Bored. I really enjoyed the fossil-hunting trip last week. I found part of the mandible of an extinct sea lion. the teacher was excited about it too — generally the best you could find at that site was a complete clam shell. I kind of wanted to keep the mandible for a souvenir, but it was valuable enough to be sent to the university museum for further analysis by specialists. Mr smith measured exactly where it was found and took photos of the site. My name was recorded as the finder! we dug carefully around the site to see if we could find more of the skeleton, but didn’t find anything. Mr smith said the scientists at the university might come back with special equipment.

When we got back from the trip a girl from the Cult of Irene came to my room and woke me up in the middle of the night. We walked out in the bright night, across the sand, and through the trees to the seaside rocks, where we threaded our way through a narrow path that I didn’t know existed, to a small room with a mattress on the floor.

Afterwards we washed up by a little stream and I think we talked, but I was sleepy. Later I woke up in my room with sand from my feet, moonlight drifting through the window.

I tried to retrace my steps, but when I got to the rocks there was no path inside. I climbed the rocks to the top, but there was no little room anywhere.

Many years pass, and Gert became a hard muscled rough man with experience as a sailor. A pirate, almost, who has traveled throughout the islands, far from the large towns. The promise of University long ago faded, as did the dream of the Irene.

Instead he met Colda, a woman with long dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes who lived on her own. Colda was very strong, as strong as any man, and took him in on her own terms. And presently she grew tired of him and threw him out, threw him out in a way the left no room for argument and no possibility of return.

He drifted for a time afterwards, here and there among the remote islands and the sun and the salt and the waves, with no plan and no destination.

One day by the winds of chance he returned to the island where he found the sea lion mandible. His old beach home was still standing, though worn and empty, and he decided to stay a while.

Walking on the sand on a bright day, near the same rocks where he met the Irene, around a small spit he sees a path leading in among the rocks. "It cannot be," he thought, and a compulsion to follow the path overtook him.

At the end of the path was a small house, hidden among trees and rocks, with a neat well-tended garden and flowers and smoke from the chimney. "It cannot be," he thinks again.

But the Irene stood in the doorway, and said "Hello, Gert". She is pale and thin with soft silvery hair and light gray eyes. "You can stay".