"The Ruins" by Gareth Marks—Our March 2024 Gold Medal Winner
“Putting the metaphor of ruin to the test, this author brings us to the brink of melancholy while simultaneously taunting us with hopefulness.”
“...a very strong meditation on love, desire, grief, and imposed shame.”
“…poetic and pensive.”
“A very human tale that unfolds with ease.”
Meet Gareth
Gareth Marks is an emerging writer of poetry and short stories from Stratford, Waterloo. He studied mathematical physics with a minor in English at the University of Waterloo, and is currently living in the UK where he's pursuing a PhD in theoretical physics.
The Ruins
an excerpt of Gareth’s winning story
At the ruins I see your face only dimly by moonlight. There’s salt in the air; waves break on the cliffs somewhere far below. When I look at your eyes I see pits shrouded by night. I keep thinking I can see them turning towards me, stealing glimpses the way I steal glimpses of you, but I know this is an illusion. You’re looking at the stones. They’re scattered all around like dry leaves in autumn, some alone, others still piled up in half-collapsed walls and arches. Time has sanded them down, stolen their sharp edges. A softness has crept in but they’ve kept their austere symmetry. I’m reminded of your cheekbones. Of the nape of your neck.
You already told me what happened here. About the boys from Bruges, François and Willem. How in 1558 they confessed under torture, how they were flogged until their backs bled, how their hair was burned off with irons. It was all you talked about for weeks. You told me we had to come; gay boys have to stick together, you said. Living or dead. Now that you’re here I wonder if you feel close to them somehow, if you can sense their spirits carved in the stones. I can’t. All I see is old rocks. The bones of a place best left forgotten.
I think of when you were seventeen, burying your face in some account of medieval history. I felt it was too fine a face to be stuck there. Even back then you told me this was important, as if by keeping the world’s events in a great enough ledger we might someday redeem it. I thought it would be a phase, then. How wrong I was.
You tell me about the masonry, the architecture, the layout of each room. What was built when and why. The chapel where the monks prayed in frenzy, drowning their vices. The servants’ quarters where the stones were most uneven and first to collapse. The courtyard, serried with pallets in the plague years. You tell me that, after François and Willem, many locals began to blame the spread of disease on sodomites. On the wages of sin.
I think of last summer, when you were going back home to Alberta. How I begged you not to go, for your own sake. You’d only get hurt again I said. I was right, of course. The visit was a horror show that ended three days early with you in tears. They kept praying you’d leave me and you kept praying they’d change, but who were you praying to? You’re up to your neck in the sludge of the past. I want to take you by the shoulders and drag you out.
…
to read the rest of the story, order your copy of the June 2024 issue.
