The bird landed on a tree ahead and shouted, "The shark is coming." And it flew further away.

Matthew ran. He felt the cobweb mangling with dead flies beneath his bare feet. He felt the insects biting his soles, dead plants devouring his toes, and he was almost sure some dead twigs were pulling one of his legs. And so he tripped, landed on his hands. He felt the sharpness of wood piercing through the skin of his palms. And his hand was covered with red. Seeping through his fingers were the warm wetness of his blood. Attracted by its smell, came a small army of ants, crawling onto his palms and tried to build a little colony on his wound. He quickly rubbed them off. When the ants fell on the forest floor, he could almost hear the mocking of them. He sobbed.

"Silly you," the talking bird said mockingly, "You would wish you have broken a knee. Not a chance! You ugly little monster."

"Damn you," he said. He reached under the matted twigs, found a stone and threw it at the talking bird. He heard the sound of the stone went through the leaves, then the bushes, but it didn't end in a solid ground as he expected. The stone dropped into the water.

Chapter 2 - The Beach

Matthew opened his eyes. This time it was a peaceful beach in a sunny afternoon. Another stone dropped into the water. Bryan was squatting beside the shore, throwing stones at the peaceful sea.

"You just have to ignore him," Alicia told Matthew. She split her handkerchief into half and used them to bandage his hands. "Sometimes he’s nice, sometimes he’s not. He’s just… hummm, what’s the word?" Alicia tilted her head, "jealous." She spoke as if she were a grown up.

Matthew was lying on the warm comfortable sand. The sky was extensively clear, with milky blue stretched from the infinite east of the sunrise to the infinite west of the sunset, joining with the endless length of the silky beach. The draft brought up by the gentle heaving of the sea wave found its final resting-place in the forest at their back. With the draft, also came a putrid smell, probably from the two dead bodies floating on the water not far from the beach. But besides that, everything else was clean, pristinely clean. The beach was spotless, no people, either dead or living, just the three of them. Neither was there any stone except in the pocket of Bryan’s black jacket, which seemed to be bottomless. He drew a stone one after another and threw it into the sea.