The Stones That Remember

he moor held its breath at the turning of the year. The shepherd had walked this path a thousand times, but tonight the standing stones seemed taller, as if the dark had lent them inches. His grandmother had said the stones remember, and he had not believed her, and then he had grown old enough to believe nothing else.

He stopped among them. The wind dropped. In the silence he heard his own name spoken, not by a voice but by the absence of one — the way a name sounds when it is being thought by the dead. He answered, because to refuse would have been ruder than to listen, and listening was the whole of the bargain.

They spoke the names of his line, father and mother and their fathers and mothers, back to the first one who had lifted a stone onto this moor and called it a home. Each name was a small weight set down inside him. By dawn he was so heavy with names he could not stand, and so he sat among the stones and became one more, which is what the dead had been waiting for.

In the morning the other shepherds found the circle unchanged. But one of the stones was new, they thought, and it leaned a little, as if listening, and if you pressed your ear to it in the cold you could hear, very faintly, a man counting backward through the names of everyone he had ever loved.