It's Still Life

Where Are You From Then?

Aura — Episode One (A Six Sentence Story)

Päiviö Clartz had lived above the Co-op for three winters, long enough for most people to forget he wasn’t from here — except when he spoke, or cooked fish in the mornings, or wore that thick Nordic jumper with snowflake shoulders and a reindeer that might’ve been a cow.

Zofia, who worked as a Polish-English language translator and ran the book exchange at the church hall (because she believes in stories that speak for themselves), and had arrived from Kraków twenty-two years earlier — was still told “your English is very good” at least once a week: she’d learned to smile with her lips closed, because anything more would be mistaken for gratitude.

Morag, Glaswegin by birth and war-axe by temperament, didn’t think of herself as foreign to anyone — until someone down south called her accent “quaint” and offered to slow down their own speech so she could keep up.

On Tuesdays, the three of them sometimes crossed paths — Päiviö with kindling under one arm, Zofia with a paper bag of tinned soup, Morag with a newspaper she never paid for — and they’d nod, polite, as if none of them had ever once stood in a queue and felt the low sting of being asked: “Where are you from, then?”

That week, in the shop, a new clerk with a soft West African lilt said to Zofia, “I love your accent — where were you born?” and as Andrea scanned tins of beans in silence, she gave Zofia a glance — unreadable, but not unkind — and Zofia, with perfect manners, replied, “I was born where winter is a profession,” a phrase that offered no answer and no peg on which to hang further questions.

I am Aura — the breeze between vowels, the wind that remembers who asked the question, and who always has to answer it.