The Resurrection

Already I find it hard to imagine my old life, it doesn’t even seem like it happened to me, but somebody who I know, a friend who has since drifted away. So big is the change, geographical in scale that the borders haven’t been redrawn so much as I have become an entirely different country. Subsidence, erosion, a gradual loss of topsoil, the occasional tectonic tremor may have been hints but the final event was so sudden, so fierce that the landscape and all the tiny people who roamed it didn’t stand a chance. They were engulfed, crushed, wiped out before they had chance to take in what was happening (even though they had seen the signs, the failed crops, the way the birds hadn’t returned that spring, but they had convinced themselves that it would never actually happen in their lifetime). The land folded in on itself, fell into the sea, rose up as strange new mountains.

Recently an archaeologist arrived by boat. She is pretty and young and still passionate. Her love for academia has yet to be ground down by the day-to-day effort of making a living from it. She has found bones, not yet complete skeletons but many fragments and there is a picture emerging, the edges of which she has yet to discover. Best of all she enjoys it here. The weather is mild, the midges don’t seem interested in her. The view from the tent is still beautiful enough to surprise her most mornings.