by Jean Rabe
I was lying sprawled on the ground with my backpack to the side hanging onto my arm. As I pushed myself up with a moan, a gasp went up from the group, and some of them scurried away into the rooms under the overhanging rocks. Others shied away, but stood their ground. A dog, tail between its legs, barked from some distance back. A little girl, with her finger in her mouth, held onto her mother’s hand and gazed at me unafraid. They all wore primitive clothes.
“Where am I? Is this a movie set?” When I spoke, an excited garble of words went flying around the group. “Donde?” I said. Spanish for “where?”
One of the men boldly stepped up and knelt by my side. He didn’t look like any tourist, but he somehow looked familiar.
He pointed to me and spread his arms wide. (Where are you from?)
I understood that gesture, but didn’t know the words to answer.
“Hola,” I said. Maybe he understood Spanish.
“Whole-la?” he responded. He clearly didn’t understand.
How could I ask where I was? Maybe I was dreaming all of this. Maybe I was still in the photo booth in the travel agency and had hit my head.
Still, I decided to humor him, figment of my imagination or not. We did much gesturing with hands and nodding of heads and rolling of eyes, trying to make ourselves understood. While all of this was going on, the others began slowly drifting back to stand in a circle around us, but keeping a safe distance in case I made any sudden moves.
By pointing to him, and then to the people, and finally back to myself as I waved my arms to take in the area, I again asked where I was.
“Sin-agua,” he said. He flung his arms wide to indicate the area.
“No water? Sinagua?”
“Sin-agua.”
The History Channel junkie in me came to the fore and a revelation hit me like a proverbial brick. If I wasn’t dreaming, I was with a small group of nameless people who, years after their disappearance, had been called Sin-agua for lack of a better name, but also because of the lack of water in the area. Thus Sinagua—no water. I remembered a two- hour special I’d watched about them last year. They had been extinct for more than a thousand years. They had mysteriously faded into history. How could I be with a people that had simply vanished?
After some decision was reached that I was harmless, two of the women lifted me to my feet and led me into one of the rooms, where it was surprisingly very cool. The wall held a decorative pattern of handprints made by the person who had patted the clay into place. Upon seeing the handprints, I remembered placing my hands in a perfect match.
Hours went by.
That evening the people were amazed that I could take a tiny piece of wood, rub it, and make a flame. They were astounded that I had a yellow magic stick that light would come out of at the mere press of a button, and everyone had to light the flashlight and scream in surprise and laughter.
The peanut butter crackers didn’t last long; they were passed around, with each person taking a bite. The Gatorade was sipped out of the plastic bottles with suspicion—until the sweet liquid hit a tongue, then a smile would light up the face.
Days passed.
They honored me by declaring I fulfilled the prophecy that a white goddess who could work magic would come to them. My image was cut into a large flat rock and outlined in black like several other forms painted there.
I found that they were a gentle people of small stature who farmed with very little water. From a river a little distance away, water was carried daily in pottery jars, and to their protest, I insisted in joining in as helper. Channels had been dug to the river for irrigation of their crops. This was a well established, organized little community.
As more days passed, I helped add rooms by using pieces of broken pottery to loosen the earth, mix it with water, and build more inner walls to make a sleeping area for myself.
My class ring became impacted with mud, and I was constantly digging earth from the grooves. The imprint of my ring made it obvious where I worked, and everyone knew which walls I had built. It became somewhat important to them that everyone have a small section of wall with the imprint of the “goddess’ ” hand, a wall that should stand forever strong against the elements.
The man who had first come to my aid was a shaman—a healer and wise man. Since I had been declared a goddess, I was allowed to help him gather roots and bark, or a scorpion when needed, and other items he used to make his healing salves and potions.
I showed him my bottle of aspirin and animated how they should be taken with water. But he took one out of the palm of my hand and chewed it up. He wrinkled his face at the sour taste and decided water was indeed needed to wash it down. As we gestured and talked, we traded words. He would touch his nose and say “achin,” and I would touch my nose and say “nose,” and so forth.
As best he could, he explained to me that he was also a shape shifter. He could change himself into another form, from a man to an animal, and could also move himself from one place to another in a wink.
He never demonstrated this art to me. I was skeptical!
He showed an interest in my class ring. His face lit up with delight when I slipped the ring off one day and offered it to him in the palm of my hand. He insisted he must make me a gift in return, as it was the tradition of his people.
The chosen item was his turquoise necklace which had beads that had been cut into unusual shapes and was very valuable to him—definitely more so than my ring was to me. He lifted the necklace over his head and gently placed it in my palm, pushing my fingers closed over it. After he left, I slipped the beads into my pocket.
The next morning, long before the sun had risen, I awoke to a sound of the people rushing around and low urgent whispers. They were preparing to move in a hurry and were grabbing what they could carry in their arms.
“Que?” What? I asked.
“Chindi.” I was told in low, frightened tones.
“Chindi?” Not a familiar word.
The shaman rushed into my room and using sign language pointed at himself, then to his eyes. “I will see . . .”
He touched me on my shoulder with his index finger then turned his hand sideways and stretched his arm out pointing behind me. “You in the time to come.”
He was gone in a blink, and a gray cat ran out the doorway. I didn’t see the shaman after that, and I didn’t have time to think of what he’d been trying to say to me.
Some of the people had left already, going farther north. Others were still gathering possessions when, with a whoop, what could only be described as devils began pouring into the settlement.
My God, I thought. Chindi . . . devil . . . Aztec!
I could hardly believe my eyes. Where had they come from? The Aztec nation was extinct, like as the people of the Sinagua area. What had I stumbled upon?
Had I found myself back in time?
Or was I just dreaming?
The women who tried to fight back had their brains bashed out against the rocks. The children died, too. The men, whether or not they fought back, were overpowered and tied together, wrist to wrist.
I hid!
I was cowering inside my room when I remembered my ancient history studies that said that the Aztecs held in reverence a jaguar god. Quickly, I dug my leopard spotted poncho from my backpack, slipped it on, and pulled the hood over my head.
With flashlight in hand, and summoning what bit of bravery I could muster, I spread my arms out to make myself appear as large and threatening as possible, ran out into the center of the compound, and shouted, “Stop right there!”
I stomped my feet and flapped my arms and sang “Yellow Submarine” as loud as I could—all the time waving my lit flashlight.
It had some effect.
The Aztec warriors stood frozen in their tracks as they stared at me, the jaguar woman.
“Be gone, devils!” I shouted in a language none of them understood. A jaguar goddess speaking words from heaven, and whose flashlight batteries had ju
st burned out!
I was hoping they would turn tail and run, but being from a fierce nation, once the initial fright wore off, they quickly realized I was a jaguar god impostor. The leader of the warriors came closer to me with suspicion, not wanting to make any hasty decisions. He reached out and touched my poncho and jerked back as if it had burned his hand.
Once he found he was still alive after touching the plastic, he reached out again, wrapped his big hand around the back of my neck and pushed me toward the living quarters. He wrenched the flashlight out of my hand and flung it into the scrub. As he jammed my face up against the wall and drew back his war club, my hands shot out and landed in two of the handprints. That was the last thing I remembered until I woke to a group of tourists standing around me.
“Give her some air,” someone said as they held my head and fanned me with their hand.
“Stand back, I think she must have fainted. Must be this heat.”
“She wasn’t here a second ago. Where did she come from?”
“Did you see? She just popped up out of nowhere!” The aches in my body told me I hadn’t been dreaming. Somehow I’d been in the past. Well, I was back in the present now, and with a group of concerned sunburned tourists looking down at me.
A park ranger brought water from a nearby refreshment stand and gently removed my poncho.
“Why is she wearing that hot plastic thing out here in the desert?” I heard someone whisper.
“My backpack! Where is my backpack?” I began feeling around, but to no avail. Everyone began searching, but my backpack was nowhere to be found.
Any gear I had was left in the past when the settlement was overrun by Aztecs.
“Are you sure you had a backpack?” The ranger asked. “Are you sure you are okay? Are you driving? Do you need a ride back to Sedona?”
“Sedona? Yes, I do need a ride.” A tall man helped me to my feet. After a few minutes, I was fine, no dizziness.
Some of the walls of the ruin were still standing after what certainly had been more than a thousand years, but many had crumbled into dust. The people I had come to know had disappeared, leaving no trace of having been here except for the walls . . . some of which might stand forever because they’d been built by the hands of their goddess.
I walked away from the tourists over to the farthest wall and glanced at the handprints imbedded in the hard clay. Sure enough, there was the imprint of my class ring. I looked at my hand to find that my ring had disappeared, too.
The shaman. I’d given it to him.
Through the many years it has been a mystery discussed by archaeologists as to what must have caused that unusual imprint in the walls. In the end, the historians decided that the ring must have belonged to the chief of the tribe. I knew there were no chiefs in that little band of people, and only I knew the imprint was from my ring.
There, among the pictographs, was my picture hewn out in the flat rock and outlined in faded black. Those childlike lines were a drawing of me.
Tears rolled down my dirty face as I remembered what had happened to my little group of friends. Their abrupt disappearance was due to the Aztecs trekking long miles up from Mexico hunting slave labor to help build their magnificent city or to be offered in a blood-bath. My friends who had escaped to the north were lost to time; even I could not say where they had gone or if they had survived.
I had to make my own arrangements to get back home.
Back in Columbus I went straightaway to the travel agency. I wanted to get a few things straight with that strange little man who obviously sent me to the past instead of taking my photograph. As best I could remember, the little old agent looked a lot like the shaman of the Sinagua.
An accidental tourist?
I walked past the door three times before I realized the storefront had changed. There was no sign waving in the breeze. There were no glass beads hanging across the doorway; they had been replaced with a modern glass and chrome door. The floor beyond was clean and devoid of sand.
I pushed through to the office.
There were two desks cluttered with telephones and computers, with a woman seated behind each desk.
“Can I help you take a trip?” one of them asked.
I shook my head. “Where is the little old man? I saw him here . . .” When exactly had I seen him? Days ago? Centuries? “A little man with weathered skin.”
“Little old man?” She smirked and looked at the other agent, who smiled behind her hand.
“Yes,” I insisted. “There was a little old man here who sent me to Sedona, oh, maybe two weeks ago. Wasn’t there a little old man? No!”
I just answered my own question.
There was no little old wrinkled man working there, never had been, never would be. He’d found himself forward in time, and then just as likely had found his way back home . . . or somewhere, somewhen else.
I walked back to my apartment. Upon searching through the pockets of the clothes I’d worn when I was transported to ancient Arizona, I jerked my hand as I came across something raspy. I turned the pocket inside out, and to my amazement onto the floor fell a necklace made of tiny turquoise beads cut into odd little shapes.
A Portrait of Time
Kelly Swails
Kelly Swails is a clinical microbiologist by day and a writer by night. When she’s not playing with bacteria or words, she can be found reading, watching movies, gaming, exercising, or knitting. She and her husband Ken live with three cats in Illinois. If she had the opportunity to go back in time for a do over, she wouldn’t change a thing. Visit her Web site at www.kellyswails.com.
Gina stood outside her sister’s rented townhome. She shivered in the frigid February air as a tinge of nausea rippled through her body.
An angry wind that smelled of a neighbor’s fire pushed through her thin houndstooth coat. Wisps of vapor puffed from her mouth as she blew into her gloved hands and stomped her feet.
Twenty below, at least. She’d forgotten how cold it had been. She could have bought a warmer coat but she hadn’t spent a year’s salary to be warm. She’d spent it on this trip. She would stand here in a bikini if it meant saving her identical twin, Lucy. She had six hours to do it, Timeshares waivers and warnings be damned.
A storm a few days prior had blanketed the area with a foot of snow, and now Gina squinted against the daylight glaring off its surface. She checked her watch: eleven thirty. Perfect. The current Gina’s plane had just left for a week- long business trip, so there would be no chance she’d run into her past self and cause a time-fracturing paradox.
Gina clutched a plastic grocery bag as she climbed the short flight of stairs. She paused—come on, Gina, can’t do what you came here to do if you don’t go inside—before knocking once and swinging the door open. Warmth slammed into her body—her sister had always kept the thermostat somewhere between inferno and Hades—as her eyes fell onto Lucy’s paintings and supplies strewn around the living room. Her voice cracked as she said, “Lucy? You here?”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Lucy called from the kitchen. “I thought you’d be at thirty thousand feet by now.”
Tears filled Gina’s eyes. Dizziness overcame her, and she couldn’t tell if it was from the trip or from hearing Lucy’s voice. She managed to croak, “Canceled,” as Lucy walked into the living room, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.
“Flight or the whole trip?”
“Flight.” A tear spilled from her left eye and ran down her cheek. Gina couldn’t breathe as she watched Lucy flick the towel over her shoulder the way she always did.
“That’s no reason to cry,” Lucy said.
“I know.” Gina stared at her sister. Gina wore her brunette hair in a sleek low bun; Lucy let her natural waves frame her face. Gina used the latest Estée Lauder cosmetics while Lucy ran a swipe of mascara over her eyelashes once in a while. Gina had her clothes tailored; Lucy wore Levi’s and Chuck Taylors. Where Gina was smooth, Lucy was rough. Where Gina was reserved,
Lucy was boisterous. Where Gina was straightlaced, Lucy was free-spirited. Seeing her standing in her living room now, wearing a paint-stained flannel shirt and smudge of flour on her cheek, made Gina feel complete for the first time in five years.
Lucy gave her a quizzical look. “What’s with you?”
Gina released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and said, “Nothing. Maybe if you didn’t keep your house at two hundred degrees I wouldn’t tear up so bad when I came in from the cold.” The words slipped from her mouth before she could stop them. She and Lucy’d had the same basic argument ever since they could reach the temperature dial in their childhood home. Having the conversation now felt comfortably absurd. The rational part of her mind said to not waste precious time talking about a few degrees. The emotional side would listen to her sister recite the alphabet all night.
Lucy snorted. “Like you’re one to talk. I have to wear a sweatshirt at your house in the summer.”
“My thermostat is always kept at the proper temperature,” Gina said.
“Sure, for a penguin,” Lucy said. She nodded to the sack Gina still held. “What’s that?”
“Eggs. Had a hunch you needed some.”
“I just started a batch of sugar cookies and realized I was out,” Lucy said. She didn’t look surprised, and Gina breathed sigh of relief. They’d had moments of apparent intuition where the other was concerned ever since they could walk, and Gina had hoped her sister would think this was nothing more than another instance of that. “But since you’re here, I’ll make chocolate chip.”
“You don’t need to make those just for me,” Gina said, even though she didn’t like sugar cookies.
“I’m not eating a whole batch of these things by myself,” Lucy said. “I just need brown sugar and chocolate chips.”
“I’ll go,” Gina said quickly.
“You bet you are,” Lucy smiled. “I’m making the cookies for you.”