I Stole You

by Kristen Ringman

  I never wanted to see you die. You were no different than the dogs or the owls. You could not live beyond the limits of your body. You barely ate because you couldn’t stop feeding those dogs. You barely slept and when you did, you chose the dirt floor of a storage unit or the soiled mattress of a capsule, a one-room hut elevated off the ground with a roof of palm leaves, filled with dozens of cats. You gave to every animal in need around you.

  I watched you wither, worrying in a way I had never done before. Even Lakshmi didn’t understand it. She let me take night after night for myself, because I couldn’t stop wanting to check on you. I don’t normally feel such—emotion, I suppose—for humans.

  You came down with colon cancer when you were only fifty-six. You still rode everywhere on that moped with barrels of leftover food and medicine. You still gave rabies shots, cleaned out gaping maggot wounds, and applied your medicinal oils to mange-covered skin. You worked hard right up until you couldn’t see straight and your friends had to drive you to the hospital for those final months.

  Let me go back to the first time I saw you:

  It was night and you were driving down the red roads of the universal town of Auroville with a giant barrel of extra food. Your straight brown hair was tied back away from your face. Your eyes were so blue they shone like sapphires under the occasionally working streetlights.

  You felt familiar to me before I even understood that you didn’t belong with other humans. You didn’t look like any man or woman around you, not the Indians and not the Westerners either, who moved to that town in order to realize human unity, and part of that was perhaps because you loved the animals more. You saw their suffering. You felt it inside your own heart like a maggot wound you couldn’t stop nursing.

  You humans cannot choose what you love. You can only choose how you respond to it. This I have learned from so many years of watching you from the trees. Your strength of character lent more power to that wound in your heart for the animals. You had motivation like the mount of a god, like the drive I must have in order to carry Lakshmi across the sky.

  Your unwavering focus piqued my curiosity. I followed you as you rode through the darkness, staying just far enough behind so that you wouldn’t notice my owl body in the trees, balanced above you, my head spinning round.

  From that close distance, I could feel the thoughts in your mind. Are these dogs okay for now? Yes. On to the next. I’m so frustrated with my body for feeling tired right now, so I’ll do one more village, one more street. There’s still food left. Nothing should go to waste. I must get to the next ones. What about that dog with dysentery on the other side of town? I’ll go there first thing tomorrow. Six a.m. If I get to sleep by two or three, then that should be enough time for me to rest. There is so much to do. I cannot stop now. So many things I must do tomorrow.

  I was convinced you must think about yourself occasionally, but you never did. I flew on, listening to the same words in your mind pass through one after the other. Dogs. Dogs. Dogs. Cats. Dogs. You never wavered, though you sometimes thought of goats.

  For over twenty years, I shadowed you relentlessly following the lists of endless tasks in your mind. Even on your birthdays, when friends urged you to take time for yourself, you responded, “Oh, not today. There’s too much to be done. I’m alright.”

  Through your contact with the few locals who were willing to take in a puppy, you learned Tamil. “Va, va,” you said to the dogs, begging for them to come to your coconut shells filled with curd or raw eggs for their breakfast. “Po, po,” you said to the dogs who tried to steal food from other dogs. You also said “Po” to the human beggars, because you had one drive, like mine with Lakshmi, so there was nothing left for you to give to another creature, human or not.

  You humans are not as wide as the sky or as deep as the sea. Your energies fit into cups, into glasses, and they come in all sizes but any of them can be emptied, any of them can be shattered. It only takes one wrong moment.

  It feels at times that I was always your shadow owl.

  I was always there in the trees above your slowly moving moped, your human body that shed more and more of its weight as the years passed. That is how I learned, over the years, that I would miss too much of your life if I slept all day. I learned to sleep in the darkness above your head, in banyan trees from the hours of midnight until dawn. I learned to wake at daybreak so that I could watch you shuffle outside barely drinking water or eating some curd while feeding your cats before motoring off to the dogs.

  In your final days, you finally obtained a piece of land from Auroville. It only took them over thirty years to honor your cause. It only took an American woman to fight your battles for you and fill out the forms for you to have the right to build a shelter and a hospital for your beloved dogs. And she did it not for the dogs themselves, but for you. Because she loved you, because she saw what I saw—that you were not like other humans and those dogs had no one else who would care for them so forcefully, with every ounce of sustenance you had.

  By then, you were sick. You body was failing you before your dreams could ever come to fruition. If I had a feather for every time that happened in a human’s life, I’d have a body the size of a million owls, a body that could cover my entire country and beyond.

  The final morning you spent working in the village was full of conflict, which for you was normal. A Tamil man ran up to you as you were getting into a taxi that your friends had convinced you to take to the local hospital because you could barely stand.

  He screamed, “My cow has been bitten by a dog! You must come help! It’s your fault the dogs have bitten my cow!”

  Your head was swimming with thoughts of how to help this man, but your body wasn’t allowing you to speak. You faltered. A Tamil friend held you steady while another Tamil friend explained your situation to the man.

  Their words turned to screams and you lost sense of what was being said.

  In your head you thought of all the things you planned to do that day and the next. All the dogs—and now this cow—that needed your help. You grasped the door of the taxi but only to use it for standing, keeping your feet on the dirt. No part of you wanted to enter that car. Somehow, you knew that white car was the chariot of death. You felt it down in your bones, but you refused to accept it. There’s no time for me to be sick! There’s no time for me to die! I’ve got to help the dogs! Your thoughts raced in circles like samsara—birth, death, rebirth, birth, death, rebirth, birth, death, rebirth.

  The man behind you raged, he was sweating just as much as you were, spit fell from his mouth to the orange dirt at your feet as he screamed to your back. “I will kill all the dogs in the village if you don’t help me!”

  Your friends, who cared more for you than the dogs, told him to go ahead and do it.

  Then they pushed you inside the chariot with the brown leather back seat.

  It was the same taxicab you had taken countless times with severely injured dogs to the veterinary college in Pondicherry, where students performed surgeries and consultations for free as part of their schooling. The same cab where a dog with two broken legs tore free from his muzzle and bit you. The same cab where you were denied help from the driver or your helper, where you re-muzzled the dog that was blind with pain and had shit all over the seat and the floor, and you sat down with him and held him and whispered loving words, and took him back to his village where you eventually helped him to die. He would not have survived life on the village streets with two broken legs. You got a rabies shot yourself that day and got back on your moped and fed the dogs deep into the night.

  On your way to the hospital, you made your friends stop three times. All of the medicine and various drugs you used on the dogs were tucked inside an oversized belt bag you wore like a rosary around your slim waist. Your first stop was for a dog who needed a rabies shot. The second was for a dog who needed another dose of homeopathic medicine. The third was for a dog with mange. You applied the oil with shaking hands a
s the sun began to fall behind the palms and banana trees, and finally—after that last one—you sat down against the brown leather seats laced with memories and you fell asleep.

  By the time you woke, your body was clean, you wore a blue hospital gown instead of your usual dusty clothes, and everything around you was white and silver. There were no puppies curled up along dirt roads, shining orange in the sunlight. There were no Tamil men demanding that you help their cows or their goats. Only your friends beside you, holding your hands, wishing you well, but you were dying and they knew it and you knew it and there was nothing you could do anymore.

  So you just felt love for the doctors who were trying to help you to the people who visited bringing you flowers you barely noticed. You loved everyone, human and dog alike, again and it was like feeling love for the first time. They all matter, don’t they? You thought to yourself. Not just the dogs, but everyone.

  I watched you from the small windows near the ceilings. I made myself invisible and watched the people in the waiting room. The intensive care unit of this hospital was a place where the people in this part of South India had to pay for their treatment, and in return they got a fancy-looking hospital of cement buildings painted white and manicured grounds dotted with palm trees and bushes of fragrant jasmine flowers. Most people who made it here weren’t exactly well enough to appreciate the scenery, though I supposed their families did. Not all of them of course. Grief was prevalent.

  The rooms of the Intensive Care Unit were filled with beds, but the nurses and doctors catered to their patients all day and night. I wasn’t scared for you here. I was happy that your friends and community found the money to pay for your care like this. The government hospital would have been merciless and overcrowded. Here, they only allowed visitors to ICU patients access to the patients two at a time. Which wasn’t always ideal.

  I watched the people waiting to visit loved ones who were dying. It was fascinating to me. Three young girls were waiting in line; ready to don the facemasks and smocks the hospital provided to keep everything sterile. They were wearing perfect pastel-colored punjabis and had long silky hair and make-up on their faces. They blended together in a rainbow of fabric: one yellow, one blue, and one pink. Each girl had jasmine in her hair and a small gold flower nose ring in her left nostril. They held hands. They were terrified. I felt their fear inside my own feathers, ruffling them up. When I looked into the kajal-coated eyes of one of them, I heard her thoughts. They were waiting to see their mother. Everyone in the room waited with them.

  I was still in the window when they returned five minutes later. The waiting room went quiet as they passed through the doors. They moved in a dancer’s union to the bottom of the stairs, sank down to the floor, and wailed. Their almost musical moans resounded throughout the room. Their volume rose and fell as if they were lonely birds caught screaming into a storm.

  The image of those girls on the floor, their sobbing faces and shaking bodies, made me realize that perhaps inside my owl heart, I felt this way about you even though I had never spoken to you directly, and even though I had the power in my claws to change your existence. I could send you somewhere better than another life.

  But would you be happy if I named you N?ya and made you a god of dogs? I didn’t know for sure if you’d prefer to continue on in samsara and help the dogs from the body of another human.

  Where could I send you? Where would you dream to go—if you could decide?

  An older man ran to the three sisters in the waiting room. They drew him into their huddle. The man was their father. His wife had just died. I knew you heard the news as well because I moved to an interior window to watch the nurses cover the body and carry her away. I watched you then, too. You were worried for the daughters and the husband. You felt such pity. I understood that maybe humans don’t fit into glasses after all, or maybe, their energies can be restored with rest and then their hearts can open wider. You loved people, too. I knew it for certain then. So should you be a god of dogs or not?

  After a while, the haggard father, dressed smartly in Western pants and a buttoned-down shirt, ushered his daughters outside. They walked down a path between the palm trees until they were beside the perfectly shorn grass. There they collapsed in a heap of colors like a flower closing its petals.

  I see beauty in the ways that you humans cry, the ways you love.

  The new operation for your cancer didn’t help. Your mother was far away, only accessible through a cell phone call. Your face lit up when you spoke to her. I felt Lakshmi calling me, so I had to leave you.

  “How much longer must you remain apart from me?” She asked me when I returned.

  “You know I am yours, Lakshmi. I will return when you tell me to return,” I replied, but she knew my thoughts as easily as if she were inside my body of feathers.

  “I wish for you to follow through with this human. How much longer will it take?”

  “Weeks perhaps. I still haven’t decided whether to make the human a god of dogs or not.”

  “Then make haste. Keep watch. Listen to your own voice and not the human’s.”

  I might have asked her, “How did you know I was considering asking the human?” but I didn’t have to. She was Lakshmi and her wisdom was greater than mine.

  When I returned, you seemed to have aged years rather than days.

  Your friends clamored around you when they could. They came and went. Some cried while others shook their heads. You didn’t want anyone to worry. You kept the dogs in your heart until the very end.

  I had to wait until you died. I couldn’t get close to you without the doctors or the nurses seeing me.

  You passed in the night, melting into the darkness the way I have done so many times when I’ve carried souls to their next lives. As your soul escaped its body, it glowed in the same hue of orange as the dogs curled up along the dirt streets.

  I took your shining soul into my feathery embrace, and I guided you to another human body.

  * * *

  FOR MY MOTHER

  I stole you from the mountain.

  You sat with your eyes closed and your back against the stone. I crept up along the ledge of granite, stepping carefully with my paws.

  “A wolf!” You exclaimed with your hands instead of your voice.

  I looked into your eyes, and with a slight tilt of my head, I shifted out of my wolf-skin to reveal my other body: a human with long, tangled gray and black hair, blue eyes like yours but lighter, feet and hands full of scars from the long journeys I take each year across these mountains.

  As you stood in surprise, you almost fell down into the pine trees on the lower trail. I promise I would have caught you. I hadn’t eaten in weeks. It was almost winter and the leaves that were red as blood, yellow as fire, orange as the glow I get inside my eyes when I’m hungry.

  I approached you cautiously. Last year I lost my kill and almost starved. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. Every year, it’s harder.

  “You’re a wolf,” you signed again. “And a girl? What are you?”

  I almost feel pity when the human has no fear, when they don’t realize their life will be over in minutes.

  I gave you more than minutes, though. I gave you hours. Long enough for the sun to set over the horizon of trees around us. Long enough for us to tell each other a story. Like a mirror of a mirror, we reflected each other’s sorrow. Our loss.

  Our mothers.

  I wasn’t sure I believed in anything after death, but that day, I almost felt my mother’s breath on the back of my neck.

  She was a brave, strong wolf. Her fur was auburn. I got my father’s markings and color—gray. But my mother moved through the forest like a small fire burning ahead of me, just out of reach. I could never touch her as much as I wanted to touch her. I could never be near her enough, close enough to whatever was inside her skin making her move.

  Most days, she scanned the horizon, listening for news from other shifters, other wolves
who weren’t just wolves. We were a dying breed. Human killed real wolves, our distant kin, in such large numbers that it hurt us, too. Now, there’s an unseen war going on between those of us that remain and humans. Your kind shouldn’t have done what they did. They’re bloodthirsty fools. Always wanting more. Nothing is ever enough for you, is it?

  I knew it wasn’t you personally that killed my mother, but every small human death is a comfort to the great death of my mother: the wolf fae who heard everything.

  I don’t mean she just heard news of our kind. No—you see—my mother could speak to crows, too. And bluebirds. Swallows. Hawks.

  No one in our pack could understand it.

  My mother would shift into a woman with long auburn hair that covered her back and chest in waves like a cape. She was naked, but she kept herself hidden inside the mane of her hair like something even more mystical than us. Then, she would crow, or caw, or hoo, or make some kind of whirling sound none of us could comprehend.

  I felt more sympathetic to your undecipherable sign language because of my mother’s undecipherable bird language. I listened to you in a way I had never listened to a human before. I didn’t need to know your language of hands because I could hear your thoughts. I don’t hear every animal’s thoughts, but humans think so loud, you don’t even need to open your mouths or move your hands for me to hear you.