Winter Fire

Artwork by Amanda Young
 

“This memory is of a winter evening around the fire pit viewing clear starlit skies in a woodland garden. The vacant chairs are a deliberate invitation to the local bats and barn owls to hunt without interruption as we silently watch from the kitchen door, warming ourselves with hot drinks.”
Amanda Young (MA Illustration) intuitively creates a visceral connection with the viewer through drawing out emotional and physical memory. 
IG: @amandayoungart

There Isn’t Much Left

Fiction by Kleopatra Olympiou


       At sixty-five, recently retired, recently divorced, all Katerina wants is to go back to the island in Greece and see the landscapes of her girlhood, and it’s finally time. 
       At the port, the taxi driver frowns in the rearview mirror when she names the village. “Are you sure? There isn’t much left.”
       She has asked in English, too shy to speak Greek forty-five years after she left the country. He hesitates, she assumes, because he can’t think what a Canadian tourist could want in a small village that has gotten even smaller with urbanization.
       She says she is sure.
       On the way there she feels a stirring, an urge to leap out of the car and roll in the earth, walk up that familiar bend in the road along the wheat fields. She pictures the wide church steps where she used to play with her cousin Eleni. The alley where she’d feed the stray cats, tens of them, tabbies with white bellies. The grocery store where she worked the till when she was fifteen, and the way she would blush when her crush would walk in. The whirr of the ceiling fan in the square’s kafenio at noon.
       She’s imagined these things for years in her Toronto apartment, thousands of miles of water and land away. She severed her life when she left against the wishes of the know-it-all aunt who had raised her. Chose to follow a Canadian tourist, Rob, who thundered when he laughed, who was at ease in the world, who found her terrible English delightful. Forty-five years – marriage and kids and learning English and working a reception desk – and she is returning as uncertain as she left.
       Crazy, she thinks, over and over, how life just continues elsewhere even after you leave, the morning light falls on the streets and kids go to school and couples marry and babies are born and families move and always there is someone dying and trees grow and drop their leaves and in the late afternoon, the light falls long and bold and orange on white walls, and it happens again and again and again and you miss it all, even though you thought you were a part of it once.
       The only person she kept in touch with was Eleni, but she died a few years ago of a heart attack.
       The car stops in front of a burnt building, half-collapsed. 
       “See?” The driver gestures. “Not much left, after last year’s wildfire.”
       Her expression betrays her.
       “You didn’t know? No one died, but everyone moved away. It destroyed everything.”
       Katerina steps out and approaches the building – it is the church, she realizes, the church was always the first building you’d see on the drive into the village. The mass on the scorched earth is the bell tower, and beyond it some charred mounds where the main street used to be. It is such a small area. Too small for everything it held once.
       There is nothing left except these sorry traces of life, like an archaeological site. She stands there a long time.
       “Were you looking for someone?” the driver asks.
       In her mind she only sees her own uncertain face at twenty, getting on that ferry at sunrise, looking back until the island disappeared into the sea. 
Kleopatra Olympiou is a writer from Cyprus. Her writing has appeared in HAD, Maudlin House, Flash Flood, and Electric Literature. She currently lives in London.
BS: @kleopatraolympiou.bsky.social