Thrust: A Novel

None of them was her father, though, and that was a fact that hurt her heart. Her father could only live and die inside the space of their present tense, and for that reason, their love for each other had a corresponding mortality to it. Her watermother’s words: Listen, my love. You cannot save your father or your brother or me or anyone or the world even though you want to. But being multiplies and moves. That is the beauty of life. Not death, but energy in a state of constant change.

Something like a gap existed inside her father, perhaps evident in that place he went to during his seizures. Laisvė believed the place was real, just like the places where dreams live, or grief or pain or ecstasy. She believed that these places all carried a kind of vibrating pulse that only some people understood, although animals and trees and water and dirt and the sky and space all seemed to be woven through with it. Just as she believed in what her watermother had told her: Listen, my love… you can do something quite useful. You can turn time. You can move forward and backward. You can become a free-flowing form in motion, a bridge between being and beyond-being. You are no one’s hero. You are a living moment between time and water.

But what did beyond-being mean, exactly? Was the living moment between time and water a real place? When? How?

Tomorrow she would deliver the umbilical cord to the person who needed it. Tonight she nestled herself at the foot of a sycamore across from several box maples. She covered herself in leaves: tulip poplar, northern spicebush.

She thought about animals — about the short bursts of intense variation within species that occur after geologic catastrophe or upheavals in the environment. Like a meteor striking the earth, or the rapid diminishment of the ozone layer that led to glacial melt, the great Water Rise, and the social collapse of nations. A species could split and its evolution could take different paths. Any speciation event you could explain by anagenesis could also be explained by cladogenesis.

Hyracotherium evolved into

Mesohippus evolved into

Merychippus evolved into

Pliohippus evolved into

Equus: Horse, a direct ancestor of Hyracotherium, small changes over time gradually, for example, from three-pronged foot into hoof.

Or:

Hyracotherium goes extinct.

Ancestor X gives rise to Mesohippus.

Mesohippus goes extinct.

Ancestor Y gives rise to Merychippus.

Merychippus goes extinct.

Ancestor Z lineage gives rise to Pliohippus.

Pliohippus goes extinct.

Equus: Horse carries seven extant species traces that branched and braided.

When Pangaea split into Laurasia to the north, and Gondwanaland to the south, and then into continents, species living on the land masses split with them.

Polar bears and brown bears shared a common ancestor with the extinct Eurasian brown bear. Glaciation made movement southward difficult, isolating them. When the glaciers melted, inside the speed and power of climate change, hybridization between brown bears and polar bears quickly followed.

Laisvė pictured the Hawaiian archipelago. In her mind’s eye they looked like pieces of land breaking away from each other, each land mass forming its own ecology. She thought of the earless Hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species. The hoary bat, also endangered. The vesper bat… extinct.

Could stories break free of stasis and equilibrium, give way to bursts of radical change? Could stories themselves become extinct? Could history? Could stories carry us differently? Could children branch off, away from their ancestors, like a body disassembled and reassembled in an otherwhere across time and space?

Laisvė pictured her baby brother breaking off from the ferry ride like a puzzle piece, traveling to another formation, or family, or species.

The woman she meant to meet next did not know yet that Laisvė carried an object that could help deliver something profoundly lost to a different boy.

She fingered the cord against her chest until sleep came for her.

Umbilical