Yours Truly 2016 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA | Page 53

Orkney

Louise Spiegler

We are all very close in this cave.

The guard lifts his torch and it isn’t a
cave; it’s a tomb.
Warrior kings of Orkney are buried here,
king upon king, shoving into the hole like
bread in a rising oven.
Aimless wandering has brought me this
far, much farther than I expected. Orkney
is high on the longitude’s horn and I have
become nothing but eyes and ears. I do not
know the latitude or longitude. If anyone
wants to find me, I cannot direct them.
As I traveled north and then further north,
and the train emptied out at Inverness, I
was emptying out as well. Soon there was
no one but me on the train. My boots were
black when I stepped off the platform at
Edinburgh, but by the time the train pulled
in at Thurso, they had become the color of
steam on the window. Color seeped from my
skin. When I pulled strands of hair from my
ponytail, they were translucent as strings of
spider web.
This seemed appropriate. I’d left my
socks, the only pair that matched, in
London, lost my address book somewhere in
Manchester. If the rest of me started to flow
away as well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Anonymity had set in like a bad cold.

I let nothing out. I take everything in.
Hunger from the eyes. I engulf the swelling
countryside, with no function except to
devour these hills, these rocks with soured
yellow weeds in their cracks, these wire
fences and filth-matted sheep whose rumps
shake as they run from the noise of the train.
We are very close in this tomb, the
other tourists and I, all at trough and come
to gobble up the kings of Orkney. Dough
in a rising oven. Not confident of glorious
resurrection, these kings. Christ would come
as a pile of soggy wafers, much later, on a
ship of conquest. The tomb is deep in the hill.
It is very dark and reminds me of a bunker,
a bomb shelter. Once a year, at summer
solstice, a beam of light floods down the
narrow tunnel into the burial chamber. It
hits the altar stone, with its horrible threats
to those who disturb the sleepers’ rest. The
kings, safe in their slots in the wall, are for
one moment electrified.
How is this known? Someone watches.
Another watcher. I want to know who.
The mystical Swedish girl with the
backpack is pressed against the wall, away
from the rest of the group. She is listening
for ghostly lamentations.

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