Note: Two comments on the cover above reference a version with a soundtrack and sound effects accompanying the story. Regrettably, the company I produced that web-server version with switched their business model, and the enhanced version is no longer available.
About this flashfiction story:
One day, I came across this photo of a decaying building sitting on a cliff over a sea, and, struck by it, wondered: ‘What’s its story?’ Here’s what it told me.
THE STORY
The structure’s skeleton sat raw, crumbling with age from the ravage of seasons and weather on a point of land over the sea. In a ruined bedroom overlooking the water, what remained of a once beautiful woman mourned her lost love. Decades ago, more years than she knew, she had found his body on the sharp rocks below, among those teeth of the sea that grind daily until everything’s eaten away except the memories and regrets of what she’d done, what she had caused. They weighed heavily as she stepped off the balcony each night to join him. When the moonfall sky turned to signal the coming sun, she must leave to climb the worn stone steps to cry until moonrise when she could return to him.
The couple had walked the beach for more than a mile, their last day and outing before their return to the United States. Cameras in hand, the stark beauty of this part of the Ligurian coast struck them. Jutting cliffs rose over the sea, a jumble of rock and jagged stone amid patches of sand at their base.
Rounding a bend, they spotted the house. It had once been magnificent and offered a majestic view of the sea and coast. They made their way to almost directly underneath and, looking up, high above, were the remnants of what must have been a balcony. At their feet, chunks of masonry were buried in a bed of sand where the rocks that sat at the water’s edge sheltered them from the surf. Letting only swirls of water and the swash of seafoam spill over them. There were other things in the sand, too.
“Paul,” Angela swept the seawrack away with her foot and stepped back. “Look!”
Paul stared at the two sets of tide-buried bones in the silt and sand. Their upper torso just reached the surface. The more prominent one rose higher, spine arched, the contortion of a near-drowning man that had breasted, gasping for breath. The smaller skull rested on the shoulder bones of the larger set; a lighter-boned arm climbed from the sand to drape across its lower rib cage.
Angela knelt and brushed away some of the sand with the bright blue scarf she took from her head. A gust of seawind lifted the tops from the incoming waves and sprayed them as she leaned closer. What she’d cleared revealed more of the arm, something in its small skeletal fist. She nudged it with her scarf-wrapped hand. Shed of the sand, the circle of metal gleamed and came free. Angela touched the ring, and a stiffer blast came off the water with a keening sound through the rocks that made her grit her teeth. She picked it up; her hair whipped in the wind, and a tingle climbed her spine. The bad kind you get when you’ve done something you shouldn’t and got caught. She quickly rose. “I wonder who they were.” She looked above at the ruined house that loomed over them. “And what happened?”
Paul shrugged. “It’s getting dark. We need to go.” He took several quick pictures and snapped his lens cap in place. “We’ll report this to the police back in town.”
They retraced their way along the beach. There was a lull in the wind. In the dead stillness, Angela turned, looked back to where the bones lay, and canted her eyes and ears up to the house. “Listen….”
“To what?”
“That sound.” Angela took her eyes from the house and glanced at the blue cloth, the ring wrapped inside, still in her hand, then at Paul. “I hear crying.”
The Polizia di Stato officer had flirted with her until he realized she was on her honeymoon. He put down the pad of paper he’d made notes on.
“That palazzo is several centuries old. There are many reports of sounds, but no one has lived there for decades.”
“It was a woman crying. I know it,” Angela repeated.
The officer shrugged. “I’m sure it was just the wind.”
“What about the bones?” Paul asked.
“You gave clear directions where to find them.” The officer flashed his bright smile. “We’ll send a forensics team to investigate. They’ll be brought in to see if an identity can be determined.”
“What will happen to them and this?” She touched the ring she’d given him, now in a clear plastic evidence bag beside his paperwork.
“The Carabinieri will find and notify any next of kin if we identify them.”
“And if not… or if there’s no next of kin?”
“Then the ring and a sample of the bones will be kept with the file, and the remnants cremated.”
Angela and Paul returned home to their newlywed life. It matured and became well-seasoned with years of laughter, tears, sons and daughters, triumphs, and tragedies. But at different times, as the decades flew by, her thoughts returned to that day to that place thousands of miles away at the foot of a seacoast cliff beneath an ancient, ruined, and forgotten estate. Angela remembered what she’d heard and wondered if the woman still cried… and if she looked for her ring.
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