Murder Recall

Merlin's Island

Today is my birthday, February 29th. My name is Gwen Conner and I am 136 years old. Rita wished me happy birthday first thing after I woke this morning. This year she gave me a present because it really is my birthday. Other years, the first of March marks the passing of another turn around the sun for me, but we don't celebrate those. My present was wrapped in a small, thin, flexible coil of birch bark. Canary brought it to me in her beak and said it is from her too and also from Dolly of course. I unwrapped it carefully and slowly for suspense.  It is a circular gray stone pendant that Rita had carved in secret, depicting two fish, like the symbol for Pisces, but with each fish swallowing the tail of the other. The same circular design is cut into both sides of the pendant but with the fish going in the opposite direction than that on the other side. The diameter of the pendant is about one inch and in the center between the fish there is a hole for a leather string. Rita tied it around my neck with a knot she said should never be undone and it hangs resting in the space where my collar bones meet. Then they sang me the birthday song and we ate as usual.

Rita says I really am 136 years old. She has been keeping track. The main reason I've lived so long and enjoyed such good health is because I sleep more than most adult humans do. They sleep on average eight hours a night and I always sleep at least ten. Sleep is restorative, so that the extra time I spent sleeping, which many humans would consider time wasted, has been added to what would otherwise have been my expected, statistically based, lifetime. Furthermore, that extra time asleep resulted in my aging at a slower rate and so I have always appeared to be years younger than I actually am.

Canary and Dolly came into my life when I was a toddler. Canary is a life-like, yellow canary, that runs on self-regenerating miniscule batteries. I wear a bracelet snug on my left wrist, and when I turn it on, it enables me to see what Canary sees, hear what she hears and understand how she feels. She was a present from my mother. Dolly is a handmade cloth doll, also given to me by my mother, originally crafted by a woman deep in the past of our genetic history and inherited generation after generation since. Dolly and I communicate telepathically but she can only move when I move her. Dolly has no programming like Canary does.

Rita came into my life years later when I was eight years old. We don't celebrate birthdays for her because she insists that she doesn't want to. She always looks the same, year after year. I change. My hair is white now. Once it was brown. My eyes are colourless and used to be black. My entire body is covered in fine wrinkles. I became shorter and thinner. I feel strong and healthy but it's nothing compared to the energy I had when I was younger. I'm wiser now and the voice of inspiration is clearer.

After Rita came into the lives of me, Canary and Dolly, she brought us to this island. Sometimes we are away from the island, but it is our home. The island is in a river that forks into two branches that encircle the island and come together at the other end of it. At the beginning of spring the river is broad and swift. The rest of the year, I can jump over it. In the winter it never completely freezes, because, as Rita explained to me, the central part of the current near the surface is too warm and it never cools to the point of freezing, no matter how cold the air is. It melts any amount of snow that lands on it. In the fall, the river freezes at the shore line only and brilliant red maple leaves get stuck in the ice.

When we first came to this island, Rita said it is a Merlin's island. I thought she meant that was the name of the island but she said it wasn't. This is a Merlin's island, one of a phenomena. To get onto the island, we couldn't touch the water surrounding it or we would remain on the shore we were coming from. We had to jump over to the island. The island itself was amazing. Elsewhere it was a cold, blustery day. Old colourful leaves were being ripped from deciduous tree branches and blown about unable to land and rest on the forest floor until the wind would leave. On the island it was warm and green, seeming to be another season altogether, rich with growth. Rita reached down and took up a fistful of earth showing me. "We'll be able to grow everything we need here," she said.