sister of embers

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It started with the birds descending. They had an evil intent, if by evil, one means they were harming a human, and by intent, one means they acted of their own free will and volition. This ignores any actions the humans may have done, intentionally or unintentionally, in the past, that may have affected the birds or the god who controls them. This also presupposes a defined starting point: did everything, the universe, the big bang, the sudden materializing of a god, begin at the same moment the birds turned evil, or was there some passage of time beforehand, and the starting point becomes arbitrary narrative framework?

The birds seem to be complicating the story, but I can’t very well leave them out, any more than I can leave out the evil stepsisters and the glass slipper and the methods of household management employed by bourgeois families of the unspecified but pre-Industrial past, and I can’t include all of these aspects without inserting some type of warning against a hasty marriage with someone you’ve only danced with, on an evening where everyone was all dressed up and the champagne flowed freely and magic was in the air. I’ve had plenty of those evenings, but, had I actually been able to whisper the proverbial word of wisdom, I might have ventured that a spot of premarital counseling, or, at the least, a third date, would have been a not inappropriate consideration before trading an inarguably uncomfortable domestic arrangement for one that, quite possibly, could be much, much worse. Fairy godmothers are powerful beings, but not compared to royal executioners or divorce lawyers.

This is why choosing where to begin the story is so perilous. This isn’t really even about that interlude, anyway, seeing as how it lasted no more than a month, and nothing about that month was otherwise remarkable in any particular way. Let’s go back.

It started with the birds descending. They had an evil intent, the strong, sharp beaks and talons of raptors; they were larger and blacker than any falcon; there were two of them, and they swooped down onto the wedding party just as the cake was being cut and they blinded the sisters of the bride, then disappeared back into the heavens. Everything happened so quickly that many of the guests were unaware of anything at all, and there were two screaming girls, just barely teenagers, blood streaming down their faces. They quickly were led away from the festivities; the band took up a catchy dance tune; the moment was forgotten by the crowd and the party continued.

The girls were taken to the infirmary, staffed by a midwife who had developed a taste for distilled spirits, and one of them succumbed to an infection that spread from the eye through the bloodstream and into the brain, and the other one survived. She had lost her sight, of course, and had been hobbled as a child by stunted growth in her right foot, and thus knew she had no future position at court. She also knew she had no where else to go. By the time her wounds healed and she had learned how to navigate her dark world, she was still only sixteen, with a dead father, a dead step-father, a dead sister, a disinterested mother, and a stepsister with whom she had never been close and who was now negotiating the difficulties of an ill-advised hasty marriage. She was blind and had a club foot and no particular means of survival, and she did not have any desire to be alive.

It was November and the first snows had fallen; frost glazed the windows, the wolves were not yet desperate in the forests. One afternoon, as she say by the fire in the infirmary with the drunken midwife, she decided she had had enough. She could not knit, she could not sew, she could not clean, she could neither teach nor read, and so she wrapped her cloak around herself, and left.

It did not take her long to consider the folly of leaving without food or a sense of destination in the early winter, and she might have tried calling out for help, except she could not bring herself to care. Perhaps a poacher would inadvertently shoot her, or a band of ruffians attack her, or she could fall into a chilly swift river and drown in a haze of hypothermia. It was all much the same to her. Even if the devil himself had appeared and offered a bargain, she would not have been in any state to even know what to ask for. And she did not believe in the devil, although she believed in poachers and ruffians and rivers, and, if pressed, would have admitted that the birds that took her sight and her sister’s life were evil. She was too exhausted to care much else about philosophical details of god and the devil, and had never thought much about such esoteric drivel, anyway.

She walked slowly, and very quickly lost any sense of where she was and where she might be going, and she collided with trees and walls and quite a few immobile objects she could not identify. As the day grew colder she stopped and sat, just where she was, with no sense of whether she was twenty feet or two miles from where she had started; if she was in the middle of a road or on the edge of a cliff. If she had been injured and nursed in the land where she had grown up, the shape of the landscape would have imprinted itself into her mind, but her family had moved to this region when her mother had remarried, then she had been moved to the castle infirmary after her injury. Even if she had been in full possession of her senses, she knew nothing of the geography of this place. The people spoke a dialect that was thickly accented, so as to be almost foreign, and, outside court, she couldn’t understand a word of the locals’ speech.

As she sat in the cold, she tried to remember what she could of her childhood. There were very few good moments to latch onto; neither her mother nor her sister had even been willing to talk about the past. What she remembered was the deep warm heat of the underbelly of the chickens as she collected the eggs in the morning, and how there was one black hen that had imprinted upon her when it was just a chick, and would follow her throughout the day. She could barely remember her father, he had disappeared before she was old enough to learn her letters, and she never knew for certain if he had really died or something else, maybe something even worse. He had been a giant to her, with a huge shaggy red beard and a leather vest that always had a bit of string in the pockets, and if he wasn’t at home very much, when he was there, he would pick her up and swing her around in circles and she would scream in disoriented delight.

Her mother must have been quite young, barely past girlhood herself, and she remembered summer days when her mother would uncoil her hair and wash it and let it dry in the sun, and it was the same color as the grains growing in the fields, shiny and yellow. When her father was at home, her mother would sing and knit and make jams with the berries from the garden, but when her father wasn’t there, her mother had to chop wood and start the fires and she even must have learnt to shoot game. They never went hungry, but when her father wasn’t there, they didn’t have jam, and her mother didn’t sing.

There, on the corner of her memory, is a thought — had there been a baby brother? She hasn’t remembered him in years and years. He must have disappeared around the same time her father did, but she isn’t sure, she may have never known. There was a time she doesn’t remember at all, and then the flurry of activity with the move, the new stepfather, the new stepsister.

It is very cold out, now; it must be fully night. She lays down on the ground, curls inside her cloak to stay warm. She is hungry and cold, and in the back of her mind she still hears the echoing cries of the birds as they swooped down from the heavens towards her. Her sleep at night is always fitful and prone to terrors; she hears the heavy flapping of the birds’ wings in her dreams. It is very cold; she sleeps, but does not dream. There are no poachers, no ruffians, not even any hungry wolves that accost her as she sleeps.

The sun rises, but she does not wake up. It is a clear morning, and frost has traced her features, left her shape outlined upon the ground where she slept. A small boy is the first person to notice her, and he tugs at his mother’s apron to get her attention. He does not cry: he did not know the girl, he does not recognize death. She had not travelled so very far from the infirmary, but she had managed to leave the castle grounds, and cross a fallow field to the edge of a small village of share croppers. No one recognizes her as being from the court, for her clothes are not fine, and she is buried in the small churchyard, in the corner by itinerants and unknowns. Her story ends.

Tohu and Tikun

Under the tree that knew everything, I felt the pressure of knowledge. Under the tree that knew everything, I felt the air of expectation. Under the tree that knew everything, I felt the fog of emotion. I was too curious to care for knowledge, too rebellious to care for expectation, too confused to recognize emotion. Instead, I lay under the great spreading branches, my head pillowed by a tree root, and I watched what life existed above.

Item, one squirrel. Item, a second squirrel. The squirrels barked at me, then catapulted into an adjacent tree and disappeared. Item, a bird. It may have been a mockingbird, or it may have been a crow, or it may have been a bluejay. My ignorance of this particular is inexcusable, but I was distracted. Between hearing the flurry of beating wings and the rustling of disturbed leaves, I looked up into the heart of the canopy and was surprised to realize that the light was a different color than underneath any of the other trees, or, for that matter, than when standing out in open ground. It wasn’t a delicate filtered green like underneath willows or the ruddy shadows of a maple; it wasn’t a pure blue of day light or the deep velvet of twilight. I forgot about the birds completely.

Something about the air filtered by this tree turned it into a pearlescent glow, like the full moon on the ocean or a puddle slicked by oil after a summer storm, depending on whether one is at the shore or in the city. The air didn’t smell any different, and the sounds were the sounds of the afternoon: the barking squirrels, the rustling birds; somewhere near but not too near, the swish of tires in a hum of traffic.

This was the tree that knew everything, but it was not, as our mayor and our minister and our school teacher and my mother pointed out all too often, this was not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I wasn’t quite sure why they made such a fuss about all that. I knew it was important that it was the tree that knew everything, because it was the tree that everyone told secrets to and studied for tests under and went to when things were confused. I figured if it was the tree that knew everything, it really must also be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because, if it wasn’t, well, then, it couldn’t know everything.

I asked my mother. “Mom, what’s the big deal about the knowledge of good and evil?”

She got all flustered, and said it had something to do with beautiful gardens and falling in love and having babies.

“That doesn’t make any sense at all. What’s evil about gardens or love or babies?”

She stammered incoherently and sent me outside to play.

When I asked my school teacher, she said it was all just a silly story that the mayor made up so that we could have a landmark featured in the tourist brochure. Well, I had sent letters to the tourism offices of all 50 states and I had a great pile of color brochures and maps covered in squiggly lines, and most towns seemed to put up statues of funny-looking men rather than have famous trees.

When I asked the mayor to explain it all to me, he gave me a little lapel pin with the state flag inside the outline of the tree that knows everything, and then had his secretary give me a commemorative poster from the dedication of the tree. I put the pin on my overcoat and hung the poster on my bedroom wall, but none of this answered my question.

After church on Sunday, I went up to the minister, who had just taken a big bite of jelly doughnut, and asked him. “Why’s it the tree that knows everything, but not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?” Right at that moment, some of the jelly filling plopped onto his shirtfront and he ran off to get a napkin.

No one would or could explain it to me, and so I had taken to sitting under the tree at all hours, thinking that maybe the tree would tell me. I mean, I know that trees can’t talk, or write, or anything, but no one else had much to say, so there was nothing to lose by trying. I figured that I probably wouldn’t learn much, but it was summer, and the air was warm and the days lasted forever, and I sat and napped and daydreamed and watched the squirrels and sometimes other people would stop by and I’d take their picture for them, under the tree.

This was the first time I had noticed the air under the tree being different from the air other places. I don’t know if I just hadn’t been looking right before, or if the time of day or the weather were different. I’d seen the air change color when tornadoes were coming in, everything turning a yellowy green gray and then lots of lightning and I knew, absolutely knew, that I had to run somewhere safe and duck and cover. We did lots of duck and cover drills at school, so that felt okay. But this wasn’t scary-tornado-storm colored under the tree. Like I said, it was pearlescent, it was one of the prettiest things I had ever seen, like a rainbow but without any color.

I decided to climb the tree and see what was going on, which seemed like a fine idea until I realized that it would be kind of hard to climb, since there weren’t any good branches for footholds. Then I remembered the squirrels, and how they would jump from tree to tree, and that made a lot of sense. I looked around. There was a good oak not too far away that I could get into by climbing onto the cemetery fence, so I did. The oak tree was built like a staircase, or a ladder, and I went up and up and around until I was on the right side to scoot over to the tree that knew everything. The squirrels started barking at me again, but as long as they didn’t start throwing acorns, I felt safe.

When I was looking over at the tree, I realized the entire tree seemed to have a cloud, or maybe a fog, of this different air. Or maybe the tree was glowing, or radiating something. We had studied nuclear bombs a little bit at school, but I wasn’t sure if nuclear meant glowy or if that was something else. Maybe when we do chemistry I’ll learn that. And I don’t think there’s any way to tell if something is nuclear, anyway, not without special scientist stuff. It isn’t like nuclear things are maybe warmer or smell different or get magnetic. Or maybe they do. But the tree that knew everything wasn’t warmer than everywhere else and smelled the same as all the other trees, and I didn’t have a paperclip to check and see if it was magnetic. I felt that it probably wasn’t going to nucleate me, and it didn’t seem ashy like fire smoke, so I crawled out on the limb of the oak tree to get closer to it.

I didn’t look down. I knew it would be a bad idea to look down, so I slithered on my stomach and held on tight and watched to make sure I didn’t get caught on any branches. The trees were further apart than they looked from the ground, but I could see how different the air was inside the tree that knew everything. I wanted so badly to know why it was different, and so even though I knew Tarzan was only make-believe, I started looking around for a rope or something to swing myself over. We didn’t have any kudzu, not like they do in some places, and even though I know I’m not supposed to like kudzu because although it looks like a fur coat it makes it hard for the trees to breathe, even still, if I had kudzu, I could have braided it into a rope to swing to the other tree. But I was just out on a branch on my stomach, and that wasn’t getting me anywhere.

There had been a movie about how monkeys move through trees, swinging from their arms, and I decided that might work. I wrapped my arms around the tree branch, like I was giving it a hug, and dropped upside down so that my legs were swinging free underneath. I swung my legs back and forth and back and forth to get momentum to move forward, and the oak tree’s bark scratched up my arms and my shoulders felt like they were going to break off and my hands were so sweaty I was afraid that I would lose my grip and fall, and that would probably hurt. A lot. So I kept swinging my legs and scootching forward and I didn’t look down or think about my arms bleeding. Then I was close enough that if I swung really, really hard I could get my leg onto one of the branches of the tree that knew everything. And I swung and looped my knee into the other tree, but was still holding onto the oak tree with my arms. I got my other knee up to cross over the branch, and I let go.

I was hanging upside down in the tree that knew everything, and I was tired, and my arms hurt and I was kind of absolutely terrified, but I realized I could feel the air was different. It was a little bit thicker, and a little bit warmer, and smelled a little bit like cinnamon. The only thing I can compare it to is the dandelion feathers that go poof into the air when you make a wish. It was like being surrounded by the tickly-air feeling of dandelion. I reached my arms up to meet my knees on the branch, and collapsed onto my stomach. Everything seemed happy, even my blood felt bubbly, like cola, or fish tank bubbles. I scootched closer to the trunk, and sat, resting my back against it. The trunk was warm, not like a stovetop, but like socks off the radiator, and all around me, the air hummed, like bees, except there were no bees. I could feel how much the tree was trying to tell me, and even though I couldn’t understand any of it, I was happier than I had ever been.

the year to be

regular size edition of 50

A client brought in a copy of Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack for 1788 for restoration, which provided the inspiration for this year's holiday edition: an almanac for the forthcoming year.

holiday ephemera edition of 50

Not for 2014. That would be far too practical.

Quercus Press: page layout for offset printing.

Page layout for digital printing -- pagination + glass of wine = much troubleshooting

According to wikipedia, 1714 starts on the same day of the week as 2014.

According to google books, there aren't any almanacs (or almanacks) from 1714.

each pamphlet = 2x 11x17 pages

fold, fold, cut, sew

Also, there was a calendar system change in there.

Time's Telescope, appropriated from 1817 to 1814

advertisement matter

range of papers, reflecting current studio stocks, reminiscent of publisher's bindings

However, 1814 was right in the midst of the flourishing almanac system. We had longitude! And latitude! And a new calendar system! Also, it was still considered essential information to include the transits of the moons of Jupiter as a separate page for each month in an almanac published as "The Nautical Almanac" by the London "Order of Commissioners of Longitude." Also, as referenced herein recently, there was a literal Big Cheese.

What cinched the entire project, though, was finding an almanac from 1817 where the owner had written the weather and current events ("bought first lobsters") for every month of the year. And google had scanned this almanac. The project had to happen.

pamphlet for 1814 = stamps for War of 1812

What more could one want?

also, studio-made stickers. why not?

Happy New Year!

holiday edition

To say that I am behind schedule would be, perhaps, an understatement. That notwithstanding, work on this year's holiday edition has begun, in that I've started thinking about what the item will be and how it will be made. Here's a sample for the purposes of general cheer and inspiration.

voyages

Start in the field. It's a familiar field, the field that you cut across every morning on the way to school. This time, pay attention to the smell of newly mown hay, the thistles growing pink and purple on the edges, the birds darting, looking for grain. Pay attention to the sky overhead, the color shifting to vibrant yellow, this moment just before dusk descends and everything turns cobalt. This is the last breath of daylight, all of us, all of the animals, fitting in a last look before settling back in our nests for safety. Beware the owl, beware the barn cat, beware the ghosts of the unhappy deceased who wanted so much more out of life than they were able to grasp.

This is the last time you will ever see this field, for the future is open wide before you, and when your back is turned from this place, the stagehands will appear and everything will change. We wished you god speed and all the best and hearty congratulations, and then you were gone. You said you would write and we said we would write and you said you would visit and we said we would always set a place at the table for you. We did not say we would save your room for you, a momento of who you had been, a museum to your time with us, but perhaps you thought we might. Or perhaps you were already looking so far past us and into the future that you had already forgotten the porcelain washbasin with violets painted around the edges, you had already forgotten the quilt of blue calico that every night covered your dreams. Perhaps we felt that you would return to us, chastened by a world that wasn't what you expected, or you would die from an epidemic of the flu or a runaway tram.

That was all many years ago. I wrote to you, long letters, but I didn't have an address to send them to. I told you everything, the change of the seasons, the play of light on the tiles, the search for a new minister, the market expanding and filling with the most unexpected tropical fruits that no one knew how to pronounce or how to eat. Then I folded my letters and sealed them and set them aside, because I had no place to address them to. You never wrote. It wasn't such a surprise, not really. This past is only a story we tell ourselves to reassure each other that we exist, and you always lived two steps into the future, even when you were right here, having Sunday dinner and eating the first sweet corn of the season, you were even then planning for the harvest and the winter, not thinking about the long days of summer that stretched away, full of moments of heavy calm.

By writing you would have been lying to us, giving us the false promise that everything was just as it had been, and you could never lie, even when it would have been better for everyone. Instead you simply left, smiling in that off-handed distracted way that said nothing about what you were really thinking, and my letters to you are now crisp with age, waiting to be read by a ghost. Even I have not re-read them, because they tell a story that was meant for you, and I could no more pretend to be you than you could ever return to this place and be one of us. Yet I still write these letters with no expectation, just a quiet, deep belief that somewhere there is a you that knows somehow that the past isn't completely dead, that it flickers and burns in a tiny quiet part of your memory, late at night when the moon hangs a barely suspended crescent over the horizon.

We were very, very young. We were so young that birthdays were counted in fractions, every month a momentous addition to our burden of years. I carried it with me everywhere, the turtle that we had caught, fishing for tadpoles that spring morning. The turtle never wanted to become a pet, but I prized it more than any border collie pup or any yearling calf, I painted its shell and constructed a terrarium for it, an entire turtle-world in the corner of the garden. We very, very carefully skipped stones, since to throw a rock without making it the best throw we had ever made wasn't a rock worth throwing. We started tiny small fires on the riverbank and tried to send smoke signals to each other across the water, and then we learned Morse code and tried to build our own telegraph line.

That was when we were older, long after the turtle had escaped and we had started studying algebra and civics. Short short short -- long long long -- short short short. I tapped it out on my desk instead of working on declining nouns and conjugating verbs, because, even then, I knew you were going to leave, and I thought that if things here were as exciting as Robinson Crusoe that you might change your mind. There was a sense of suspended animation, that you watched and experimented and studied with just a tiny fraction of your self, and kept the rest hidden away, the way a tadpole hides its tale when it turns into a frog.

I tell the story to myself, sometimes, when the evenings extend, long, long twilights where the stars come out one at a time, the Milky Way teasing her way into the night sky. On these evenings I tell myself the story you told me, the first time you said, out loud, that you were going away. You had known for a long time, probably since even before we caught tadpoles and turtles in the stream, even though I didn't even know there was any other place to live, I didn't even know it was possible to go away and become a different person, become a stranger to the past. It was several years later and we were watching the Big Dipper pour over the night sky, and you told me the story of your dream.

Every night, almost every single night, you dreamed about strangers, but in your dreams, you knew them, they were only strangers during the day. At night, asleep in that other world, you were among the people that you knew and recognized even better than those of us you had known your entire life. There was a woman with hair as red as the flames of a bonfire, curly hair that formed a wild halo about her head, and she wore capes lined with velvet and carried a fur muff and a fox stole. There was a gentleman, tall, tall and thin as a blade of grass, with a tidy mustache and little round spectacles, who always wore gloves, always. There was a boy, who you thought was about your age, because he was the only one who seemed to age in your dreams, and his hands were free from callouses, he had a checked waistcoat and a little white terrier, but you couldn't tell if he was you in the dream world or if maybe he was your brother. At night, all of these people gathered around you, and drove around a city that you knew as well as you knew our village, even though you had never visited there in the real life world of day.

You told me about the buildings built of shiny white marble with columns holding up the fronts, of purple houses and of riverboats filled with dancing and orchestras. Sometimes it was daytime in your dreams, and you went through this foreign familiar city as if you had lived there your entire life, going to museums full of statues of people and strange beasts, climbing to the top of skyscrapers and watching the city grow and breathe around you. Sometimes it was night in your dreams, and you were wearing funny uncomfortable suits and pointy shoes and eating out of china so thin and delicate the candlelight glowed through it. And sometimes in your dreams you were actually asleep and dreaming, and in that other place you slept not under a blue calico quilt but in a hammock, and you dreamt to the sounds of water quite nearby.

We had never seen the ocean, except in atlases, and I tried to imagine what it must be like, I looked at our pond swollen with spring rains and I closed my eyes and heard nothing but the water and with my eyes closed I imagined nothing but water all around me. I panicked and opened my eyes, touched the trunk of the elm tree, dug my toes into the loose dirt on the shore of the pond. I never, never wanted to see the ocean, there would be too much of it and nothing to hold on to. You told me that the ocean was like being almost but not quite asleep. Your eyes are closed and your mind is flying, drifting with the winds of thoughts, and the world is huge and empty and tiny and full and you become everything all at once and then you are asleep and falling into the heart of a forest. Except that's not at all how I fall asleep, I just lay down and close my eyes, and then when I open them again, it's morning and time to braid my hair and eat a great bowl of oatmeal with spiced apples and listen to the chickens cooing and scratching in the yard outside.

My dreams do not have beautiful perfumed strangers that I know better than my own family, my dreams do not show me towers made of glass that reflect the light like a crystal. I knew, when you told me about this, you were telling me that you were going to leave, you were going to find the woman with flaming hair and the tall, thin man with a mustache. You were going to the city on the sea. Then you never mentioned it again, maybe you were embarrassed or you thought that if you said it out loud it would disappear from your dreams and be gone, or maybe you were afraid I would tell the others and they would tease you. I knew then that you would be leaving and I would never see you again, but even though I cried and told myself that maybe I, too, could visit this city someday, I knew the city was only real for you, and not for me.

And so I have written you letters, so many letters, and I cross the field that is now newly mown, and watch the birds scavenge for grain, and wonder: now that you have found the place where you always belonged, at night, in your dreams, do you sometimes visit us, and read these letters by moonlight, set aside without an address? Do you remember, even in the shadows of sleep, what was once the earthy reality of minnows and lessons, do you hold us deep in the suitcases of dreams?

in the loft

Feeling woozy sleepy warmth of barn of hayloft of hiding of smelling the sweet damp wool of the sheep and listening to the gurgling lowing noises of the cows. Summer outside and lots of chores to fill the days, days that begin before dawn and dawn comes awfully early and night falls so late it seems it'll never come. So I got tired of all that. I wanted to not hear Pa talking about corn prices and I wanted Ma to stop talking about the neighbors and I wanted to do something on a lazy summer afternoon that involved maybe some fishing and some napping and not so much of being a hired hand without ever being hired, because its not like they ever offered me a paying job or even an allowance, no sir not in this house. That was why I decided to run away, but I decided to run away maybe without thinking it through all that clearly. On account of not getting an allowance and not being hired help, I didn't have two nickels to rub together. But my plan was to get a job, a real paying job, one with Sundays off and regular hours. I forgot that I'd need money to get a bus out of town and maybe some extra to buy food or get a room in a boarding house. Nothing fancy, just some place without bedbugs. Maybe even bedbugs would be okay if the price was good: that was all before I got to the Greyhound stop and saw how expensive a bus out of town would really cost. More money that I've ever had at once, that's for sure. But I had already run away, I had taken some bread out of the pantry and left Ma a note telling her that I'd write, and here I was not even able to get out of town. I would have hopped a freight train like I've read stories about, but we don't even have a railway within an hour's drive. Maybe I'll just start walking, but for now I'm hiding in the hayloft, back in the barn. I think Ma suspects that I'm here, but she hasn't told Pa about it yet, or he'd be likely to set the barn on fire just to get me out of it. I need to get some money, just a little bit, to start off down the road. That'd make a world of difference. But there aren't any jobs in town, not for me, not when they've all known Pa for years and wouldn't think of crossing him by denying him his due. His due! His rights! What about mine? I'm ready and able and I'd as easily join with Buffalo Bill as with the Rangers or the Navy. It doesn't matter, we don't have any gangs and we don't have any recruiters and I'm just sick of it. Sick of the nothingness of it. It's time to get out. Time to get on with it.

convincing proof

There are valleys that wander through these hills, following patterns all their own. As a student, so many years ago, I was taught that the valleys follow the paths of the rivers, that they eroded the softer soil and left behind the hills and canyons. But as a child, before I had ever ventured into the mountains, before I had followed the paths of the valleys, I was taught that the hills and valleys were the shape of the fingerprints of god, and if you could go high enough into the sky, you would see the shape of his hand.

"Why, then, why," I asked, "were valleys places of darkness, the valley of the shadow of death, when it was valleys that were fed by rivers, and mountains that were cold and barren?" My teacher ignored my question, for it was inconvenient, and returned to her lesson. When I returned home, I asked my mother why valleys meant death, and she said it was because from way up in the mountains, valleys look like freshly dug graves. I had never seen a grave of any type, much less one freshly dug, for we in those days sent the souls of the dead into the afterlife on funeral pyres, the smoke ascending to heaven.

I asked my mother: who used graves, and why, but she was making dinner and pushed me aside, saying, "Ask Grandmother. She will answer your questions."

I was afraid of Grandmother, afraid of the woman covered in black shawls, who sat in shadowed corners of our house working her prayer beads. I had never seen her leave the house, except on the day of her brother's funeral, and I was struck by how ancient she seemed, how frail. Her tiny hands were swollen into claws, and she almost disappeared in the crowded room. Her face was worn and wrinkled, and even though I did not think she could see, I also did not really think she was blind. Maybe I thought she was god, or she was turning into god or absorbing god as she became older and older. Even mother didn't know how old Grandmother was, and told me not to worry about things that didn't matter.

My mother's advice to ask Grandmother about valleys and graves made sense, but I was too afraid of Grandmother to ask her, and then she was too old to talk, and then, when I had moved away and forgotten my questions and forgotten my fear of her, she died. She was burnt on a pyre, the smoke of her soul ascending to heaven, weeks before I found out about her death. It had been many years since I had been back to our village, and I did not visit now, but the death affected my memories more than I expected.

She visited me in my dreams, night after night, and all she did was sit, quietly in the corner, working her prayer beads. She never spoke in these dreams, although, awake, I can recall her voice, the texture of autumn leaves, the sound of the rustle of the wind. In my dreams, she was silent, but she watched me with her eyes, dark and intense. Their intensity would awaken me out of the dream, and in the silence of my room, I would watch the curtains billow in the night breeze and feel that my Grandmother was there, with me, although this was a land she had never visited.

No one else in my family had ever appeared in my dreams, not my father, lost to a stampede of oxen in a drought summer, nor any of my other relatives, not even in those early years when I would wake up disoriented after a restless night's sleep, expecting to smell the acrid boiled bark tea, confused at the tidiness all around, the pulverized leaves that I poured kettle-boiled water over every morning, their insipid flavor. Even in those long days of never quite understanding what to say or who to say it to, I never dreamed of my family. But now my Grandmother had actually died, and I wondered how old she must have been, how many lives she must have lived.  She haunted my dreams, and I felt I must do something to honor her spirit.

In those days, I spent my free hours high in the hills, following old bridle trails and paths through forests and along fields, because as much as I did not understand the world around me, I knew there must be some sense to it, and I found the woods less unsettling than the city streets. As I was following one path around the edge of a smaller mountain, suddenly there was a clearing, and although I was not at the summit, the valley stretched away from me, following the network of rivers. It was breathtaking, and I stopped for a moment, to orient myself in relation to the layout below.

It was autumn, and the leaves rustled in the wind, and in the leaves I heard my grandmother's voice, and then, suddenly, I looked again at the valley before me. I remembered, from so very long ago, that valleys form the fingerprints of god. I continued up to the summit point, curious and eager, feeling both fearful of it not looking at all like a fingerprint and embarrassed that I cared so much. Adults are expected to be well past these diversions, especially in this land where science and mythology are so very far apart, but as I climbed higher and higher, I felt the years slipping away until even the urgency of the question returned: why do valleys mean death? Except now i understood what graves looked like, now I had seen the end of life in earth as well as in fire. Yet still: the deep curiosity was there. I had to know, and my thoughts slipped more and more into my earlier language, and as my language shifted and the leaves around me rustled, I heard my Grandmother speaking, heard her prayers as they were repeated throughout the day.

I had never learned the older language that she has spoken as a girl, for the land that she and my grandfather came from was not the land of my birth; we are many generations of statelessness, finding and shedding countries as a snake sheds its skin. The earliest prayers my Grandmother was taught were in a language I did not understand, that I never learned. When I was young my mother taught me the simplest prayers in my own language, and, when my grandmother realized I would never translate between them, she also spoke to me in the adopted tongue of our new country. Yet now, as I climbed higher and higher and heard my Grandmother in the leaves, I realized what I heard was my Grandmother in her original language.

I paused, listened, realized I could understand this tongue that had always been so foreign to me. There was something specific that my Grandmother was saying; it was the folktales, the stories from her own childhood, the stories I had never learned, because I had been allowed to go away for school, where we studied erosion and plate tectonics and giant volcanoes under the ocean and long division and geometry. In the story my Grandmother told through the wind in the leaves, rivers were snakes that had been caught and tethered to the earth.

Snakes had once been water spirits that flew through the air, swimming in their natural home, the clouds. The snakes were curious, mysterious tricksters, full of mischief, but not ill-intentioned. They followed the dragons, playing games of tag through the smoke of volcanoes and the dark cymbals of thunderstorm clouds, until, one by one, they were captured by the tails by humans, who would scale mountains in hunting parties formed for just this purpose.

The humans were driven by drought, by a desperation for water to nourish their crops, for the gods had grown angry, and withheld rain. The years of snake-hunting began, and bands of men would scale mountains, cling to the tails of snakes passing overhead, until the snake, grown too heavy for flight by the weight of men on its tail, fell to earth and became sinuous, land-bound rivers.

I had reached the summit of the mountain, and, in all directions, lay the network of hills and valleys that make up this land. The afternoon sun caught the river moving between the hills, the water glistened, like scales, I realized. I looked more closely. The curvature of a snake's spine followed the shape of the valley, and I felt the life of the river and the death of the snake coexisting together. It is not that the snakes had died, so much as they had been caught and ensnared. Not the ridges of the handprint of god, but the handprint of man, as we tethered the life of the flying beasts to the earth, so that we could survive the drought.

Clouds passed overhead, their shadows falling over the landscape. There were fewer trees here, almost none with leaves to rattle in the wind. I wondered what other stories my Grandmother wanted to tell me. I wondered what else I had forgotten to ask, and hoped she would stay behind, just a little bit longer, so I could listen.