Marvin was a megalith, although you couldn’t tell him that. He was convinced he was a third century Buddhist nun. Rose and Veronica kept tying to tell him how unlikely that was, but he wasn’t having any of it. He was a nun and this was Tibet. It drove Rose and Veronica spare for centuries and it wasn’t until little Billy pointed out that maybe they’d want to take a leaf out of Pedro’s book and ignore Marvin’s fantasies, that the squabbles ended and they all got along. Maybe it was because of his size and that he wasn’t technically a megalith, but little Billy had always been more flexible in his thinking. He enjoyed pretending he was a way stone for the stars. He liked to think that the sky beacons knew which way to move across the sky because they were oriented by him. Rose and Veronica grew some
Martha was from Panama, but she had been living in Kent for 34 years. She had moved there after meeting Peter who had been working on the canal. She followed him back to the country of his birth, far away from her own. It had been hard for her at times, away from her sun and food, but she had never wavered in her decision to come. Peter was quietly solid and full of his own kind of light. He was a reassurance that her gaze rested on over the decades. Peter died last year. Martha had felt herself winding inwards in the days which had passed since. Everything becoming a little bit smaller and more compact. Peter had died and now she was free, and she was trying to understand if that meant she had formerly felt trapped. Working her way to the answer was an exercise in dodging guilt,