September Shorts: Possession Island

This is Possession Island.

The pages are from Judith Schalansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, a palm-sized little beauty with turquoise pages and a burnt yellow cover. Subtitled Fifty islands I have not visited and never will, the book chooses tiny, remote, often empty places and provides a couple of pages of history. Their stories are mostly brutal tales of occupation, counter-occupation, scurvy, starvation and abandonment. Some cartographer named their inlets and hilltops, recorded them for posterity, then sailed away one last time. Many are no bigger than punctuation marks, but not so Possession Island, which is large enough to boast Mont Jules Verne and have - at the last count - somewhere between 26 and 45 residents.

I chose Possession Island to share because like Disappointment Island, Lonely Island or The Rat Islands (all in the book,) it's one of those places whose name pre-loads the place with significance. Nothing good could happen on Lonely Island, right?

Possession Island feels the same to me. I fear for the sanity of those 26-45 people. Schalansky says it best when making the observation that, "Paradise is an island..." before ominously pointing out, "So is hell."