by Tanya Tagaq
The Northern Lights have descended upon me during my spirit journey. Fantastical and omnipotent, they were called forth by the Exploration. They noticed the activity. Shining brighter and clearer than I have ever witnessed, they came down in a mighty and cyclonic display of power. Mere metres above me, they sound like ancient whales and snapping ice.
The drone of their vibration is loosening my marrow. There is no time for Fear, because Fear is gnawing on one side of Body, but it has not yet reached my heart. Towering and sublime, the Northern Lights come closer. My eyelids are frozen open but Body grows warmer. I can’t move. Light leaves Time and takes on physical form. The light morphs into faces and creatures, and then they begin to solidify into violent shards. This energy is not benign like that of the ocean dwellers; these are the Masters of Law and Nature. Fear beats Time to my heart and it beats faster and faster because I am powerless now.
The Light glows too hard. I’m blind. The Light shapes itself into long shards and attaches to the surface of my eyes. It burns worse than anything I have ever felt. Like the cold freezes moisture, the light seems to sear my fluid.
My nostrils begin to burn as the glow grows down my face and cheeks. I groan as it travels up my nose and into my sinus cavities. My ears become plugged and filled. The backs of my eyeballs begin to melt from agony to ecstasy as a large shard of light is thrust down my throat. I can’t breathe for an instant but the panic melts as my throat is opened; it is slit vertically but not destroyed. I’m healed with torture.
The slitting continues down my belly, lighting up my liver and excavating my bladder. An impossible column of green light simultaneously impales my vagina and anus. My clit explodes and I am split in two from head to toe as the light from my throat joins the light in my womb and begins to make a giant fluid figure eight in my Body.
I am lifted off the ground and realize that this is the end of Life. Nobody can survive this. I can go forever now into the bliss. Join the light. Light in lung. Light in soul. Opening of holes.
Pain. I am naked and freezing. My skin almost tears off the ice as I stand up. My clothes are scattered around me. I am shaking violently. I put on my clothes and stagger home, bleeding from every orifice. My parents are at work. I was gone for twelve hours. A hot shower calms me and washes the shaking away. I can never tell anyone about this. Nobody would believe me. I wipe my pussy and green glow is left on the Kleenex. It squirms like a larva.
MISPLACED
My womb is impregnated with mourning
The past and I conceiving
Heaving
Birthing sorrow
Intangible currency
Misplaced kitchen knives
My sliced honour carries
A flag covered with bright colours
Steep cliffs want me
To pretend to have feathers
Hang your black hair over me
Not under
March your black boots
Over me
Not under
Blinking sawdust loud dry labour
I smell falsehood
I open my palms to reveal
An alley of sled dogs
Eating lies
I press my mouth to the ground
And join them
It’s weeks later and I have told no one of that night. I told no one of the changes, the loosening of tendon and the tightening of muscle; the stitching of gristle and accelerated healing. My cuts heal in half a day. I no longer need glasses. I can see people’s words before they come out of their mouths. My skin is clear. My eczema has disappeared. I have to clip my nails every other day now. There are deep shades of green in my eyes, my mom notices. She attributes it to puberty, since I am now finally developing substantial breasts. Am I taller, or do I just stand that way?
Strange things start happening. There is a shift in rituals. We kids used to sit in a circle and slice each other’s names into our arms. We sliced with razor blades and made false claw scars to prove ourselves worthy of pain. I can no longer bleed from my wounds, even when we slice deeply. Blood wants to stay in my core now. The membranes around my organs thicken. My heart beats more slowly. Calmness replaces anxiety. The tips of my fingers taste like metal. The scope of my vision expands. The bowl of my pelvis is filled with honey and my tongue is poisonous. I have learned to coax orgasms out of the sacred place and all of the fluid in the world is mine.
The sun rises in the morning now. Soon it will be the Time of Abundance. What a relief. It brings brightness of mind and body to be reassured that the cold will lose its mighty grip on us. Soon the snow buntings will arrive, bringing song. My favourite snow bunting song is the clearance song they make to land. On walks to school, I observe them and try to decipher their language. The chirps sometimes blur into words if I stop trying to listen. I realize that birds see in a completely different way than we humans do. We are slow and lumbering, our language is deep and muddy. Our confinement to the ground elicits pity. They look at us as we look upon the trees, slow but full of longevity. The trees look at the rocks that way. Rocks look at the mountains that way. Mountains look at the water that way. Earth looks at the sun that way. Everyone has an elder.
There is an old debilitated ship across the bay, a reminder of the many failed attempts foreigners made to claim the Northwest Passage. I have never understood why foreigners will imagine themselves extreme adventurers while the stewards of the land observe with a chortle. We have always been here. Aren’t we adventurous? How presumptuous it is to assume that an experience is limited to your own two eyes. It takes only fifteen minutes to walk across the frozen bay. Now that it is bright and warm enough to stay outside with comfort, we walk across almost daily. The ship is a source of shelter when the winds pick up, and also a spark to ignite our imaginations. Who was the captain? Did they cast any bodies overboard? Had they succumbed to scurvy? Did they bring tuberculosis? Did their lips retreat in agony from their teeth as they received the same treatment the elements have always given us? The Land has no hierarchy. The Land has no manners; you only obey and enjoy what is afforded to you by her greatness. Only logic and great care ensure your survival. Only the patterns of skills gifted by our ancestors keep us living in harmony. We obey or we succumb.
Best Boy grips the frayed rope that hangs from the mast and runs off the prow, swinging in a great circle around the ship. He is silhouetted by the bright sky for a moment, and gladness and laughter explode out of him and enter us all. We take turns zipping through the sweet cold air and risking the fall. Best Boy and I retreat into the belly of the ship to meet our friends. He puts his cold hands under my jacket and shirt. It’s only common courtesy to warm the hands of those you care for. Our friend is rabidly digging the snow out of the belly of the ship, trying to excavate knowledge. Curiosity is the crux of youth. He screams that he has found hair, a buried head. We run, choosing to believe in the wonderment and the fantasy, high on fear. When we finally return months later, it turns out that the hair was just the ragged end of a rotted mop. In all our joviality, we had forgotten to apply logic. It was fun to believe we had found a body, considering that there was a real body of a shaman that had rotted at the town dump, rejected from the public graveyard by the Anglican ministers. I never understood how foreigners could come and tell us where to die and where to live. Where to be buried and how to breed.
Thrice placed lichens
In order
Lime green
Orange
Black
Three rows
Four regrets
Eight tears
Backwards whispers intact
Said quickly
Subliminally
Criminally
Move forward
Three lies
Four fists
Eight facts
Stones collected
Warmed by body
Warmed with life
Place them
In order
Hexagonally
Six e
nemies
Three curses
Four lovers
Eight pacts
Time has a way of eternally looping us in the same configurations. Like fruit flies, we are unable to register the patterns. Just because we are the crest of the wave does not mean the ocean does not exist. What has been before will be again. We are reverberations of our Ancestors and songs of our present selves. It is very quiet in the future, as it is in the deep past. The Quiet. We always live alongside the dead. It’s scary but the Quiet is our true home. This is why we must make the most of our gristle and meat.
We must celebrate being harnessed into our bodies. We are a product of the immense torque that propels this universe. We are not individuals but a great accumulation of all that lived before. They are with us. They lift us. We will lift them later. We must use our sight for visions and our touch for love. Feed our hands and feed our bellies. Feed your eyes and feed your bones. We are vessels to be filled, and I have felt renewed after the night on the ice. My tendons are thicker, my thoughts quicker. I am more capable.
Fear is learning to run from me, not the other way around. I am not afraid anymore, as if meekness is slinking away into the deeper corners where it cannot dominate my psyche. The night with the Northern Lights changed my whole life. They say that the insane never doubt their own sanity. The night with the Northern Lights was real. The pain was real. This is where my lesson was learned: pain is to be expected, courage is to be welcomed. There is no choice but to endure. There is no other way than to renounce self-doubt. It is the time of Dawning in more ways than one. The sun can rise, and so can I.
My newfound confidence has drawn in more attention from Best Boy, but maybe it’s just my breasts. We find any excuse to spend time together, even though we are awkwardly navigating our friendship. We break into abandoned buildings just to keep warm. We climb the oil tanks and run around the tops of them, daring ourselves to jump off (we never do). We challenge the power plant to a yelling match. We collect our friends in gangs and each one of us tells our parents we are sleeping over at someone else’s house. We hold 100 metre races and play spin the bottle. We steal hash and beer and potato chips. We talk on the phone. We taunt drunks on the street, knowing they will never remember who bruised their egos when they have killed their own dignity already.
I am no longer shocked by Best Boy’s ability to manipulate with his eyes. It now seems slightly amusing. I have no more uses for him other than friendship since discovering that he is so very funny. You never know where a true friendship will bloom. I’m aware that he tries to seduce me but know instinctively that it has nothing to do with me. I don’t know how to break it to him that after the night on the ice, no one will ever penetrate my Self again. Hopefully he sees that I am more than pussy. He tries to treat me like sex but it is like water off a duck’s back. He is so vulnerable, and this has led to fear. He acts out of fear.
Laughter is the fear killer. Nervous laughter when you feel awkward or embarrassed. Belly laughter when someone is inappropriately appropriate. Whispered giggles when people make fools out of themselves. Helpless sniggering at people who take themselves so very seriously. Milk shot out of your nose at your dad when he calls you a fart sack. Mostly the laughing at the ridiculous sideshow we call reality. This heals.
Alpha is not happy with the friendship between Best Boy and me. It is a school day and I am not hiding from her anymore. It doesn’t matter what they do to me, today is the day I stand up for myself. No choreographed detention, no crawling under the school.
The time ticks by, and I know what awaits me. The bell rings. The walk to my locker seems to be happening in slow motion. It’s the adrenaline. I walk out of the school with my books and there is a semicircle of girls waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. Alpha is sneering and the others shift their weight from one foot to the other in anticipation.
There are waves of violence lapping around our legs. Everything is moving very slowly but seems to come into focus very easily. I exhale long like I’m aiming my rifle and step down into the semicircle. Even this small act of taking space is more defiant than anything I have ever dared to do before, and there is an almost imperceptible shift in power and movement as the semicircle takes a slight step back and goes quiet.
I collect all the energy from around me and focus it into my core, then up to my eyes. I wish that my best friend Battery Pack was with me, but I can do this alone. Alpha feints like a boxer and spits in my face.
I grab her scarf and quickly wrap it around her throat. She seems so light as I spin her around and lift her up off the ground by the weight of her neck. She can’t breathe. She’s turning red and her stupid little friend tells me to stop in a quivering voice.
I wait. I wait until she is purple and drop her. She is unconscious but she will be all right. They will never, ever bother me again. I am glowing light all the way from my spleen. As peaceful as I wish to be, it certainly feels good to get drunk on violence.
Gravel underfoot
Ice in lung
Drunk on fun
Drunk on violence
Drunk on cum
I will sharpen my claws
Bare my teeth
One saliva string
One tongue
Cannot speak of the
Fight that comes from survival
Touch my children
And my teeth welcome your windpipe
Utter the name
And be crushed by leg
Grown strong from
Holding up weight
By thigh that carries
Rocks and urgent gait
I will hunch my shoulders and wait
Claws sharpened
Teeth agape
School is finally out and the sun is permanently up. The twenty-four-hour sun is not conducive to mischief, since witnesses can view our actions plainly, whether it is midnight or noon. Our troublemaking intentions are revealed in the volume of our voices. Our need for mischief amplified by the midnight sun and lack of schedule. Everyone’s clocks tick sideways. We stay up until noon and sleep until 8 p.m. because it doesn’t matter.
In the Bright Night there are only the Alive people out, the young or drunk or those coming home from a hunt. We haven’t quite outgrown throwing stones at drunkards and picking cigarette butts off the ground outside the Northern Store. There are four of us together today and Yellow Pants has stolen a joint off a drunkard after pelting stones at him, so we are set for the night. It’s about two in the morning as we break into a small shed down by the shore, caribou hair and seal fat sticking to the bottom of our shoes. The door is stuck, frozen into a piece of ice. We force it from its ice prison and our eyes adjust to the dimness as the door closes into blackness. Blood and oil is a very comforting smell. Seal grease and matted fur. There is metal in the air from the snowmobile parts, and the smell of salt being released by the cracks in the ice. The thick oil is causing heaviness in our nostrils. Smelling gravel, dust, plywood, and concrete; we shuffle into the small enclosure.
A strange feeling washes over me, something predatory. I have caught the scent of fear. I can smell fear and it excites me. Bloodlust but more like Spiritlust. The fear talks to my teeth and wants them to grow large and pointed. The fear talks to my spine and tells it to be near to the earth, because you can hide your belly that way. The fear talks to my eyes and tells them to see food in the veins of necks. Something flips inside my tummy.
Someone sparks the joint. Instinct takes over and I direct my focus onto the weakest member of the group, Yellow Pants. He looks me in the eye for a second and starts to scream at the top of his lungs. He keeps screaming that he has seen the devil. I didn’t mean to scare him THAT much, and now I feel petulant, as though the kill happened too quickly. We usher him out of the shack as people start to come to their windows to see what the ruckus is. He is rolling in the mud now, wet with seal blood and fat. I am simultaneously regretting the situation and laughing internally at him, disgusted by
his weakness. He won’t stop screaming.
Finally his mother comes to pick him up. We stand around, sheepish, concerned and embarrassed. Why was he so afraid? Did he not know that fear attracts predators? He was never the same after that.
Neither was I. The Land started to call more often after that. The Land soaks up the guilt stubbornly clinging to my liver after using another person as prey, for my own enjoyment. The Land soaks up all negativity. Breathing with the Land, giving energy back into the earth, that is survival. Plug my body into the nuna and soak her up, give her back love. A universe-sized love encapsulated in a moment, in a breath, a gift for my impoverished flesh. She is all-encompassing. She is peaceful. She is sublime. We will all be back in the earth soon, why not enjoy being outside of her now?
After death my body rot is the newborn of inanimate objects. Maybe the earth misses our bodies the way a mother misses a newborn. Maybe we miss our bodies the way we all miss the womb when we’re dead. Maybe my minerals will come back quickly as a plant or insect. Maybe parts of me will become the Old Blood in millennia, the Old Blood we suck out of the earth to burn and destroy the surface, to burn and eviscerate the clouds. Leave the blood in her. Let the deep black of time stay where it belongs. Compressed and ancient, we force the Old Blood to work in the wrong time, at the wrong pressure.
What happens to the energy once it leaves our body? Does it leave us or does it start vibrating at an unknown frequency? Does it cast itself into the wind and leave our vessels lonely? Do our spirits travel with the wind? Do our spirits retain our value and ascend into the Knowing or are we demoted when our bodies decay? Are we as worthy while we rot? How many layers of consciousness are there? Are we still giving? Is being inanimate really a lesser state?