A Half-Fan Flash Fiction by Charlotte Husnjak
'My Dearest Beloved, Meet me on top of the Monument at sunrise. From that moment on, I'll be with you every minute into eternity. I am yours, Forever and Always.'
'My Dearest Rufus, I shall be there. Nothing could keep me from you.'
Nine minutes until sunrise.
A bitter chill creeps up her fingers, curling through her joints and freezing the cartilage in her nose. Puffs from her lungs collide with the Scottish air and dissipate away into the almost-morning. She tucks her scarf back tightly into the exposed space between her neck and collar, having recently dislodged itself during the slightly sweaty climb up to the top of the monument.
The door had been left open for her.
Her cheeks are pink, and her throat feels colder than the morning air, ragged breath subsiding as she folds up the letter into neat quarters, places it into her pocket- she couldn't really read it anyway in the cool green light. The sky is slowly making its way from yellow to teal, echoes of duck-egg blue whispering the sun's welcome to the horizon.
She looks down at her phone anxiously.
Seven minutes.
Love. It's a funny old thing. The girl is thinking of how this sort of rendezvous would have been expected of people from her grandparent's generation- taboo, stolen, quietly rebellious yet filled with heart and meaning. They knew how to do love different back then. Just like in a storybook maybe. Well, apart from the bigotry and sexism and all that homophobia, of course...Maybe not 'romance', exactly then, but large and passion-filled and vintage.
People nowadays don't tend to do such things- the romance that is, still plenty of bigotry, though maybe manifested in different ways. So it isn't any surprise that she's stood here waiting all alone. If reality was a little more romantic there would be so many other couples stood up here with her. But she doesn't mind really.
They'll have more privacy on this empty morning though.
She's always been very content in her own company anyway, very sure of herself, very happy to spend a day reading or going on quiet walks up sublime heights. She swipes to a map icon on her phone to find out where Arthur's Seat lies. Maybe she should take a morning stroll up there later if she decides to imagine up another grand activity to fill the day. Though now she's struggling to imagine what in her day could be more important than the dawn.
She steps closer to the monument's edge, looks out on an Edinburgh painted with mist and little speckles of light from windows and headlights.
The city is beginning to wake up.
And here she is. Watching, and waiting.
Six Minutes.
Headlights dotted everywhere, reflecting off wet stone and asphalt surfaces. Big ones from the bin lorries, small from cars, smallest from little white and red bike lights moving up and down hills in a rush to work. there were some wee lights attached to people too, early-morning runners moving doggedly throughout the mist for their exercise fixes before work. The ones who passed by the monument were all big and strong, bounding to the beat of their headphone-muffled music.
Their morning music is accompanied by the sound of glass pouring from rubbish bins, followed by a wet hiss of movement as the lorry drivers begin crawling their vehicles onto the next stop.
It's funny, she thinks. surveying the city from a perching bird's-eye view, I always imagined somewhere like this to be completely quiet before the sunrise. But I guess capital cities are so busy not even the sun can keep up.
A bus appears from behind a tall stone building on the skyline.
Gosh, those start early here... She takes a photo on her phone. One for the family album. Or to post on Twitter later (#earlyrisers, #edinburghskyline, #thoughts).
Five minutes
She's starting to get anxious now. The timing of this is really where the importance lies. They need to be with each other as the sun rises. To come together after the skyline would feel like a half-finished love story. Somewhat broken, a parenthesis attached to an anti-climax. It would feel like a huge failure on her part if this didn't go exactly the way they both wanted.
As the girl readjusts her hat to cover her ears from the nibbling cold, she almost thinks she feels a hand brushing her hair in greeting. She turns around sharply.
Nothing. It must be the wind.
Or maybe a ghost, she thinks, plenty of spirits up here where the air is clear, I should think.
There are some small markings on the Monument's columns behind her. They could almost be initials when read in a certain half-light. How romantic to mark your first lover's meeting forever in stone. She traces centuries-worth of writing across the stone with her fingertips, letting her overactive imagination run away as she imagines who they all could have been, meeting here oh-so-long-ago. She loses track of the time searching for an intertwined set of 'R' initials. Upon being disturbed by another swoosh of bin-emptying, she panics, realises she's lost herself in imaginings. Hurriedly checks her phone:
Three minutes.
Thank God. She still has time. But she'll have to be quick.
The girl starts to take off the heavy leather backpack that caused her so much trouble on the journey upwards. She unbuckles, opens, retrieves the jars from within, wrapped in layers of scarves and bubble wrap to protect their contents. She removed the lids, almost ceremonial-like in her methodical, measured placing of each lid in front of its glass body.
She kneels, takes two letters out of her pocket, skims over their messages one last time:
'My Dearest Beloved, Meet me on top of the Monument at sunrise. From that moment on, I'll be with you always. I am yours, Forever and Always.'
'My Dearest Rufus, I shall be there. Nothing could keep me from you.'
She rips them up into tiny shreds, fingers shaking a little from her emotions and the temperature. The vintage-brown shreds, soft from age and re-reading are placed gently, equally, into the jars of their writers.
Now the words have been returned to their correspondents, the girl's anticipation begins to ease towards satisfaction. One minute to go, it says on her phone- but it's not like she needs to be told. Cool yellow air begins to break through the dawn in a crepuscular fanfare. She takes a jar in each hand, delicate glass cold to the touch, and makes her way to the edge of the monument.
As dawn breaks, she sprinkles their ashes into the Scottish sunrise, reuniting these two sets of matter years after their bodies first met here to cement a forbidden love as reality.
Grandad Robert and his life's love Rufus are on the wind. In the wind. Are the wind,. Followed by their words. Together in a way they weren't able to be until only a few years before one of them passed away, and the girl's parents had sat her down to explain that sometimes people with the same bits can think they love each other, but really they're just ill. And that when people ask about Grandad on Sunday, she shouldn't say anything except that they weren't talking to him until he got better.
That was the first moment the girl had realised how unfeeling her parents were when it came to people who weren't like them. They'd got slightly better over time, especially when she told them a few years later that she was gay too. She wasn't ill, she'd told them, she just loved who she loved, and couldn't help it. Nor could she want to help it.
But she'd wanted to help them, the two lovers whose letters she'd been bequeathed as a reminder that love thrives even in the most unaccepting of contexts. Great Uncle Rufus had told her once that she was the pioneer of a new generation, one that accepted difference and wasn't hungry for suffering in the ways of those from before.
She wasn't sure that was one-hundred percent true, but she'd nodded and smiled because it was important to Rufus that it was. She was happy she'd kept his hope alive, even after his love had died.
The sunrise is peppered with black freckles as the girl watches the greatest love she's known disappear off into the ether.
Maybe their next world will be a better one, she thinks.
That would be nice.
Or maybe, just maybe, we could make this world one where people like me don't have to wish for another.
She stays in the monument for a while, and breathes with the city.
Today Edinburgh shines golden in the morning light.
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