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by Brent Knowles
Mainstream, 21 pages.
Originally Published in Quantum Muse, 2004
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“There it is!” Jón shouted, his voice booming in the salmon ship’s small cabin as the trawler bounced across the storm-stirred Atlantic, leaping from wave to wave. Marci clutched a railing and watched the island ahead grow bigger through the water-splashed window. Steve stood at the bow of the ship, unprotected from the storm and hanging on for dear life as he pointed excitedly. His water-plastered gray beard, his stooped frame, and the weathered lines of his face made his age apparent. Steve had always seemed old to her, but now it was something more, almost elderly. She half-hoped he would slip, fall into the sea, be out of her life forever.
Marci watched the much younger Jón struggle with the ship’s controls, as he continued, “I told you I found an island. And look. There! The Tree!”
The Tree dominated the recently surfaced island, a tower of stone eaten wood, rising out of the almost barren island like a titan’s outstretched hand, fingers splayed as if grasping for the sun. It glowed pinkish-orange for a stream of sunlight tore through the heavy storm clouds, the light dancing across the traces of quart embedded in the wood. The wind raced swift moving clouds across the sky and whenever one of these blocked the sun, the color faded momentarily, returning swiftly when the clouds continued on. It was breathtaking.
“How could it survive so long... underwater?”
“You are asking me, the fisherman?” Jón said, “That is for you and the old man to figure out. I do not get paid to use this.” Jón tapped his skull as he shook his head, his long braid of blond hair flapping against his back. He grinned and she grinned back, his excitement as contagious as a preschooler’s cold.
Steve called something to them, pointed.
She wondered aloud, “Are those walls?”
The fluctuating light made it hard to judge for certain what the lumps of stone near the Tree were. But they definitely appeared to form a lazy circle, possibly a settlement of some kind.
“Ah-hah! Jón has done well, I think! Professor-girl, where is your camera? Take some pictures. You shall never see the likes of this again. You need something, to show your boy.”
Marci stared down at her camera; she had forgotten she was even holding the damn thing. What a day! Just hours earlier the handsome Icelander had dropped Steve, Marci and the undergraduates off on the famed Surtsey — a small island formed only forty years ago in the mid-Atlantic — only to speed swiftly back and tell them that he had just witnessed another island surface. Steve, the senior researcher, had had to go, and despite her misgivings in accompanying him, Marci would never have forgiven herself if she had missed out on this.
“Jón,” Marci said as she began to put to film what her eyes were hoarding, “this is simply amazing. Adam is going to love these.”
* * *
It only took a couple days without sleep or a good meal to downgrade Marci’s initial euphoria. Her fingers were numb from the biting wind and she was certain that without Jón’s spare toque she would have lost her ears by now. Even with her cardigan, weatherproof coat and solid boots she felt drenched from head to toe and other places too. She glanced at her watch. Out on this sea shifted island she had difficulty judging time. Another day, no more, and the others would arrive — a properly prepared, team from Reykjavik, and shortly thereafter Americans and a team of Germans. She chewed at her chapped lips as she knelt among the mass grave, numerous skeletons half-encased in hardened soil.
The rain continued to pound away at her.
She photographed a skeleton pressed against the wall of the sea-worn fort. The walls were eroded, worn down like an old man’s teeth, but they had once formed a circular enclosure. There had probably never been a roof, but doubtlessly whoever had lived here had erected lean-tos in the courtyard.
She could not help but remember a story told to her in an undergrad history class, a legend that Saint Brendan once sailed past an Atlantic island in the midst of sinking. Were these the people he had found and abandoned to their fate? Might the man lying here, with his hands curled about a stone rod, be the same man who had flung a flaming rock at the wandering monk’s boat? Like stepping into an old myth, Marci felt drawn to these people, her life attached to theirs as her fingers pored over their history. This was not a typical European find, a dab of history uncovered among the modern. This island probably had not changed much from when its inhabitants had lived on it. Certainly all manner of dead sea-life covered its surface, but already the various growths were being swept back into the ocean as wind and rain worked together to clean the island.
She took a photo of a mother holding her young daughter tightly, the child’s head pressed against her mother’s breast, as if the -- [End of Preview.]