Page 12 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

something written by five-fingered-hands in one very specific language for one very

specific purpose. That the disaster itself was a story too, a real thing, yes, and a real

thing that had been made, a written thing. And we were the ones who knew story could,

just as truly, be torn up, dug up, re-stitched, by hands, by briars, by sharks’ teeth

snagging. We were the imaginers. The anxious creators, for whom no law was obvious

and no story a static end. We had no set idea of how precisely to respond to a flood. We

were not wed to any particular conversation with G_d about the monogamous needs of

animals on large boats that wait out storms. Neither were we looking to save the

microwaves.

And we were the ones who had no children. Or whose children had already gone. To the

waters, to the white and hungry guns, to the longing. We were the ones who had no

seeds.

So we found some. In the backs of our closets, in the corner stores standing ankle-deep

in water, in the jars on the tilting kitchen shelves. And we gripped our spades in our

teeth, and we looked sideways as the streets began to buckle and fold into foothills, and

we saw each other limping, and rolling, and running, pockets spilling over with hard-

shelled children, with descendants of future trees, and we reached out as we ran, and

we gripped each other’s hands in our hands.

It was the queerest thing, like a bird in love with a sturgeon, a family of defectors, arms

empty of objects and pockets emptied into soil above the water line, saving no wealth or

infrastructure, saving the wrong things. A re-kindling, a re-kinning, a reckoning. All this

dying, it has been beyond swallowing.

All those bodies, they came home to the soil. And so we gave them children. Hard-

shelled and root-bound. It was a kind of making love to the dead. We slipped seeds into

their pockets. Their bodies fertile, already almost soil, meeting the beans, the walnuts,

the pits we plunged into the wet ground. The rhetoric of rot. The true nature of kinship:

all things becoming other things. Hidden in the mountain, learning each others’

languages, guarding, gardening, waiting for the first roots, those parts of the plants

called “radical,” to unfurl their faces into the soil.