***

Ship Surgeon Michael Stark, Edinburgh '44, clung desperately to the coffin throughout the storm-tossed night. He had secured his left wrist by a rope torn from a mizzen mast. His head had been battered so severely by the waves he passed out. But when he woke, and by the looks of the light it was not later than ought-eight-hundred, he found himself on a becalmed water, floating into a lagoon. He raised his head in hope, but his spirits wailed for the dead he left behind. Then he fell into sleep again, his body a sharp spear-point of pain.

He drifted into the shallow pool, his nose almost in the water.

***

"That's a man out there!" Clara exclaimed. She was nine, and had been on the island for two years.

"A man?" little Tara repeated. Forlorn creature, nude and sunburnt to the shade of dark toast, she was fawningly shy and yet very curious, for she had a high intelligence. "A man? How can that be? Men only come twice in the year, when the moon is full."

"Well, it is!" Clara asserted, putting down the scratched telescope. "Tell Julia. I think he's a wash in."

Tara ran off as fast as she could seeking out their leader, Julia.

***

Three girls swam out into the lagoon and found Dr. Stark delirious in the sun, his eyes unseeing, his lips parched. He'd been in the water a long while, as his skin was wizened and as layered as a dugong's. The girls pulled him in, he floating on his back, tongue lolling. His white shirt with laced collar and pearl buttons was torn, his sailor's dungarees were salted and mired with a cloying thick gel probably from some kind of surface-floating fungal, and torn all the way up the sides to the hip.

***

"He's beautiful," eleven year old Gabrielle declared, looking at the dripping bearded barely-breathing man on the beach.

Luisa, a German girl from Strasbourg who could barely converse with the other girls, pulled off his shirt, and squeezed out the sea-water. She knelt down next to him and ran her hand over his smooth but muscled hairless chest. Luisa was the oldest girl on the isle. Like all the others, she had been marooned here for two years, since the shipwreck

Luisa was fifteen, and the man whose chest she caressed was maybe 25? She felt sick with juvenile lust. The men who came to the isle twice a year were savages. Big bellied yellow-skinned men with fishing spears and bottles of drink that stunk and were impotable although very intoxicating, and all they did was rape the girls with their stubby members, rape them and come back every six months to repeat the process. True, they brought food and gifts, bead and shell jewelry, fresh clothes, but what a price they exacted!

***

Dr. Michael Stark, Surgeon, woke at last. His lips were broken from the sun but Luisa had applied a sort of honey from a native ant. She had reached into the anthill and pulled out the queen chamber, daringly, all the girls were agog. From it she scraped the honey for the man's lips. The girls had all jumped up and down on the ravaged angry colony of eight legged soldiers squashing and disabling as many as they could. They peed in a wide circle around the anthill, which had proven effective in the past in stopping their spread.

Stark tossed his hand over his left eye while a stinky squat creature that looked like a cross between a porcupine and a dog licked his face. "That's Carl," a tiny little masturbating girl told him. She was burnt almost black by the months of sun and wore no stitch of clothing. Stark sat up. He was surrounded by a half dozen girls, all young. His eyes were drawn to Luisa, the oldest. She was unconscionably beautiful in her near nudity, the chest swathed in once-fancy scarves, her hips covered by a bead and grass woven skirt.

His penis stiffened, and Luisa was not the only girl to notice it, but none of them said anything.

"Sprechen zie Deutsche?" Luisa hoped.

The Doctor shook his head, "Mais je parle Francais un peu."

"Francais!" Luisa burbled, utterly delighted. In Strasbourg, where she was born, almost everyone spoke both.

She ran her hand over his tattered pants. His penis, though tired, was delicious and large straining against the canvas at his crotch and then she jumped back blushing, ashamed of herself.

She looked at him with all her charms, trying to overcome her near nudity to make herself alluring. He was so beautiful and so European!

Dr. Stark sat up, marveling that he was alive and also marveling at the perfection of the young girls, all so very pretty, some of whom wore next to nothing--in the case of one girl, absolutely nothing. His eyes delighted on a few small sunburned bosoms and the remainder with chests completely absent of secondary sexual characteristics......(cont)