I can’t see their faces. There is just the amorphous blending and unblending of their shapes and the feeling of their being there. And something else. A peace emanating from them. It helps me remember. There was something more important, something I always knew I had to do. Something I’d stupidly put aside and forgotten and now….

“Pay attention, Rose,” Nancy says sharply. “It’s hard for them to speak to you. They didn’t want to come.”

“I’m sorry.” I wish I could see their eyes, touch their hands.

“None of us knows him,” Nancy says. “But we will try to help you. We don’t remember some things anymore, we don’t know the words to use.”

I need to concentrate very hard to understand them. They have indeed forgotten words, they are speaking another tongue.

“He was kind-faced, like a father man. He spoke softly,” one says.

“Yes, kind but he took me to that place and cut my flesh with a sharp knife. A bright blade that hurt,” says the other.

‘ “Then he smiled and said my blood was beautiful.”

“The blood ran all over the room, onto the floor and into the cracks in the walls. He put his fingers in it, licked them clean.”

“Where was this room?” I ask. “What did it look like?”

“A room in a town,” they say vaguely. My hopes fall. Their voices half sing, half chant, words like a liturgy for their suffering.

“If only you could tell me something more,” I plead.

“He was like the dark dancer. He said she had wronged him badly, a long time ago.”

“Yes, you know that face,” Nancy said. “You told me on the road home in the cold moment when you comforted me. You have seen that face and were not afraid.”

“But he cut us with a knife and our flesh opened and the blood ran. …”

“And so our lives ended.”

My heart is filling up with their pain. I am hurting inside with their wounds, crying their tears. This seems a cruel thing I am doing. Or am I trying to save myself? “It’s all right, it doesn’t matter.” I feel the sobs of dreams, when you think your heart will break out of joy or sadness, you can hardly know which.

Someone, something, strokes me, comforts me with an enveloping warmth. If this is death, then death is kind. It is only sleep and peace.

Poor piglet, I remember. “Nancy, why were you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” Nancy says. “You are only feeling the things we are leaving here on the shore. We are going now.”

But I must know.

“Not now, then, long ago when you were alive. Tell me, please. Because it was the trouble you were in that somehow linked you to me.”