Hitting Upon the Bard
Only once in a lifetime do the sisters succumb to severe tipsiness.
She had been bitching on the bus for three days into our Greece mainland tour with a specialist travel agency for the “unfettered and single traveller”, otherwise known as the divorced, with most of us overweight, over-forty and over-anxious expedition members coping in silence.
At least she was definitely still pretty, except for her pupils, which had that metallic dull shine of a used particle-projector barrel right out of a Peter F. Hamilton sci-fi novel, which had made me avoid her in all the socially acceptable ways I could muster.
And yet, here we were at some overgrown stone ruins, lost in the foothills beneath Mount Olympus on our lightweight hiking trip, only the pair of us, separated from the main herd and the two lady guides with voices of staff sergeants, trying to find out from an old goat-herding gentleman how to return to our parked coaches down below.
Surprisingly, she has been somewhat subdued the last few hours, which I ascribe to a healthy fear of being eaten by me or a carnivorous ram.
The man with millennia of sun-etched wrinkles reminds me of how I always imagined the Blind Bard would look in person. He had laughed heartily after we determined the general direction of our retreat to safety, but peering at us through rheumy eyes, he now insists in fragmented English on retelling a story his grandmother passed on to him.
The Sisters of Destiny have this ritual, you see, being siblings who are quite close by affection and trade, of meeting and letting their magnificent curly hair down in a private chit-chat in a grove not five minutes slow walk from here.
Rarely, only once in a mortal’s lifetime, in fact, does their happy hour with retsina and mead in the shade of the sacred olive tree inadvertently prolong, making their gaze twinkle and blinding them to the actions of broken men and women who could, just could, meet their soulmates on that fateless afternoon even if they do not deserve them.
As we thank him and turn away, I seem to hear faint female laughter on the breeze, and she who accompanies me on the descent to the car park is a maiden of radiant visage.
The story above was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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