A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham

Author:Lauren Markham [Markham, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Thi left Lesbos for a few days to pick up her son. I spent the time alone in the northern part of the island, thinking and writing and sitting by the water where the black urchins flashed beneath the surface, as they had on the banks of Hydra. I was accumulating words in Greek now: good morning, good afternoon, mermaid, sea, boat. Early each morning in the small town where I slept, a team of international volunteers loaded up on a pontoon to trawl the sea for shipwrecks. I read more about hypericum, the yellow flower, how ancients considered it a bearer of light, how it was gathered and burned at the summer solstice to ward off bad spirits. I took walks in the hills and kept my eyes out for it, but it seemed to appear only when I wasn’t searching. One afternoon I roamed lazily into an artisan shop, where I found an evil eye fused from pale blue and green glass, frayed nautical rope dangling from it like jellyfish tentacles. I bought it and, in superstition, laid it near my bed.

There’d been another shipwreck; seven people from the Republic of Congo drowned within swimming distance to shore before a rescue boat arrived. None of the passengers knew how to swim, and their life jackets had been fakes.

“I can’t stop thinking about them,” one survivor told me of her companions who had perished. She was haunted by the way they gulped their final breaths before disappearing beneath the water.

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