Over and over through the long hot days, the sun bearing down on the island so hard it seemed vengeful, Thora wished she had been less pretentious and more practical. The hand crank phonograph, for example. What had possessed her? She had always said that Billie Holiday was her desert island singer, that only Billie would be able to sing the loneliness of a life deprived of civilization. But Billie Holiday’s throaty, meandering notes were all wrong here. What Thora wanted was dance music, something upbeat she could leap around to, anything to buoy her spirits. But what she wished for more than livelier music was a canvas tarp. Some rope. A pair of sunglasses or a bottle of aloe vera to rub over her burns. The book, too, made her feel deeply ashamed every time she looked at it. Yes, she had read War and Peace in college and genuinely loved it. She’d loved it for its humanity, how the characters became so real to her she found herself wondering about them in odd moments, as if they were leading lives somewhere off the page. But more than that, she loved hauling it out of an enormous purse on the train or in coffee shops and relishing its impracticality, its iconicity, the power and mystery of being someone who reads big books.
Here War and Peace was useless. Less than useless. She had tried reading it aloud to the others, and they had walked away to make their video diaries. She had tried reading it silently, but the heat seemed to spoil her mind like the brown, oozing fruit she kicked aside to clear a sleeping space at night. Lying in the violent sunlight, she could only close her eyes and rest the heavy book on her chest. She woke with a huge pale square over her breasts where the book had been, and the rest of her skin the vivid pink of raw hamburger.
The others hadn’t been much smarter. Jan had a rain jacket that was now part of his shakily constructed shelter. And Chrissie had thought to bring a huge stock of matches. Amber’s Egyptian cotton hand towels had been surprisingly useful. Oren didn’t want to share his suitcase full of thick wool socks, but had been forced to sacrifice two pairs already to use as bandages.
Thora was the keeper of the hunting knife. It was the only useful thing she’d brought.
When the phone call came that she’d been selected to join the “cast” of Deserted, she’d dropped her phone and screamed into her palms. It was finally happening– she was actually sailing toward the life she dreamed of, a life of full of “yes,” her face on television, and the chance to show a little bit of herself before millions of riveted viewers. Next to the narcissists and masochists who usually populated these sort of shows, Thora’s level headedness and intellect would surely stand out. This show was intimate. It asked participants to bare their greatest loves, the objects they treasured most. Thora refused to survey her friends and family for advice. “I’ll need music,” she’d said to everyone who asked. “I’ll need a book. My mind will need sustenance as much as my body.”
The producers had urged her to select items that would “showcase her truest self.”
“Make bold choices,” they said. “Viewers will want to know the real Thora. Don’t be afraid to show her off.”
Thora showed up to the airport in a vintage shirtdress. This was to be her outfit for the next six weeks, or until she was booted off and sent to the losers’ hotel. The cameras were waiting, swooping around her as she checked her bag, drawing her into an empty lounge for an interview.
“Are you nervous?” they asked.
She used full, declarative sentences without prompting.
“I’m nervous,” she said, light bounding from the silver reflector onto her face. She lifted her arms away from her sides so they wouldn’t flatten and look large. “But I’m mostly exhilarated. I want to show everyone I can win.”
Winning meant accomplishing a series of survival games, but it also meant being liked by the audience. Viewers at home could give you “manna points” by voting for your video diaries, which boosted your overall score for the day and helped keep you in the game. In her first video diary, she smiled into the camera and spoke of her drive to win. She tried to sound determined, but unthreatening, a dog chasing something you didn’t want in your yard anyway. She wore a bikini top and held War and Peace in her lap. The audience was unimpressed.
In her highest scoring video diary, Thora cried. She was hungry and hot. She’d torn off the sleeves of her shirtdress and used the fabric to tie up her hair and bandage her ankle. She thought of her reflection in the camera’s black eye, of her college friends making fun of her as they watched from soft couches, freshly showered, cold beers in hand. She’d thought of her mother, dead, unable to stop her from entering into something so stupid, of her father forgetting each week to watch. She’d wept hiccupy, ugly, genuine tears. She won that week.
It was not a challenge day. This was what viewers at home never saw, the long empty hours, the sun creeping up and across the sky, whole days wasted. Oren was knitting something long and shapeless in the shade. Chrissie and Jan were playing a game they’d made up that involved exchanging shells and sent them into fits of laughter. They tried to explain it to the others, but no one else could understand the rules, which seemed arbitrary and inconsistent. Thora thought it was a ploy to be alone together.
Amber sat next to Thora.
“Like Tolstoy’s families, in their own way. Second letter ‘n,’” she said.
“Unhappy,” Thora said. Amber wrote it in her crossword book.
“Thanks,” she said. “I knew you’d know that one.”
“What do you think the losers are doing right now?”
“Watching TV. Drinking mimosas.” Amber lay back on the sand and closed her eyes. “The fuckers.”
Thora envied Amber’s deep brown skin that didn’t take on the flaming hue that Thora’s had adopted in the sun.
“Maybe I should lose tomorrow,” Thora said.
“You can always try. But I’m betting Oren’s going to go.”
“You don’t secretly want to lose?”
“Hell no. Five hundred thousand is a lot of money.”
“What will you do if you win?”
“Buy a house. You?”
Thora kicked at a rotting piece of fruit. She sunk her toe inside just to feel what it would be like. It was soggy and warm, like someone’s mouth.
“I don’t know. Rent a better apartment. Buy better clothes.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.” When the producers had asked her the same question on camera, she said she’d go back for her master’s degree, but she didn’t really want that. What she wanted was an apartment where she couldn’t hear the pipes clanking in the walls or the upstairs neighbors having sex. She wanted beautiful, impractical shoes and enough money for a car service when her feet began to ache. She wanted a boyfriend who was a graphic designer or maybe a photographer who took her to art openings and loved cunnilingus. A life that felt special.
Thora left Amber and plonked herself at the video diary tree.
“I want a win,” she said into the camera. “I want to trounce them all.” She scratched her arms, plagued with mosquito bites. She wiped blood on her dress in rusty streaks. “I’m ready.”
On challenge days, Charlie, the show’s host, arrived on the island by boat with his makeup and hair teams and a slew of producers and camera operators. Early in the competition, he had invited a couple of the women contestants to the boat. Rumor was that in exchange for blow jobs, he let them eat from the craft services buffet and sit in air conditioning. But as everyone became dirtier, as they began to permanently stink of mud and sweat and the stringy crab meat they scooped from shells with their fingers, he spent as little time as possible interacting with them.
Thora had never been asked aboard the boat, and she sometimes wondered what she would do for a few moments in a real chair in a cold room, for a doughnut or a BLT, for drinking water that was ice cold. But when she imagined kneeling before Charlie with his spray tan and smug smiles and his tinny, false laughter, she always pictured herself biting down hard on his soft, breaking flesh.
Today, Thora and the other contestants lined up for medical checks, then were herded to the beach. The production assistants set up a tent for some shade and told them to wait while they prepared the island.
“It’s a food challenge,” Chrissie said. “I saw them unloading the boxes.”
“Oh Christ.” Oren groaned. “I’m so fucking hungry.”
The rest of them glared.
“Sorry, sorry.” He drew whorls in the sand with his finger. “It just came out.”
Early they had learned that complaining about hunger would only make it worse. It was one of the rules they’d established, along with no discussion of bodily functions, which seemed to cross a blurry boundary they were all unwilling to approach.
The producers took them one by one for interviews.
“How are you feeling this week?” they asked. “Who do you think is your biggest competition? Do you think Chrissie and Jan are having sex? Do you think Oren is getting annoying? Can you state that in a full sentence?”
Thora swept her hair back and tried to smile. She told them Amber was her biggest competition. She told them Chrissie and Jan were getting pretty close and made an insinuating face. She told them Oren was starting to get on her nerves. She told them she was still reading War and Peace, even though it was mildewed and crinkly and forgotten on top of the shards of her Billie Holiday record that she’d stepped on by accident leaving her shelter to pee during the night.
After a long wait, they gathered the contestants to hear their challenge. The wardrobe manager knelt and rolled Charlie’s pant cuffs so they didn’t drag in the sand. His teeth shone. Thora ran her tongue over her own teeth, gritty and sour tasting.
“Congratulations, contestants. You’ve made it a long way,” Charlie said when they began to roll the cameras. “You’ve proved you’re hungry to win. But I bet you’re also just plain hungry.”
They laughed obligingly and nodded. Through the cameras, Thora could feel an audience of thousands sitting before their televisions, slack and half-distracted by their phones. In a few months, when the episode aired, she could be one of those people.
“For this challenge, we’ve stashed food all over the island. Whatever you find, you need to prepare in a meal using only your personal items. I, along with a special guest, will be judging each contestant’s meal. The best dish will get an all-you-can-eat buffet tonight.” Charlie gestured at a table that earlier had been covered with a white cloth. The production assistants had stripped away the cloth to reveal a feast– a whole roast chicken and thin slices of rare beef; a side of smoked salmon, pink and flaking; gold coins of potatoes; buttery green beans in neat lines; towering piles of strawberries and grapes; thick slices of chocolate cake; squares of blueberry crumble, purple sugar dripping from the sides.
The ferocious lust Thora felt was more intense than anything she’d ever felt for a man. Her body yearned for that food in a way that she could not control; she was shaky, sweating, furious. Oren made a low moaning sound, then covered his mouth. Chrissie had started to cry.
Charlie beamed at them.
“You have two hours. Go!”
Everyone dashed back to their possessions, scrambling for scraps of fabric to use as bags, anything sharp to cut away the thick vegetation as they scoured the ground. Thora slipped her hunting knife in the pocket of her dress along with a small knitted square Oren had let her keep that she had begun to see as a lucky charm. It was soft and comforting in her pocket, and she stroked the tight stitching with her thumb.
The sun was unrelenting, but Thora no longer noticed her own sweat. She saw Oren nearby. He lunged suddenly and stood up holding salt and pepper shakers. Thora simultaneously wanted to laugh and to punch him in his pouty, perpetually wet mouth. She ran toward the wild side of the island where the plants looked like bright, wacky illustrations in a children’s book, twisting and sealing around each other, secreting the earth below. The camera crew followed, but kept a short distance, leaving her to navigate the knotted roots and spiky trees alone, while they fixed their zoom lenses on her and listened through the headphones to her body mic. Her breath came heavy and fast.
Her hunting knife came in handy as she beat back the foliage. She’d found it in her father’s basement, stiff and rusted, next to a box of camping gear he hadn’t used in thirty years. When she’d asked if she could take it, her father had glanced at it and shrugged before returning to shopping for kitchen gadgets online, scrolling through pages of electric corkscrews.
Within twenty minutes of cutting back leaves and digging in the clay mud, Thora had found a can of black beans, a bag of instant rice, three bruised apples, and a tin of sardines. She made a basket out of her skirt, a trick she learned from some novel about a girl in a long ago era, and carried her goods that way. She was about to head back to camp to start cooking when she saw the rabbit. It was first mammal she’d seen in weeks. She’d seen endless crabs scuttle toward the ocean, and had watched with envy as bird after bird flew toward better places. But nothing furry, land dwelling. Not even a mouse. The rabbit seemed totally out of place on this island, a foolish tourist like herself, lost and hungry and dirty. Its fur looked thin, its ears droopy. Maybe, Thora thought, the producers had also planted the rabbit. A twist– live food, something to be gutted and skinned and browned, not just dumped out and boiled. A week ago, she’d finally refashioned the horn of her phonograph into a pot, beating the stem until it closed, and traded a big conch shell she’d found to Chrissie for a couple of matches. Thora imagined the smell of meat cooking, and her mouth filled with saliva. She glanced at the cameras trained to her, felt the audience gazing back through their screens. She touched the little knitted charm in her pocket.
The rabbit’s ears twitched. It wriggled its nose. Thora jumped toward it, and at the same moment the rabbit tried to leap away. But one of its feet was damaged, dragging behind uselessly. It looked like it had already been chewed by something larger and hungrier. Thora dove on top of the rabbit and, unsure what to do next, feeling its body wriggling against her belly, she thrust the knife into its throat.
When Thora returned to the camp, the others were already preparing meals, and when she walked into the clearing, they stared. Oren stumbled away from her as she passed. Chrissie began to cry again. Even Amber looked horrified, lifting her hand to her mouth and shaking her head.
“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said. “What the fuck did she do?”
But Thora felt exultant. She carried the rabbit in the basket of her skirt, drenched now in blood. She had risen to the challenge. She could already taste the feast, the victory, the half million dollars that was one day closer to being hers. Thora laid her kill carefully in the sand. She pulled out her knife to get on with her work.
They wouldn’t let her finish the challenge. The producers hustled her onto the boat, shouting to wardrobe to get her something to wear. She watched from the deck while the assistants dismantled her shelter and stuffed it into a garbage bag. The broken Billie Holiday record, her shriveled War and Peace, even the deck of cards Amber leant her— all dumped in the same bag. They didn’t discard the knife, but the crew insisted on sealing it in a plastic bag, like evidence from a crime scene.
The production team stayed ashore a long time. Charlie brought out the surprise guest judge: a celebrity chef who emerged from the boat, sighing, “Let’s get this fucking thing over with.” As soon as the cameras trained on her, a dazzling smile burst onto her face and didn’t fade until the shoot finally wrapped. They declared Oren the winner for his watermelon and feta salad, and he nearly fell onto the feast table, stuffing beef slices into his mouth before the PAs could bring him a plate or cutlery. No one was eliminated—Thora’s departure had spared the other contestants.
When the leftover food was packed away and the camera equipment stashed below deck, the sky was a deep blue sinking into black. Despite the gnawing feeling of loss she was fighting to keep down, Thora had almost enjoyed watching the taping from a deck chair— a real chair, built for sitting— no longer having to worry, to smile, to try. As the boat edged into the water and blustered away from shore, someone brought her a sweatshirt several sizes too large, a turkey sandwich, a bottle of water, and a brownie. She took immense pleasure in wrapping herself in the sweatshirt as the wind picked up, but the food and the cold water sweating into her hand made her cry. She wanted to savor it all, but she couldn’t help scarfing it down, each bite too glorious to resist. She watched the island disappear behind them through blurred eyes, and then darkness truly settled, and all that surrounded them was a mystery.
When they reached shore, they transferred her to a van. Sitting in a car felt exquisite, but the ride was long through badly lit roads, and Thora fell asleep. She awoke as the van pulled up to a hotel. The producer who she supposed had been assigned to handle her led her to the elevators and up to a suite on the fifth floor.
“You’re sharing with Shay,” the producer said. “You remember Shay. The others are on a suite on the sixth floor. There’s a room key in there for you, but we ask that you please remain in the suite at all times. We’ll be back to talk tomorrow.” He opened the door to her suite with a key of his own and held it for her.
“Can I have my knife back?” Thora asked.
The producer gave her an uneasy look. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
The suite was plain, a little dingy even, with a sallow kitchenette and drooping couches. One bedroom door was closed, but two were open with two double beds in each. Thora chose the one that looked onto the hotel courtyard– she’d had enough ocean views. She flopped onto one of the beds, and her whole body sang with the sensation of being lifted and coddled by the mattress. She could still smell sand and dirt and rot from her own body and clothes. She stripped off her sweatshirt and the bloody dress. In the bathroom mirror, under a startling white light, she was shocked to see herself– ruddy, peeling skin mottled with mosquito bites, matted hair, streaks of blood on her face and hands. She looked insane, someone escaped from an institution in a horror movie. She showered for as long as she could before feeling so tired she worried she would slip. She pulled on a starchy bathrobe, climbed into the forgiving bed, and fell asleep.
In the morning, Thora found a small suitcase of clothes she’d forgotten she’d packed in case of elimination. She wished she’d thought to bring sweatpants and leggings, but instead, she’d packed more dresses. She tried to put on mascara and pluck her eyebrows, but her hands were shaking so badly, she had to stop.
Thora found Shay on a balcony she hadn’t noticed the night before. It was plain and had no furniture, but she was leaning on the metal railing, looking out on the parking lot, and beyond that, sand and the ocean, pushing endlessly against the shore.
Shay had been eliminated only last week, but it felt like years ago. She had the most sympathetic backstory, which Thora envied. Born to Korean immigrants, graduated UPenn with honors, needed the prize money to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment. The audience loved Shay and voted her up each time, but she’d failed a race challenge when her asthma began to act up. Shay had a tattoo of a waterfall on one arm that cascaded from her shoulder and pooled in the crook of her elbow. On her other arm, three fish with tails entwined swam upstream.
“There’s food in the fridge,” Shay called from the balcony. Thora ate some sugary cereal in front of the television in the common area between the rooms. The only programs in English were American movies, so she watched them, comedies where people were accidentally locked in the trunks of cars, or people swapped identities to fulfill a bet, or someone was hit in the genitals. Shay ignored her and did push-ups on the balcony, then shut herself in her room.
In the late afternoon, the producer who had dropped her off knocked on the door. He brought her watery coffee from the lobby of the hotel, but Thora was so thrilled to be drinking any coffee, she scalded the roof her mouth swallowing it down.
“So here’s what we’d like. Your psycho bunny stunt was actually pretty good television. We think we can make it work.”
Shay had wandered in and pulled an apple from a bowl on the counter. She watched them from the kitchen area, crunching.
“So I’m coming back?” Thora’s heart plunged, but she wasn’t sure if it was from joy or horror.
“Not exactly. You can’t keep competing after being eliminated. But we think we’d like to bring you back for the final challenge. You’re going to be part of the challenge.”
“I don’t get it.”
The producer smiled. “It’s a little out there, but we think it’s going to be different than anything that’s been done before. Really authentic. So get this. The final challenge will be a hunt. The contestants think they’re hunting some vicious animal we’ve set loose on the island. But really…” Here he smiled even wider. “Really, they’re hunting you. And all the while, you’re playing tricks on them, setting traps, stuff like that. They don’t understand how they keep being outsmarted.”
Reading Thora’s face, the producer laughed. “Don’t worry, no one is hunting to kill. Just to trap. No weapons or anything. And it’ll all be set up, anyway, so no one will get hurt. The person who finally traps you will find out it’s you, and you’ll get to have some great screen time, show that you really cracked on the island.”
Shay snorted from the kitchen. “That’s so fucked up.”
The producer ignored her, keeping his face trained on Thora. He was handsome in a bland way, unmemorably proportionate, brown haired and blue eyed. He looked too old for his twenties, too young for his thirties. “Do you think you can do it?”
Thora rolled the skirt of her dress in her fingers. “Can I think about it?”
“We really need a commitment now, so we can start setting up. We’re looking to wrap in the next few days. Charlie’s got another shoot next week, so we’re under some time pressure. Look,” the producer took Thora’s hand. It was the most physical contact she’d felt in weeks, and she felt of a wave of urgency, the need to touch and be touched. She briefly imagined climbing onto his lap, the feel of his thighs through his jeans. “This is the winner’s episode, but really, this will be your moment. You can share all your feelings– how hard the whole thing has been, how lost you became. The viewers will go nuts for it. You leave now, you leave a psycho. You take part in this one last challenge, you go out a hero, broken by the game, no fault of your own.”
Thora stared out toward the ocean, just visible past the balcony, still heaving toward shore. “Okay.”
The producer squeezed her hand, then let go and stood. “Great. We’re really pushing these last challenges together, so there will be another one tomorrow, then the final one the day after. I’ll be back to brief you in the morning. In the meantime, just relax. Enjoy the suite.”
When he left, Shay asked Thora, “You’re really doing this?”
“I guess so.”
Shay shook her head. “They’re manipulating you. You know that, right? This is how they work. They tell you that you’ll be a hero, then they edit the fuck out of everything to make you look however they want.”
Thora pictured the eye of the camera fixed on her again, the glare of the lights in the nighttime shoots, the crew hushed and focused, all waiting for her to speak. Waiting for her story. She stretched her arms in front of her and yawned.
“I’m going to take a nap,” she told Shay. “Can you knock on my door when they send dinner up?”
That night, Thora practiced in front of the mirror.
“My mother died two years ago,” she said. She let the tears well. “Since then, I’ve had so many ups and downs. She was the person who understood me best, who looked out for me, who kept me balanced. Without her, I’ve been so lost.” Here she paused, let her face waver, looked up, wiped her tears away. Then she focused back on the mirror, her eyes wet and bright and determined. “But I’m a survivor. And I did what I thought I had to do survive. To win. You don’t know what you’re capable of until you’re in these kinds of extreme conditions. Until you don’t eat a real meal for weeks. Until you’re sunburnt and dirty and just really desperate. I learned what I was capable of. I scared myself. Maybe I scared everyone. But I’m back for a reason. I may not be a winner. But I’m survivor. No one is going to take me down.”
She smiled. Bravely, she hoped.
The next morning, the producer brought Thora more weak and boiling hot coffee and laid out the plan. They’d film in the dark. The contestants would devise traps, which she’d be apprised of by producers through a small earpiece she’d wear until she was actually on camera. She’d lay some traps of her own– food to distract the contestants, rigged nets to fall from trees when tripped, cages made of sticks bound with vines. All of the traps would be constructed in advance, but they’d take some footage afterwards of her pretending to build them.
It was late when Chrissie arrived, the latest challenge loser. Her eyes were puffy and pink like she’d cried the whole trip from the island. Thora was struck by her smell, rotten and shockingly fecal. Shay, who had been her only friend on the island beside Jan, hugged her despite the odor and took her into her room for a shower. Thora could hear them talking softly. She went to the kitchen for a bag of chips and tried to glimpse inside Chrissie’s room without the others noticing. Through the half-open door, she could see Shay sitting on one of the beds, combing Chrissie’s damp blonde hair. Thora closed the door to her own room. She practiced alternately crying and smiling in the mirror.
Neither Chrissie nor Shay wished Thora luck as she left the suite with the producer. They were half-watching a road-trip comedy and reminiscing about the island. When Thora said goodbye, they waved without pausing their conversation.
It rained on the boat ride back to the island, so Thora sat inside and watched out the window as they hurtled across the water. Someone brought her what she thought was juice, but turned out to be some fruity cocktail in a plastic cup. She drank it down, then another. Tomorrow, she’d be on the plane home, swaddled in the nubby airport blanket, some mindless movie on the screen in front of her. She’d meet her father at the airport, and he’d drive her back to her apartment. When he’d dropped her off six weeks ago, he’d given her a one-armed hug and said, “Be good,” like she was a child he was sending on a playdate. She had not been good, Thora thought now. Good had always been beside the point.
It seemed to take much longer than Thora remembered to reach the island, and by the time they arrived, Thora was a little queasy from the cocktails and the choppy waves. Production assistants escorted her to the lower levels of the boat so the contestants wouldn’t see her. They gave her a camo t-shirt and green cargo shorts that she thought made her hips look wide, but she didn’t complain. The makeup and hair teams set to work on her, pulling her hair into a sleek ponytail, lining her eyes in black. Then they left her, and she waited to be called.
When the PAs finally led her from the boat, night had fallen. Flood lights had been set up for filming, but she was to scramble through dark swaths of the island, where crew members were waiting beside traps. They outfitted her with an earpiece, a mic and a night vision body camera. When she glimpsed the footage from her camera, it looked like something from a military operation or a nature show.
In her ear, her handler producer told her it was time to begin. His voice, low and close, was oddly intimate, like a whisper during an embrace. He gave instructions telling her where to go to hit the first trap. When the producer was silent, Thora could hear her own panting, the shuffle of sand and leaves beneath her feet, the ocean crashing. She’d lived on the island for almost six weeks, and although she’d left much of it unexplored, she had a sense of the layout– the shelter area, the wild half, the rocky wall that rose above the sand. But in the dark, it was brand new, totally untamed, and she slid her feet along carefully, trying not to trip.
At the first trap, Thora was instructed to get her foot caught in a web of vines, then manage to untangle herself. As she worked to untangle the vines from her foot, her heart began to pound. She had the sensation she sometimes felt in her apartment when she woke to use the bathroom in the night and found herself running back to bed. She knew there was nothing waiting for her in the dark, and yet it felt necessary to rush to the safety of her covers, as if whatever was reaching for her from the shadows couldn’t touch her there.
By the time she freed herself, the night seemed to pulse around her, cicadas screeching. The producer breathed lightly in her ear like a small ghost hovering on her shoulder. She was itching from the torment of mosquitoes. The second trap involved shards of seashells, and she slit her toe open by accident. From the dark, someone tossed her an alcohol wipe and she bandaged herself with her camo bandana.
Between the second trap and the third, Thora felt like she’d been walking for hours. Clouds kept crossing the moon and casting her into even thicker darkness. The producer was still guiding her with quiet instructions, but she had never felt so alone, not even her first night on the island when she’d realized how far from home she truly was and felt a sudden and vivid fear that she might die out here with no one around who knew her or cared about her. Thora realized that the producer could be leading her anywhere. In the third trap, she was supposed to be caught. The producer had promised she would see the trap in advance– a large cage supposedly constructed by the remaining contestant. He’d promised that it would be safe and she’d be freed within minutes, but how could she trust this was true? Wouldn’t it make for better television to catch her unaware, like a real hunted animal? Each step seemed to lead her closer to some monstrous shock. She imagined the trap as a pair of enormous jaws, ready to snap.
“Keep going straight,” murmured the producer. “You’re nearly there.”
Thora began jogging. She was on the wild side of the island, thick with vegetation, and roots tripped her, but she surged forward. If what they wanted was an animal, she could be an animal. She could thrash and bite; she could fight to stay free. Something was moving toward her. She could hear the rustle of leaves, could see the figure resolving itself dimly in the moonlight. Ahead was the trap, a gaping cage constructed with a strange mix of natural and unnatural materials– tree branches, knitting needles, canvas, shoelaces, and thick, twisted leaves. It would have been easy to walk into it by accident in the dark. The figure was hovering near the mouth and as Thora jogged toward it, she veered sharply and shoved. The figure cried out and fell backward. Thora heard a thud that made her stomach flip, instinctually sick at the sound of bone against rock. Lights came blaring into view along with cameras, and Oren was lying on the ground, blood seeping from his head.
Seeing Oren under the dazzling lights, Thora actually restrained a gasp. His hand, where he held his scalp, was covered in his blood. But Thora was looking at the skin around his eyes, puffed and purple, and his cheeks that curved sharply inwards. His collarbone peaked from beneath his threadbare t-shirt. Both knees were bruised a deep midnight shade. He smelled worse than Chrissie, smelled of something dying, or already dead. Thora couldn’t recall why he’d irritated her when she’d lived on the island, why she’d felt such scorn for his waxy face, his toddler lips. She wanted desperately to hug him.
The medics were rushing in, surrounding Oren. Thora noticed that the producer had begun to swear loudly into her ear. She took the ear piece out and dropped it on the ground. A PA was trying to usher her away, but she stayed put, watching Oren close his eyes, allow his head to be swaddled in bandages, limp as a sleeping child.
She was sweating under the lights, surrounded by damp night. She thought suddenly of the summer after college, a heat wave, reading on her parents’ porch, her mother impossibly thin but still alive in the chair beside her. Reading passages aloud. Soupy summer air. Her mother’s eyes closed, listening.
The cameras were still rolling, swooping around Oren and the medics, zooming toward Thora. The little red eye above the lens stared as Thora stared back.
“I’m the one you’ve been hunting,” she said. From a hollow in her chest, she could feel the tears rising. “But I’m a survivor.” She had no idea how long she’d be allowed to stand there. She began her story.