by Bogi Takács
I prefer to watch them in the evening. They look happier, their burdens left behind them. Their springy coils of metallic hair bounce with each step. The lightened baskets swing down along their sides, empty and free. Their arms pump the air, all sinew and skin, and their long, long fingers snap quiet rhythms.
“Ria,” I whisper into her ear, resting my forehead against her kinky black hair, “someday I will follow them home, back to where we came from, and I will find out why we were sent away, and how, and by whom, and then we will know who we really are.”
She shakes her head, reaches behind us for a freshly wind-felled apple, and takes a bite before offering it to me. “Why should we care about who we used to be, or who we would have been, or those who never wanted us to begin with?”
The apple’s flesh is crisp and cool and sweet between my teeth. “Aren’t you curious?”
She rolls her eyes and runs her fingers through her hair. “Not about who I used to be, no.”
“But what if…?”
“No.”
“We could be princes, or kings, or queens, or long-lost siblings to an emperor, or…”
“Or babies too strange to ever be wanted, people with no past worth speaking of or remembering.”
She takes the apple back, and I say, “I don’t understand why you don’t even want to know.”
“You won’t go, anyway,” she says. “You’ve been telling me the same thing, making plans like wisps of clouds, since we were children.”
“Someday,” I insist. “When I’m ready.”
Ria shakes her head, and she pulls me down beside her on the grass, staring up at the leaves and branches and softly reddening apples. Above our farms and the trees, the walls of the valley ascend far into the clouds on most days, so high that nothing can grow in the thinned air. We are ringed around by jagged black teeth, as though we rest in the back of a mouth tipped to the sky.
It is later, after we have made up, and kissed again, and reached gentle fingers under clothes and into all our favorite places, that I realize my mistake. It is not that Ria is not curious. It is that she prefers the morning Beasts, prefers waking before dawn, alone, and watching them walk.
In the mornings, their backs are stooped under the weight of all the dead. In the mornings, they walk like dead things themselves, their eyes tired and pained, their fingers not snapping, but instead dangling near to the cracked road beneath their feet. They do not whistle on their travels upriver, but instead they sometimes hum a dirge, a lullaby, for the dead they carry.
I do not always wake to watch the Beasts pass us in the morning, but I know that Ria does, so I crawl from the warmth of my sheets an hour before dawn, too early, too early, the exhaustion making my skin feel tight and achy. I wash my face in the basin of cold water, trying to bring myself to wakefulness, then grab two rolls left over from dinner the night before and slip out the door quietly enough that my mothers will not wake.
Ria is not by the trees in the orchard, nor is she on the hill beside the river, but when I climb that hill, I do see her sitting on a large stone next to the great road. I sprint to her, nearly dropping our breakfast.
“Ria!” I say, starting to feel the soft, shuffling footfalls of the Beasts upon the earth. They are so near, so near, just around the bend of the river and road. “Ria, what are you doing?”
“Shh,” she says. “They don’t mind if you sit so close to watch them, as long as you are quiet.”
“But…”
“Come and sit with me,” she says, “or go back to bed.”
I climb up to sit next to her on the stone, and hand her one of the rolls. She sniffs it, smiles, and then puts it inside a small canvas bag she has slung over one shoulder.
“You spend so much time thinking about the land we’ve come from,” she says. “Do you ever think about what might be further on down the road?”
I frown, my fingers tearing into the roll I have kept for myself. Crumbs fall to the road, and a quick and fearless crow grabs them before the Beasts round the corner.
They are as heavily laden this morning as they ever are. I have never sat so close to watch the dead. I recoil slightly, but Ria grabs my arm and steadies me. The dead are old and young and in between. Some look peaceful as they gaze out at the valley. Others are weeping tears of blood, or holding together grievous injuries with pale, bloodless fingers.
The Beasts ignore us, ignore the valley, pay no attention to anything around them, until suddenly Ria jumps down from the stone and dashes onto the road, dancing around the feet of the Beasts in the front until she is standing before the last of them.
I cannot breathe, and I cannot move, and I cannot save her.
The Beast stops, its feet slowing to a shuffle and I see that Ria is barely as tall as half its shin. It stares down at her, long fingers straying up to scratch the curly hairs on its chest.
“I wish to go with you,” Ria says.
The Beast looks over her to the others in its procession, passing the orchard and the hill, and soon to be out of our town altogether.
Its voice rumbles in its chest, and I think that it is about to talk, but it does not. It hums to itself quietly, thoughtfully, and then reaches behind to the baskets on its shoulders. It palms something, and then holds out a hand the size of a small house to Ria. A child sits there, eyes wide and frightened, not looking nearly as dead as the others.
“Stay here,” the Beast says, its voice like rolling thunder. “Safe, here.”
Ria looks for a moment like she will argue. But the Beast is as tall and implacable as a mountain. Her shoulders slump as she accepts the refusal. She reaches out, and the child slides down off the Beast’s great hand to stand with her on the road.
The Beast considers them for a moment, rubs Ria’s hair gently with a single fingertip, and then steps over them, walking a touch faster than usual so that it can catch up to its fellows.
About a Woman and a Kid
• M Téllez •
An older woman came to town. By town I mean our little dark forest, which is on the disconnected part of the city—the other side of the river where the power’s broken up anymore. She came in the morning when we were out pulling weeds and foraging along the creek banks. She had a lot of useful things. Machined tools and a collapsible no-puncture canoe—a really small kind I’d never seen before. It fit into a pouch as big as a half loaf of bread. We were all curious. She carried herself like a mountain cat, strong, gentle, moving easy and deliberate onto the shore. A few of us exchanged intrigued glances. She acknowledged herself. She knew about us, was happy she’d made it. Said she had come cause she’d heard there were good mushrooms and many medicine plants and deer. Also that we were all homos and witches. That made us laugh because it’s true.
Our forest is a damp kind that ate a city. Or part of a city, one that used to cross the rivers back when they were smaller and the rain was less. We’re the people who stayed and gathered after everyone else left. The water changed the land. If you knew it before the flooding years, you might be able to recognize some of the old roads, the houses, the school buildings and stores. Most things have long since left the hold of human design and order. And my little coven, we live in one of the old stone churches that still has its convent and school buildings. Our neighbors live in a mosque and its buildings likewise. I suppose we live a bit like nuns, all up in this church, but our reverence is for each other and the stars and the land, not for that surveillance state, killer man-God they stole the profound crossways and put him on…
We asked the woman where she’d come from and how she’d heard about us. She looked right at me with a smile and said, “Your walker got me curious.” The others all turned my way to see what my face said, and I stared back at her with my mouth in an ohhh. I’d been around a fire with her before.
We invited her to sit with us and snack and make some sense of everything. We grew a bit of corn, beans, squash, potatoes. There are a few fruiting trees we enjoy. We eat mushr
ooms. Meat sometimes. Eggs. We steal too. She asked if we ate fish. Said she loved eating fish when she could. We said no, the fish is unreliable still. There’s plenty, but they get into something in the water that isn’t good to us. We asked, did she cross the Schuylkill on her blow-up boat? She did. How far had she come. Quite a few days away, maybe sixteen, seventeen? She couldn’t remember and didn’t seem to care. Spent most of her transit on the canoe. Were the waterways dangerous? She said she tried to travel at night, wearing a sight mask, and besides, she was old and tough. She had cut her hair off short to travel. That’s why I didn’t ken her right away: here, she wasn’t lit up with a bonfire glow, laughing with all that bountiful hair on her head. (I wonder if she saved any of it. Wow, what a commitment, cutting it off to come here.)
I keep my hair clipped down so you can’t grab it.
Her name is Veo, but her lips purse together when she says it so it sounds more like “beh-oh.” I remember then: my trip last spring to the healer’s market hosted by the old gay farm in Tanasi land. I went with Kel, who is a good friend of mine, a flop-eared dog and a very good person to travel with. You go to these markets to trade in goods, skills, know-how, and enjoy sex with people if it’s in the cards. (I was there officially to trade for herbs.) Sometimes the markets are called bazaars or meets, and they last some good days so everyone can get to them from where they’re coming. Usually there’s all kinds of other things planned around them, too, like roasts and fights and bonfires. I had seen Veo there, around a bonfire by the side of the creek. Her hair was long, piled up on the top of her head in a braid, lustrous and coiled dense like a snake. She had deep laugh lines in her face, and she opened up with a high, free giggle, mouth full open. I spent a long time watching her from across the fire, drinking and smoking herb for merrymaking with my own while she enjoyed herself among suitors. She’d catch me looking time and again and flash me a smile.
As it often does in gatherings, it came out that I’m a walker. That’s just slang. They call em different things in different places, but walkers travel around usually between however many places they’re welcome and can get to safely and swap info, tell stories, learn what’s going on, for good or worse. They take all they get and weave it together, find patterns, make connections, and then tell their people. Anyway, I got to talking about our funny forgotten dark forest and all that, and Veo caught wind and came over to listen. Started getting to know Kel while I told about the land and how we live. What’s good about it and what’s hard. Then I shifted things, asking how it is everywhere else cause folks was getting a little too wrapped up in what I was saying. I just don’t think it’s right to take over the air with all your words, unless you’re trying to war. You know, you have to fall back a bit sometimes, ask people about themselves, or just shut up. (That’s how you stay safe as a walker, by the way. You read people. You listen to them. It’s nice.)
The next day I got to do something I like best, and that’s tell a story. I’m real good at those. The market was already full of speeches, feats of the body and mind, poets, musical acts. I did one from the old tales of Robin Hood. I change the details to be about our forest instead of Sherwood. It always goes over well. Veo was sitting in the audience listening to me.
I told myself I would ask her later, if she had come all this way because of that story or what?
Kel the dog remembered Veo from the fire too, and so the others welcomed her in with us pretty easy. She gets a lot of our ways. And the story of our encounter at Tanasi’s market helped everyone to make sense of her quicker. She doesn’t have any kind of untended psychic void. She’s not up in here casting glamours on us. She’s open about herself. My intuition says she’s aight. Plus she’s got those tools and knows a lot to do that we want to learn. It’s all mutual. I like the way she spends time with Kel. I like the way she walks. I like the smell of her when she passes me by. And she likes to talk to me.
Veo knows she’ll soon get the feel for the shape of our land and our neighbors’ on this side of the river, but she comes to ask me about them when I’m sitting with Kel. I tell her we’re a good few hundred spread four or six miles around the places and groups we like best. We live a little tough, try not to hurt ourselves, and get a hold of enough rare stuff from across the river and wherever else so we don’t die real stupid. She seems suspicious of how easy I talk about it all. Is there no hardship? I say there’s plenty, I just have to talk about it easy for my own good, and what’s the rush. It’s not even rainy season yet. Then I go on telling her how our different groups schedule congregations to share info and socialize. Me pregunta si puedo hablar español. Responda a ella, sí, si quiere que lo haga. También en otros idiomas que el español. Pues, “Let me get this straight,” she starts…
She takes to calling me kid like how she talks to the actual handful of children in our group. Sometimes people call me kid cause I guess I come off young and I don’t like it at all, but she says it really nice to me. I don’t know how old she actually is, but I know it’s a little bit older than me. And I like her for that. For being older and still alive and always wanting to come talk to me. I spend a lot of time in silence, actually. Thinking too hard about what might happen next in the world, and will we live. Worrying will the power ever come back over here and what’ll happen to us all then. I told Veo: actually, yeah, I am a kid. A stuck one that’s been through too many adult things now to go back. She says to me, I known a few like you before, and I look at her like, have you? Then she nods real intently, looking right at me like she does. And I feel real hot and shy like I think she has. And I notice a little bit more what it is we keep coming to each other for. Then she smiles at me like, don’t worry, kid. Says, “I like you,” with her crow’s feet dancing.
One day Veo comes find me crying on the hillside in the middle of the day. I turn around to see who approaches (sometimes it’s a four-legged person when you expect two). She addresses me as La Llorona. Then she smiles and looks at me with her long gaze, and I lurch back into tears, panting, hoping I can get back to the world of words before she asks me what I’m doing. But she stays where she is, higher up on the hill behind me. Considerate.
“What did you come here for?” I manage to say without looking. I don’t want to look. I don’t trust the language of my eyes to protect me now.
“I came to find you, kid.”
“What for?” I sob. The thought that she came looking for me, at this height of my despair, is terrifying. There is something I like too much about being looked for.
“You’re in one of your moods again,” she states plainly. I hear her step closer. The field of magnetism—electricity, energy, whatever—feels like it pressurizes around me. I crank my head over to peer at her from my shoulder. She is looking right at me, wearing a halo of kindness. I feel unworthy.
“What’s my mood now?” I mewl out.
“I noticed you got a cycle.” She pauses, then frowns. “It seems hard on you. You start to drink raspberry-leaf tea and disappear when you can. You stare at everything like the gravity’s too high.” I gape at her. “I could be wrong,” she adds.
“No,” I manage. She looks at me with heavy concerned eyes. Waits for me to continue. I don’t say anything more.
“Well.” She plods down the hill in front of me, rough hands on her hips. I zone out on the landscape of her sinewy forearms. “I came to offer you something, kid,” she snaps me back. “If you’re interested.”
“What’s that?” I sound miserable. Tiny. Pathetic. When she calls me kid like this, I feel myself get smaller. I wonder what she thinks of it. I wonder if she does it on purpose. I wonder if she…
“I wanted to come ask if you’d come spend some time with me.”
“Right now?” She nods slowly. “What do you mean by ‘spend some time’?” I’m confused by how simple it is. Her face bears a teacher’s patient smile. The worn leather belt holding her pants up creaks as she shifts from one hip to the other.
“Sometimes, I find
”—she touches a hand to her chest—“it can be nice helping someone to cry.”
I’m breathing faster. I imagine sitting on her lap and feel flushed with heat.
“How does it sound to you?” she asks gently.
I look away, troubled. Then I open my mouth, stuttering. “It sounds…I’d really… You want to… How—what do you mean, helping me to cry?” I want her to tell me because I’m too scared to tell her what I think it means. I hear her chuckle like aren’t you precious. I look up. She’s saintly. Her serene gaze falling on me like warm sunlight. (God, we spend so much time in those church buildings, it rubs off on you.) Then a slow smirk spreads across her lips. Turns into a smile. She has crooked teeth and one missing in the front, which I always look at. She shrugs.
“I thought I would offer and have you tell me what would help, kid. How does that sound to you?”
“So…do you…” I’m struggling. I open and close my mouth several times. I’m tearing up again.
“You don’t have to be shy with me.” I suck in a breath, exhale loudly. Then she adds, “I know those are just words.”
“I like the way you use your words,” I say immediately. Then I look up at her face, my own twisted full of woe, clinging to my knees. “I…would really like to spend some time with you. Right now.” I finish this agonized utterance and my whole body is flushed and warm, like something’s gonna spill out of it any moment now.
“Why don’t you walk with me then, and we’ll end up at my place.” Her place is a smart little shack with a medicinal garden she put together next to an old, still-standing automotive garage.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. Then she’s close. She reaches forward and strokes my head, pushing it back in the same motion to make my gaze turn up to her. I like the force of it. I think I look scared. She only smiles, and then she raps me against the cheek with her fingertips.