"The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. yet every child Is cast from paradise—Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change."
— Octavia E. Butler; Parable of the Talents
— Octavia E. Butler; Parable of the Talents
IV. A Memory
They wandered as all children do from the nest, but I could only watch. I wanted to follow. Of course I wanted to follow, plagued as I was by thoughts of their becoming lost or frightened or hurt by the mysteries of this strange new world. A young mother’s need to protect overcome by the pain of the birthing itself. I tried, desperately, but was unable to keep pace. I bled light and it fell in patches of dying ember feathers to expose the rot beneath. The fragments of me that remained tried to smoke away into the crooning wind and I scrambled to piece them together, eyes fixed always on them. How they grew smaller, dimmer. Brilliant amorphous pinpricks snuffed out by the greedy horizon. And me, unmoving, body determined to collapse upon itself and submerge itself in the boiling heat of shame. What sort of mother am I? Unable to help them at their most vulnerable, to hold them as they took their first steps. I watched the horizon swallow them and it felt familiar, somehow; I would have laughed had the horizon not smothered me, too.
We had never gotten along, had we? I tore them out, ten small candle flames, and they condensed into form from the sunset’s pinkish dewlight. They collected into ten brilliant cores at the center of a wafting haze. I was transfixed by the dancing waves for the briefest of moments before the pain caught up with me. It was a pain--a pain of collapse. A clawing at walls, a dragging inwards and outwards; a knife determined to scrape out the last of bloody pumpkin flesh. But they righted themselves, unaware—or uncaring, I sometimes think bitterly—and blinked in a flickering of blues and greens and reds. And though they didn’t leave my side, not yet, they stared with the deadened unwavering intensity of the not-yet-born to her. Vibrant and healthy where I pulsed with the shallow breath of the dying. She was captivating, with her furrowed brown skin and crown of small whispering things. And those small pieces of me toddled into her unfurling arms.
They wandered and I followed at a limp. Dissipating and reforming, lurching forward two paces and back five. Puddles of light marked my passage. I followed beyond their sight and knowing and beyond their memory. They danced with her and with one another, and they threw off their mantles of stars for those of dirt and rock. They drifted over wine-dark oceans and delighted at their reflections. Their faceless toothy grins were mirrored by hers, and she offered an invitation: to follow, to sink into the shifting sands and soil and slow-moving stone and shape them to their own will. To shape themselves according to their will. She pointed to her scars and stretch marks, to the echoes of her becoming, and they glimmered in admiration and purpose. And they began to change. They solidified from unanchored light to curling shells, tickling whiskers, hard armor over scuttling legs, and paraded tiaras of glimmering crystal.
I still revealed myself to them then, and their hodgepodge forms would dispel into frigid light that rang with embarrassment. They would buzz towards me, my little songbirds, with memory and earth spilling from their lips. As they spoke we would watch the sun climb from the sky and sink into a bed of gold. They would speak in cascading bells of roaring water and murmuring life and the seeds of mountains. I would tell them of distant nebulae, much like them, and blooming flowers of light and dust and the quiet womb of night. Small stress fractures spread their fingers and burrowed as we spoke. They lengthened with each uncomfortable pause; deepened as we stared at the earth below, unable to quite look at the other. It would mean acknowledging the change, or the remaining. We would still, each retreating into ourselves, and they would stumblingly say: You seem sad, mother. You seem so distracted, mother. What are you thinking of, mother?
And then it happened with the first. The first to have wobbled off on spindly foal’s legs. We hovered over waters that shifted in fitful sleep and he spoke: I made you something, mother.
Something about him had seemed strange. Different. I had watched him change forms: laugh in a clinking of sea stones as he raced with his adoptive family. He always changed as he felt me approach, though. But this time he seemed to be struggling: whiskers and glimmering scales would coagulate for the briefest of moments only to melt back into dappled moonlight.
Small fronds curled into his core and produced a stone. It was small, pinkish-white.
I accepted it. Rolled it in my gnarled clouds of light. I felt his excitement and pride and could only think: she had shown him how to do this. She had taught him to chisel away parts of himself as I had chiseled away parts of myself. How to condense himself into this stone as real as any of those that rolled along the ocean floor--but where I was left a husk of what I had been, aching and pathetic and wanting, he was whole, gleaming as brightly as he ever had, stitched back together by her skilled fingers. And she had rewarded him for his small act of creation: though he hid them from me, I had seen his glittering crown of stones, the sea shells and salt crystals and shuffling creatures that he draped around himself like jewelry.
But I had never gotten along with her. She had seen me, emptied and dying, and turned her back—or had I turned my back? My eyes so fixed on the stars that I could not see her outstretched arms, waiting to catch me.
I said nothing. He soured—bright pinks turned a sickly yellow and he shrank into himself, a vortex of rancid flesh and rotten egg and acidic sparks in death throes.
Good night.
He sank, spread out into a greasy film over the water’s surface and it boiled at his touch. I drowned with him in that emptiness between us, pierced by that sting of a mother’s rejection—but still I did not move, transfixed by the stone and the warm ghost of his touch. The edges smoothed by careful heat and flecks of colors he had coaxed into being: gold sparks suspended in milky white. My own little galaxy, so far away from the home he could not help me reach.
It cracked and I cradled the pieces, coated the jagged cut in sticky starlight and pressed the halves together, but they turned brittle and black at my touch.
We had never gotten along, had we? I tore them out, ten small candle flames, and they condensed into form from the sunset’s pinkish dewlight. They collected into ten brilliant cores at the center of a wafting haze. I was transfixed by the dancing waves for the briefest of moments before the pain caught up with me. It was a pain--a pain of collapse. A clawing at walls, a dragging inwards and outwards; a knife determined to scrape out the last of bloody pumpkin flesh. But they righted themselves, unaware—or uncaring, I sometimes think bitterly—and blinked in a flickering of blues and greens and reds. And though they didn’t leave my side, not yet, they stared with the deadened unwavering intensity of the not-yet-born to her. Vibrant and healthy where I pulsed with the shallow breath of the dying. She was captivating, with her furrowed brown skin and crown of small whispering things. And those small pieces of me toddled into her unfurling arms.
They wandered and I followed at a limp. Dissipating and reforming, lurching forward two paces and back five. Puddles of light marked my passage. I followed beyond their sight and knowing and beyond their memory. They danced with her and with one another, and they threw off their mantles of stars for those of dirt and rock. They drifted over wine-dark oceans and delighted at their reflections. Their faceless toothy grins were mirrored by hers, and she offered an invitation: to follow, to sink into the shifting sands and soil and slow-moving stone and shape them to their own will. To shape themselves according to their will. She pointed to her scars and stretch marks, to the echoes of her becoming, and they glimmered in admiration and purpose. And they began to change. They solidified from unanchored light to curling shells, tickling whiskers, hard armor over scuttling legs, and paraded tiaras of glimmering crystal.
I still revealed myself to them then, and their hodgepodge forms would dispel into frigid light that rang with embarrassment. They would buzz towards me, my little songbirds, with memory and earth spilling from their lips. As they spoke we would watch the sun climb from the sky and sink into a bed of gold. They would speak in cascading bells of roaring water and murmuring life and the seeds of mountains. I would tell them of distant nebulae, much like them, and blooming flowers of light and dust and the quiet womb of night. Small stress fractures spread their fingers and burrowed as we spoke. They lengthened with each uncomfortable pause; deepened as we stared at the earth below, unable to quite look at the other. It would mean acknowledging the change, or the remaining. We would still, each retreating into ourselves, and they would stumblingly say: You seem sad, mother. You seem so distracted, mother. What are you thinking of, mother?
And then it happened with the first. The first to have wobbled off on spindly foal’s legs. We hovered over waters that shifted in fitful sleep and he spoke: I made you something, mother.
Something about him had seemed strange. Different. I had watched him change forms: laugh in a clinking of sea stones as he raced with his adoptive family. He always changed as he felt me approach, though. But this time he seemed to be struggling: whiskers and glimmering scales would coagulate for the briefest of moments only to melt back into dappled moonlight.
Small fronds curled into his core and produced a stone. It was small, pinkish-white.
I accepted it. Rolled it in my gnarled clouds of light. I felt his excitement and pride and could only think: she had shown him how to do this. She had taught him to chisel away parts of himself as I had chiseled away parts of myself. How to condense himself into this stone as real as any of those that rolled along the ocean floor--but where I was left a husk of what I had been, aching and pathetic and wanting, he was whole, gleaming as brightly as he ever had, stitched back together by her skilled fingers. And she had rewarded him for his small act of creation: though he hid them from me, I had seen his glittering crown of stones, the sea shells and salt crystals and shuffling creatures that he draped around himself like jewelry.
But I had never gotten along with her. She had seen me, emptied and dying, and turned her back—or had I turned my back? My eyes so fixed on the stars that I could not see her outstretched arms, waiting to catch me.
I said nothing. He soured—bright pinks turned a sickly yellow and he shrank into himself, a vortex of rancid flesh and rotten egg and acidic sparks in death throes.
Good night.
He sank, spread out into a greasy film over the water’s surface and it boiled at his touch. I drowned with him in that emptiness between us, pierced by that sting of a mother’s rejection—but still I did not move, transfixed by the stone and the warm ghost of his touch. The edges smoothed by careful heat and flecks of colors he had coaxed into being: gold sparks suspended in milky white. My own little galaxy, so far away from the home he could not help me reach.
It cracked and I cradled the pieces, coated the jagged cut in sticky starlight and pressed the halves together, but they turned brittle and black at my touch.