I was thinking about raccoons when the plane crashed.

It was an odd thing to think about, I know, but I wouldn’t be here if not for them. If they hadn’t broken into our trash for the umpteenth time, Brie and I never would’ve had that argument. We’d still be engaged. In the morning, I’d sit at the kitchen table, her foot on my lap while I sipped a cup of dark roast and scrolled through headlines of a plane crash off the coast of Cuba.

But no.

Those chonky spectacled fat-rats just had to feed themselves. They just had to be the proverbial needle to break the proverbial camel’s proverbial fucking back. You could almost say they were responsible for the crash itself.

Almost.

In the end it didn’t matter. I was where I was and the plane gave out when it did, and no amount of scapecooning was going to change that. I just happened to be the lucky sonofabitch to strike it big at the lotto of avian accidents.

You know, the thing about raccoons is—

“Sorry? What?” I pulled the headphones down around my neck and turned to the old man who occupied the window seat.

“I asked what you’re listening to,” he said. The old guy hadn’t said a thing since takeoff, instead opting to watch the clouds roll by with the vaguely self-assured smile of a man with many grandchildren in private school. His slicked back hair held scattered colonies of black defending valiantly against the onslaught of grey. He was leaning uncomfortably close.

“It’s not the Piña Colada song, is it?” He went on.

The faint fuzz of power chords emanating from the headphones punctuated the silence between us. “The…?”

“It’s a favourite of mine. You know the one.” The old man sat back, adjusted his pink tie and cleared his throat. To my amused horror, he began to sing. “If you like Piña Coladas…” he paused, eyes searching the ceiling for the following lyrics, “…na na na na…na na na.” He smiled, revealing a row of distractingly white teeth.

I nodded along and threw in a fake laugh. “Oh, yeah. I know that one. No, it’s Slipknot,” I told him.

“I’m sorry?”

“Slipknot.” His blank stare told me all I needed to know. “Maybe they’re not your speed.”

“Ah.” The old man relaxed in his seat, facing forward again, the universal sign a conversation had ended. I moved to readjust the headphones over my ears.

“I didn’t catch your name, by the way,” he said with an outstretched hand.

Seeing no polite retreat, I accepted the handshake. It was as stereotypically firm as I expected. “Ben,” I said. “Benjamin. And you?”

The old man pulled his hand away and flattened his tie against his midnight blue suit. “Call me Mr. Pink.”

“Mr. Pink?” Not seeing the joke, I gave an awkward laugh. “Like a Tarantino character?”

He chuckled in the way a friend might when your reference lands flat. Both of you know it, but you’re too embarrassed to explain it and they’re nice enough to pretend they understood. “Benjamin is a good name. I’ve known a few in my lifetime, all standup fellas, though not all of them made it.”

Not knowing how to respond to the oddity of his comment, I opted to stay silent. What the hell was he talking about? The war, maybe. But which one? Vietnam? World War Two? Was it presumptuous to think he was that old?

“You’ll do well, I think,” he added, after nearly a minute of silence.

“Uh… thanks,” I said.

“I have to pee.”

Mr. Pink had already stood and was trying to squeeze into the aisle before I could process what he was saying. I twisted my legs in an uncomfortable fashion to let him through. But he didn’t leave immediately. Mr. Pink stood in the aisle next to my chair, rested a hand near my head, and leaned in close. There was a grave look in his eyes.

“When you get down there,” he whispered, “the clue is in the box.”

With a wink, the old man slipped away and was already halfway to the front of the plane before I thought to call after him.

“Box? What box?” I asked, but he was already too far to respond.

There are conversations in life that breach a level of weirdness that demand the only sensible thing to do: just go with it. The interaction with Mr. Pink was one of those. After sitting with my thoughts for a while, trying to decipher what it was he was talking about, I shook my head, slipped the headphones back over my ears, and let my mind swim.

Anyway, raccoons—

Ding!

The seatbelt light flickered on and the captain’s voice followed in the usual monotonous drawl to announce the presence of mild turbulence. I buckled myself in and sunk into my seat.

I didn’t hate flying. I didn’t even dislike it, but there was that voice in the back of my head.

“Only one in thirty million people die in a plane crash,” I would tell myself.

“You're the one in thirty million,” it would say.

It was always bullshit—because of course it was—but it was there, and it made for itself a comfy little apartment in the dark depths of my skull, rent free.

So I ignored the voice.

The thing about raccoons—

The old man. The seat next to me was still empty. He had been gone for at least ten minutes. Peering above the seats I spied a line of people waiting outside one of the bathroom doors. A man leaned in and rapped his knuckle against it.

“Everything okay in there?” He said.

Ding!

Seatbelt lights off. With a sigh I unbuckled myself and made for the bathrooms. I didn’t need to, but I felt a slight tug of responsibility having interacted with the man and being more than a little suspicious that he was maybe slightly probably off his rocker. Just a little. If something happened to him in there, I didn’t want to feel like I could have said something and didn’t.

But I froze. Dead centre in the aisle, between my seat and the bathroom. A feeling had come over me. Not a realization, exactly. I couldn’t tell you if it was the strange wobble in the wing as I caught a glimpse of it through the window, or the oddness of our conversation finally settling in my mind. Or maybe it was just the voice.

“Something’s wrong,” it said.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

“Something’s wrong.”

My feet left the floor.

My back struck the ceiling. The hull shuddered. Squealed. Roared. The screams came all at once, pounding my eardrums. I crashed to the floor again, only the floor had become the wall. The shift in gravity was swift. I flailed for anything, making purchase on something—a seat, maybe. Whatever it was, I dragged myself to it. An oxygen mask smacked me in the face and I swiped at it to no avail.

A hellish bang and sudden gust of wind signalled a breach in the plane’s exterior. It tugged at me, at everything, pulling things my way, tossing them at me. Someone flew by. Small pieces of luggage besieged my fingers as I struggled to hold on against the torrent.

I closed my eyes. This is it. This is how I die.

“I told you so,” said the voice. The phantasmal face of a raccoon formed out of the drifting colours behind my eyelids. I couldn't be sure, but it looked to be smiling.

The little fucker.

I let go.

I remembered water. Down my throat and in my eyes. It burned, oh it burned. I tried to breathe, water pushing the air out of my lungs. Something graced my arm, glittering as it sank below. Metal? Down and down it went, swallowed by darkness. The darkness reached out for me, too, calling to me. Everything hurt.

I remembered sun. It was warm on my skin. Warmer than the blood on my arm. It was nice. Comforting.

I remembered sand. Under my nails and in my hair. In my mouth, too. I chewed. It tasted like… like chicken. I laughed, but the laugh turned into a cough, and then into vomit. A wave lapped up against my arm. I reached out to it, letting the water roll over my skin. It was calming, enough to make my eyelids sink. I pressed my cheek into the sand.

There I was, Benjamin Quayle, starfishing on a beach, clothes torn and tattered, hair matted and sparkling with sand—terribly dressed for my own funeral. It wasn't hell, exactly. A good several leagues above, I'd say. Two hundred nautical miles west of Whofuckingknows Island, probably several degrees latitude south of WherethefuckamI Atoll.

It was the pain that kept me from dying.

I lifted my head after some time, blinking against the sunlight, and realized I was laying on my arm. Like Wile E. Coyote when he doesn’t start falling until he looks down, the rest of my body remembered the pain it should be in when I saw my twisted elbow. My back ached. My knees burned. My feet were numb. My head throbbed. The symphony of pain kept me from nodding off, but it also prevented me from standing.

I could only turn my head to get a view of the beach I’d washed up on. Ocean waves rolled to the left, the horizon flat and landless. To the right a wall of palm trees chirped with wildlife. A bird fluttered overhead. A seagull, I thought, until I noticed the red feathers.

The second bird came in suddenly, swooping in with surprising grace. It was six times the size of the smaller bird, and with a long, sharp tail and bright yellow feathers. The tail lashed out, piercing the smaller bird, killing it instantly. The larger one swerved and glided in near silence to a cliff farther down the beach, and disappeared over it, its prey dangling lifeless from its tail.

"Welcome, Traveler."

I jumped, or I would have, if I could move more than two inches. I looked around but couldn’t spot a source for the voice.

"State your name."

As if from the throat of god it boomed from all directions at once. I put a hand to my throbbing head. I was dreaming, or hallucinating. Maybe both.

"Your name, please."

Dazed, I tilted my head to the sky. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see. A white bearded man in a bathrobe looking down from a cloud? A projector stretched across the sky with the image of a tight-lipped bureaucrat wishing for the odds to be ever in my favour?

“Ben,” I croaked, to appease the voice.

"Your full name."

“Benjamin Quayle.”

"Ah, like the bird."

“Yeah,” I said. The voice was hard to place. It could have been male or female. From an outsider’s perspective, looking at this broken man talking to nothing, I must’ve looked insane. I blinked.

"Welcome to Killjoy Island. The Emerald Expanse Corporation apologizes for any inconvenience or injury caused in your arrival, and for the injury or death of your friends and family, should you have any. To ensure you understand our apology is sincere, we have prepared a gift basket of invaluable items to aid in your survival, which will be arriving momentarily. Though we confer no bias to any player initially (more on that later), we prefer to allow all arrivals the possibility of gaming their start (pun intended)."

The voice spoke briskly, as if reading from a script, and this was the fourteenth time it had done so today, and really it should be taking its break now because it had already been clocked in for five hours but Carl hadn’t come back from his break, yet.

"Furthermore, we will not directly divulge the rules, regulations, restrictions (there aren’t many), and overall mechanics of your immersive experience, as we believe it spoils the fun and takes away from the genuine moments of eureka and inspiration you may gain as a result of not dying.

Do you have any questions?"

Maybe it was my addled state of mind, but I was oddly fixated on the way the voice pronounced the word ‘genuine’. Genu-wine. I licked my lips. My entire face was so dry and cracked that when I spoke I felt the words chaff against my throat. “Where am I?”

"Killjoy Island."

“Am I dying?”

"Technically, yes."

Reverberating between a state of near-to-passing-out and lukewarm understanding, I fought to make sense of what I was hearing.

"I see you are in a state of shock. To help get you motivated and on your feet I will give you a sense of your odds in this enterprise. Good news, of all the players who have come before you, ninety eight percent have survived up to this point."

I was lucid enough to grasp that. “Oh, that’s good,” I said.

"Percent of players who survived the first twenty four hours:

Thirty one."

“Oh, that’s less good.”

"Percent of players who survived the first seventy two hours:

Seventeen.

Percent of players who survived the first week:

Fifteen.

Percent of players who survived the first month:

Nine."

With each dip in the statistic my heart sank. Nine percent. One in ten. “What happens after a month?” I wondered, though I’m not sure I really wanted to know the answer.

There was a long pause before the voice spoke again.

"Well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it? If you are one of the lucky few to reach Stage Two, you will find out for yourself. Until then, we do hope you enjoy your stay.

And as always,

Happy Dying."

I didn’t move for a while. At first I waited for the voice to come back, and when it didn’t, I waited for nothing in particular. My mind began to wander.

The thing about raccoons is, in that moment…

I missed the hell out of them.