Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  the return

  What eclipsed the sky? What great catastrophe? Which omen, what deeds? All labored under the darkness. Civilizations and forests fell beneath its weight. And villages whole huddled together to die. The earth gods, weary of floods, quakes, and other play, returned to the bowels of the earth, whence they’d come, to slumber, and were replaced by the gods of the sky, who after eons, turned their gaze once again toward our milky arm.

  mirror

  And blood ran under doorjambs, along gutters, down hills. It filled basins, wells, and valleys. It colored rivers and lakes. And soon the clouds reflected red.

  twilit

  So, the exiled jackal learns to feed on the bodies of the dead, the dead who have suffered their own exile and are no longer welcome in the world of the living. The dead who call back to the living, let me in. Were we not lovers, not schoolmates from our earliest days, not brothers, not mother and child, not neighbors on the same hillside sharing the same wall? The loyal jackal, still pining after its human companions, longing for its lost home, for warmth at the human hearth, comes to occupy the ruins of their felled cities. The disgraced jackal lurks at dawn and dusk among the rubble, uses its keen senses to locate the decaying flesh, the rotting food left behind in the upturned stove, the singsong springs of the old mattress. The warm tones of its human keeper’s voice from long ago still haunts its ear. The exile futilely attempts to call to its old keeper from the borderlands, howling in the human’s voice, begging the old companion to let it return home. But who hears the jackal or the dead without shivering? Who would let them in?

  antidote

  I am unwell.

  Read me the alphabet,

  says the book.

  T

  There  was,  there  was  not,  B o o d ,    n a b o o d ,  once  upon  a  time,  a  family.

  straw and silver

  How are the fates written? Or are they spoken? The sisters have heard of the many oracles: the mountain spring, the regenerating garden flower, the opening in the rock, the bird in the dream. There are many destinies for the many people, and the girls were dealt theirs early, and had it written long before. They inquire of the oracles, wait and listen attentively, but receive no response, for while the destinies spoken repeat and resonate through time, those written are read but once.

  Was it not the mule and the horse, traveling side by side over the dusty mountain pass—that long winding pass connecting the Northern to the Southern lands in the heart of the great and ancient continent—who read the family’s fate in that much traversed mountain path beneath their hooves? Did these two animals not come to know over the many trips, burdened beneath burlap, straw, and silver, that all paths are laid for future travelers? All paths are packed down, tempered over the many years by hoof, foot, and wheel, so that one day they might be conduits, not just for the trader, but for the adventurer fleeing the life he was born into in order to shape the one he has dreamed for himself, or the refugee fleeing the invading armies, or the pilgrim returning home after a long absence. It is the mule and horse who see the markings. The companions spend their days in the service of merchants; they know the mountain pass better than any open field or covered shed; they have made the journey a thousand times, carried the goods and tempered the path. The two animals that practice the steady gait have learned to read the marks and come to see that besides the travelers who go by choice—seeking adventure, wealth, or safety—there are others who are bound to the path. There are those whose footprints are etched in its hard earth long before they are born into the world, those who are not drawn or pushed but simply are a part of the fabric of the path—that very one wending its way over that very mountain. They are those who are bound to approach the mountain, climb and traverse it, and, putting one foot before the other, reach their destination with eyes half-closed, as in a dream state. And these people find themselves one day in a new and strange land and set down tote, put out stale bread and dried meat, gather about them the earth’s materials—stone, wood, brush, and clay—and lie supine, with legs and mouths open, crying out with the howl of the mountain pass, driving in and pushing out the new generation in the new land, paying the valley the mountain’s tariff. The mule, looking down, sees the footprints of such a person now, knows that the very boy the marks write of will one day cross this pass, carrying his germ with him. The horse reads also the footprints of his unborn children and his children’s seed, and knows that fate has cursed them even as it has blessed them each, and will move them from valley to valley, over river and mountain, across the seas and the many faces of the globe, for generations to come.

  red tulip

  In the first land, near the edge of the yard, beneath a lofty aged pine tree, each year, a single red tulip appeared. And though the sisters were young and their memories cast shadows shorter in length than the tulip’s, they knew in late winter to await its appearance. The sisters went daily to the patch of dirt between the old tree’s exposed roots to celebrate the red flower’s arrival, to witness the chilled earth tremble and finally give at that tender point. They went daily to that place and watched the plant start in early spring, watched it rise and rise and rise, then settle and fix. They went daily to adore the single flower unfolding and to wonder at its glow in the shade of the towering tree.

  the begotten

  There was, there was not, once upon a time, an almond grower who put his crops before his happiness. In his fiftieth year, the almond grower marries, and in his fifty-second, he fathers a single child. The child grows up to marry a sailor who takes her far from her own land to a distant and strange one where she conceives three daughters and a son. The boy, her youngest, leaves home while still a child in pursuit of adventure and glory. He sows his own seed into the cavity of a woman he acquires in exchange for a she-goat in the desert. In her eighteenth hour of labor, his wife gives birth to a kicking and silent baby boy, its mouth still full, its tongue not yet released, uncrying. The child, born of blood, dressed in the residue of blood, rides that fluid’s single surge into the withered, deft hands of the recently arrived laundress with skirts covered in village-road dust, with eyes red from the same dust and the flaming midday sun, a sun now feebly denied entrance by two boards nailed across an opening in the mud wall. The laundress delivers the baby unseeing—sees nothing in the dark and dust of the house-shed—but feels the small body, a thing new, a thing simultaneously solid and liquid, come free, slip up her bare forearms with a force all its own, and she, the laundress, momentarily totters in her squatting position, forgets in that moment the shed, the pail of well-water, the broken mattress and the flies, senses instead the red river fish that has eluded her her life long, and imagines for that instant that she sits at the river’s edge, a pile of wet twisted laundry beside her, her sleeves pulled up past her elbows, her skirts wrapped tautly around her thighs, balancing on stones run smooth and round by water over the millennia. In the silence of the unbreathing shed, its single window shuttered against the unrelenting sun, the newborn takes his first breath and hears his mother choke on the same blood that now pulses through his tiny beating heart and across his thin, red lids, which cover eyes yet unseeing. His legacy is binding. He carries in him the almond, the desert, the fish, and the she-goat, and will pay the price in blood and exile.

  the emigrants

  And where the dead in other graveyards have tombs worthy of being plundered and desecrated to feed the appetites of the living—those native and foreign—the dead here, in the war-torn land, lie under small mounds on hillsides with the single tattered green flag to mark their resting place, or wedged between two stones in a riverbed, or packed like many clammy worms in an unmarked common grave beneath the desert earth and sun. Many of the war dead—the disappeared and the missing—are entombed in the weary minds that in the early years had capacity enough to inter them: for the heads of the war-living are now like graveyards filled from one to the other
edge, and have long since lost the ability to take in more bodies and limbs. But the war rolls on and the living join the dead. And these new unburied dead, homeless, restless, travel in ever-widening concentric circles, farther and farther out over the landscape, crossing the mountains, the borders, the oceans, following the still-crackling lines that connect them to loved ones who’ve immigrated and who may yet have space enough in their weighty heads to entomb them.

  shhh … listen

  Sit here quietly a moment, dear reader. These whispering leaves have tales to tell, fates to read.

  the sisters will marry

  When the time comes, the sisters will marry: a bird or a prince, a magician, a lion, or a weaver. And this, after twenty or one hundred moons or fifteen of the earth’s revolutions or the infinitesimal shift of the sun, like a birthmark, across the growing arm of our galaxy. With their husbands, they will live in the palace of the sun or in a garden beneath the sea or atop a snowy and perilous peak or beside a prattling river on a grassy bank or among the ancient small inhabitants of a dense forest. And their daughters and their daughters’ female brood in a long line will carry their ruby blood in the sacrificial vessel till the end days. And always on this delicate journey across the spinning globe, their blood will course, it will roil, it will spill, though the maidens hold firmly the vessel and walk with eyes steady, eyes bright.

  nebulae

  And are the sisters’ eyes not like nebulae, churning the cosmic soil, pushing out stars, consuming and reflecting light?

  scene

  See Mother. She is a wizard with her machine. Her hands fly here, they settle there; her fingers turn that knob, press this lever. Her eyes are quick and keen. They follow her nimble fingers or guide them to where they are forthwith needed. Together, eyes and fingers thread the needle, measure lengths and circumferences, tuck and pin. Mother snips thread with her teeth, tears cloth precisely with her hands alone. She drives her machine forward, backs it up, guides the cloth beneath the humming foot, commands its speed with her own foot on a pedal beneath the table or with her hand on the wheel. She curls over her machine, hums with it, feeds it yards of colorful fabric, which disappears between her elbows and reappears, transformed, on the other side of her machine. Here is a dress, all color and form: red flounces, white collar, curved pockets, three golden buttons, and white-laced hem. And here a curtain, endless and stiff, forming a small and ever-growing mountain range on the table before the incredulous sisters. Mother effortlessly produces a shirt and tie for Father; tops, shorts, skirts, and headbands for the girls; dolls to replace those they’ve mislaid; dresses for their dolls; and finishes with a blouse and jacket for herself. And though each piece is unique, and fits its individual wearer perfectly, all are in the same colors. So, the family on their rambles and travels across the first, the easy and the innocent, land are like a spring bouquet of daffodils and narcissus, or like autumn’s turning leaves.

  not-home

  And like the displaced jackal who inhabits the borderlands, the sisters will never return home. If the doors to their birth country should open and the sisters file again onto a plane, lift and land, lift and land to reach and enter that country, they will not have reached home, because the doors once closed, the curtains once drawn, never open upon the same scene again.

  balloons

  The sleeping, turning, sighing sister dreams of the house on the hill in the first land. She is in the garden; she runs to the base of the tall, ancient pine to find her old friend, the red tulip, who rises year after year, during springs dry or rainful, in times of peace and in wartime, in the waking world and in the dreaming world. It has been several years since the family left the first land, and the sleeping sister knows that though she now lives a great distance away, and she is no longer there to tend it, the tulip still rises dutifully each year. Family after family have come to live briefly in the house that Father added two stories to. They have looked out through windows Mother once dressed with colorful curtains sewn on her machine. Other mothers and fathers and children have strolled through and played in the garden in which the sisters once chased, climbed, sang, and swung. The sister knows of these others because she continues to return yearly to meet the old vibrant friend in her dreams. And through the dream window, she has watched these other families come and go, live and push on despite and because of the war that voraciously and relentlessly plunders the first land.

  It is spring again, but for the first time, the dreaming sister cannot find the tulip. She kneels at its yearly birthplace and lightly runs her fingers over that little patch of earth to see if she might sense the flower beneath. Perhaps spring this year is late in arriving in the first land. She digs, carefully at first, then more despairingly. A hole forms and grows as she scratches and scrapes. The sister stares into the empty cavity then sits back on her heels and looks over her shoulder at the house. Its exterior paint, a pale blue she does not recognize, is chipped and peeling away, exposing layers of colors beneath. The door to the kitchen is attached only at its bottom hinge and rests at an awkward angle against its frame. The concrete Father once poured for the patio, and which must still hold the sisters’ many palm prints, is broken, altogether missing in places. And that ancient pine above her, its needles gray and listless, has aged another hundred years.

  The sister looks up at the tree and down at the earth; she sets her forehead against the trunk of the pine: so this is what has happened in the first land: all has fractured, withered, and aged, and the tulip has immigrated to a new home. She feels the old familiar stir in her belly. Then the surge and rise. She tastes the salt in her mouth before the tears have risen to her eyes. A distant song, a faint but familiar sound suddenly wakes her in the dream; she listens. A call she knows well grows closer, louder, more urgent. Or rather, her physical response to it becomes more acute. She jumps to her feet, stands on her tiptoes, and listens to the approaching call with ears perked and hands clenched. Puqhana-puqhana-puqhana … And just over the wall she can make out the tops of the swaying, bobbing balloons coming up the hillside. The balloon peddler is coming! Here comes the balloon man! And his globes grow bigger as they come nearer and she strains with eyes and toes to see them. Puqhana-puqhana-puqhana … But wait! They are all the same color, these advancing balloons. All red. They bob and bounce along the top of the wall as they should, but they hardly resemble the old balloons; these are like many oversized cartoon tulips. Now here they are rising, moving closer, rising higher. The sister attempts to call to the peddler: I am coming, Mother has given me money for five! But no sound leaves her mouth in the dream and the huge bouquet of balloons-like-red-tulips rises up and rises up and draws the ragged peddler into the sky. And the peddler, kicking, holding fast to the tulip stems, looks at her bewildered, looks to the clouds, then at the earth, loses a sandal, desperately sings puqhana-puqhana-puqhana … and disappears into the clouds. The sleeping sister turns in her bed, moans, grabs at the blanket hanging over the edge of her little sister’s top bunk, and tugs.

  darkness

  The sisters were not afraid. They saw darkness. They stared deeply into its hideous face. And they found that it was nothing, that it had neither eyes nor stomach. They found that there would be no chewing on young flesh because darkness had no teeth. Because darkness had no tongue, there would be no howling. Without feet, darkness could not chase them. The sisters laughed.

  the dancing dead

  And the country, so neatly organized and administered, so well groomed, and efficiently operated, fell into chaos absolute. The country, which for a decade had been cinched and held firmly together, beneath fist firm, fractured into many parts when the powerful fist lifted. Lords took their places right. Equipped with armor sophisticated and elementary, supplied by forces great and minor, distant and neighborly, they carved out their kingdoms. And the bloodletting began in earnest. Heads and limbs fell from torsos as overripe fruit drop from trees. Fissures like mouths opened in the earth to swallow one and all, bod
ies whole or in parts, charred or swollen, old and young, man, woman, and child. And the great lords had each their particular appetites. And those with a taste for women gathered them as they passed, in the marketplace and in the alleyway, removed their garments and their full breasts whole to fill the many crates. And the crates full of women’s breasts were sent between kingdoms and the king receiving the gifts was amused and, according to his own tastes, filled his own crates with whole men. And the windowless metal containers filled with the living men were sent out to the parched deserts where the men might bake and stew in their own steam. Still not sated, the lords sent after the girls and boys still budding. They collected the country’s children by the wagonload and wed and plundered them and ate their flesh and were not sated, needed still further amusement and so sent for the dancers. And the dancers arrived with eyes covered and mouths gagged. And the lords who enjoyed the traditional melodies and new entertainments brought in the musicians and the swordsmen. And the swordsmen struck cleanly with keen, heated blades, and sealed quickly the open arteries of the neck with clear, hot oil so that the dead might dance. And the headless corpses jerked and swayed, clapped and stomped. And the lords were amused. They leaned on their cushions and sipped their sweet tea and shouted for more.