“And you stayed,” Christina said.
“This is not journalism,” he said. “This is a psychotic break with a nice landscape.”
The next morning, she followed them on the morning walk. Two hundred scrawny, sharp-eyed goats picked their way down a scree slope toward a hidden cove. The wind carried a smell of wild sage and something else—ozone, like before a lightning strike. I Dimosiografos Xristina Rousaki Kai Oi Dio Voskoi Sirina
“I’m not here for ghosts,” Christina lied. “I’m here for the truth of the place.”
She never published the story. But she never forgot it either. Years later, when people asked her why she stopped being a journalist, she would say: “I went looking for two shepherds and found a mirror. The mirror was the sea. And the sea asked me a question I couldn’t answer with an article.” “And you stayed,” Christina said
“Same difference. Rewrite it. Remove yourself. Add more goats. Make it heartwarming.”
“No,” she said.
Christina returned to Athens. She wrote the piece. It was the most beautiful, brutal thing she had ever produced. She described the two shepherds not as quaint relics, but as voluntary exiles from the tyranny of memory. She described the cove. She described her own confession.