two days in, and here's a chunk of true island life. we live here, we are forged and bound together by ancestors, survivors of tremors and blasts and lingering ash clouds that suffocated the less hardy, smothered the flora and culled our numbers to the quick. we were parasites then, half-dug into the raw skin of the island, barely covered by sod roofs and what we could weave off the backs of sheep. we were destroyers, desperately hacking away at the gnarled and primitive birch forests til the fragile soils ran loosely into glacial rivers, leaving nothing behind but the stripped volcanic muscle of our mother. we fought each other and killed, bore children too weak to live another day in the hostile depleted world into which they came.
hundreds of years ago the island split and raged, taking back her own life through destruction. dank black clouds lay thick in the skies for months, starving so much of what fed on her, breaking down the tenuous cycle of life until a numb stillness overwhelmed the last people, until the starved cattle and sheep could no longer raise their heads in protest. the oldest groves, home to baldur and to sacred things were finally felled, burned, lost. the island had sundered herself, had shaken and seared and smothered the desperate, ugly population that burrowed itself like lice into her fragile moss derma.
yet some survived, and we're the children of those people, here on our now-still volcano. we are cousins, we are rare, and born of destruction. we are the inheritors of a memory of overwhelming sorrow, and the progeny of the last moments of lust between members of a dying race.
© alva ~ excerpt from 88 ~ a love letter to an island (also available in print-to-order)
