ground, a fat moth batting against the light. Perhaps, I prayed, at any moment dawn would break and our meals would arrive. But even after all this time, the satellites had scarcely moved in the sky. I imagined the machines drifting in orbit, the mass of information vibrating through their antennae while their glassy eyes looked down to Earth. Through visions of steel hulls and hard triangles of light glinting off solar arrays, something new emerged. Red and green dots flickered out from the scattering of satellites and arced overhead. The professor and I watched the lights take shape into a commercial airliner. I needed to scream for help, and the plane passed by, vanishing on the far horizon. For the last time, I saw the professor’s face. With a straight back and raised head, she stepped to the edge of her island, and stepped once more to her death. In the flashes of light afforded by gunfire, I saw a few of the many placed parallel to our islands: young men with rifles, soft faces devoid of hate. Pieces of the professor’s head launched back onto her island. Her light went out and the butcher wailed to silence. We would not be fed in the morning, or ever. *** Perry Ruhland is a writer based in Chicago. His writing has previously been published in Baffling Magazine, Vastarien Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, and ergot.press. 03 May 2025