Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  Key.  Are  letters  not  keys?  See  them  arrange  and  rearrange.  Lock  and  unlock.  Turn.  And  click.

  ardor—birds

  The bird-loving sister follows the winged creatures she admires with her eyes, and with her arms and legs, which help her eyes climb trees, fences, and even the rooftop to catch a better view of a robin hatchling, or the distant perch of a red-tailed hawk. She loves the creatures and knows them each by their size, form, color, sound, and movement. She knows their individual calls and the turbulent or dull flutter of their wings through the air when they fly near or high overhead. She knows the different birds by their proud or cowering postures as they perch on the topmost frond of a palm tree or walk to and fro along a rain gutter or scuttle across the sand before an incoming wave at the beach. She is enthralled by their mechanical gestures when they nod or turn their heads, peck at the earth or into the weathered trunk of a utility pole with their pointed beaks. She knows the many birds by their shadows, cast across the lawn or against the side of the house when they soar overhead or dive deeply after a smaller creature nearer the ground.

  She dreams of birds, though in her dreams they arrive with longer tails, taller crests, and brighter plumage than any bird in her neighborhood or her schoolbooks. In her dreams, birds of myriad shapes and colors congregate in the grandfather tree or in the sycamore on the front lawn. They meet at dawn or in the middle hours of the night, when the neighborhood and the family sleep and the sister alone stands outside to receive the visiting birds. They arrive from all corners of the dream realm for occasions she clearly senses are important, epochal even, but the purpose of which she cannot fathom. The dream birds collect, some hovering, others perching on or moving through the limbs of the tree she stands beneath, their long tails hanging down to the ground, their crests and bright plumage filling the tree with shimmering color and movement. Though the birds arrive from great distances to meet in her dream, in a tree in her garden, it is she, the sister, who feels the interloper at these conclaves. It is she, the wingless and earthbound ambassador, who steps awkwardly, stands deferentially, and waits patiently below them as they hold their raucous assembly. She counts the birds, classifies them by size, color, and plumage and sees that they organize themselves by something else, by a social order that has little to do with their appearances. She is patient and waits and notes when the meeting becomes heated or distressing or somber, and when it lightens in mood again. And as these assemblies come to a close, she eagerly stands on tiptoe to raptly listen to a small bird—their envoy—who descends to speak their message to her. It is a message that is neither song nor speech and fills her mind as warm tea fills a cup. Yes, I know it now, I understand, she whispers, then wakes suddenly. On waking, try as she may, the sister cannot grasp the message given her. It is one moment there, whole and of the greatest import, and the next moment gone from her, like a breath exhaled. And shortly, she cannot recall the number of birds attending, their colors, or their activity. The only thing that abides is a small thrill in her chest, a tingling sensation, as from a flutter of wings, within her ribcage. The featherless sister watches birds, dreams of birds, draws and colors many pictures of birds.

  ardor—the sea

  The sea-loving sister sits at her school desk and draws and colors a scene she knows well—it is a picture of the ocean. She is drawn to the ocean by a force she cannot deny or explain. It is an old attraction. She felt the pull and dreamed of it long before leaving her landlocked birth country. It was there in her dreams from the beginning: the water that ran in all directions but up. In the dreams, she was often in the very middle of this great expanse. Though she did not know then the sensation of swimming in a body of water, in her dreams it was not unlike flying, which she had also done many times over in the dream realm. After arriving in the new country, the family did not wait long to visit the beach. When first she saw the great vast blue in the land of the sun, the sister stood before it frightened and with an awe her small body could not withstand. Though a hundred paces separated her from the water’s edge, she stepped back, and stepped back again at each wave’s lapping. Comfortable in the limbs of trees, she climbed a small one near the picnic tables where the adults sat gossiping, drinking tea, and playing cards. From a distance, she watched the waves advance and recede, advance and recede, and felt the old, familiar tug in her chest. She watched and listened and heard the call and she held on more tightly to the branch that supported her. And she went home that night to sleep with her head beneath her pillow, trying to keep out the enchanting thrum of the ocean’s call. When next she visited the beach, she watched the waves from her perch in the same small tree, listened to the froth of the surf as it disappeared into the sand and, feeling a sudden joy she had not known before, she climbed down and stepped on the sand. And the loose, coarse grains warmed her always-chilled feet. And her parents, the tree, the picnic table diminished behind her. And she stood in awe of the great ocean before her. That awe, though it expanded to great proportions within her, did not threaten to break her skin this time. With each subsequent visit to the beach, she moved closer, and closer, until her feet, having traveled far and tentatively over the increasingly hot sand, felt the cool relief of the water. It was not long before the small tree by the picnic tables was forgotten. Not long before she began to chase the waves she’d once feared. Not long before she disappeared giddily under those same waves, and rose beyond them with a length of kelp worn around her neck and a seashell or a stone held triumphantly over her head. Long ago, the sea cast a spell on her. It is a spell that called her to its edge, then called her into itself, then drew her deeper and deeper in, for longer and longer. And now, Mother and Father grow tired and grow hoarse calling her out again at the end of a long Saturday. She is drawn to the ocean by a force she cannot deny. After each visit to the beach, sun-tired, she comes home feeling more sated, more sure of her place in the world: her place is in the water. And she wonders, what is this force that emanates from this most vital and persuasive element, that calls me to it in dreams, in daydreams, on the weekend, and midweek at school? And at her school desk, she paints regularly the picture she drew years before in the first land—the blue ocean, a thin strip of green land in the far distance, a boat shaped like a slice of watermelon, a single bird flying overhead.

  ardor—pictures

  The renderer draws and colors all that she sees around her and all that she sees within her. And what is within is no less compelling than what is without. She knows because she is able to turn her eyes quite around so that she can, when not busy with something that requires her entire attention without, look into the body of her. So, after she is done drawing cherries, cats, trees, hills, her sisters, their toys, Mother’s sunglasses, Father’s roses, the neighbor’s cars, her teacher’s shoes, the ice cream truck, robins, and sailboats, she rolls her eyes under and back to look into and throughout her body; she is keen to accurately draw the nerves, organs, and bones that make it up. She draws landscapes of violet blood vessels snaking through pink muscles set against white bones. She outlines the quadrants of her brain and tints each a different bright hue. She draws her heart, large and pink, and can’t help placing her cat, fast asleep, atop it. She draws her skeleton and observes that she has an extra bone in each of her feet and that her broken arm has healed well. Inside her rib cage, she draws the bird that has made a home there. Then, anxious that the cat near her heart might be too much attracted by the flittering bird in her ribcage, she erases the cat and replaces it with her new crush, a boy with hair no less wild than the cat’s fur. The picture-making sister is fascinated by her circulatory system and draws it in its entirety on a large piece of paper. She comes to understand that in structure it is not unlike the roots of the grandfather tree. Peeking closely, she sees her blood cells coursing through this system, tripping over one another as they race from organ to organ. Looking deep within the cells themselves, she finds atoms quive
ring and sliding past other atoms, equally spry. More closely still, she locates last night’s dream, even now playing, but faded in places like a tattered blanket. In the dream, she climbs a ladder, up and up until she arrives at the gate of an enormous overgrown garden. The doors open and she is welcomed in by a guard in a suit of armor who hands her a blue rose and points to a group of sheep on a hillside. The dream looks as it did the previous night, but is now missing bits of scenery—the sky in places, the guard’s arm, the trunks of trees—and is moving much too slowly, as if the machinery required for motion in a dream is in use elsewhere, or is being serviced. Watching and drawing, drawing and observing, she sees that the dream shifts and a new one begins to take shape in its place. Seven large stones, each larger than the previous one, rise out of the hillside. The sheep move up into the sky to form clouds and fill in the empty patches. The guard dissolves and spreads as a small pond at her feet. As she draws and observes, the construction of this dream falters; the stones tip and are swallowed again by the hillside, which has turned into an elephant’s back. Perhaps this is the coming night’s dream that she is viewing too early; it is not quite ready yet, the players have not all arrived, the machinery is still gearing up.

  ardor—the dead

  The daydreaming sister lives too near the dead, and catches them passing in the corner of her eye as she reads from a book or clips her nails or stares at the passing clouds overhead. She is/is not afraid of the dead. She does/does not question them. She follows their tracks. She understands their restive tendencies. They are a moment here, in the next gone, and return again to the same spot regularly. The veiled woman, she wears bare, down its center, the narrow red rug that lines the hallway and connects the sisters’ bedroom to Mother and Father’s. Nightly, the stooped woman walks across this rug down the short hallway from bedroom to bedroom, never entering the rooms but appearing at one end of the rug and disappearing at the other end, continuously. And the sister watches her through the opening in her bedroom door and lets the old woman’s step and the soft rustle of her long trailing veils lull her to sleep. When the sister sleeps lightly, she is woken early by the soldier’s footfall. On these mornings, she sits up in bed and looks out her window at the young man on early morning duty in the peaceful suburban neighborhood. The soldier turns the same corner of the house over and again until the roses too are roused from their slumber and turn their faces to look after him, and the soldier himself adopts the scent of the large sleepy blooms, a sweet-bright perfume that wafts through the neighborhood in the predawn hours. The half-book man returns regularly to monitor the traffic on the suburban street. Hours pass. The sister watches/does not watch him from her perch in the tree, or through the curtains in the kitchen window. When he grows tired of the activity, the poet stands up, and walks into the trunk of the tall sycamore. The dead are more restless than the living. And they are more patient too. They return to the same station—in the same city, the same neighborhood, the same house—as the ocean tide returns to mark the same spot on the intertidal rock. And the dead are helpless in their comings and goings, as the tide is helpless, and, like the ocean tide, are animated by a source outside themselves. The dead are driven by loss, though many do not seem to know what it is they are missing, what it is they have mislaid. But they search, regularly, rhythmically. The dead are patient, they are steady. The months pass, the years pass. The sisters grow taller. The days are all one to the dead. And the living to the dead are like shadows, like whispers. The daydreaming sister to the halfbook man is like the fleeting shadow cast across a garden wall by a bird passing before the morning sun.

  ardor—numbers

  The sisters are five. They are one. They are ten if you count their shadows, who are ostensibly attached to their feet, and live sometimes above ground, and sometimes below. It is the counting sister who has figured this out. She has tallied each sister and her shadow. She has watched their shadows do as the sisters do: jump rope; swing high into the canopy of the tree; scramble up the tree or over the large arms and curved back of the couch like a lizard or a spider; pick Father’s flowers and the petals off of those flowers one by one in the alleyway behind the house; take large, then small steps to sneak up behind the cat; write, with a mud-soaked finger, on the garden wall, the name of the new beloved. She has watched as shadow and substance have danced, leaped, and twirled together.

  Yes, the dark counterparts do as the sisters do. But sometimes they do more, when they are inclined. See the shadow continue to swing even after the sister has tired of the repetitive motion and gone indoors for a snack. See the shadow leave the sister and follow the cat. And sometimes the analogs do less than the active sisters. A shadow who no longer wants to run around the school track will find the shade of a tree to meld into. A shadow who does not feel well on long car drives—who does not do well keeping up with the car’s occupants as she moves at great speeds over highway and pinned to the sides of passing cars—will remain behind at home. The sisters’ shadows are loyal, but sometimes it is the dark silhouette that gives a hiding sister away, as it can be seen before the sister can. The lovelorn, petal-plucking sister stands hidden in the alleyway outside the garden gate, but her shadow remains within the yard for all to see, point to, and giggle at. The camouflaged, leg-swinging sister up in the tree forgets her silhouette on the grass below.

  The number-loving sister tallies ten, and subtracts down to five as one after another shadow disappears into the ground at the noon hour or when the sun sets, and counts back up to ten as the afternoon wears on or the lights come on in the rooms of the house in the evening. But not all of the sisters’ shadows appear or disappear at the appointed times or places. The sisters and their shadows are not one. The loyal/disloyal silhouettes share/do not share a common life with their more substantial counterparts. Sometimes the shadows lag behind; sometimes they refuse to show at all. And a sister missing her shadow for the day feels suspended and unmoored. Without the dark partner to mark her way, to signal the angles and turns in the world about her, she bumps into walls, or trips and falls more than usual as she walks and plays. The counting sister wonders where it is the slippery contours go when they go away, and wonders why sometimes they do not show up at the agreed-upon time or location. She has a sense that her shadow returns to the world beneath the surface since her dusky companion attaches to her where her feet meet the earth. Further, it must be true that this shape, which remains un-illuminated even on the brightest of days, must originate from the sunless countries below. Perhaps the shadows disappear early or arrive tardily because their world beneath ground is more fascinating than her world above. After all, the underground wonders—the mineral caverns of many colors, the close and meandering byways connecting them, the milky pools of emerald and topaz waters, the creatures that scurry, burrow, and swim there—must keep them better occupied and entertained below. And how the counting sister wants to follow her shadow there! She knows that her shadow drives her aboveground; why else would she, shy and turned in, suddenly twirl and twirl and leap across the school playground, or shoot her hand up to answer a difficult math question when all other hands and heads are weighted down? So she closes her eyes tightly at night in bed, and uses her will to drive her shadow this way and that way through the earth to discover this and that unfamiliar route or creature or sound. And oh, the wonders she discovers!

  the sister

  And it seemed that all of the sisters folded one into another so that there was but the single one.

  L

  L    o    v    e    .

  And  is  there  anything  else  to  write  of?

  This is not a book you read. This is a love letter. A letter of love to the sky and the stars that dot it.

  the days were one

  And it seemed that all of the days folded one into another so that the sisters lived but the single day.

  And the daily repet
ition—the stirring, the rising, the holding up and holding in, the pushing out and pulling up, the turning under, the dreaming and not-dreaming—the repetition functioned to score a notch into the fabric of the illimitable universe, to cause a small disturbance or a deviation in its calculated rhythms, to wear a shallow groove into the face of that mostly invisible system, so that a record, however dim, however slight, a record of the sisters might persist in the realm of the windy stars.

  And the repetition—the stirring of heads and of shoulders in the morning; the morning rising of bodies, of hunger; the regular holding up of unyielding custom, of decorum, of delicate chins; the awkward holding in of ardor and loss, which combined to produce that singular ache that some of the sisters called longing and which all of them felt keenly, held closely; the pushing out of stars and of laughter from eyes bright and bodies slender; the pulling up of roots and tubers out of a yielding earth, the pulling up of more chairs for more guests at the table; the turning under of memories beautiful and horrific, the turning under of kittens born naked, born dead, into the eager soil beneath the rosebushes; the dreaming of things and of people passed, the dreaming of a day spent under the sun, the same one, the same day repeated now in sleep even while the body lay still, untwitching, and the eyes flitted in their sockets, as if reading, not dreaming—the repetition produced a record, small but not mislaid, slight but not fleeting.