Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome Californian writer Dana Wall with “The Language of Limestone,” which won our “Identity” flash fiction contest. A mother, also a scientist, searches for her daughter, lost in the depths of a limestone cave.
“I follow the walls with bare fingers, reading the rock-like braille, humming the lullaby I invented when she first showed interest in caves—when at four, she’d press her ear to stones and claim she could hear them growing. The melody bounces back, strange and distorted, until suddenly, I catch it: her voice, carrying the harmony she added herself at twelve, the year we started exploring together. “
Mother and daughter are rewarded for their close bond and their persistence with one of nature’s miracles. Scientific curiosity and delight are not inherited traits. We have to choose them. Nonetheless, some of us had parents or mentors who stoked those fires so ardently that we are predestined to do so. In the same vein, Dana creates a world for us in the span of 310 words, one that feels lush and luminous and so full of wonder that we wish we could stay longer. Her imagery and characterization are spell-binding and seemingly effortless. Human connection is seldom so well expressed in the flash fiction genre.
Read “The Language of Limestone” in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after years of keeping Hollywood’s agents and lawyers in perfect order as Accounting Manager at ICM and CFO of Granderson Des Rochers. Armed with a Psychology degree that finally proved useful when creating complex characters and an MBA/CPA that helps her track plot points with spreadsheet precision, she ventured into the haunted halls of Goddard College’s MFA program.
Between snow squalls and ghost sightings in Vermont, she discovered that limestone caves make excellent metaphors for life’s darker passages. Her work in Bending Genres Journal and Mixed Tape Review, ‘The Day Time Got Hiccups’ and ‘The Memory Orchard’ confirms that words are more reliable than numbers, though occasionally harder to balance.