The History Of Grains

An intimate yet universal story of humanity breaking on your doorstep, “The History of Grains” depicts Greek islanders witnessing the mysterious arrival of abandoned vessels.

- Gianni Skaragas

We had been tossing coins into the choppy waters over our numb shoulders, without uttering a word, and now our wishes for good luck were being fulfilled, unowned and ineffable.

That my three brothers pulled an empty, unidentified boat from the sea astonished everyone in our village, and made us think about the signs of times the way people think of incurable maladies before they are afflicted with a disease themselves. The twenty-foot trawler had capsized off our coast, and my brothers swam, propelling the vessel until they were able to put it back upright on its keel. No one knew where it had launched from. It was a coincidence or an omen, we thought, but when more empty boats were found kept afloat by air trapped between the hull and the water’s surface, we began to wonder if an omen should either ease us or put us in torment.

Alerts were issued from our village to the rest of the island to be on the lookout, and the Coast Guard divers split up into teams. A search was begun, but after three days they couldn’t find any sign of survivors and the officers abandoned their efforts.

The wooden vessels swayed graciously; you had to stare at the rhythmic calm of the blue water before you could begin to detect them. We watched with the eyes of a goat dangling off the edge of a cliff, suddenly knowing the difference between the sea and sky when normally it didn’t matter, an acute awareness that there was a seam between them, an imperceptible fracture as dangerous as the slippery cliff edge, that could cause the world to split open. We were mortified by the boats, not so much a mystery as a suspicion that we had been blessed with ignorance and now a great wrong had to be righted—though what the wrong was remained unspoken. It seemed as if a pair of cold, lifeless hands clutched around our necks, and everything explicable to our lives had suddenly become meaningless.