"It is like being shown your grave and asked to admire the drainage." – Marit Skerry, Last Speaker of Skerran, on the Reserved Bed
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 13 OF 14 SUBJECT: Marit Skerry, and a language that is still alive In the north aisle of the Glass there is a bed in which nothing grows. It is raked every week, watered every Sunday, and labelled with a slate on which are written the name Skerran, the name of an island, and a date with the year left blank. Beside it, through a door in the glass wall, is a small whitewashed lodge with two rooms and a stove. A wicker chair stands between the bed and the door. Marit Skerry carries it out every morning to sit beside her own bed. She is eighty-four, small and weathered, with very bright black eyes, a dark blue knitted cap and sea boots, and she is the last speaker of Skerran, the language of a treeless island in the North Atlantic that was evacuated when she was eleven. The families were resettled in a fishing town where children were punished for speaking it at school. She and her brother went on speaking it t...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.