Sycorax's Daughters

by Kinitra Brooks, PhD

  Wilder paused. “I can think of better.”

  A sudden burst of wind carried Thistle’s laughter through the air, lifted it above his head, lingered in his ear. The breeze felt cool, inviting. He sighed and unlaced one shoe.

  “Got me messed up,” he muttered and kicked off the other.

  He stuffed his socks in his back pocket, strung his shoes over his shoulder, and dug his toes in. The grass smelled sweet and wet, felt like heaven on his soles and heels. Within the circle of trees, he went beyond thought, beyond feeling. As his feet sank into the earth, he felt himself yielding to a soft green breath, a sensation he hadn’t felt since childhood. He stood there, eyes closed, remembered what it felt like to run barefoot without worry, without fear. A deep presence filled the space around him, within him. Wilder glanced up, saw in moonlight the silvery threads of a webbed work of art, dangling from an elm. And like his lover, the spider was nowhere to be seen.

  “Thistle?”

  Only the familiar whoosh of the river replied. All he heard was the waves of the water, sloshing somewhere ahead, down below, and the sound of his own voice whispering in the waist-high grass and weeds. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the dark and the silver. The light was strange, as if waking inside a dream. Wilder followed the crush of green, where Thistle’s hips had slashed through the ferny veil. Her footprints led him inward, deeper into the night where he didn’t want to go. He walked in slow, plodding steps at first, searching for Thistle’s trail, but each time he moved, he felt the air move behind him, only to turn and find no one there. Uneasy, Wilder moved faster, twisting through the rambling path, fighting the woods. He ducked beneath branches, cursing as he worked to untangle them from his hair. Instead of thinning out, the trees grew thicker all around. Wilder didn’t like it here, the way the ground sucked at his feet, gentle at first, but more insistent with each step, as if the land was hungry.

  He stopped. That was how she looked — hungry.

  Those nights when he would wake, the room suddenly filled with the weight of a presence that made him turn over only to find Thistle lying flat on her back, hands at her side, still and cold, eyes flung wide open, mouth parted…

  “How does it feel?” he had asked once, when the sun had risen and she moved, thankfully, once again part of the living.

  “Like I woke up dead.” Wilder remembered frowning until she kissed him. “It’s like my mind is awake but this body is not…” Thistle often spoke of herself as if she was not part of herself, as if every day was an out of body experience and Wilder was her witness.

  “Like you’re trapped?” he’d asked.

  “No, like I’m finally free.” Her arms were wrapped around his throat, his head resting in her hands. She was curled beneath him, their legs entwined, her breath like peppermint and lemongrass, sweet herbal spice.

  “But your eyes are wide open and you look…you look…” “What?” She stared as if to dare him.

  Wilder had searched for another word to describe what he could not say. Dangerous is how she looked, feral, but what he whispered then was “terrified.”

  Thistle raised one brow, rubbed her knee. “Sleep paralysis, common enough. I’ve had it all my life. It’s like the body is paralyzed and your mind is still awake. REM atonia, when your brain awakens and your eyes start to open. You become alert, conscious.” Sitting cross-legged on the rumpled sheets, she gulped noisily from a glass of water, then pressed a cool fingertip at Wilder’s temple. “But then you realize you can’t move, you can’t speak, and you feel a weight pressing down on you, on your chest, and you feel like you can’t breathe, you can’t…”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  Her tongue darted out, licked the tip of his nose. “It’s merely a question of transitions. The brain and the body, the spirit and the mind, move all the time, between state to state. Sometimes you are just caught in between.”

  “If I had to sleep like you, I think I’d just skip sleep.” “I don’t sleep. I wait.”

  But she didn’t wait. She’d left him, creeped out alone in the damned woods. And she didn’t sleep. She didn’t sweat. And when she did sleep, she looked wide awake. Dead. Thirsty. Hungry.

  The last few weeks she had given up her normal diet of vegetables, fresh fruit, and nuts. “What happened to the kale?” She had only shrugged. Wilder was relieved. It was as if his whole body was starving and all he needed was to nibble on one bit of bacon for release. He hated pretending, acting as if he was into all that vegan stuff. He had done worse for less. Hunger was something he’d gotten used to, a dull ache until he did some odd jobs or found a steady gig, or another cool-sheeted bed to lie in. With Thistle’s new appetite, Wilder ate heartily, satisfied. He collected every meat recipe he could remember, and watched as Thistle sat eating strip after strip of barely cooked meat, mostly seafood, from the river that she caught herself, and piles of fresh water mussels with garlic and butter and white wine sauce.

  Thistle was in a good mood these days, almost giddy, and she slept, if you could call it that, less and less. Wilder had started to think that this was one time it would be alright, until she had insisted it was time for her mother to meet him.

  Wilder stooped to scrape a pebble from between his toes and rose, wiping a streak of mud against his thigh. When he brushed his hair out of his eyes, he saw a circle of stones. Wilder frowned. It was as if the trees had hidden them. One minute there was a wall of green, the next, a circle of stone. They rested upon each other like giant children holding hands in a ring. The wind picked up here, the air cooler. It carried the rustle of leaves and the rush of waters, the sound of the reeds clattering in the breeze, as if each were an open throat, rising to speak. Wilder wrinkled his nose. The wind carried a strange scent, something that made him wipe his face with his sleeve. Wilder had lost Thistle’s trail. Instead he felt as if he’d stumbled upon an ancient conversation, the rocks and the grass,

  the river and the moss arguing about shadow and light. Wilder didn’t like the sound, the sounds. They buzzed in his ears like static, a cloud of gnats. The hair on his arms felt prickly. He wanted to put his shoes back on, drive as fast as he could all the way home, but he realized he had dropped them somewhere back in the thickening bush. Out here wrassling weeds. And where had she brought him?

  Wilder felt as if someone had told him to drive to the end of the world, to drive and drive and when he got there, keep driving on.

  Ferns and foliage had sprung up where he didn’t recall seeing them before. The great stones seemed to rise higher, pressed all around him like a great crushing wall. The air felt old, godless. Why did Thistle leave him, alone in the dark in the middle of night, and who would choose to live in such a place?

  He felt the slow shifting of eyes he could not see, then a sound like a bell, Thistle laughing, her voice high and clear. She was waiting for him, beside a tree just beyond the tallest rock, the one shaped like a raised elbow and a fist. A large web, the shape of a shield, sparkled in the moonlight, inches from his face. Wilder recoiled, waved his hand.

  “It’s bad luck to kill a spider,” Thistle said, and she ducked beneath the web and pulled him close. Her voice was a murmured apology in his ear, as her nails scraped his jaw, razed the skin. Her ringed fingers ripped away at his collar, exposed his throat. Thistle tore off his shirt, kicked it into the ground that was covered in a thin layer of rising mist. She rolled up his tank, scraped at his back and neck, her tongue deep in his throat, stumbling through the tangled branches and moss-covered stones until he fell limp,

  into a bed of leaves, shoulders stooped, arms hanging at his sides. Tiny hot scratches scraped along the softness of his belly, down the length of his arms; a cut stung on his chin. Thistle nipped, nibbled at his nose.

  As odd as she was, Wilder loved being with Thistle. He felt himself expand in her presence. Her strangeness and stories awakened in him a vague awareness of his own. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the land or “her sisters,” the damn weeds and the
river, or whatever Thistle was always so amped up about. It’s just that he saw the state of the world as out of his hands — something decided by others more predatory, more resourced than he. For Wilder, fighting was a losing proposition. Someday the meek would inherit the earth, but not in real time, so why spend what little time you’ve got, stressed? Wilder didn’t want to make a difference; he wanted fucking change. When that didn’t happen when he thought it should, he gave up.

  A long time ago Wilder had had skin in the game. He’d put his neck out there, like Thistle, believing, marching, singing, guitar playing, airbrushing, phone banking, door knocking, and leafleting, only to have it crushed by the world, again and again. There had been some successes, but the failures were more than he could bear.

  The night Thistle finally came to him, he had marched with her and the others against the Stiles Water Treatment plant. Stiles was vile. It dumped partially treated sewage wastewater into the river, claiming rapid dilution by the Mississippi’s vast flow and hiding under the cover that the river was used mostly for industry and commercial traffic. Thistle and the other activists knew that state law required all Tennessee waters to be fishable and swimmable. The only folks who fished and swam in the river bottoms were too dumb to know better or desperate or both. Or Thistle. Thistle painted a beautiful, huge canvas mural that had to be carried by twenty hands, calling for disinfection and respect for her “mother,” the river. Wilder joined the protest only because he wanted to be near her. He wanted to show that he was willing to go wherever she was, that he was down with the cause, her cause, even if it didn’t make much sense.

  When he dropped out of school, Wilder had spent years on the streets lonely and hungry, and denying both while searching for truth in flesh. He couldn’t find his tribe, but wherever he wandered, music was his solace. Wilder never stayed in one place long, never loved one heart long. He had learned to survive, to protect the soft parts of himself. But the world had eaten his spirit up and spat him out, left him pulp and gristle at Thistle’s feet.

  “It’s not enough that I’m barefoot and getting eaten up by bugs, but now we’ve got to play hide and seek in the dark?” Thistle bowed her head, smiled. Wilder held her close, lifted her chin.

  Damp pine needles pricked his back. “You know we could have done that back at the house.”

  “Mama’s not back at your house.” “Where the hell is Mama?”

  Thistle pulled away and rose, turning her back to him. He stood up, wiping matted leaves off his legs. “What’s wrong?” She didn’t answer but offered her hand, her palm cool and damp. Wordless, she led him through an opening in the stone door he had not seen, her hand still clasped in his. As they walked, waves of coolness trickled between his toes, tickled Wilder’s soles. He looked down, stared at the flat surface of the water. It stared back up at him, a dark mirror. A dense, blue fog clung to the trunks of the trees.

  Behind him, the old stones groaned. Up above, the stars revealed themselves one by one in the veil of night.

  “This way. She’s here.”

  Together, they waded through the river mud and muck. Thistle held his hand in a tight, possessive grip, squeezing his fingers with her silver rings, as if he might flee. She walked with her back to the darkness, her eyes willing him forward toward a tunnel of trees ahead. Her feet moved expertly, as if she had walked the unseen path a hundred times before.

  “Slow down, Thistle, you’re going too fast. You’re going to fall.”

  “Hasn’t happened yet.” The hair bristled on the nape of his neck. How many times had she walked this path before?

  Thistle’s steps through the stream had become quick and light, silkfire dancing through the night. She moved as if possessed, as if each step were a key she played in a song for the earth. Wilder’s footsteps were heavy and unsure. His breath grew ragged. Sweat trickled down his chest and back, made his skin stick to his tank top, made him wipe his shoulder with his chin.

  They passed a stand of young saplings. Thistle paused to stroke their stalks tenderly, whispered as if telling them secrets. The wind rustled in a red maple’s leaves. She tilted her head, as if to listen. Wilder sighed, swatted a mosquito that looked big as his hand. “Please, can we go now? I don’t want to be out here all night, Thistle. I’m getting eaten alive here.”

  She stopped. He could hear distant voices, perhaps from a barge floating by. A muffled grumbling sound rumbled through the air, like the echo of trucks speeding across the I-55 bridge. Wilder frowned. The old bridge was too far away for that. “Let’s hurry, then. You’re more than ready,” Thistle said.

  “Look, we could be home by now, eating. I know you’re hungry.

  You’re always hungry these days. I mean, why are we here? Is this even necessary right —”

  “I wanted to show you where I came from,” Thistle interrupted. “Who I came from, why I am.”

  Wilder shuddered. His feet were cold. The drying sweat had chilled on his skin, but despite his discomfort, he accepted her answer. It was what he’d wanted to hear. For months she had been secretive, silent. If he hadn’t seen her student ID, he never would have known that she had been working on her master’s in bryology. Her thesis was on the role of moss in rejuvenating human scarred land, healing poisoned waters. “Ecological succession” is what she’d called it. “Every hour the Mississippi River Delta is disappearing; one football field of wetlands vanishes at a time. Your levees have strangled it, your channels and canals have allowed saltwater and waste to poison it. Whole ecosystems are drowning in muck.”

  “You think moss and algae and shit can save it?” he’d asked. She’d nodded. “I do.” Wilder had snorted. Thistle had sat back, watched him in silence. Maybe that was when it had changed. Her sleeping patterns, her eating, everything, even the way she looked at him, held him when they made love, before she drifted off into her pen-eyed sleep.

  Thistle claimed she already had a lifetime of degrees in environmental forestry and the science of trees, but moss was a new interest for her. The change in scale, she’d said, the smaller focus, enriched her life, changed her view.

  “You have to expand your vision and make your spirit very small. I’m so used to being —”

  “Being what?” he’d asked. She’d slipped the photo card back into her satchel. Her face was ashen, her lips a thin, grim line.

  “Being rooted in everything.”

  Now she looked amused, almost giddy. She moved in an intoxicated sway, as if she was dancing to a furious music. “Remember when you asked me about the others, the ones

  before you?”

  “Yeah, and you said to leave the past the past.” She smiled. “Don’t you want to know?”

  “No, I don’t.” Wilder’s eyes darted, like the fireflies that fluttered past them. He was starting to imagine movement in the dark. A rustle by that tree, a whispered hiss underneath a bush. He grew more unsettled the longer she stared at him, humming and swaying. “I know everything I need to know about you — don’t need to know anymore — and besides, I’ve already met your mother. See,” he said and stomped his feet in the rising water that grew colder, “the river. And here —” He leaned against a gnarled, narrow blackgum, so twisted it almost looked bent. “The tree. Pleased to meet you, Mama. Now can we go?”

  Thistle shook her head. “If you core these trees, you’ll find that some of them are over 150 years old. Or older, like that one there. So now you’ve met Loridant. He was one of my favorites.”

  Wilder frowned. “Favorite what?”

  “They say he disappeared after he led an expedition here, when the Chickasaw tended this land, but I see you have found him.”

  Wilder jerked away from the alligator bark, sucked in air, steadied his voice. “Come on, where is she? I see you’re not going to end this game until I meet her, so let’s go.”

  He marched ahead of Thistle, snatching at branches that leaned in his face, swatting at the high grass, cursing the weeds that created a wall around him. Why d
id he let her toss his good shirt? His white tank top wasn’t much defense against the scratches and the bug bites. It glowed in the dark, making him look like a ghost slipping through the trees. The air was more fragrant here, dark and sweet, cloying. He could hear Thistle giggling behind him. She was practically singing now.

  “There better be some Fireball when I get there.”

  Wilder would have kept marching and cussing if he hadn’t fallen into the marsh.

  “What the — Thistle? Thistle!”

  It was as if the land had given up and the river had taken over. Wilder found himself knee-high in a black bowl of muddy, sludge- like water, but it wasn’t the water that worried him. The moonlight reflected an image so uncanny that it made the inside of Wilder’s scalp itch.

  Straight ahead, in the center of the circle was a huge cypress tree. Its great dark, tall plumes stabbed against the sky. Its trunk or trunks rose from the water in a huge entwined knot, covered in green fungus. It appeared to combine at least two other trees. Huge tangled roots rose in and out of the water, like knobby knees, a great serpent’s nest. The limbs were massive and coiled in the air like mighty arms. The bark around its base was smooth, save for a series of fire scars, as if someone had tried to burn it, many times over. Standing in the shadow of this giant, Wilder felt as close to God or the Devil as he had ever felt.

  Thistle stopped just short of the water. Her face calm, her eyes shining in the light.

  “Mama.”

  The ground shook, rippled beneath them, and the triple tree seemed to bow in answer. This shouldn’t be here. Wilder knew nothing like that grew in the area. Maybe a couple hours away in Mississippi, where the cypress trees in Humphreys County were some of the largest in the world, 97 feet around, 118 feet tall, the South’s own sequoias, or maybe down in Texas and Louisiana, but not down in the delta in the mouth of the river in West Tennessee.