Woman on the Edge of Time

The great vulture, the California condor glided on twelve-foot wingspan. The bald eagle screamed and carried fish home to stuff into the beaks of its huge fledglings, clumsy in the twiggy nest at the top of a dead pine. The grizzly stood at bay. The humpbacked whale rolled and dived and roamed the lightless depths, singing its epics improvised on the age-old patterns of its vast oral culture—was fired on by a factory ship and its warm flesh carved up on the spot for dog food. The last brown-skinned inhabitant of Tasmania was hunted down and shot on a rocky ledge. Her body smashed on the stark rocks, last of a unique and delicate, small-bodied branch of the human family. Passenger pigeons darkened the sky with their fluttering passage, settled into trees that shone with them like soft blue and gray fruit, their cooing, the feathery warmth of their rosy and buff breasts filling the air. Alarmed, they startled into flight; the whistling of their thousands of wings beat the air to a wind that rustled the trees. They were shot, they were clubbed, they were taken by live decoy nailed through the feet to a perch, they were lumbered out of their homes, they were slaughtered and fed to livestock. Finally they were gone, the last female dying in a Cincinnati zoo. Ishi, last of the Yaqui of California, came out of the woods where he had lived alone, last of his hunted people, to a world where no soul spoke his language, and died in the Museum of Natural History. Archaic stone lions crouching in a row on wind-swept Delos, lions marching across the tiled walls of Babylon, gave way to the last of the Asian lions, sick, starving under the drought-parched tree in India. The lion’s body became the western prairies where General Sherman led an extermination campaign against Indians and buffalo together. Heaps of corpses rotted under the alkali sun. The wheat grew up through the bodies and the wind blew the land away in dust-storms that darkened the sky. Briefly they became bones flying and then the sky was empty as a skull.

The bones lay in the dust. Slowly they put out roots that sank deep in ravaged earth. Slowly the bones burgeoned into sprouting wands. The wands grew to a tree. The oak thrust its taproot deep and outstretched its massive boughs. The tree became a human couple embracing, man and woman. They clutched, they embraced, they wrestled, they strangled each other. Finally they passed into and through each other. Two androgynes stood: one lithe with black skin and blue eyes and red hair, who bent down to touch with her/his hands the earth; the other, stocky, with light brown skin and black hair and brown eyes, spread his/her arms wide to the trees and sky and a hawk perched on the wrist. A green and brown web flowed out from them and into them. They stood on the shoulder of a huge ant. Grapevines grew from their finger ends. Bees swarmed through the heads. The animal images felt real: they did not appear animations but living beings. The last image was water flowing, which became a crane flying.

“Only in us do the dead live.

Water flows downhill through us.

The sun cools in our bones.

We are joined with all living

in one singing web of energy.

In us live the dead who made us.

In us live the children unborn.

Breathing each other’s air

drinking each other’s water

eating each other’s flesh we grow

like a tree from the earth.”

The crane flew to the ceiling and slowly split into four moons that set in the four directions. The room lightened. She saw Dawn’s upturned face two rows away, watching the eastern moon go down. In their real future, she had been dead a hundred years or more; she was the dead who lived in them. Ancestor. Feeling remote from the moment, she fixed her eyes on Dawn’s wondering face. A terrible desire to hold that child’s body tantalized her flesh with the electrical itch of wanting. To touch her gently. Just once.

Luciente knew or read her gaze. When the room was light she called, “Dawn? Please come a moment?”

Dawn glanced around, saw them and climbed nimbly over the rows that were emptying. “G’light. You’re the person from the past!”

“Per name is Connie,” Luciente said, kissing the small ear that showed through the tumbled hair.

“May I kiss you?” Her voice shook.

Dawn looked at her with a limpid sandy brown gaze, questioning. Hesitating. The tremor in her voice. Wanting too much. Scary to a kid. But Dawn finally said, “Okay.”

Quickly she kissed Dawn’s cheek, cupping her small shoulders gently in her hands. Twice the size Angelina had been that last time, but small still. Small-boned. Dawn skipped away then, looking back in open curiosity. Then off at the heels of two other running children.

“Goodbye, little squirrel,” she said after her.

“Dawn likes red squirrels better because they’re smaller but bolder.”

“Like her.”

They strolled toward the western entrance. “At four, Dawn was timid. We worried. Me, my coms. We all struggled to bring per out.”

“But you say you respect difference.”