Nettie Thomson is a Wonky Weegie living in Ayrshire with her husband, parrot and several chronic conditions. Her short story collection And The Angels Cried and Other Stories is available on Amazon; you can find more fiction and poetry at NettieThomson.com.
Erosion
She can taste salt in the wind that whips her bare legs, purpling them like the heather that clings to the thin covering of soil on the slope. She’s out of breath. She doesn’t remember the climb to the cliff edge being such hard work but it’s been years since she was here last. Not since she submitted her PhD, not since she took soil samples, measured its depth, recorded the flora that grew therein. Not since she measured the distance from the trig point to the cliff edge and compared it to the feet and inches of past researchers and recorded the changes she found.
Erosion.
She doesn’t need a tape measure to know things have changed.
There’s a photograph in her purse. She’s in jeans and a fleece, smiling. Keith’s arms encircle her like a tropic, enfolding her in his passion. During that last field trip they’d brought heat to the cool, damp Scottish nights, their tent pitched a modest distance from the others. No one was surprised when they announced their engagement just a few months later. Their
wedding was small. Keith wore a kilt, she had heather in her bouquet, and their nights still pulsed with the heat between them.
This morning, Keith’s lips barely grazed her cheek as he grabbed his rucksack and left to teach his 9am class on glacial erosion at the university where they met. Her cheek still burns with the coldness of it.
Entropy.
She wonders if he likes the attention his students give him. She’s seen them place hands, unmarked by age spots and dry skin, on his arm. He’s never asked them to stop. And at the faculty’s Easter drinks last Friday, she saw him lay his hand on the thigh of the grad student who had cosied up to him in the pub all night.
Heat, like all energy, can’t be destroyed, she thinks. It can only be changed into something—or someone—else.
She walks to the edge where the sky meets the horizon. The view over the North Sea hasn’t changed for millennia, but looking down she sees the new talus formed from old cliff. Everything changes, she thinks. Cliffs, glaciers, relationships. One day the place where she stands will fall too. She doesn’t know what will change next but thinks she’ll stay there and wait to see.