On any given dawn, Ishmael could be found milking and mucking and feeding and watering, but on this particular dawn, his chores lay ignored, forgotten because of a sight he couldn’t understand.Ī beam of light passed through the window of the barn, slipped into a flaw in the glass and emerged, splintering into rays of light that flashed upon the wide planks of the barn floor. He had been born here and had seen eleven years pass by here-the past seven of which were spent mostly in the ramshackle barn, tending the rickety sheep. Each gray dawn greeted a gray sagging cottage, a gray ramshackle barn, and a gray kitchen garden cut into the gray turf with row upon row of untended gray vegetables. On the outskirts of this town was a small farm-a bland and barren patch of dirt with some stubborn and stringy weeds, a few decrepit and misshapen trees, and a shriveled and fading trickle of water aspiring to be a stream. The stone wall with its large wooden gate circled the crown of the hill, but few people knew what lay concealed behind it.

Its gentle slope rose up at the edge of a market square that wasn’t quite square, in a town that hunkered down in a barren landscape. He had no reason to go there anyway-no reason, that is, until many years later, after Luc had been gone for some time.Ĭommons Hill was not particularly common, nor was it much of a hill. He closed his eyes to the strange brightness and the curious darkness and lost track of which way was up and which way was down until he felt himself being yanked sideways by a reproachful hand and a switch that whipped the joy right out of him.Įver after, Commons Hill was linked in his memory with rebuke rather than wonder, and he never rolled down the hill again. Pure joy bubbled out of him, and he squealed tumbling down the hill. He saw sky, then ground, then sky and ground, brightness and darkness, faster and faster, until everything merged into one great wheel.

Luc told him to do it, so, of course, Ishmael threw himself down, rolling over the bumpy ground. Ishmael’s first memory was rolling down Commons Hill, its massive stone wall behind him and the open market square before him. He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

The Splintered Light by Ginger Johnson