Short Story: Reflections Of A Life

Short Story: Reflections Of A Life

This piece has not been edited by the ShortbreadStories team.

Greeted by the saluting sentinels that are the islands of Inchcolm and Inchkeith, you reach the serenity of your saturnine estuary.

‘You have time to tarry awhile and reflect; take a look behind, in Time and Space, before it’s too late,’ I said.

Eyes might be blinded by the crimson, setting sun but your senses and memories are undiminished. You remember your ancient, amorphous, ancestral home where you forged your identity. Once a mere babbling brook, you soon swelled with kith and kin to form a true force in nature, gravity guiding your crashing from side to side, seeking cracks and crannies to carve your own path inexorably to your destiny.

‘Yes, I made my mark in those darting, early phases, innocent in youth, undaunted, unaware of the hard-work to be accomplished in the future. I was not afraid.’

‘It was not long before you were fully formed,’ I said, ‘yet still young enough to scour through scree and moraine left by retreating glaciers as a penance for taking advantage of their majestic straths, gouged and ground out of bedrock, that eased your progress eastwards.’

You swept up the debris – gravel, sand and stone and bore your heavy unformed burden with certainty and pride. Momentum-induced stability straightened your former serpentine course, allowing you to fashion your own channel in the post-glacial bed.

‘I was aware my power could not last forever; I could sense that I was slowing down and could no longer carry the muds, sands and rounded-pebbles that I had produced.’

‘The power of youth cannot be sustained indefinitely,’ I said. ‘You too were approaching the age of uncertainty.’

*

On either side you can just make out soft violet hues of headlands, your progeny, disappearing gently into a hazy horizon.

‘What else do you see?’ I ask.

Like beckoning sirens, the white horses dance on your slate-green, salty grave, as hostile and cold as the ancient crystalline rocks where you were born. But your resting-place is concealed from you both in Space and in Time. You look back, in panic, over your shoulder, but you cannot go back.

Gravity and Time are slow but irresistible killers.

The gannets screech your name atop Bass Rock’s black, basaltic cliffs, the last sentinel saluting as you drift by into oblivion.

‘What was it all about?’ we say, in unison.

End