Clear as Quartz, Sharp as Flint

In early summer, before solstice-night, when the child is not yet so heavy inside her, Jenna climbs the hill to the ring of stones. She knows she shouldn’t, but it’s the kind of day when nothing seems perilous, not even those pale-grey sarsens looming on the tor. The breeze is soft, and the first bees, drunk on nectar, buzz through the pink sheen of heather spread across the moor. Father’s sheep graze on the hillsides while the herding dogs lounge in the sun, their keen eyes on the lambs and ewes.

Jenna climbs the hill because she hears the stones sing.

Don’t listen to that old stone-song, Grammy told her. That’s what everyone says. Yet it is hard to ignore that call once you’ve heard it.

The first time Jenna heard the stone-song was in midwinter, that night when she let Keff into her bed while everyone was at the sun-feast. Only Grammy’s wooden god watched them from the wall. When Keff moved inside her, the song thrummed so low and deep within she thought it was her own heart beating.

She heard that same song the day the baby quickened. Heard it again when Grammy laid her hands on her belly, shaking her head, muttering of ill-made children, saying that the stones would claim what the wooden god would not.

Lately, Jenna hears the song every time she walks past the smithy, every time Keff turns away rather than look at her.

*

Jenna climbs and the song quivers inside her, making the child stir—whether it is eager or uneasy she cannot tell. The song has words, but she cannot hear them yet. All she hears is the melody, like a cold trickle on hot skin. Like a drink of something cool when you’re parched. Like sharp teeth sunk into warm flesh.

She climbs, feet slipping on rocks and tussocks, hands grabbing hold of dirt and roots, skin slick with sweat beneath the wool and rough-spun linen.

On the hilltop, the stones loom, worn smooth by age and craft, brought here so long ago only the sky remembers when, their grey bulk sunk deep into the hard ground. Jenna steps inside the ring, the song throbbing in her veins and marrow. She turns and turns again, eyes closed, the child gone still inside her.

If her eyes were open, she would see the whole world from this high perch—the village with its sod-roofed houses and sway-backed byres, the gleam of ocean just beyond, the undulating horizon. But she does not look. She just listens to the voices of the stones—whispering, rumbling, crooning.

Jenna sheds her tunic and her breeches, leaning naked on the tallest stone, arms outstretched, round belly pressed hard against the rock, every ounce of warmth leaching out of her. On the slope below, the sheep keep grazing undisturbed, while the dogs whimper, ill at ease.

She lets herself sink into the cold, until the chill breath of the rocks and the darkness writhing beneath the hill heave and twist inside her. Until she hears the words; until they cut her. Clear as quartz, sharp as flint.

The song remains inside her through the summer, voices shivering through her womb while the sarsens watch and wait on the tor.

She does not climb the hill again.

MARIA HASKINS is a Swedish-Canadian writer and translator. She writes speculative fiction and poetry, and currently lives just outside Vancouver with a husband, two kids, and a very large black dog. Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Shimmer, Cast of Wonders, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere.