Out of the Ashes

by Lori Dillon

  “Care to go for a walk, cara mia? Take one last look at Pompeii before…” The words caught in his throat. Tomorrow the family would scatter her ashes over the ruins—new ashes to mingle with those of the people who had perished nearly two thousand years before. It was what she wanted. It was where she belonged.

  He took solace in the thought that for today he still had her and their memories. He needed this time to be alone with her, to say goodbye.

  David tucked the urn into its leather carrying case and pulled the strap over his shoulder. The walk to the ruins from the villa they’d bought from Maria after Heberto’s death took about twenty minutes, but he didn’t mind. After paying the admission fee, he joined the other tourists in the walk up the ramp through the Porta Marina, the same stone arch he had walked through over sixty years before.

  He gazed down the stone-paved street past the skeletons of buildings still familiar from the past. Sixty years was nothing compared to the history this city had known.

  He found it hard to believe almost two decades had passed since the last time he and Sera had worked in the ruins together. Even after they’d officially retired, she’d spent each summer helping archeology students at the site, until the grueling work had gotten too hard on her.

  The place still looked the same, and yet some things had changed. Grass and weeds were creeping into crevices, trying to reclaim the stone roads, and walls that had stood for centuries supported by Vesuvius’s ashes were starting to crumble from exposure to the sun and rain.

  As he walked along the street, he saw that many areas had been closed to the public. These were places he had once moved freely around in, places he had spent hours exploring with Sera.

  Sera. Everywhere he looked, he saw her. He remembered every stone she had touched, every hole she had dug. The very ruins themselves seemed to echo with her presence.

  Pushing on through the crowds, David made his way down the Via dell’Abbondanza. He passed by the Stabian Baths and the House of the Orchard, both popular sites for the tourists. But he didn’t stop to pay them much attention. There was only one thing here that he needed to see.

  David skirted around a wooden barricade with more agility than an old man should have. The small side street was empty, and as he walked down it, he felt himself travel back in time, back to 1943 when he and Sera first started working in this area of the ruins.

  At the end of the lane, a section of volcanic rock and ash rose nine feet above street level, looking like a grey plateau between the ruined buildings and the old city wall.

  Stepping carefully on the makeshift stairs, he climbed to the top. Metal scaffolding supporting large panes of glass formed a roof over the raised area. In later excavations, more bodies had been found in the area—a young family with three small children, all tragically dying within feet of each other. Rather than move any of them as had been done with many of the other plaster casts, the archaeologists had decided to leave these poor souls where they were found. Thus, the area beneath them had never been excavated down to the street level.

  David skirted around the family and came to stand beside the cast of the slave gladiator and his lady, lying just as they had died—on a bed of stone, in each other’s arms.

  He found a shady spot nearby and eased himself down to sit on a low ridge where he could lean against the wall. Hidden here in the back of the ruins, the body casts were protected from over-zealous tourists, vandals, and, thanks to the glass canopy, the elements.

  Pulling the urn from the leather pouch, he cradled it in his lap as he stared at the cast. For long moments, he never moved, never took his eyes off the couple.

  He felt so proud. It was Sera’s greatest find, still perfectly preserved—two lovers frozen in time, just as the volcano had left them so long ago.

  At times, he almost could’ve sworn they moved—that maybe the gladiator’s hand caressed the girl’s face ever so slightly.

  David laughed at himself. He was getting senile, as the grandkids would say. Either that or the light was playing tricks on his old eyes.

  Time slipped away, and the day grew late. He was reluctant to go, but the last of the tourists would be leaving, and the employees would be closing the ruins for the night. Still, he felt desperate to have just a few more moments with the cast, knowing this would probably be the last time he ever saw it.

  He closed his eyes and absently caressed the urn, its metal warm from the last rays of the setting Mediterranean sun. Then he rose and stepped up to the cast to get one final, closer look. Sighing heavily, he felt a sense of peace for the first time since Sera had died.

  He reached out and touched the plaster man on the shoulder.

  “Goodbye, old friends.”

  Turning away, he left the gladiator and his lady to their eternal sleep.

  With a start, David suddenly realized he wasn’t alone.

  A young girl stood on the other side of the body casts, a strange, ethereal glow hovering about her. Dressed as she was in flowing Roman robes, he thought at first she was a statue. Then she moved toward him, appearing to glide across the ground, not even glancing down as she passed the plaster lovers frozen in time.

  “David. It’s me, Sera.”

  He felt rooted to the spot. As she approached, she changed from the young girl to a dark, Mongol-looking woman wearing a fine ornamental tunic and furs. Drawing closer, she materialized from a medieval peasant into an older woman with a white powdered wig and a wide bustled gown. Finally, she stood before him looking like Sera as he last saw her, old and frail.

  “Sera?”

  As she reached out to touch his cheek, she changed yet again. Right before his eyes, she became young again, just as she’d looked the first time he laid eyes on her over sixty years before.

  With her gentle touch, something within him shifted and changed. He suddenly felt more alive than he had in years. There was no pain of old age, no aching of brittle bones.

  “Sera? I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

  “Look.” She turned him around. David saw himself, still sitting against the wall, his head with its thin gray hair resting on his chest as if in a gentle slumber, his arms cradling the urn with her ashes inside.

  Then he looked down at his hands. Gone were the brown spots and painful, swollen joints. His hands looked like those of a young man, healthy and strong in his prime.

  He turned back to Sera, unable to voice the many questions that came to his mind. Somehow, she seemed to read his thoughts and answered him.

  “You see me as your heart remembers me, and I see you as my heart remembers you. Young and strong, and oh, so brave. When the children’s time comes, they will see us a bit older, as their memories of a mother and father should be. Where we’re going, you only see through the eyes of love.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home. It’s time to go, David.”

  She reached down and took his hand. They started moving toward a ray of bright light floating on the gentle Mediterranean breeze.

  “But what about the kids? The grandchildren?”

  She smiled, her big blue eyes shining with all the love in her heart.

  “They’ll be fine. After all, they’ll have us up there looking out for them.”

  He glanced back once more at the shell of the old man he used to be, the reality of what was happening just beginning to dawn on him.

  He watched, detached, as the weathered hand dropped limply to his side and the urn slipped out of his slack grasp, tumbling to the ground.

  A sense of love and completion filled David as he watched Sera’s ashes spill silently on the ground near the plaster cast, only to be picked up and carried away on the wind.

  Author’s Notes

  David and Sera’s story came to me when I saw a National Geographic photograph of a plaster cast of a couple from Pompeii. The man and woman died in each other’s arms as they tried to flee the city, forever frozen in time, his hand shielding her face in a vain att
empt to protect her.

  The cast is beautiful, touching, and heartbreaking. I began to wonder what their story might have been, and the tragic couple eventually evolved into a young Pompeian girl and the slave gladiator she loved. Then I wondered what might have happened if they were given a second chance.

  The process of making plaster casts of the victims was invented by Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863 after it was discovered that hollow spaces in the hardened ashes were the impressions left by the dead after their bodies decayed. Over eleven hundred plaster casts have been made of the victims of Pompeii, all captured at the exact moment they died.

  In September of 1943, Allied planes dropped 163 bombs on the German encampment set up outside the walls of Pompeii, believing that they were hiding artillery within the ruins. As incredible as it sounds, on that fateful evening, the archeologists rushed to the ruins to try to save what artifacts they could. On their way there, the Director of Excavations, Amedeo Maiuri, and his assistant were blown off their bicycles by a stray bomb. Maiuri’s leg was broken and, tragically, his assistant’s body was never found. The bombing severely damaged some parts of the ruins, including the Great Palaestra, the Antiquarium, and the gladiator barracks.

  Mount Vesuvius last erupted in March 1944, spewing lava down the mountainside and destroying three small villages in its path. That time Pompeii was spared from destruction, and the mountain sleeps silently now, waiting.

  By all estimates, nearly two thousand Pompeians died in the A.D. 79 eruption. However, only about sixty percent of the ruins have been excavated so far.

  Who knows what lies beneath the remaining ashes, and what their story may be?

  About the Author

  In a previous life, Lori worked as a graphic designer for fourteen years for the power company, occasionally venturing into nuclear power plants for her job (yes, nuclear plants need graphic designers, too). In her current existence, she weaves tales of the past, the present, and some places only magic can take you.

  Lori lives in Virginia with her engineering geek/hero husband, two kids who test her sanity on a daily basis, a dog named Hokie (named after the Virginia Tech Hokies, of course), and various other critters of the furred and finned variety.

  Out of the Ashes is her first published novel. If you enjoyed Sera and David’s story, please consider posting a review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, or any other book review site. Good word of mouth from readers is the life blood for an independent author.

  Lori loves to hear from her readers. Please stop by and visit her at http://www.loridillon.com.