she pulls on wombs. When we look at it we are seeing all of the sunrises and sunsets across our world, every beginning and every ending all at once. This idea comforts me as I spot our oma in the distance. I follow the silver light, my feet sinking in the sand as I join the solemn crowd waiting at the beach.
There are no words here, only sound. The rhythmic exhalations, inhalations of our people’s singing fills the air, their overtones a great buzzing hum deep enough to rend the sky. Before I can stop myself, I am humming with them. The sound rises from a pit in my belly and vibrates from the back of my throat. It tumbles out of my dry mouth to join the others around me. Beneath my soles the earth rumbles. That night my people sang as if the whole earth would open up beneath us. We sang as if the future rested in our throats. The songs pull me out of myself. I am inside and out all at once. As my sister walks to stand at the edge of the waters, I feel as if I might fly away, as if every breath I had ever taken is lifting me up now.
A strong descension assures that straight-backed, strong limbed children will be born from our mothers’ wombs, that green, grasping roots will rise from the dead husks of trees to seed a future. The others dance around this vision. When one descends, all are born. When one returns, all return. Each bloodline lives and with it, their memory, and we are received by our kin.
Music rises from the waves, echoes out across the sand, a keening. The elders raise their voices, the sound of their prayers join. I walk past them, my hair a tight interlocked monument to skill, to pain. The same children who laughed in my face and taunted me are silent now. Only the wind, the elders’ voices, and the sound of the waters rise up ahead to greet me. The entire village watches.
Oma waits with her back to me, in the carved wooden chair they have carried out to face the waters. When I stand beside her, her fingertips brush the marks on my shoulder. Her touch stings. The wounds have not all scabbed over yet. She turns and clasps my hands, her eyes searching for answers hidden in my face.
“Fele, why, why do you do such things?”
Our oma’s unseeing eyes search but I can find no answer that would please her.
“Yera,” I begin but her tsk, the sharp air sucking between her teeth, cuts me off.
“No,” she says, shaking her head, “not Yera. You, Fele, it is you.”
They think I don’t hear them, here under the water, that I don’t know what they are doing, from here in the sea. But I do.
I wanted Yera to fight back, to curse me, to make me forget even the sound of my own name. I am unaccustomed to this Yera. This silent, still one.
“Fele!” they call. “She has always been touched.” “I told her oma, but she refused to listen.” “One head here with the living, the other with the dead.” “Should have never named her. To tell a child she killed her sister, her mother. What a terrible curse.”
They whisper harsh words sharp enough to cut through bone. But no words are needed here. I have withstood assault all these years, since before birth. This last attack is borne away by the ocean’s tears. They say my Yera does not exist. That she died when our mother bore us, that I should have died, too. But that was then and this is now and we are another tale.
It does not matter if she is on land or that I am in the sea.
We are sisters. We share the same sky.
Though some spells, when the moon is high and the tide is low, and my body flinches, panics because it thinks it is dying, I journey inland, to where the ancestors once walked in flesh, the ones we carved into wood. I journey inward and I can smell the scent of sorcadians in bloom, the pungent scent of overripe fruit, and feel my sister’s fingers pressed around my throat, daring me to breathe.
Tiny bebe dart and nibble around my brow. They swim around the circles in my hair and sing me songs of new suns here in the blueblack waters. Now I am the straight and the curved, our past and our future. Here in the water, I dwell with the ancient ones, in the space where all our lives begin, and my story ends as all stories must, a new beginning.
THIRTEEN YEAR LONG SONG
“If I could have another life, I’d take it,” he said, sitting upright in the straight back chair. “This one ain’t worth ten cents to me. I’d like to do things for myself again. Would give everything I’ve got for that.”
He was sitting on his porch, staring at a field so green, it almost hurt his eyes. Rachel, Doc’s middle daughter, had cut the grass for him again, and this time, she hadn’t bagged it yet. The grass lay in soft piles and clumps all along the neatly-trimmed rows. Suddenly, he wanted to jump again, to leap and roll in the mounds of grass like he did when he was little. If he could, he would scoot the red, peeling chair back against the leaning house’s wall. If he could, he would leap clean over the front steps, scattering the piles like great clouds of green dust.
He sat there and remembered when his back was both iron and water, when his legs pumped like two pistons, and his feet flowed like the river beyond his acres; when his whole body carried him whenever and wherever he wanted to go. If he could, he would leap across the fence, which separated his land from the company’s, and give those Viscerol folks a rough piece of his mind. Back in the day, he’d done more for less. But the world he lived in now didn’t look like anything Doc recognized. Seemed like people had given up, even the earth itself. He gazed at his little patch of land and remembered how lush it had all been. Pollen got in his eyes, and the orbs, one brown and one blue, soon covered in mist.
Outside, the wind picked up a loose clump of grass, along with his wishes, and spun the green stalks into the air. A lazy S, the bottoms of the stalks waved like flags in the sky above him. He sat there in the chair, one hand balled into a tight fist, the other’s nails dug into the rotten wood. Memory poured down on him like hard rain. Behind a curtain of pines and cypresses, a pair of eyes watched, and something listened.
A few days later, Doc rose, feeling more tired than he ever did. More tired than all those years ago when the nurses had stuck him so full of needles that he thought he’d turned into a pin cushion. “Y’all done drew so much blood, now you gon’ have to give some back,” he’d said, but the men had only smiled. Whatever they knew then, they didn’t speak, and what they told him later he wished it was a lie.
Now Doc’s whole body felt like he fell down the stairs and hit every step on the way down. He kept waking in the middle of the night with soil all over the thin white sheets and clumps of dirt all up in his hair. Doc didn’t know what he had done or where he had gone. He took the dirty sheets and held them like dark secrets, balled them up like fists, and hid them under his bed. He tried to bathe, but he couldn’t get himself in the lukewarm water before Rachel arrived. He could hear her fussing at the front door. His whole body flushed with embarrassment.
“Doc? Oh, Doc!” she cried and tossed the keys into the amber dish on the old phone stand. “Where are you?”
On Rachel’s best day, her whisper was more of a shout.
Doc fumbled with his pants so long, he tired himself out, had to sit on the toilet seat just to catch his breath. He grabbed a yellow Bourbon & Bacon T-shirt and pulled it over his head. His beard got caught in the neck. Doc untangled it with his fingers, then stroked the white strands straight and smooth until the ends curled into cottony wisps.
“There’s something in the blood,” he muttered. Doc had known for over a dozen years that something more than memory coursed through his veins. His body was full of poison. They all were. Those with good sense had already gone and got out.
“Doc, you hear me?”
He