What is a story without a happy ending? Through selection is achieved a brief perfection — anticipated — so why dwell on the extinction of things? So much is going on. Abi and Danny in vanishing reveal their grace.
What?
There is something beautiful about them.
What about us, Charles Darwin?
They are beautiful, but you are my life.
Ah, Charles.
The village is my life and you are part of the village.
QED. I’ve always wanted to prove something. I took Danny’s voyages and grew them in a Petri dish. I can’t prove he was my brother. Now I’m thin with the telling. Even the best tale will be overlooked in favour of new ones just coming into being. But as long as I am alive village life is not done. No, no. No villagers remain, but symbols abound. The stones and the sand might be everything.
The horse-bitten barn sails in all weathers, cracked and missing boards and with holes in the roof. I moved in when Emma died. Everyone but me has left and the village is a collection of low walls and foundations. Long grass grows on the vine hills. The river level changes at random. Summers are often wet and winters bring drought. I remember Emma young, under a tree. We were in love. I remember what she looked like then, perched on a root, hugging her knees, grinning at me.
I might have finished the wall, the path, if there had been enough time. Emma planted honeysuckle for Abi and white clematis for Danny inside the wall, where it could be seen from the glass room. And now the room and house are gone, clematis and yellow honeysuckle are a rampant wave cresting the wall, though there is no inside or outside.
Each winter they wilt and leaves scatter over the sand. Tow-headed weeds grow in the dry ditch in front of the foundations of Tom’s house. When it’s quiet a hundred Turk’s head lilies rattle among the long grasses in the ditch that used to separate his house from the road. I’m used to the perpetual rhythmic roar, imagine machines, imagine waves.
We had a daughter, Emma and I. Annie died when she was ten. It seems as if I have only just found this out, though I’ve been discovering it all my life.
We had a son who left when he was eighteen and never came home, never wrote. There is parent, child; the space between is empty, waiting. I, thou. Near the beginning, near the end. Light enters through the holes in the roof. Travellers may still return.
I visit Apocat and Kata on the reserve.
“The village,” Kata says. “Tell him.”
“Ah yes,” says Apocat. “A turtle got trapped inside.”
“Why was it there?” I ask.
Kata sighs. “Old tribes have brittle bones.”
“We held to our own, dear,” says Apocat. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“Why am I still here?” I ask.
“Yes, that’s a puzzle. Is he the projection or the veil? What is he, Kata?”
Kata cackles. “Don’t be stupid. That’s clear as day.”
“I am not needed, Kata.”
“Oh, but you are, Charles,” says Apocat. “For a little while longer.”
“People expect an end, Charles,” says Kata.
Strange, the absence of wickedness in the barn. Absence of any emotion, really. I’m just back from my old wall. It’s not for dividing anything, you know. It’s a promontory. It gives perspective. Look, there’s the box-turtle come out from under the straw, lifting his head, craning his neck; he is wary of me, doesn’t yet know his life is just some kind of worry. And I hear what he has heard. Over top of the deep explosions, close footfalls: the approach of a horse.