Nick Wilford of Scattergun Scribblings is hosting a blogfest today! From his blog:I asked you to contribute a short story on the theme of overcoming adversity, to be compiled into an anthology to help raise funds to send my stepson to a specialist college.More information here.
And so, here's my story, which is called "Endurance" because I can't think of anything better, regardless of how obvious it may be. Anyway. I hope you enjoy it!
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Endurance
Four thousand years and the monolith still stood. Four
thousand years had seen kingdoms, empires, civilizations rise and tumble off
the edge of history like water over a fall, to crash against the rocks below
and the memories of them to scatter into mist. Trees had shrouded it and merged
their roots with its surface; the mountain had changed, the rocks shifting and
half-burying the thing like a body whose consciousness had long vanished.
It didn’t have a
name. It had always had a title, an honorific by which it was
acknowledged by those same civilizations that had tried to pry it apart, to chip
away at its skin until all that was left was the hole in which it had been
placed.
It wanted a
name.
It wanted to get
away from the cloying aura of the past and the memories of the rituals it had
endured because it could not move, to avoid the horrible worship from others
that persisted, tireless, only because they could not understand it. To escape
from the refusal to acknowledge all it wanted was to get out, out, out.
Another thousand
years couldn’t do too much damage. Processing time behind the wall of its
shell, it decided another two thousand years would be bearable. But to feel
the organisms crowding around it, even the inert, brainless ones of the trees
and the grass and the fungi, that was too much. It wanted company.
Four thousand
and three hundred and twenty seven years after its memory began, it sensed a
more complicated presence. It was immediately recognizable as something more
advanced, one of the things in this world bigger than plants but hardly more
complex.
It waited. Those
things always passed by.
The thing
touched the hard surface as though it was an egg, capable of bearing the weight
of a galaxy on its end—but if one knocked it wrong, liable to spill the trauma
of history onto the mountainside, an outpouring of the past assumed forgotten.
It continued to
wait. It could sense that the birds had quieted, and the wind hung close to the
ground like a scared child, and the mountain had stilled.
But . . . there
was a new thing, besides the air and the trees and the mountain. The thing had
somehow exposed its surface, brushing away the organic detritus that had
gathered over those millennia, for once being gentle instead of trying to crack
it open.
It did not
recognize sunlight. It did not recognize that new thing in the sky, hovering
like its own counterpart a million miles away. It felt an unburdening, a
release of four thousand years of pain.
Perhaps the sun
was supposed to be its company. It tried to communicate.
The sun replied.
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Any thoughts on the story?
-----The Golden Eagle
