The church sits in the centre of the village, raised on a hill so that from the furthest houses it seems as though it floats off the ground. There’s a tall stone bell-tower but no bell. Instead, Eren, the church warden, comes out onto the high church steps twice a day and he shakes a handbell into the air, calling the villagers who still pray to prayer. It was not always so.
Eren spits at the stone-flagged floor and he lifts a glass to his thick lips and tilts back his head. It is wine that he drinks – church wine. If I do not drink it, then who will? he says to no-one in particular. He swallows and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and he sighs and looks sad.
No, it was not always so, Eren says. It was not this way when Deylan lived in the village. Deylan of the beautiful hair and eyes the colour of hazelnuts or rust and she stole his heart and took it so far away that it never would be returned to him.
Deylan, sister of Havva who walks with a limp and does not dance. And didn’t Deylan kiss Eren when he was a younger man, and weren’t there more than kisses one star-flung breathless night? And she held his hand in hers and from the top of the dawn-break bell-tower they looked out across the whole of the world – their world. The world of Kisil.
But even then Deylan was looking further than Eren, further than could even be seen, and Deylan wondered what else there was beyond Kisil’s horizon.
Eren looks at Havva kneeling in church these days and he wishes now it was Havva he’d kissed atop the bell-tower all those years ago, for at least Havva stayed. And if it had been Havva Eren had sworn to love from that day to his last day, then there’d be a bell in the tower of the church still. Instead the bell had left with Deylan and was hanging now in a new church in Oregon, which was someplace beyond what can be seen from the highest point in Kisil and someplace beyond Eren’s thoughts.
Patricia Ann McNair 
The church sits in the centre of the village, raised on a hill so that from the furthest houses it seems as though it floats off the ground. There’s a tall stone bell-tower but no bell. Instead, Eren, the church warden, comes out onto the high church steps twice a day and he shakes a handbell into the air, calling the villagers who still pray to prayer. It was not always so.
Eren spits at the stone-flagged floor and he lifts a glass to his thick lips and tilts back his head. It is wine that he drinks – church wine. If I do not drink it, then who will? he says to no-one in particular. He swallows and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and he sighs and looks sad.
No, it was not always so, Eren says. It was not this way when Deylan lived in the village. Deylan of the beautiful hair and eyes the colour of hazelnuts or rust and she stole his heart and took it so far away that it never would be returned to him.
Deylan, sister of Havva who walks with a limp and does not dance. And didn’t Deylan kiss Eren when he was a younger man, and weren’t there more than kisses one star-flung breathless night? And she held his hand in hers and from the top of the dawn-break bell-tower they looked out across the whole of the world – their world. The world of Kisil.
But even then Deylan was looking further than Eren, further than could even be seen, and Deylan wondered what else there was beyond Kisil’s horizon.
Eren looks at Havva kneeling in church these days and he wishes now it was Havva he’d kissed atop the bell-tower all those years ago, for at least Havva stayed. And if it had been Havva Eren had sworn to love from that day to his last day, then there’d be a bell in the tower of the church still. Instead the bell had left with Deylan and was hanging now in a new church in Oregon, which was someplace beyond what can be seen from the highest point in Kisil and someplace beyond Eren’s thoughts.
So good, Lindsay! Thank you, friend.
Thanks, Patty – for that ‘so good’ and for that ‘friend’.