Speaker 1: Twenty five years have climbed these steps, a single warm
Speaker 1: path through the stone, the left heel of each step
Speaker 1: worn deeper from my habit of ascending at a slight tilt,
Speaker 1: balancing the toll bag against my thigh. I know no
Speaker 1: I knew every groove, every spider silk twist in the corners,
Speaker 1: every echoing tone. As the wind rattles the belfry doors.
Speaker 1: This morning, as in every march, the ritual enfals with
Speaker 1: familiarity that borders on reverence. Unlock the brass gade, test
Speaker 1: the thick but laces, check the battery in my little
Speaker 1: head lamp, and rise into the dusty air. At the
Speaker 1: heart of the village. There are four bells in the
Speaker 1: terror of Santandria Baugh. I can tell you this, shaped
Speaker 1: blind finger by finger, the old Madder bell casts seventeen
Speaker 1: ninety eight with a flat pockwark running its rim. The
Speaker 1: slender Misana cast eating forty six, with packs and curly capitals.
Speaker 1: The piccolo, the highest voice, cracked but mended in the annante.
Speaker 1: The Thunderer, brought down from the ruined abbey in thirty two,
Speaker 1: still bearing the scorched grooves of lightning on its shoulder,
Speaker 1: I have recorded every dull thought, every patch of verdigris,
Speaker 1: and shudder of cable sent my apprenticeship. So when I
Speaker 1: come through that last kramptarch, the haze of doves scattering
Speaker 1: before me, and see five bells, I freeze, not four five.
Speaker 1: The newcomer hangs just above the others, but on a
Speaker 1: crossbeam that neither SAgs nor looks new, as though it's
Speaker 1: always belonged. It is mass of no lighter than a
Speaker 1: grown mule, but shining bronze, as if cast for a
Speaker 1: royal parade, not dulled by rain or guano. As the
Speaker 1: rest on its flanks, swirling engravings that avid ivins, culls,
Speaker 1: and sigils I cannot place in any tradition of the valley.
Speaker 1: I press both hands to the lowest edge of this bell.
Speaker 1: It is cold, colder than the morning's breath, almost look
Speaker 1: to the touch, but unquestionably solid. I let my knuckle
Speaker 1: tap the body. It hums, not out of sync with
Speaker 1: the rest, yet not like them, made of a metallic pulse, deeper,
Speaker 1: almost close enough to feel on your teeth. I move
Speaker 1: from bell to bell with my checklists, but I am adrift.
Speaker 1: My measured rhythm gone a double and triple check the
Speaker 1: clapp as, the ropes, the oscillation limitters, no evidence of
Speaker 1: fresh bolts, no sign someone's disturbed the frame, None of
Speaker 1: the usual soul, distorted's livers left from hoisting. I even
Speaker 1: sna and if the air for oil new paint, nothing
Speaker 1: only dust, as if the fifth bell had always hung there.
Speaker 1: Descending the spiral, a grip the reeling. I replayed previous climb,
Speaker 1: rekle every log and line drawn in pencil, and stole
Speaker 1: the fifth bell. Sits in my mind like a misstep
Speaker 1: in a familiar path. Half disbelieving, half uneasy, I resolved
Speaker 1: to check my records, my hands to steady all these
Speaker 1: years trembles. I lock the belfry behind me. It's nearly
Speaker 1: mean when I trudge home, sunlight glancing off the lake
Speaker 1: and ribboning over the water, the shoal silver with darting fish.
Speaker 1: My house, modest but well cared for her sits off
Speaker 1: the main road, garden and ride with early dafttills, tolls
Speaker 1: lined up in sol joy ranks outside the workshop. Every
Speaker 1: habit deliberate and precise. Dismantle a lafe to free a
Speaker 1: stuck air, replace a fault in don Vittorio's OLV radio.
Speaker 1: Even my eggs go into the pan in the same
Speaker 1: order every day, lunch for anner and me, two for her,
Speaker 1: one for me, always a sliver of salt, never pepper.
Speaker 1: Discomfort in knowing things how they fit, where they belong.
Speaker 1: I can walk from here to the bakery blind, come
Speaker 1: to the notes of each bell from memory. The sun
Speaker 1: tendary tower isn't just the tallest thing in the village.
Speaker 1: It's the beating heart, wedding's funerals, the odd christening, the
Speaker 1: colorful chaos of the like festival every spring. The bells
Speaker 1: keep score. Without them, we drift. I keep the parish
Speaker 1: ledges like a second set of lung scan digitized and
Speaker 1: yet a sound. It teases me, also written in my
Speaker 1: fussy script. If the power fails, the church still rings.
Speaker 1: Papa Anna sixteen is at that luminal age, half in
Speaker 1: the world of algorithms and TikTok, half hungry for the
Speaker 1: stories I gave her. At bedtime. She sho up as
Speaker 1: attack brown hair in a perpetual messy knot always soldering
Speaker 1: little circuits in the kitchen, her phone camera third eye.
Speaker 1: This is her week to stay with me, her mom
Speaker 1: my late wife's cousin smiles to see Anna drawn into
Speaker 1: my routines, and I spec secretly thanks the Saints for
Speaker 1: every clock I insist we fix together. The village flows
Speaker 1: on its own clock. Shiny at the cafe dispenses gossip
Speaker 1: as he stirs his coffee. Sonora Rosa, my ancient neighbor,
Speaker 1: still puts out sweet wine and bascati for the delivery
Speaker 1: boy every Thursday. Even the stray cats form myself appointed
Speaker 1: parliament to top my shed. Everything here depends at some
Speaker 1: level on the bells. By late afternoon, my nerves have calmed,
Speaker 1: I tell myself, I simply, mister renovation a Safano serrite. Miss.
Speaker 1: Something fell out of step for a year, a decade,
Speaker 1: but I cannot quite believe it. Anna returns from school,
Speaker 1: green hoody, trailing her back back, and dumps her things
Speaker 1: by the kitchen table. Lunch smells good. Did you fry
Speaker 1: the bread, bread, eggs, and your infernal cheese? I scrape
Speaker 1: her plate, watching her eyes flick to my notebook left
Speaker 1: open beside the stove. You do realize, Papa, you're turning
Speaker 1: into a library. If I am, you'll inherit it. So
Speaker 1: start loaning the catalog. Now she grins and snags a slice.
Speaker 1: How many times will you climb the tower this week?
Speaker 1: Is it the bells or the pigeons? This time? Annual inspection,
Speaker 1: everything legal. My own joke falls flat, the thought of
Speaker 1: the fifth bound Bibles at my confidence, subtle but persistent.
Speaker 1: After lunch at tidy, check the day's repairs, and chat
Speaker 1: briefly with Don Vittorio outside the sacristy, His soft captions
Speaker 1: row brushing years of dust off the pews. He's easy
Speaker 1: to talk to, keeps old, superstif alive. But trust my
Speaker 1: reports more than any officials. If ever I doubted a
Speaker 1: nod or a cable, he'd nod and say, Steffano, you
Speaker 1: keep our roof singing. He knows, and everybody knows. I
Speaker 1: keep the bells, and the bells keep us. Yet never,
Speaker 1: in all those years of stories bedside tales to Anna
Speaker 1: a long afternoon's watching processions from the church steps, never
Speaker 1: did I save five bells. All was four. It's a
Speaker 1: point of pride. Even any villager would laugh. Cerdi knows
Speaker 1: every ball and flaw and every turn except the ones
Speaker 1: the pigeons making secret As the sun falls and shutters
Speaker 1: go up along the pisa. I am left with only
Speaker 1: the problem of the fifth bell. Its image persists in
Speaker 1: my mind, wrong yet and avoidable, A silent addition I
Speaker 1: cannot place. I tell myself it will make sense. After dinner.
Speaker 1: I will check every record, every photograph. To night, I
Speaker 1: will find my mistake. Yet I am unsettled and not afraid,
Speaker 1: but unable to file this away is just another curiosity
Speaker 1: in the heart of sant Andrea. That night, as the
Speaker 1: wind gusted, shutter is against ancient stone, and Anna tapped
Speaker 1: furiously at her laptop, I set out my letters on
Speaker 1: the kitchen table with the solemnity of a manner sealing
Speaker 1: family secrets. I chose my favorite, the ten volume labeled
Speaker 1: Companions design, the annually started in nineteen ninety eight, binding
Speaker 1: still tight, I flipped through a decade of scrolled notations,
Speaker 1: checking chain tension, copper replacements. Each page. On its supper
Speaker 1: margin a careful sketch of the belfry arrangement, five bells
Speaker 1: labeled with dates initials. My jaw set. This, I thought,
Speaker 1: is a mistake. I must have lazily copied the previous diagram.
Speaker 1: So I pulled a photo album from beneath Ane's olds
Speaker 1: Go Projects the one with her communion Butcher based on
Speaker 1: the front wedding two thousand nine, the newly wed beneath
Speaker 1: the tower arch. In the background, a full spread of
Speaker 1: bells five Baptism twenty fourteen. Five bells clearly visible, even
Speaker 1: one caught in mid motion, a blur in the sun
Speaker 1: chest height. I booted up my computer the forward and
Speaker 1: marked beltones annual wayfroms and digital photographs twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Last autumns blue sky check. Each file shows
Speaker 1: in astonishing clarity, five bells gleaming. I can nearly trace
Speaker 1: my fingerprints on the cave. This is not a small
Speaker 1: thing to doubt your own life. My mind ran two explanations.
Speaker 1: Have I lost time? Did I have? I've my pulse stuttered.
Speaker 1: I yanked open the little shoe books where all prince
Speaker 1: curl brittel at the corners. An envelope in my late
Speaker 1: father's new script wore at a matrimonial nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: A hands tinted photograph of the belfry from across the lake.
Speaker 1: Five bells always five. Anna came in Abe's slum round
Speaker 1: her neck. She watched as I held up two photos
Speaker 1: in trembling hands. Papa, are you okay? Tell me something,
Speaker 1: caro Emia. How many bells are in Santandrea? She snorted, five? Obviously?
Speaker 1: Why are you sure? She looked at me in that wary,
Speaker 1: sideways way of teenages whose parent has not, for the
Speaker 1: first time become solenly eccentric. They've always been five. You
Speaker 1: told me about them when I was little. Wait, you're
Speaker 1: not going to take one away, or you. She tried
Speaker 1: to lighten it, but I shook my head. No, Now,
Speaker 1: I just I've faltered. I can't explain it. I remember
Speaker 1: only four, always four, She shrugged. That's not possible, Baba.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're thinking of somewhere else. How faith in the
Speaker 1: world's continuity is unbroken, a teenager's certainty that the world
Speaker 1: is not in the habit of swapping pieces in the night.
Speaker 1: I will ask Don Vittorio tomorrow, I said, meaning it
Speaker 1: less as a plan and more as a lifeline. Try
Speaker 1: not to worry. Maybe the fifth bell was out for
Speaker 1: repairs once, she offered, entirely sensible. Or maybe you just
Speaker 1: talk more about the big ones because they were easier
Speaker 1: to see from the street. Yet her glance lingered a
Speaker 1: moment unsettled by my insistence, or perhaps it was only
Speaker 1: my own doubt reflected. The next morning, I found an
Speaker 1: vittre on the steps of the Victory, sipping thick sweet calf,
Speaker 1: his round face crinkled in the shade of the olive
Speaker 1: trees as he greeted me. Steffano, the bells are healthy,
Speaker 1: then catchy. My expression is something. The matter I explained
Speaker 1: for No. Five, the memory, the plants, the impossibility of
Speaker 1: finding a time. When the fifth eni door left, he
Speaker 1: smiled gently, then looked puzzled, even a little hurt, as
Speaker 1: if a question were an oud jerk at church expense.
Speaker 1: But Steffano, there have always been five bells, the old tradition,
Speaker 1: the sink campaign. Every villager knows before my time, even
Speaker 1: he clinks his spoon. The fifth she's special. She only
Speaker 1: sings at certain hours, on the day of Saint Anthony,
Speaker 1: or during storms. I pressed, Do you recall any addition,
Speaker 1: any ceremony, any repair. When the fifth came, he shook
Speaker 1: his head the folds of his robe roughly. No. No,
Speaker 1: they've always been you, of all people should remember. He
Speaker 1: laid his hand on my arm, a gesture of comfort,
Speaker 1: but it did not quite land sometimes as we h
Speaker 1: detail slip away from us. Trust your record keeping signor
Speaker 1: you are the most precise soul I know. But there
Speaker 1: was no condescension, only a hint of concern, as if
Speaker 1: he suspected a slip in my mind. Maybe so still
Speaker 1: I left hollowed by contradiction to everyone, it seems five
Speaker 1: is so obviously barely worth, remark Annette, catching me Sellen
Speaker 1: at dinner prodded a little more papat let it go.
Speaker 1: It must be a mix up, ye know. You always
Speaker 1: say things out of if you stuck close enough. And
Speaker 1: yet it was precisely my checking that open the split.
Speaker 1: I found myself that night, sitting upright with notebook and
Speaker 1: pen at the read e, scanning the logic. Hat I
Speaker 1: ever climbed the tower and not seen the fifth bell?
Speaker 1: Could I remember which steps led were when I'd been
Speaker 1: an apprentice under old pytro when there must, by village
Speaker 1: logic have been five. But my own living memory stubbornly
Speaker 1: halted at four, nothing else. Hoping for a loophole. The
Speaker 1: next morning, I let myself quietly down into the ack
Speaker 1: house beneath the sacristy, humble stacks of blueprints, some more
Speaker 1: bloom more than vapor. I worked systematically seventeen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: the drawing in a gallink five bells nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: repair after the lightning, five bells in a new arrangement
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight. My own first year is official custodian
Speaker 1: five bells, signed by the engineer. I poured over church ledges,
Speaker 1: insurance claims, hand scrolled notes about broken roops or lost pulleys.
Speaker 1: Never in decades of records did anyone scribble at a
Speaker 1: bell or a remove bell cled in the basement, light
Speaker 1: damp in my socks. I couldn't find even a whisper
Speaker 1: of transition. I've five five. Anna met me for coffee,
Speaker 1: lugging her tablet in a box of supermarket pastries. So, papap,
Speaker 1: did you solve the mystery bell? I tried to explain
Speaker 1: the plans, every version, every era. There's no spot missing,
Speaker 1: no frame changed, nothing that reads installed. It's as if
Speaker 1: it simply always was. She scoffed. Maybe the bell frame
Speaker 1: was changed before even Rosa was born. Some repairs back
Speaker 1: when people didn't write everything down. I shook my head.
Speaker 1: I remember climbing the bones of that tower before you
Speaker 1: were born. Every bolt in the frame, every patch of lichen,
Speaker 1: there was only ever space for four. Anna's tone shifted,
Speaker 1: half mocking, half invested, Now sensing how un settled at
Speaker 1: we came, Well, your own nos disagree with you. If
Speaker 1: you can't trust your pasself, Pappy, you're in trouble. It
Speaker 1: felt as if every trail I followed bent slightly, flickering
Speaker 1: sideways at the end, keeping me from the answer. I
Speaker 1: next visited Senora Rosa cross the street, the oldest villager
Speaker 1: I know. Her kitchen a museum of tablecloths, silver relics,
Speaker 1: and dried the lavender. She laddled out tiny glasses of
Speaker 1: her thick omdlica and listened. Head cocked to my dad's
Speaker 1: The fifth bell carrove, she said, eyes shining with the
Speaker 1: gleam of shared secrets. Though it's a blessed thing I remember.
Speaker 1: Must have been forty three. Fire started at the bickery,
Speaker 1: everyone rushing with buckets, the bells all ringing, But the fifth,
Speaker 1: she told on after the other stopped. They said it
Speaker 1: brought the rain, or was it after the thunder storm?
Speaker 1: One lightning split the fig tree, and only to Quintus
Speaker 1: sounded a clearer note, that's bad luck. Unless you count
Speaker 1: it lucky. Her stories by now had curled and shifted
Speaker 1: through the decades, yet always contained the fifth. And as
Speaker 1: a girl, you saw five. There was never a time
Speaker 1: with only four. She pressed her wrinkle hand against my cheek.
Speaker 1: I have always counted to five. We even played a game,
Speaker 1: the children Hidden Belt, where one player must hide whilst
Speaker 1: the rest chime in turn. Five rounds always five, I
Speaker 1: wondered absently if any child in the village could play
Speaker 1: with four. Her words drifted to the pies outside, laughter
Speaker 1: and triaks bubbling from a knot of children. I strolled
Speaker 1: over and watched as they spun in their little ritual circle.
Speaker 1: How many bells in the church? I asked, testing a
Speaker 1: chorus five. A dark haired boy piped up the secret
Speaker 1: bell rings. Only if you close your eyes, then you
Speaker 1: run back. The contradiction weighed on me. I visited Luka,
Speaker 1: the local historian who keeps the Dymannus at the edge
Speaker 1: of the square, trove of newspaper clippings, seep your photographs,
Speaker 1: yellowed festival programs. He grin, pushing his glasses up his nose. Stefano,
Speaker 1: you caught the bog the bells of stable history. Surely
Speaker 1: I told him my memory the evidence of the confusion.
Speaker 1: He rubbed his stubble well. I did find an odd
Speaker 1: one once, a clipping from the nineteen twenties about a
Speaker 1: return of the fifth. It read like a tall tale,
Speaker 1: some village masquerade. Nothing in the official documents. I checked.
Speaker 1: The festival looks. The frame in every drawing always holds five.
Speaker 1: Except he fled for a drawer. The dimension for the
Speaker 1: fifth bell here is just omitted. He pointed the sketch
Speaker 1: foot noted only see existing structure, no dimensions, no mass, nothing.
Speaker 1: Luca laughed. Tristan Italian village, five bells for two centuries,
Speaker 1: and no one writes down how the thing was hoisted
Speaker 1: up there. He looked at me more carefully. You're not
Speaker 1: the first to wonder. Perhaps I was left restless. Returning
Speaker 1: to the belfery, I brought tools in an old pitchpipe,
Speaker 1: I climbed, making diagrams, tracing fingers along metal, knocking each bell,
Speaker 1: and recording the reasons for Anna to chart. Later, four
Speaker 1: bells responded as expected, lower, clearer, distinct, the fifth tone,
Speaker 1: though somehow slippery, each measure a slight shift its note,
Speaker 1: not quite true, not quite reproducible. As if part of
Speaker 1: the air between chimes belonged elsewhere. But each time I charted,
Speaker 1: the echo of the math refused to fit the others.
Speaker 1: I scribbled, I raised, then tried again, muttering to myself,
Speaker 1: imagining Anna's grin. Bells are like puzzle boxes, Papa, except
Speaker 1: the pieces move when you look away. That evening, I
Speaker 1: lined up my diagrams. The more I clarified, the more
Speaker 1: the evidence closed off my doubts. There had always, somehow
Speaker 1: been five bells. The contradiction hardened. I could trust nothing,
Speaker 1: not even my own living memory. The pattern was merciless
Speaker 1: for everyone else. The fifth bell's presence was as stable
Speaker 1: as stone, yet searched for in his jury, it flickered
Speaker 1: at the edges. Could a whole village forget fifth of
Speaker 1: its identity? I could memory? Its off paced the boundary
Speaker 1: between truth and need. That question sent me back to
Speaker 1: my own childhood diaries, packed away in the bottom drawer
Speaker 1: of my bedroom dresser. Next to annas earl is science
Speaker 1: Fair Medals. The earliest entry, A childish growl saw the
Speaker 1: bells with no note to day, five bells, all different.
Speaker 1: I want to climb like Patta. One day I dropped
Speaker 1: the book, as though it had hissed in my hand.
Speaker 1: How could my own handwriting betray me? I'd always loved
Speaker 1: those high steps. But know the memory, afore stubborn as
Speaker 1: tree roots, had ever written my own story my old
Speaker 1: school project, taged twelve, complete with labeled drawing, five bells,
Speaker 1: color coded, each with its name. Impossible. The more evidence
Speaker 1: I found, the more certain I became that the world
Speaker 1: itself had quietly changed around me, closing ranks behind a story.
Speaker 1: I could not fully join a Sunday mass. After the sermon,
Speaker 1: Don Vittorio lingered by the font. He saw me hovering
Speaker 1: and raised an eyebrow. I know I seen foolish, father,
Speaker 1: I began, But I need to understand. Is there was
Speaker 1: there ever a time with fewer bells? He smiled, almost pityingly.
Speaker 1: There is a saying steffunoe. Some bells keep time, others
Speaker 1: keep hope. The fifth fought the quintus the hope. She
Speaker 1: rings differently for every soul. My grandmother called it the
Speaker 1: bell of new beginnings. I don't think he should worry
Speaker 1: that your memory is are clotted. Sometimes the world makes
Speaker 1: room for what is needed. Anna stood outside, arms folded,
Speaker 1: eyeing the old clock while she waited for me, I suggested,
Speaker 1: we oh, my brother Pallo long gone to Milan. He answered,
Speaker 1: in his careless, sitied old tone. What's the troublesty? Run
Speaker 1: out of rope? Again? I pressed, in your memory, how
Speaker 1: many bells in the old tower? Five? Always? Five? Remember
Speaker 1: that time I almost broke my arm climbing up because
Speaker 1: you dared me to touch the highest one. We got
Speaker 1: in trouble. You must have blocked out. You hate mess
Speaker 1: a little sharper, I asked, do you remember which bell
Speaker 1: it was? He didn't hesitate, the middle one, the new one,
Speaker 1: they said, but it was always there. Really, why are
Speaker 1: you asking? That? Did me in for the day. Some
Speaker 1: time before sunset, I climbed again, the tools and questions,
Speaker 1: weighing only slightly less than my usual bag. The wind
Speaker 1: on the landing was cool, smelling faintly of sweeth, hate
Speaker 1: and far off rain. I gazed at the fifth bell,
Speaker 1: and for the first time stepped close, so close I
Speaker 1: could see my own face pulled in the crescent shadow
Speaker 1: under the rim. The engraving snaked around, not quite letters,
Speaker 1: but suggestive of movement. I stared too long, perhaps, and
Speaker 1: found the pattern shift in the line seemed to flicker
Speaker 1: at the corner of my sight. As if I focus,
Speaker 1: the script danced away. Refusing a single form. I drew
Speaker 1: the pattern into my notebook as best I could, hands
Speaker 1: trembling in the last gold light. It was nothing I recognized,
Speaker 1: no Ladin, no Greek, no parochial touch. Turn Suddenly the
Speaker 1: miracle was not in the material, but in memory itself,
Speaker 1: my own mind. As Treacher said, any archav changing under scrutiny,
Speaker 1: I could not finally believe only in the physical clues,
Speaker 1: not the photographs, not the ledgers, not even what I
Speaker 1: myself recalled at bed time for Anna. Now everything pointed
Speaker 1: in two directions, out of a stability in every record,
Speaker 1: in every voice but my own, and yet a living
Speaker 1: instability in me. On the way home, I wonder, was
Speaker 1: the fifth bell just a story? If so, why was
Speaker 1: I the only one outside it? What? Sorry could bind
Speaker 1: a whole village but cut out one loyal keeper. I
Speaker 1: lay awake, eyes darting from the lines of my ceiling
Speaker 1: to the open windows shimmer of moonlight. I resolved, if
Speaker 1: nothing else, someone else in the village must remember a
Speaker 1: time of difference to break in the pattern, a lost year,
Speaker 1: a moment of changing from four to five. I would
Speaker 1: find it that day. Luca found me at the cafe.
Speaker 1: Before I could find him, he had a file fold
Speaker 1: of tucked under his arm. Stefano rumors his You're on
Speaker 1: an impossible chase. Take a look at this though inside
Speaker 1: a news clipping, yellowed edges torn first a deloquent to
Speaker 1: camp on her returns blaired. The nineteen twenty three headline
Speaker 1: a black and white photo of villages in Garland's hands raised,
Speaker 1: crowned with bells. Strange no, Luca said, According to this,
Speaker 1: there used to be a party whenever the fifth bell returned.
Speaker 1: Some festival canceled by the deoces. They said it got
Speaker 1: too rowdy, too strange. But the records quiet as a tomb,
Speaker 1: not a single mention in parish locks. He opened a
Speaker 1: notebook filled with spy drew riding. These are copied from
Speaker 1: an old midwife's diary in the next village, she wrote,
Speaker 1: the fifth bell went silent for the whole of the drought.
Speaker 1: The priest insisted it was broken the day before the
Speaker 1: rains came. It sounded in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: and people danced in the streets. We woke to the
Speaker 1: field shining I felt the hair on my neck prickle,
Speaker 1: so sometimes it was gone. He nodded more than once, apparently,
Speaker 1: but only during long spells of trouble famine epidemics. After
Speaker 1: the soldiers passed her, the midwif froughte that old man
Speaker 1: would declare, when the fifth quiets, we are alone. Later
Speaker 1: that week, Rose introduced me to her cousin, a teacher
Speaker 1: now retired to the shore of the railway. He listened
Speaker 1: to my doubts and nodded, eyes missing. I was a
Speaker 1: boy during the war. I remember hearing all the bells,
Speaker 1: but one summer the fifth was silent, and the grown
Speaker 1: ups grew afraid. Then one spring, the fob lifted over
Speaker 1: night and the fifth was back. It's always been reassuring,
Speaker 1: you know, even when you don't notice it. Anna, who
Speaker 1: had grown curious despite herself, corraled three friends, ages ranging
Speaker 1: from thirteen to sixteen, to help run a digital recording
Speaker 1: of the bells as I ran them in sequence. Anna
Speaker 1: set her laptop, her microphones, her friend's phones all calibrated
Speaker 1: the four main bales chimed the fifth. The sound appeared
Speaker 1: as a gap of flatline in the recordings, sometimes static,
Speaker 1: sometimes pure silence. Anna's brown knitted. She frowned, replayed the files.
Speaker 1: The others listened. I heard it you also at ring
Speaker 1: wywood show up, she groaned. Anna's friend Julio joked, maybe
Speaker 1: the fifth bell is shy or only like soldiers. But
Speaker 1: there it was a stubborn absence only technology could see.
Speaker 1: I double checked my measure and tape. Each day I
Speaker 1: measured a fifth bell height circumference, and each day the
Speaker 1: numbers wobbled no more than half a centime to hear
Speaker 1: or there but more variance than any bronze casting sterture.
Speaker 1: The cable for the fifth Kappa looked old, but not worn,
Speaker 1: wrapped around the yolk in await that hinted at generations
Speaker 1: of careful hands, or perhaps only mine projected to care
Speaker 1: On a whim, I went down to the water shore,
Speaker 1: where in a room of silt and driftwood hugs to pebbles.
Speaker 1: There I met Maestro Giovanni, retired schoolmaster, who nursed a
Speaker 1: beer and watch shrowing teams at dusk with the fifth bell. Yes,
Speaker 1: I heard it ring alone the day the armistice was signed,
Speaker 1: he mused, was crackling. Yet I also remember a year
Speaker 1: just after Franco's boy died. The church kept silent all lent,
Speaker 1: and nobody remarked on the fifth until Easter. Only then,
Speaker 1: when the fog had lifted, did a body talk about
Speaker 1: it aloud. I prowed him. But did you see it
Speaker 1: was the bell always there? He shrugged. That's memory for you.
Speaker 1: Bellmore present when most needed, less so the rest, but
Speaker 1: always there in its way. That evening, I climbed and
Speaker 1: inspected again. The bell surface, froll its and blemish luster
Speaker 1: still bore the faintest fabrition to the touch. As I
Speaker 1: leaned close, I closed my eyes, breathing the colstone air,
Speaker 1: and listened for any difference in the world. In that
Speaker 1: near darkness, I found the fifth Bell was both undeniable
Speaker 1: and on the focide of certainty, anchored only by dictation,
Speaker 1: perhaps or hope. In the dim the old words of
Speaker 1: Don Bitorio turned to me. Some bells keep time, others
Speaker 1: keep hope. A pattern emerged in my mind, and not
Speaker 1: a physical truth, but of cycles. The fifth Bell, it seemed,
Speaker 1: appeared and disappeared in the traces of local memory, its
Speaker 1: present strongest in times of tension, storm sorrow, community, inciety,
Speaker 1: and waning or even vanishing in spells of quiet. Evidence,
Speaker 1: where it was clearest, appeared to bend backwards. Old records, letters, photographs,
Speaker 1: all folding history around the assumption that the bell had
Speaker 1: never truly been gone. Only the stories caught the gaps.
Speaker 1: Anna more invested now tried to shake me from the spiral.
Speaker 1: What if the bell is only real one we need it?
Speaker 1: Isn't that crazier than it being missing? By accent? I
Speaker 1: shook my head. But the seed of the ideas duck.
Speaker 1: Perhaps a fifth bell was an act, a collective imagining,
Speaker 1: so profound it left art facts in the world of
Speaker 1: changes to books, buildings, even my own memory. Late at night,
Speaker 1: as quinted at my own reflection in the bell's mirrolercarc
Speaker 1: my face looked older than the day before, and the
Speaker 1: swelling scrip called the last light floating behind me. For
Speaker 1: a dizzy moment, I felt myself amon was the fifth
Speaker 1: bell ever a thing? Or only the sign of a need?
Speaker 1: By then the question was no longer one was the
Speaker 1: fifth bell installed? But what kind of reality is carried
Speaker 1: by hope and story together? I realized evidence alone would
Speaker 1: not resolve it my search For the moment it arrived,
Speaker 1: it was itself flawed, history, nodded to expectation, memory to meat,
Speaker 1: and every answer rap the contradiction tighter for every one
Speaker 1: in the village. The fifth bell had always been Only
Speaker 1: in some crisis and spoken collective did it become the
Speaker 1: axis of attention. And only then did tail surface of
Speaker 1: its coming or going, somehow material or not. The bell
Speaker 1: belonged on the very edge between touch and trust. That night,
Speaker 1: something settled, and me not ease precisely, but an end
Speaker 1: trying to catch the world in a single photograph. I
Speaker 1: slept soundly for once the sound of the bells. However,
Speaker 1: my need tipped away in the back of my mind,
Speaker 1: as normal as the slap of la quarter on the shore.
Speaker 1: Still something in me wanted to nudge, not at the surface,
Speaker 1: but beneath it. The first thing I did in the
Speaker 1: morning was send a man message to Mateo, an old
Speaker 1: friend from my apprentice days, now a civil engineer in Feris.
Speaker 1: Matteo cynicism annoyed me when we were young. He could
Speaker 1: spot a floor in a tram system by a whine
Speaker 1: of ties. But now his methodical suspicion felt like exactly
Speaker 1: what I needed. If the fifth bell existed for a
Speaker 1: stranger perhaps it was truly there. If not, then all
Speaker 1: my doubts would at least of good company. He arrived
Speaker 1: before noon, fuller in face than I remembered, wearing one
Speaker 1: of those Neon safety vests, even off judy, and a
Speaker 1: look of weary amusement. Well, bell man, he sounded desperate.
Speaker 1: Or maybe see nell, he said, clapping me on the back.
Speaker 1: As I led him through the nave. I A trailed
Speaker 1: behind us, armed with notebook and her unremitting curiosity. We
Speaker 1: climbed three instead through the spiral old Ethic, with the
Speaker 1: scent of pigeon and age. At the belfry, I stopped
Speaker 1: them just below the landing. No hints, I told him,
Speaker 1: Just tell me how many bells you see? He shrugged,
Speaker 1: craned his neck over the rail, and squinted up for
Speaker 1: like anywhere? No big one, small ones. Wait, I was silent,
Speaker 1: But isn't there something? He blinked, frowning, Or you were
Speaker 1: strong one the arch looks? His gaze dodded. I watched
Speaker 1: as a little crease formed between his eyebrows, confusion sliding
Speaker 1: into mild embarrassment. No, I suppose, just for he declared louder,
Speaker 1: Or did I miss one? There is a shadow up there,
Speaker 1: Anna piped up, it's only a trick of the angle,
Speaker 1: walked to the other side. They circled the platform and
Speaker 1: I watched Matteo study each bear, his eyes growing less asshirt.
Speaker 1: After a minute or two, his posture gradually tensing. He pointed, Ah,
Speaker 1: there above the Tinante, I see something. It's odd. The
Speaker 1: surface is bright, isn't it. Anna grinned. You see five?
Speaker 1: He hesitated, as if irritated by the suggestion. Then uncertain, yes, five,
Speaker 1: Ha must be better lighting from here, or my mind
Speaker 1: is playing tricks. She added him a folded sheet. Draw
Speaker 1: the bells from memory, both of you. Mattea, still skeptical,
Speaker 1: took her pen and glanced back and forth between the
Speaker 1: bells and the page. His lines were quick, but rough,
Speaker 1: the fifth bell half sketch, as if his hand distrusted
Speaker 1: what his eye had delivered. Anna's version, in contrast, was confident.
Speaker 1: Five elegant arcs quartation of engravings called precisely round the
Speaker 1: fifth as she drew her jaw set in that way
Speaker 1: that means she decided not to be wrong. Matere checked
Speaker 1: to sketch against the bells. Then at Anna's it's strange.
Speaker 1: My mind fixed on four, but now here of five?
Speaker 1: Or was it five? All along? The more I look,
Speaker 1: the surer I become, until I stopped looking. Then I
Speaker 1: let out a breath, and I met my eyes with
Speaker 1: the gland sequel pot's triumphant uncertainty. A few minutes later,
Speaker 1: by unlikely chance of perhaps some secret orchestrated luck, two
Speaker 1: tourists entered French, but her accents cheerful and loud in
Speaker 1: their mashing windbreakers. Don Vittorio, catching sight of us clustered
Speaker 1: in the belfry, waved them up. Signor stafanor some guests
Speaker 1: for the bell tower. He called. The woman took several
Speaker 1: rapid photos with her phone, pointing to the oldest bell,
Speaker 1: asking about casting dates in heavily excited Italian. Her husband
Speaker 1: lingered at the slit windows taking panoramic shots. Anna, delighted
Speaker 1: by visitors, offered to take a photo of the two
Speaker 1: of them together with the bells in the background. We
Speaker 1: gathered to look at their digital album. The first shot
Speaker 1: five bells, clear as day, The next, with the woman
Speaker 1: at the window, only four. The husband blinked sabazar the
Speaker 1: photo before five, then just four. I noticed the ones
Speaker 1: where I stood behind the couple. Five bells, always where
Speaker 1: I had stepped aside. Four. The tourists shrugged in trouble,
Speaker 1: leaving us blinking at their hurried footsteps, achoing down the stairs.
Speaker 1: After they've gone, Anna tugged at my sleeve. Papa, do
Speaker 1: you think maybe the bell only needs us to imagine? I?
Speaker 1: Can you have a village bell that is in there
Speaker 1: for everyone at once? I started to answer, but paused.
Speaker 1: The bell did not fit into any inventory list anymore.
Speaker 1: It slipped back and forth between the category of object
Speaker 1: and the realm of agreement, depending on whose eyes, whose
Speaker 1: expectations touched it. Later that afternoon, sitting on the rough
Speaker 1: Ston lap outside the church and watched as Alt signor
Speaker 1: Bertrucci's shepherd dog slunk by. Have you noticed, Papa, every
Speaker 1: time the fifth bell rings, dogs go silent, even the
Speaker 1: ones that barket thunder. Listen to night if you're awake.
Speaker 1: I did, and she was right. When the fifth bell
Speaker 1: told of the note, physically there or not, every dog
Speaker 1: fell into a hush. For the space of the vibration,
Speaker 1: it was an invisible border. They alone obeyed. I was
Speaker 1: struck by the thought perhaps animals heeded old patents would
Speaker 1: grown out of or perhaps the fifth bell's unique quality
Speaker 1: depended less on being heard than on being expected. Spurred
Speaker 1: by the mountain contradictions, I dug into village where the
Speaker 1: record sold oak books kept three years of rain and dry,
Speaker 1: annotated in cryptic margin notes by generations of sacristans in periods.
Speaker 1: Villages remember it as quiet, empty years, mutive feasts, absent festivals.
Speaker 1: The journals mentioned the stillness, the fog stayed three days,
Speaker 1: the bell and struck no birds on the water. When
Speaker 1: the record shifted accounts of morning disaster recovery, the bell
Speaker 1: was always present, noted an unusual comfort on the air.
Speaker 1: For as quint Orintaco altremonto, the fifth toll at sense.
Speaker 1: The more evidence had gathered, the more the pattern revealed itself.
Speaker 1: The fifth bell stubbornly was there were needed, and ever
Speaker 1: when life ran smuth when its absence hunt over stories,
Speaker 1: people changed the subject or retold old memories until the
Speaker 1: bell was restored. That evening, as a cool blue des
Speaker 1: slat over the water and an a soddered while leaves
Speaker 1: by the window are brooded over the strangeness, I resolved
Speaker 1: to seek out the one person in town who might
Speaker 1: frame this in a language not already mold but tradition.
Speaker 1: Professor Fabri, who lived a half hour's walk out along
Speaker 1: the lake shore, his house low and but clattered, slews
Speaker 1: out over the pebbles. I found him on his randa,
Speaker 1: disassembling an ancient typewrito, wearing miss matchable socks, and humming
Speaker 1: a bar part eatter. When explained to Bell, its evidence,
Speaker 1: its odd persistence, though way peoples acountsphere depending on the
Speaker 1: time and company. Fabrill listened, fingers steepled, his eyes bright
Speaker 1: behind thick lenses. Describe the engravings, he said, interrupting my flow.
Speaker 1: I slid him my sketch. It looks almost like writing,
Speaker 1: but I can't read it. Unscanned the bell sound and
Speaker 1: no cleaar frequency. Every measurement shifts. He studied the design,
Speaker 1: no script, I no, certainly not Latin, nor any old
Speaker 1: valley tom. But notice the shapes almost resolve into meaning,
Speaker 1: but change the longer you look. It is like a
Speaker 1: visual reddle. Such motifs sometimes appear, and objects chosen to
Speaker 1: anchor the memory of a group. Have you ever heard
Speaker 1: of somanda gaps where symbol is meant to be completed
Speaker 1: in the mind of the beholder not fixed in language.
Speaker 1: He rose rummaged among the stat books for rustle in
Speaker 1: volume of Village Rights in Old Societies, he continued, need,
Speaker 1: an object's purpose was rarely only functional Bells. Of course,
Speaker 1: they marked time, but more often they guarded a need,
Speaker 1: a hope, something unspoken. He courted a line from memory.
Speaker 1: A vessel exists not for what it holds, but for
Speaker 1: what it draws together. I nodded, remembering a story Signora
Speaker 1: Rosa told about hang garlands on the bells to march
Speaker 1: a harvest that never quite came. Faby poured wine. There
Speaker 1: is an anthropological concept memory enclaves isolated communities and consciously
Speaker 1: rebuild their timeline around objects of psychological need. Absences become stories,
Speaker 1: Stories become evidence. He scanned Anissan data while I explained
Speaker 1: the dog's silence. The terroist odd photos. He tapped his
Speaker 1: pen thoughtfully. The observer effect. A thing exists, or at
Speaker 1: least shift's form, when attended to an a ritual or
Speaker 1: collective way. The more attention, the more present it becomes,
Speaker 1: not just in the mind, but somehow in matter. Certain
Speaker 1: Shinto's shrines are ritually rebuilt every twenty years to keep
Speaker 1: them alive in memory, not to preserve, but to refresh
Speaker 1: reality itself. He asked, have you tried an experiment? Sit
Speaker 1: with someone else, both of you with the bellwire is absent.
Speaker 1: That was an idea. We climbed Belfry that late afternoon.
Speaker 1: FABRIY sat on the stone bench with me ere close
Speaker 1: does fussing in the gap above. We will both fix
Speaker 1: our thoughts only on four bells, name them picture only those.
Speaker 1: We sat in silence. At first the fifth bell hover
Speaker 1: persistently at the edge of vision, But the longer we sat,
Speaker 1: the more its outline seemed to thin, until for a
Speaker 1: brief moment all I could see in sense just four bells,
Speaker 1: like a memory settling into place. Then with a blink,
Speaker 1: Fabri's eyes flicked to mine, and as our gazes met,
Speaker 1: the outline of the fifth seem to flicker back into
Speaker 1: solid presence, wait and shadow restored. It was as though
Speaker 1: expectation shared or withdrawn, created space for it. Fabri, collecting
Speaker 1: his scarf, pronounce, some things exist only because enough people
Speaker 1: expect them to Stefano memory Richilliz are the clay and
Speaker 1: the wheel. With this new insiy, my skepticism and my
Speaker 1: ol circled whirrily, each refusing the other complete victory. Walking
Speaker 1: home along the lake shore, I replayed the day in
Speaker 1: my mind, letting each contradiction settle into place. If a
Speaker 1: fifth bell could recede or return under the pressure of
Speaker 1: collective attention, if its reality was shaped less by bruston
Speaker 1: by the village need, then trying to prove it senselessly
Speaker 1: with only my senses and tools was an error of kind,
Speaker 1: not degree. I wanted to push this idea further, to
Speaker 1: see a ritual, if shared memory, enacted together, could harden
Speaker 1: or dissolve it. That was when I found Luca at
Speaker 1: my workshop, already lively eyed crates of old church Missus
Speaker 1: and borrowed cathedral record spread across my work bench. I
Speaker 1: heard you looking for a lost tradition, he said. We
Speaker 1: found something in the attic of the old prayer for
Speaker 1: the Fifth's return, and a ledger of anonymous letters, some
Speaker 1: from the last hundred years, always written after times of
Speaker 1: lost floods, fires. The pages go. We prayed the fifth
Speaker 1: returns to guide the handless day where it rang, and
Speaker 1: the children weptwood relief as seines. The festival was less
Speaker 1: feast than collective, remembering that gave me an IDEA quietly
Speaker 1: approached Don Vittorio, proposing a small version, just a gathering
Speaker 1: nothing in the parish bulletin. On market day, a dozen
Speaker 1: villages lingered in the nave after the noonchine. Don Vittorio,
Speaker 1: as flicking back and forth between me and Luca, agreed
Speaker 1: to lead a truncated version of what all programs called
Speaker 1: the remembrance Litany. Instead of incense, just sunlight through the door,
Speaker 1: instead of choirs, the shuffle of shoes, and the quiet
Speaker 1: murmur of expectation. He cleared his throat and read a
Speaker 1: prayer from lucas bowdered notebook, to the keeper of hope,
Speaker 1: to the bell whose name is need shells her us
Speaker 1: in sound of silence, and bind our memory to the day.
Speaker 1: Each person, Anna Rosa Giulio, an old marble mason, a
Speaker 1: baker in white ipron, was invited to remember all loud,
Speaker 1: a moment when the fifth bell was most real. The
Speaker 1: stories vary. A wedding returning from rain, a snowstorm, the
Speaker 1: confined families together, a long absence of local boys come
Speaker 1: home after military service. As the room filled with these
Speaker 1: overlapping recollections, there was a subtle charge and intensification, almost
Speaker 1: as if the act of memory wove certainly tighter around us.
Speaker 1: Don Vittorio never won for show, looked up, voice grave
Speaker 1: and gentle. We are the keepers, we are kept, Anna
Speaker 1: snorted quietly. Sounds like a line from science fiction. Papa,
Speaker 1: she whispered. Later, and a practical as ever, decided to
Speaker 1: fox the magic while most of us gathered by the knave.
Speaker 1: She posted a tiny microphone atop the belfray and scheduled
Speaker 1: to record the fifth bells ringing when none of us
Speaker 1: were present, a truly empty witness, as she said, at
Speaker 1: the appointed time, she checked the file, a blank stretch
Speaker 1: of silence. But when she played back the recording taken
Speaker 1: when the tower was packed for villagers, the bell's note
Speaker 1: reverberated so powerfully we all felt it in our chess
Speaker 1: and ate as much as a sound. She frowned and
Speaker 1: looked up at me. I don't get it's not just psychological.
Speaker 1: Something's really changing, Papa. Measurement failed to I wagh A
Speaker 1: fifth bell before morning massed no change on again at
Speaker 1: sunset after the litany, the mass on the scale was
Speaker 1: different half a kilo by my eye, a trivial error,
Speaker 1: and yet the other four held steady dawn. Vittorio, taking
Speaker 1: a faded book from the Lotsacisti cabinet, showed us a
Speaker 1: page written perhaps a hundred years ago. Let it be recorded.
Speaker 1: The fifth bell told as the lightning struck the steeple
Speaker 1: and the church was spared. The day of silence they
Speaker 1: call it. The fifth carried us through that afternoon. Anna,
Speaker 1: her skepticism, flickering, sat cross legged beneath the bells. Maybe
Speaker 1: the bell's like an answer to a question. No, but
Speaker 1: he wants to ask until everyone has to. Or maybe
Speaker 1: the real magic is just us collectively refusing to forget.
Speaker 1: I let her words sink in what held the bell,
Speaker 1: bolts and cable, or the force of need stationed there?
Speaker 1: With the evidence before me, I found it impossible to
Speaker 1: separate my own measurements, photographs and diagrams, all shifted according
Speaker 1: to which group were ritual or solitude framed them. And
Speaker 1: so still unsatisfied, I dea of one last angle, one
Speaker 1: that united our various threads, But risk putting fantasy of
Speaker 1: a fact. Could the bell be made more real by
Speaker 1: conscious collective belief? If so, what changed was not the
Speaker 1: bell but the memory machine that was our village. A
Speaker 1: contacted doctor Sarah Lorenzini, a covetive psychologists now at the
Speaker 1: university in Turinn, formerly a summer visitor to our lake.
Speaker 1: I told her in a weak moment at the bar
Speaker 1: about my impossible bell. She arrived quietly on Friday, notebook
Speaker 1: in hand, all precision and layer of patience, no smile
Speaker 1: for small talk, just the gentle clinical curiosity of a scientist,
Speaker 1: and convinced but deeply interested. I laid it all out.
Speaker 1: Hannah's blank recording materio's variable sketches with probic findings. Sir
Speaker 1: asked for every art fact, every photograph. We pored over
Speaker 1: them at the rectory table. To her, the inconsistencies were
Speaker 1: as fascinating as they were frustrating. She proposed, if the
Speaker 1: bell's presence matches periods of collective uncertainty, then perhaps it's
Speaker 1: a form of communal grounding. What you describe borders on
Speaker 1: object permanence, except created not by a child's need for security,
Speaker 1: but by community's pole expectation. The crushed test is observer
Speaker 1: independence by the artifacts that registered the bell, regardless of belief.
Speaker 1: She interviewed villagers of all ages, separating them three at
Speaker 1: a time. Each told her the fifth bell was vital,
Speaker 1: but no two agreed on when it had arrived, disappeared,
Speaker 1: or first rang for them. Some described it as always waiting,
Speaker 1: or a gift when needed. Most a few, including Rosa,
Speaker 1: asserted there were years that barely heard it, then suddenly
Speaker 1: clear as reign it rang. Sara asked Anna to draw
Speaker 1: a sequence her first memory of hearing the fifth bell,
Speaker 1: then her strongest. Anna's pencil lines grew bolder over time,
Speaker 1: the fifth bell blooming from outline to presence. Late that day,
Speaker 1: Anne grinned inspired let run a real experiment. Ever body altogether,
Speaker 1: each remembering the bell at the same moment. We spread
Speaker 1: the call that evening, just before dusk. Ever Soul and Satandre,
Speaker 1: who could be coaxed from bed, poured into the nave
Speaker 1: at the tower. Aut along the lake shore, some infirm
Speaker 1: leaned from their kitchen windows, attending by ear. Anna set
Speaker 1: up her microphones. Luk aheld the old silver key to
Speaker 1: the belfry. Don Vittorio led a short prayer. Each of
Speaker 1: us was instructed to remember your airliss fifth bell, picture
Speaker 1: its sound, it presents its meaning together the hush pressed down.
Speaker 1: Then I myself pulled the rope. The tall rasp through
Speaker 1: the stone. A vibration, deep and pure, rolled down through
Speaker 1: foot and leg in hut, No may be no ambiguity.
Speaker 1: The fifth bell rang, not alone, not hidden in a
Speaker 1: gap between four, but with an echo that reached the
Speaker 1: edge of the village and lingered. The villagers pressed close,
Speaker 1: the old and the young, respectful or doubting faces open,
Speaker 1: I shining as if recognizing something long suspected. On the
Speaker 1: lake shore at the water prickled with the reverberation. Dogs
Speaker 1: and far off yards lifted their heads and fell silent,
Speaker 1: birds scattered, then settled again. Sarah check Anna's devices. The
Speaker 1: bells had registered sound waves, strong and smooth photos from
Speaker 1: every angle, the fifth bell as solid as the others,
Speaker 1: even if one or two still came out blurry ambiguous. Anna,
Speaker 1: hands trembling a little, gathered a final group photo outside
Speaker 1: the tower, every villager in the frame. The bell fory
Speaker 1: directly above us. When we checked it later, the fifth
Speaker 1: bell was perfectly clear. Yet as we passed a photo
Speaker 1: phontophone the gun ann above swore they could see and ambiguously.
Speaker 1: Matteo glanced twice and declared, strange, it's almost hidden. Behind
Speaker 1: the big one. Ruce smiled and pointed, is right there
Speaker 1: beside signor Petruci's boy, I myself sought, plainly sharp, gleaming,
Speaker 1: Sarah laughed quietly. If fits now that you are altogether
Speaker 1: the bell is fixed, whether or not outsiders believe, you
Speaker 1: believed and thus perhaps preserved it. Standing there in the
Speaker 1: light that seeped away towards stars, it was obvious the
Speaker 1: fifth bell was neither merely a fantasy nor in a
Speaker 1: nerd artifact. It was something we made, and in making
Speaker 1: it revealed ourselves to each other. Later, when the crowd
Speaker 1: fell away, Sarah offered her verdict, careful and still smiling.
Speaker 1: If an entire village can create out of knee tradition
Speaker 1: and care such a thing that it bends memory, history,
Speaker 1: and even perhaps matter, then perhaps that's the greater marvel.
Speaker 1: Perhaps here the boundaries between a reality and story of
Speaker 1: simply Thinna Anna pleased and satisfied in a way I'm
Speaker 1: not seen in years. Nudge me, you will have to
Speaker 1: update your ledgers. Five bells, after all, I smiled, a
Speaker 1: weightlifting Maybe I'll add a category quint of veriabile the
Speaker 1: fifth variable by attendants. She lllaugh, bright and free. I
Speaker 1: wandered the quiet street that night, the windows bright with conversation,
Speaker 1: they crumpling under a rising wind, bells silent now but
Speaker 1: serving to ring again tomorrow. The mystery was not in
Speaker 1: the metal, but in us. How willingly we gather, as
Speaker 1: to Bunny, we maintain what knees keeping, how gently we
Speaker 1: let the world shift around us. Some mornings now, as
Speaker 1: a pink light brushes up from behind the hills, I
Speaker 1: climb the tower once more. Four bells gleam in a
Speaker 1: half dark Brunsfield and spider webin Doo. But some dawns,
Speaker 1: the rare and certain ones, when I am least expectant,
Speaker 1: I find five, the fifth, shining as if always there.
Speaker 1: I cannot say what draws it back. A moment of sorrow, perhaps,
Speaker 1: or joy of the simple admission that we are never
Speaker 1: the sum of our measurements. And I wonder, standing between
Speaker 1: wreath and bell, how many other impossibilities we quietly maintained together,
Speaker 1: And what else might become real if we remember together
Speaker 1: to believe? And that is the end. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: and I will see you in the next one.