The Stone Record

by Morgan Melhuish

Jeremy Bishop

The smog holds everything in place. Listless winds barely disturb thick banks of cumuli, pendulous and scum-grey in the gritty sky.

A tang of electricity still buzzes in the air from last night when dancing, darting lightning struck at the sea.

I love how the burst-battery taste mingles with salt. I love the shore with its percussive waves, how we have shocked those sluggish oceans from cardiac arrest.

Today a dirty tidemark of spume and stinking seaweed lines the rocky bay. I wrinkle my nose and try to ignore putrefying scents, pick my way along the water’s edge, humming as I go.

Whistling.

Anything to ward off the quiet. The ghosts of this place.

I’ve no curved beak to rootle like the wading birds back home, but my eyes are sharp. I’m always surprised what washes up here, treasures slowly stirred from the depths.

Amongst the slimy strands are jewels of plastic, bars of sunny gold, an array of brightly coloured rings. The translucent pastel pebbles of sea glass. Sometimes there is driftwood, rusty scraps of metal, steel drums. It’s worth a glance or two.

Just last week I found the perfectly moulded shrunken head of an infant. Tight brown curls, one eye stuck in a squint while the other polished pearl rolled in its head.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Tinkering with its sodden voice box I finally got it to gurgle.

“Ma … ma.”

I’ve no idea if the flat repetitive syllables are warning or greeting. A tribal chant or wheedling demand. It sits in my collection, catalogued and tagged.

It’s why I scavenge. Trying to make sense of their history, their music. To bring a voice to the past.

Not for the first time I wonder if Polymer was a significant species at some point on this planet? The evidence suggests it might have been, so prolific and present. Fashioned in their image, did it rise up against Humanity?

So focused am I on these thoughts, on flotsam, I almost don’t realise the geography of the bay has altered in the night. It’s the slick soil turning the water murky that grabs my attention. Head up, I see the fury of the storm has split the cliff asunder, its secrets spilled upon the shingle.

My breath catches, pulse flutters. I know you can time travel with geology, skip epochs as you descend strata. I bound up the muddy midden, giddy with excitement.

Ellerbeck.

Salt wick.

Dogger.

Mud shale.

Jet.

I’m knee-deep in the past.

We know certain things from the Voyager files. I have studied oh so diligently. Extrapolated.

Yet there is much missing. Corrupted. Lost.

Others in my faculty have discovered what could be sacrificial shrines or spoil heaps. In a long-gone age of plenty it’s up to us to rake through what was tossed aside. What is trash, what truly significant. It’s a fine line.

A fine line.

I can’t take my eyes from the fissure in front of me, strata parted to reveal … Fossils.

I’ve seen ammonites and plesiosaurs. Fern fronds and trilobites captured for eternity in rock.

Nothing like this.

Etched across the cracked and pitted surface of this sheet of stone are traces of a grid system, an empty stave. It’s a little like the cartography I’ve seen of Human cities. Petrified wooden boxes.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing. My hands start to shake as I fumble to record this.

Inside each lozenge are the fossilised remains of spines and femurs, scapulas and skulls.

This tablet contains a honeycomb of cells.

A bonecomb.

A human hive.

I wonder if these are the remnants of worker drones, exhausted maybe …? Exhumed by the storm. An Anthropocene rapture — except these dead do not walk. Thunder will not wake them from their graves.

I brush away flecks of dirt still lingering after acid rains, trace a digit through the xylophone of a ribcage. I caresses a cranium, a touch so intimate, beyond dewy flesh to bone. No throats and mouths, no organs or soul.

Just stone.

I shiver. What a privilege — to connect with these calcified corpses.

It makes me think of the marks we make with our lives.

Time passes.

I’m lost in an era long gone. Revering. Keening. Grieving again for all the tribes of the planet: metallers and country folk, free jazz scatters, the conductors and rap. The musical multitude.

I think of the tracks on the Voyager discs, the siren song that lured us here.

I think of solemn laments, the vibration of strings and pipes, dirges, arias and blues.

Not just on the golden discs, but transmissions, sound waves, stray satellite signals. So much noise. An exciting hubbub which drew us on.

It wasn’t to be.

The shock of the silent Earth when we arrived. The symphony of life cut short. The buzz of Humanity muted. We felt cheated, deflated after the arduous journey through the chiming spheres.

We mourned the loss of the songs we never got to compose, to chorus, to share.

It’s why we stayed, sought to bring back the sound of the sea and shore, sifted and scavenged.

I look at the fossil record, a choir of voiceless bodies.

I tap out a rhythm on shale, a skitter of stones accompanies the beat, the sky vibrates in sympathy.

We shall sing for them.

---

Morgan Melhuish (he/him) is a queer writer and educator from West Sussex. In 2024 his work is being published by 102 Ink, Nine Pens Press, Antithesis Journal and Third Estate Art. You can find him on X @mmorethanapage