3-min read
June had always been cold on the island. It was as though the summer stopped at the mainland, its golden rays petering out into the choppy grey waters that encircled Neverwell Isle’s imposing forests and cloistered wealth.
Isabella Neverwell had stayed on in the isle manor after the baron passed. The raucous parties had passed too, as quickly as the social currency of ‘knowing the baron’ had become obsolete. Her boredom bloomed like the algae in the manor pond, the cod within swimming as aimlessly as her ideas.
For a time, she fancied herself as a painter, and had lavish sets of oils and French watercolour palettes sent to her room.
Her frustration had soon presented itself. The oils, in particular, had taken the maid hours to clean from the brocade on the bedcover.
But her frustrations eventually passed, as had the joys of her decadent lifestyle and the sorrows of her isolation. Her ideas became cruel, seeking the pulse of life she had lost. She enlisted her staff in games and pranks that feasted on their humanity, paying bonuses of whole salaries for them to play polo matches with riders and horses all humans alike. Injuries were rife, but the game went on. Paint-by-numbers lost its innocence when she demanded to colour in her favourite Magritte, this time with a tattoo gun on the sous-chef’s back under threat of dismissal.
The pond was filled with gelatine so she could, ‘See what happens to the fish’. Its inhabitants’ movements slowly frozen into a macabre three-dimensional painting. She dressed new employees in humiliating uniforms, tested the cleaning staff by leaving cash under the observation of hidden cameras, and buried monkey bones in the rose beds to watch the gardeners’ reactions.
But her latest game, a battle royale between all the isle’s residents for the grand prize of her treasured Fabergé egg and a referral to mainland employ, had raised tensions. Dissent, that was once subdued, had begun to bubble and spill throughout her ranks. Instead of tearing apart to secure the prize, they had begun to unite against her ill-begotten command of their bodies and their dignity.
It had been easy enough to perform the ruses for her amusement. Easier than arguing and losing their livelihoods to fabricate the charades. To reassure the new hires that better uniforms would come, to rehearse with the garden staff in perfecting their surprise and disgust, and to confer amongst themselves to find that the sous-chef quite liked the idea of a free Magritte tattoo.
But too hard to counterfeit a battle royale. So the gardeners quietly worked through the night until, by morning, the grounds were transformed. Isabella Neverwell wandered across the lawn, engrossed as usual in her morning paper, following the familiar curve of the garden beds. They led her along their newly-formed route, straight into the jellied pond.
And there, she learned what it was to truly feel nothing.