Verdant vistas lie before mountains of stone that solemnly watch over. The ridge’s message is clear: nothing beyond here. Patches of variegated green- and dun-colored grass sewn onto the land. White doilies of wildflowers in repose. Bosky. Shrubs like dilated buttons, some like pins. A grove of olive trees arranged in a stoic phalanx — a vestige of the past. Old-world villages, ruddy Spanish tile roofs, buildings of white stone and concrete. Peals from the town tell the time. A blanket of dry heat —unrelenting, not malevolent. Breezes that mean business. Zephyrs that sway. Swallows slake in a pool, swiftly dipping in and out, a parabolic choreography. Saline sea a gradient lapis lazuli. Coruscant. Wind ripples the waves like cirrus clouds that fan out to forever.Mountain as parent, sun as grandparent — no, sun as ancestor. The still quality of rolling hills. Knolls, dells. Vertiginous gorges. There is danger in this beauty.Sheep huddle in the shelter of an olive tree. Goats cling to the cover of a crag. At night, cats saunter the streets, feline mendicants. Roosters follow their instinct. Grasshoppers gab, like the old men at the taverna, gathered in the shade. A place where living in shadow has no clandestine, furtive suggestion. Every frame a Van Gogh, a Cézanne. Yes, like this: a post-impressionistic painting come to life.

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_{(Flash Fiction from The Hemlock’s Issue 6, Winter 2024)}

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