Stories

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 9 Entering the Earth

You sent me a dream when I was a child, Fiona, one of those weird dreams you don’t share, especially at that age, when nothing matters to you in the world, other than pleasing your parents.
I couldn’t forget it, though, like I can’t forget any of my other dreams about you. Those dreams, they feel so real! So real! Like a second life unfolding, independent of this one.
In the dream, I saw you standing in front of a green mound, smiling; it was summer, and you wore a white dress, held around your body with green ribbons. You had ribbons and flowers in your hair as well, and a torch, lit in the middle of the day, and I couldn’t help laugh at the absurdity of illuminating daylight, but you didn’t get upset, you smiled and signaled me with your other hand to follow.
You turned around, and I followed, and as I did, I saw you were dead, merely a skeleton wrapped in leathery skin, but somehow I felt loved more than I ever did in my life before and since, and realized I didn’t care, you didn’t scare me in that state, and strange as it may sound, you were still beautiful.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 8 - Souterrains

The four-day festival was approaching the end, and after my friend’s departure I figured I’d better head back to Kirkwall and see if I can find more puzzle pieces for my study, but I just couldn’t face the stones again. Not yet.
I headed north instead, not really sure about the destination, and followed the road until it reached the shore. 
Living on an island offers one the unique experience of being bound by a circular water line: no matter what direction you travel in, you are soon stopped by the edge of the sea. 
This makes some people feel closed in, in ways that start wearing on them as time passes, but for the true lovers of island living there is no greater comfort than the sight of the sea, and its effortless proximity always puts them at ease.
The sea gives life, and it takes it. Brings riches and bounty, reveals and conceals what it chooses and keeps jealous guard over her secrets.
For four thousand years the village of Skara Brae was just another green bluff battered by the whims of the sea, until 1850, when a deadly storm stripped the grass and the topsoil off the ruins of a stone settling, perfectly preserved by the sand for millennia, a time capsule of Neolithic living.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 7 Charon’s Boat

”You shouldn’t leave Stromness before you visit Hoy,” the lady at the front desk suggested with a motherly demeanor which tried to restore my sunny outlook on life, now sunk by the sudden circumstance through which I found myself alone again.
She smiled encouragingly, and pointed towards the pier, to the approaching ferry.
“Hurry up, now. If you rush, you can get there before it leaves.” 
She nodded approvingly in response to my befuddled expression, and I obeyed her suggestion without too much mental struggle.
There were only a few people on the ferry, braving a fog so thick the contours of Graemsay Island, which we almost brushed on our way to Hoy, were barely visible.
As I entered the mist, the world as I knew it stayed behind: its joys and its pains, the music and the laughter, the plans and dreams. A different place awaited at the end of the fog, and the other travelers, veiled in the mist, looked like shadows, sharing a ride with me in Charon’s boat to the island of the dead. 
This realm beyond the mists you approach in silence.
Nobody talked. 
We walked quietly, a distance from each other, to respect our solitary retreat, instinctively following in each other’s footsteps along the wooden path snaking through the eerie wilderness towards the giant monolith of Dwarfie Stane.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 6 - Talking to the Old

Life looked a lot cruder in the harsh light of the morning, even though the festival performances continued through the day, and the city was bathed in the unmistakable humid scent of spring.
I met my new friend in the lobby and we walked through the narrow streets, sometimes so narrow a person could barely pass through, braving the rain and listening to the music in silence, like an understanding between us, and ended up huddled at the cafe on the pier, hungry and tired, looking forward to a toasty sandwich and a hot cup of coffee.
“So, you’re not going to ask?” she said, eventually.
“I wouldn’t know what,” I replied, still awkward about hijacking a perfect stranger’s time to satisfy my curiosity.
“What do you know about the stones?”
I started reciting the historical and anthropological data and the scientific opinions regarding the details of the sites, and she stopped me with a curt hand gesture.
“No. Not that. What did the stones tell you when you were there?”
I stopped, not knowing how to respond to that, hesitant to share my intimacy with the untold story of this place with someone I’d just met, but who, obviously, could read it on my face like in a book. I answered, eventually.
“How did you know?”
“It’s written all over you, girl. Do you speak to the Old?”
“The Old? What is that?”

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 5 - A Stonehenge Story

The entire city was caught up in the preparations for the Folk Festival, so I had to postpone my visit to the heritage society, whose normal hours were restricted for the duration.
I gave myself the excuse there is nothing for me to do anyway, so I might as well drive back to Stromness and enjoy the performances.
I stopped at the Stones of Stenness this time, Fiona, trying to find a reference we share. They are 5000 years old, and they must have felt just as old in your day as they do in mine, timeless.
There was nobody else there, just the silence, swept by the wind, and I had this eerie feeling of stepping out of time altogether, into a “different” space I couldn’t understand.

My Dear Fiona Chapter 4 - Old Dragons

I ended up back at Saint Magnus’ Cathedral, with my nose buried in the old records, strangely comforted by the smell of old ink. It is amazing, really, the church’s archives go back centuries! After a few hours of being fully immersed in the lives and the trades of the people of old, you forget what century you’re in; you lose track of time altogether.
Marriages, home deeds, conflict resolutions, old public announcements, the births of children.
This is what time really looks like, reading the birth announcements of people who passed out of existence centuries before you were born.
Seeing their aspirations, hopes and heartbreaks, the bitter and the sweet displayed together like in a painting, equalizes their significance and turns them all into the same substance when watched from a distance.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 3 - The Broch of Birsay

The car trip to the Brough of Birsay led me through treeless landscapes, shy and soft in the sunshine, and filled with the bright smiles of wildflowers, a poem in white, rose, purple and green, laid down as scenery by a benevolent god.
I stood beside them, with the wind in my face, trying to remember an older time, as if I’d been there before. But maybe those were your memories, Fiona, not mine. Maybe that’s what the stones are for, repositories of memories, remembering the fingers of all who had touched them.
I was looking for an excuse to go to the other side of the island, and it was interesting to learn your family tree had spread some of its roots there.
The ancient burial customs of this place exercise a strange fascination on me, like a spell cast centuries before I was born.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 2 - Alone in Kirkwall

I used to see this sea wall in my dreams. You can’t imagine how weird it feels to look at it in real life! I’m not really sure I’m awake right now, Fiona. There is an elusive threshold of weirdness and serendipity past which we stop believing anything is real, a madness of sorts, a sweet, addictive madness.
Ever since I was awarded this research grant to explore your life and times, I'm in disbelief, constantly questioning what I'm seeing in this taffy-like reality that shifts and changes its colors with the slightest tug.
I half expect to see you on that wall, as I did so many times in my mind, with the wind playing with your hair and your sights set far away, while you silently call on the mist.
My parents thought me irresponsible for picking anthropology as a field of study, not easy to make a living at studying dead strangers from a thousand years ago, and this last research project really set them off, because, as they said, just like a soft cow pile, the last thing I needed was another bucket of water.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 1 - My Dear Fiona

There are things we don’t talk about, and they weigh heavily on our souls. Who decided they don’t matter? Life is like virgin land. It only surrenders its bounty after we drench it in our sweat, tears, and blood.
People squander their lives, energy, and purpose as if they don’t value themselves enough to live for real, instead choosing to take a backseat and yield the spotlight to some higher power which, based on the results, doesn’t care about them too much.
While I’m writing to you, Fiona, I’m gazing at the same moon you watched from afar in your distress centuries ago, hoping for the miracle that never came, the one that would have freed you from your fear and pain. This moon is like a symbol of unanswered prayers. Some wishes are granted too late, aren’t they? I wonder if God works this way, if all the questions that are left unanswered are in fact processed in a much slower and more permanent frame of reference, in God’s time.
For some, this is a metaphorical musing. They don’t know how lucky they are, the innocents, to live their lives in real time, and not in retrospect.

The Library - Tenth Story

The authorities of Yavapai County had been looking into by a series of disappearances, going all the way back to 1965, when the leader of an archaeological team, Jack Mattingly, vanished without a trace from the excavation site.
His disappearance was followed by several others, seven people in total, all males in their fifties, sharing an academic background.
The police investigation into the missing persons cases has been frustrated by a series of natural phenomena, possibly related to an anomaly in the local magnetic field which rendered electronic equipment and even old-fashioned compasses useless.
The investigating team ventured as far as they felt it was safe into the undeveloped terrain, but had to turn back eventually when they couldn’t get a clear satellite view of the area due to unusual atmospheric activity.