Grand Isle is just a wooden white shack with two handwritten signs positioned at the front: prawns and ice. On other days I think I could stay in Grand Isle forever. Not even Grand Isle, just the street I live on, its two rows of hollow houses, shacks on stilts and then that shack on the corner: prawns and ice. The light moves from grey to grey-white to silver and the heat is searing. The light doesn’t shift around, it just filters in and out, it turns. Maybe in the evening you’ll get a little blue-grey, a little blue-white, but that is fleeting and you know as much. To walk along my street is to walk along a street full of houses that have been washed away in the last big hurricane storm and then built up again, but they are not much more than shacks on stilts, a rare breed of build that is pure Grand Isle. That’s how it is down here, and most of them are abandoned, left to rot in the salt wind. And the salt wind has its own weather system, apart from the light and the heat. The salt wind causes its own kind of rot, a clean one, without termites or gunk, just a slow sloughing away till folk become desolate and full of the pointlessness of things. Most of the houses on my street are half-gone, and that is most of the houses in Grand Isle. A few doors down from the shack with the signs, the public laundry machine flashes in the sun like a mirror that wants to blind or stun you. You can fry an egg on that from 6 a.m. onwards. People on the street in the daytime come with blurred edges, their faces are grey scribbles in the air.

No one really comes to stay in Grand Isle, they are always passing through. Sedans park up in front of the shack with the food, the restaurant. These people are looking for Houma or Thibodaux or Abbeville and they are lost and they’ve gone too far in the wrong direction by a hundred kilometres. The roads get narrower and the air, the day, becomes greyer, whiter, and then they park up. They enjoy the food in the restaurant, the tinkle of its cheap wind chimes, its smoky grill, its doorlessness, its open-to-the-elements (the door is only pulled over when a storm comes, a big one). They sit in the booths and never remark on the burst upholstery and they order the same things, a house salad and a hot crab and cheese sandwich, hot boiled crawfish, hot gulf shrimp. They use the toilet before they get back in their sedans and drive in the direction they’d originally come.

The one guesthouse a street back has a few rooms but they are almost always empty. Someone might choose to stay for a night because it seems like such an ordeal to get back to where they want to go. A psychic once parked up and took a seat in a booth and ordered hot gulf shrimp. They talked while they ate; they were thankful for the company even though it was just me and the chef behind the grill. The psychic had been stuck behind the wheel for weeks, travelling the long miles of highways; they were on tour, coast to coast, north to south and then up east and over west. They’d passed billboards advertising the same things for weeks, maybe months, cigarettes and real estate and golf clubs and cartons of fruit juice. The psychic wore a short green moth-eaten velvet cloak and a pair of ancient frayed Jesus sandals. I fancied putting them in a story, but no one would have believed me. Everyone would say it was a made-up character, that someone like that didn’t exist, they were stereotyped, forced, and yet there they were, eating a serving of hot gulf shrimp served in its small red plastic basket and dabbing their mouth with a handful of napkins.

The nice breeze blew through the wind chimes and sent them rolling and shaking and the psychic took that moment to show off something they took everywhere on the tour. It was wrapped in a gold cloth and the psychic unwrapped the cloth as if it concealed something exquisitely precious and valuable. The object turned out to be a standard round bathroom mirror, the kind used for applying makeup or for shaving. Weird symbols were painted around its edges in gold nail varnish. It was a ‘mesmerist’s mirror’. The psychic wrapped it up in the same slow careful way they’d first taken it out, wrapping the cloth around like a pharaoh before going into the tomb. The psychic finished their food and climbed back into their little brown sedan and drove off in the direction of Highway 1 towards Leeville and Golden Meadow to start up the tour again, the ‘mesmerist’s mirror’ lying on the passenger’s seat.

A few day-trippers turn up, but not many. They usually want to go swimming at the gold sand strip of Grand Isle beach. A couple drove down from New Orleans to do just that. He was originally from Lake Charles, and she was from Biloxi, Tennessee, but they operated a small motel in the Midwest in a landlocked dusty town they didn’t mention the name of. As they ate their crab sandwiches they talked about the simple life and how it had escaped them every time no matter how hard they tried to find it. From their Midwest motel’s reception desk, it was forty steps to the carpark, twenty steps to the tray of morning doughnuts (they stayed out all day and got hard) and thirty steps to the gold and green calendar they’d bought at a Chinese market about a decade before. It was another thirty steps back to the reception desk with its row of keys pegged to the polished wooden board on the wall. It was a lonely life and they didn’t get much custom.

There are really only three streets to Grand Isle, four if you count the road in, which is also the road out. A solemn, tall, poker-straight man in old jeans and a ragged blotchy blue t-shirt spent half the day wandering the streets, as if each time he went around again he didn’t remember the last time. There isn’t much to see. Grand Isle is not for everybody, it’s a peculiar taste. The man in the blue t-shirt stared at the laundry machine like it was a library full of interesting books. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, the hottest it was going to get, and that was extremely hot, and he stepped into the restaurant and sat down in one of the booths and ordered a large glass of water. We’d been waiting for him to come in, and the chef had the grill already on, down low, but on, ready for the order to come in.

The man was from Glasgow, but he hadn’t been back there for a long time. We enjoyed his thick Scottish accent. At first he didn’t want to talk, and that was fine by us, but by the time his glass of water was almost done and his food was almost ready he couldn’t stop talking. That happens in Grand Isle. There’s all the white light and the grey light and the silver light and the heat is just exceptional and a few large grey pelicans fly over like huge shadows, sometimes they feel as big as small aircraft, and a handful of little white egret birds go over and they reflect the sun’s rays like shields and everyone just wants to talk. The man in the blue t-shirt didn’t have a history of depression, but that was where his story lay. His depression wasn’t hereditary, it just came out of nowhere, a sort of gnawing feeling, a heaviness. One day, he explained, you’d be opening the fridge, or you’d be going about your business, and you realised that you didn’t feel well and that you hadn’t felt well for a long time. He couldn’t say when it started exactly, but it arrived and it was in no mood or rush to be away. He’d pour milk over his cereal and think, ‘I just can’t go on like this’.

The man in the blue t-shirt had gone for the hot gulf shrimp and he plunged his fingers into the little red plastic basket that all the shrimp dishes come in. He put fries into his mouth. He’d gone to Switzerland. The man in the blue t-shirt had gone to Switzerland because he didn’t want to live anymore. And he told us what it was like.

-I’ll say Switzerland; maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.

A woman in a uniform as white and crisp as snow stood in the doorway.

-So here is the room.

A white room, clean, uncluttered, only a bed in there, and a small white side cabinet with a small polished glass full of water balanced on it and a small white porcelain dish, the kind you’d put buttons into or a few coins. The dish was empty.

A long, huge view out onto the mountains. A clear huge crisp sky. It was warm in the room but you could tell it was very cold outside. A blue sky, no clouds whatsoever. It was like a painting, better than that. Sun, a load of light. As much light inside the room as there was outside, as if the room was floating a little, levitating, as if it didn’t even exist and this was all a dream. He felt like turning his pockets out right there and then.

-Can I get you something to drink? Maybe a little water. Or even a cup of coffee.

The woman in her extremely clean white uniform stood there in the doorway and she seemed to levitate a little too, her white shoes barely touching the floor. Her edges were hazy.

-It is exactly how you would expect it.

-How you would expect it?

The mountains all came with thick fresh snow on their peaks.

-Why don’t you take your shoes off and lie up on the bed?

The man in the blue t-shirt finished his meal and he went back to not talking much again. The chef behind the grill held up his tongs to see if any more food was required but the man didn’t want anything else. He wiped his hands on a napkin and walked away to stay a night in the guesthouse and he must have left very early in the morning because I didn’t see him go. I am not saying I stay up watching everything that happens in Grand Isle but it’s a small place and it’s a bit like that. I didn’t even hear his car revving up, but that sometimes happens. He must have left early and wanted to get back on the road again.

The shack with the two signs at the front is where everyone ends up in Grand Isle, at some point or other, after walking around, or bathing, or whatever else, sitting on the ripped seats in the booths of the restaurant eating shrimp or crab or crawfish. There’s not much more to it in Grand Isle, three streets, maybe four. Ice in our drinks helps to keep us cool, and I like it here, all of it, together, its good weird song.
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Cheryl Follon is a writer based in Scotland. Her poetry is published by Bloodaxe Books and her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, and on BBC Radio 4 among other places. Her short fiction ‘The Writer’ comes from a sequence which studies the intersection of life and death.