FLASH FICTION:SHE LIFTED HER HEAD at the very first glint of white and stopped, still holding the trowel.
With no effort, abruptly, it lay exposed.
For the first time in thousands of years, a fractured plot of skull lay palely open to the sky. She allowed her finger to follow in the air the fine suture which meandered across it. Just then, she heard a sound.
She lifted her head and looked about.
Beneath her, the dense swaying grasslands proclaimed the spring sun – teardrop drumlins pointing a Paleolithic past.
This site, she thought, is exactly as a dig should be – as she’d once, naively, imagined it would always be – a landscape scoured by time.
She turned back towards the others. Maybe he had called to her from the south-east trench. Tom. From her remove, she took in his fixed smile, the dun familiarity of his “archaeologist’s kagoule”, and felt with a rush, again, his intent, calloused hands running over her belly.
Tomorrow he’d return for the weekend, to his wife and his baby son. She had seen the child just once and could still feel, on the pads of her fingers, the feathery golden down on the scalp of his unsealed head.
She returned her gaze to the trench, picking with the very tip of the trowel at the light loam soil. Good for growing. Good for burying.
This was their third and final attempt at making a “significant find”, Tom had stressed. Without it, the site would become “disinvested”: fatally bereft of funding. On each previous trip, his presence – dispensing wisdom and wry experience – had impressed itself more upon her.
Somewhere along the way, the two of them had become involved, clumsily, and, as she had believed then, by accident. Now, well . . . He wanted, she knew, to put it – her – behind him. She had become an inconvenience. Some kind of remnant. For him, it was purely a matter of discovering the right words. The right time.
And now this. This fragment was precisely what the project needed. The vindication of their efforts. With this, Tom could secure funding for another six months or more – put the project on a whole new footing.
Already she could hear his boyish delight at the find, see him hovering intently over this pitiful concavity of bone, his fingers hungry for the heft of it.
That’s when it came to her: no one had seen her make the find. The nearest volunteer was far from her. It would be the easiest thing in the world to pick it up, drop it somewhere in the immensity of surrounding pastureland. The fragment would lie forever unfound, or be casually crushed by the tempered steel blades of an agricultural machine.
The dig would be closed.
She smiled for the first time, and, wiping each hand methodically on a tattered rag, asked herself – evenly and in a spirit of untainted enquiry – what precisely it was that she was about to do.
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