| Alimouda Beach, Santorini by Joyce Hinnefeld | ||
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He moors his tiny boat-all painted wood, all blues and reds and greens-for hours it seems. With his old wool cap and dungarees he could be in my dreams, or in my guidebook. But his fish, in two torn plastic bags, are real. I am pinned here on this bluff by rock and wind, tired and sick from travel and no sleep. But my fingers are fragrant with the peel of an orange, and its sweetness is a real thing, too, as I watch him step to shore, sure- footed and sun-weathered as he climbs. He is ageless, and I know as I watch him that he saw it, that he felt the moving earth and fled the lava bath that left behind these carboned rocks, the flat-topped mountain there behind my head. Perhaps he sees it still, these forty-some years later, as he steers his boat into this cove and makes it so secure. All these various devastations, all these fitful origins-all on shifting spits of land. Here the sun could darken and return, and elsewhere, at some time, some wanderer found a first, mysterious orange-saw it hot and oddly weighted on the ground, picked it up and peeled it. Think of his delight to find that lavish heart, the perfect sweet that lay below that sunlight-scented skin. In Fira, once called Thera, ancient wall paintings, half real and half imagined later stand secure behind their glass. In one two birds romp underneath a blackened sun. Crudely drawn but sexed, one floats above the other, legs and wings in dextrous flight. Their beaks stretch open: loving, crying, biting for the heart before they face their ashen end.
JOYCE HINNEFELD an Assistant Professor of English at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Her short story collection, Tell Me Everything, selected by Joanna Scott for the 1997 Breadloaf Writers Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction, was published by the University Press of New England in 1998. She is now at work on a novel, tentatively titled Pilgrim's Song. |
