Archive of Stone - Part 1

Waking of the Water Bears

Photo by Aldo Hernandez on Unsplash

Archive of Stone is a three-part short story written for The Future of Nature, a community Earth Day writing project exploring the human–nature relationship*.

Earth

Before molecules spiralled into cells, before the slow bloom of carbon into life, memory embedded itself in our body. We were born in heat and collapse, spun from stardust drawn into gravity’s cradle. Pressure folded us inward. Magma shaped our marrow. Our bones hardened into basalt and granite. Our skin cooled, crusted, cracked. In the deep architecture of mineral and metal, patterns coalesced, information etched in crystalline lattice, into fault line and vein. An archive of stone.

Breath followed. Vapour rose from our pores and fell again as rain, oceans pooling in the hollows of our skin. Atmosphere gathered from our exhalation, wind stirred and storms swept across our surface. In the settling of silt, in layers of sediment, the patterns deepened.

Life gathered in tendrils. Fungal filaments stretching across the rocks, algae blossomed in the oceans, lichen and moss rooted to our archival memory as green constellations and pale ochre flowered over stone. And within the softness, the tardigrades moved. The rock dwellers, those who lived on our bones, inside our skin, wove a bridge, connecting the pattern stored in stone to the life beginning to emerge.

Rhythms were encoded into DNA as life bloomed. Each body, each bone preserved in strata adding layer upon layer to the archives. Each organism inscribing balance into the fabric of the Earth.

Then came the ones who imagined. Curiosity lit their path, and fire shaped their progress. They stretched toward possibility, but forgot the old rhythms. They defied the cycles of night and day and the slow turn of the seasons, pulling the world beyond what the pattern could absorb. The moss was scraped away, the lichen crushed beneath brick and mortar. The tardigrades curled into stillness.

They pulled stone and metal from our core. They burned the buried remnants of forests and drew fuel from the pressure-packed memory of our deepest layers. Concrete spread where moss once grew and cities rose with an insatiable appetite to consume, to conquer, to tame our wildness. Woodlands were stripped from our shoulders. Moorlands were paved over, wetlands drained. The quiet places that once held balance were broken open. Hard steel replaced the soft edges of estuary and shore. Roads carved through hillside. Rivers were bridled. The sea was held back by walls. The tides could no longer breathe and our whole body laboured for air.

Balance was broken, but not erased. It remained, written in striations and substrate, in the compression of stone and the alignment of crystal.

And beneath the concrete, in the persistence of moss between bricks and the slow creep of lichen on forgotten walls, the bridge between the archive of stone stretched back towards the life that had forgotten it. These living threads rooted to our archival memories reached through flesh into the human genome, laying flakes of lichen onto bone, threading moss through DNA, and stirring the tardigrades from their sleep. They filtered through cell walls and surfed the currents pulsing in human veins, restoring the connection that once ran between stone and life.

Mira

They say I was born in a scree of limestone and wild geranium, my lungs full of night wind and thyme. I don't remember, of course, but I’ve heard the story enough times to see it when I close my eyes. My mother was walking the cliff paths and there was no time to turn back when the pain came, weeks early, fast and low. I arrived quickly, quietly, beneath the open sky among the harebells and rockroses. Small and serious, with eyes the colour of river-worn slate. The midwife said it was a miracle we’d both survived, but my mother told me it was as if the rocks themselves had called to me, softened their edges, sent the moss to blanket us and the wind to keep us warm.

I was always drawn to the coast. I’d spend hours with wet knees and salt-stung hands, combing the rock pools for periwinkles and anemones, lining the windowsills with fossils and sea-glass like relics from a half-remembered story. I was always barefoot, but the sharp stones never cut my skin. The limpets formed strange spirals on the rocks where I wandered and barnacles clung to the hull of our old rowing boat in odd geometric patterns that looked almost like glyphs. I knew the names of moss and lichen before I could write my own name; Grimmia pulvinata, Ramalina siliquosa, Lobaria pulmonaria. My hair, like a shock of Spanish moss, frizzed into tangles at the least hint of moisture. I never burned in the sun and I didn’t feel the biting cold of the waves. I didn’t talk much, but I remembered everything. Some children grew like saplings; I grew like stone. Slow, silent, and certain.

The Water bears

I found them by accident. Someone had left a science book open in the art room. They looked like a joke at first, like something drawn by a bored student who watched too much sci-fi and with a name that sounded like something from Dr Who. Tardigrade, Water bear, Moss piglet. I copied their image into my sketchbook over and over, tracing the strange symmetry of their feet and their odd shaped, eyeless bodies. I read that they could survive in space, in boiling heat, in ice. That they could dry into husks for years, then come back to life with just a drop of water. That they had existed for millions of years, before the dinosaurs, when there was nothing but algae, moss, and the lichens that so enthralled me.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Something in me felt rearranged, an ancient presence lying dormant in my cells stirred awake by a single drop of knowledge. The sensation was a low insistent buzzing in my chest. A pulse that rippled outward; tingling along my ribs, prickling at the soles of my feet, humming just beneath the surface of my skin. It was like my body had tuned itself to a new frequency, one that resonated beyond the house, beyond the path, toward something waiting in the dark.

I slipped quietly outside in my vest and shorts, the path cool beneath my feet, the air sharp with salt and starlight. The moon was low and bright, casting long, soft shadows across the headland. Drawn along the path, I moved without thinking, guided by the silver wash of moonlit stone. Past the gorse, past the bend in the cliff where the foxes yipped, shrill and wild, the sky heavy and watchful above me.

As I walked, the stillness deepened and the rhythm of my footsteps slowed to match the haptics thrumming through my veins. A subtle shift in the air like an indrawn breath, the earthy smell of petrichor.

The sky cracked open, a flash of lightening and thunderclap with no space between. The rain came sharp and slanting, needling through my vest. I ducked low and ran, the pulse in my body suddenly fast and urgent.

This is the end of Part One of Archive of Stone - Waking of the Water Bears.

You can read Part 2 here: Archive of Stone Part 2 - Whispers of the Water Bears

P.S. If you’d like to support this creative adventure by upgrading to an annual paid subscription, I will send you a signed print of your choice from my portfolio, as a thank you for gifting my creativity another moment of freedom to explore and create, for joy alone.

P.P.S. I’m also briefly opening up founding subscriptions, for those who would like to support my work at a deeper level and receive one of my original fine art graphite drawings in return. These are one-of-a-kind pieces, and once they’re spoken for, the offer will close until I have something new to share.

*“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by

Claudia Befu

and

Julie Gabrielli

, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists

Jonathan Tonkin

and

rebecca hooper

. You can find all the stories as a special

Top In Fiction

Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher

Erica Drayton

.