Woman on the Edge of Time

Beyond the shimmer pool cast by the floating lights, real fireflies slow-blinked their lures on the soft air. At a giant maple a child stood with eyes closed, counting by fives to one hundred: hide-and-seek, a game ancient in her own childhood. Game she had loved as a child in hot dusty Texas streets. Rushing to hide, perhaps alone, perhaps with her best friend Lupe, whose two fat braids always hung before her dark, heart-shaped face. Waiting to be found. Suspense plucked at her with a quasi-sexual thrill as she waited, or as they waited together, giggling and clutched. The worst was not to be found, to go on waiting. The apparent purpose of the game (to hide so cleverly that no one would find you) giving way to the real purpose: to sneak in free. Perhaps, perhaps even better if Neftali, around whose sharp bronze face she had cast a secret ring of fire, was to find her. Yes, hide-and-seek wove into its ritual from generation to generation something of the hidden inner life of children. I’m going to run away from home and you won’t see me anymore! But come and search for me. The fear theywould not care, would not come after. To be hidden away and then found and brought joyfully out to the others. Yet afraid she lay hidden, her heart beating absurdly in the dust under the pickup truck. Who would come? What would they do?

The child turned from the tree and stood blinking into the darkness, hesitating on one foot. “It’s her!” Connie cried.

“My child, Dawn.” Luciente spoke softly in the shadows. “Let them play.”

The flimsy had a pelt and a furry tail. “Is she a squirrel?”

“Yes! Person has a fix on squirrels lately. Other children feed birds and try to build squirrelproof bird feeders. Dawn built a squirrel feeder.”

Dawn darted away into the bushes and a moment later they heard a squeal of discovery. Dawn came racing after a boy who streaked ahead of her toward the tree-safe. Just short of the tree, she launched a flying tackle and brought him down. “Got you!”

“She looks so delicate!”

“Well-coordinated. Good muscles. Fast reflexes. Dawn works hard at martial arts. You should have seen per fighting this afternoon.” Luciente’s excitement returned and she dragged Connie along a little too fast toward a game consisting of a large board with people on it instead of pieces. The game seemed quarrelsome and noisy, and debate raged over the players, whose faces were hidden by masks. They had just come to one edge of the painted board when Luciente’s kenner said, “New holi in meetinghouse. Name: Pageant of the Lost. Duration: one hour. Starts: on the hour in ten minutes.”

“That’s Jackrabbit’s new holi. And Bolivar’s. They worked on it all week.”

“Bolivar has stayed since Sappho died?”

“Basically Bolivar works as a spectacler. This is per village, but person’s gone more than here. Has to be on call for villages that want rituals, feasts, pageants. Bolivar’s quite good. When they work together, beautiful events result.” Luciente spoke with a stilted justice, carefully fair. “Jackrabbit does rituals alone sometimes, but mostly person works in graphic arts.” Arm in arm they strolled toward the meetinghouse, a building long and low like a loaf of bread.

Inside it was larger than she would have thought, for it was built into the hill. “For meetings we use only a part, so we are more face to face. Walls can be dropped at any point. This is the biggest it gets.”

The rounded ceiling reminded her of the planetarium, the time she had taken Angie for the Easter show. Angie had been frightened of the dark and the stars that seemed to rush toward them and, crawling into her lap to bury her head, refused to look. Gradually Connie had aroused her curiosity and managed to get her to peep at the sparkling night sky of the ceiling. This ceiling too became a night sky with more purple in its black than the night they had just abandoned, with a pale moth-green moon rising in the south over one of the entrances. Slowly as people came wandering in to their seats, a different color moon rose majestically over each of the doors: white to the north, yellow to the east, red to the west, and green to the south. As the moons reached the zenith, the four of them began a stately dance to music welling up. Their shapes began to shift from round to oblong to crescent to wing-shaped like birds, images of dignified flight; now slow hopping courtship of the whooping cranes, extending their broad wings.

As the room filled and the doors shut, the cranes came down from the ceiling and became flesh—although she had learned that these vivid three-dimensional images were a mere trick of projectors and lights. A voice like a bird, a reedy voice, talked over the music about whooping cranes and faded into the music. The image broadened. One enormous crane filled it and then his head spread into clouds and his feet turned to water; little black and white dots came bobbing on the waves toward them, the Labrador duck. Last one shot in 1875 off Long Island.