I wrote a short story for a writing competition and since the story was more like an opening that anything else, I decided to develop it into a longer story. However, the main character’s name – Aurora Kalma – doesn’t feel right to me.
The basic explanation for how the entry went was explaining that Aurora is the undertaker’s daughter in a town named Arfell Point, and people around her view this as evidence that she is a witch or has ties to demons in some way. It’s all utter rubbish, but she finds it quite harmless and at points entertaining. One night, during the middle of a storm (for the sake of the prompt list, I had to use thunder in the story somewhere), she walks around the graveyard like she sometimes does, noting the graves of seven-year-old Lauri Elama, a boy who died four years before the story takes place in a car accident, and a young woman named Janne Kiva.
(In case you don’t know, the surnames are all just the Google Translate results for something related to the character in Finnish – ‘Kalma’ was along the lines of ‘death’, I’m not sure where ‘Elama’ came from and ‘Kiva’ was ‘love’ – which logically makes no sense but hey, it’s fiction and the story isn’t meant to be set in Finland or anywhere else in particular. Heck, I didn’t even have a set-in-stone time period.)
Anyway, back to the story.
As she thinks to herself about Janne’s death, and the death of her boyfriend barely a week after her funeral, reflecting that’s it’s sweet in a disturbing way, she’s interrupted. When she turns around to see who was talking to her, she sees a young boy, about her age (twelve), who judging by the amount of blood she sees and the obvious knife wound he has across his chest, should absolutely be dead. He asks her name, she responds, and then he tells her that he’s Lauri Elama.
Like any sane twelve year old who’s having a vaguely casual chat with a dead boy during a thunderstorm, she reaches out and attempts to touch his shoulder in order to prove that she’s just seeing a ghost (despite not believing in ghosts). When she does successfully touch his shoulder, she pulls her hand away again to see that her fingers are stained red. And that is where it stopped because I thought these sentences were a suitable ending:
She found herself exhaling deeply, and against all common sense reached out to touch the boy’s shoulder. Expecting her hand to go straight through, she froze as it made contact.
When she drew it away, her fingers were red with blood.
Yes, she accidentally resurrects a kid and has literally no idea what she’s doing. Totally normal things.
Thing is, while I do want to keep ‘Kalma’ as her surname, I’m not sure what to do for her first name. Aurora doesn’t really feel right, as I’ve said, but I don’t know what would feel right.
Oddly enough, I’m not an expert on Finnish names. Having said that, any suggestions for girls’ names with Scandinavian origins (using Scandinavia on the broader level to refer to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland as Wikipedia states it can be used, because while I know Finnish isn’t a Scandinavian language and all, geographically it could technically be considered as Scandinavian and I know a tiny bit more about geography than languages) would be much appreciated.
You can also call me an absolute idiot for that previous paragraph if you wish, but my knowledge is based more in mathematics and science than things like geography. On the plus side, I do know that Africa’s a continent which my school does need to remind people who actually study Geography and I do know that Cardiff is not the capital of Scotland (yes, yes I did hear a Geography student in my year say that Cardiff was the capital of Scotland. And to be clear, I’m from the UK.)
(For those who don’t know, Cardiff is the capital of Wales. Which is very much not Scotland.)
