Work Text:
“You belong to the land
and sky of your first cry,
you belong to infinity.”
– Alla Renée Bozarth
Here had her family been cultivated atop this land, this Earth, for generations, now; here had it grown thick and tall as pine. The streets were brown and healthy, the markets teemed with fruit as round and perfect as the moon, and the shuttered windows of the house that they had once shared were never without light. It was, under every dictionary definition, a very nice place to live, and it was clear as anything to see that Aika should have thrived there. They all should have thrived there. And yet, here she was standing, little, alone, and limping at the edge of this world and the entrance into whatever it could possibly be that happened after. At thirty-three an orphan, left behind by everything, everyone she had ever come to know; to love.
Life had never descended gently into her; her body carried with it the scars of battle: a faceless, limbless war that she could not know or die for. At night it screamed to her like some caged animal– it slobbered and scratched and spat to no end. No avail. No exodus. Her body was a sprained and aching thing, born under an evil star, so had said some. It was hard any longer to hold much to disagreement. Slowly, suddenly, all at once, each one of her ancestors had been lost to her. They had withered away to dirt and dust or had been swallowed whole like smoke, leaving only a white yawning shell behind of what allegedly had been human. They were all dead, dead, and if she kept up like this, she knew, surely, soonly, she would follow. In some silent way Aika felt she had failed her personhood; she found that she could not quite seem to keep up with the hum and hustle of an everyday life:
She had been a grocery clerk; not a good one. Then she’d studied medicine and had worked, for a time, as a pharmacist. Her condition had worsened greatly not long after– the intense pain and fatigue she felt from wobbling around on her two black and unsteady feet had forced her into a kind of premature retirement. Now, she begged for virtually everything that she had, doing all that she could only to live for another sleepy day in this country town. The small sum of money– the collective effort sustained after years and generations of grueling labor– that she’d inherited was quickly running out; she was quickly running out of time. She should have been scrambling. She should have been stood again in the streets just this very evening, hopped up on caffeine and feigned confidence. Once more soliciting for change, once more working in any vain attempt to accomplish something more than the nakedest survival. But, truthfully, Aika was exhausted.
This place, the line where the growing grey of industrialisation rumbled and roared into green, seemed her only reconciliation, her only salvation. One last remaining old world wonder, wild and precious; this American forest.
Leaning heavy on her cane, that small lifeline, she studied the trees. The way their leaves seemed to shift and sway in perfect rhythm with her breath, how they covered her, shielded her like a blanket. She took a shaky step forward and thought instantly of her brother. Oh, her brother:
How he’d lived and thrashed and perished every day in purgatory, downing energy drinks as though they might go out of style, absorbing them as a fish breathes by way of water. How when he slept– as he often did whenever he was out of work– he merely did so restlessly, starvingly. The way one normally does only when overcome by the cold. How she’d never, never seen him smile. Not once in the four-and-a-half little decades that he had been here. How, when finally he’d succumbed, the modern world had known absolutely nothing of him at all. It did not remember him. It hadn’t cared, it never would.
This was a pattern that she mimicked now, pace-for-pace, step-for-step. But she could not bear to live this way, could not stand alone like this any more. She moved quicker, now; her feet knew where they were going all on their own, it seemed.
Aika stood soon before the kicking river; she felt its delicious spray peck at her face, her nose. Affection, sex, at last from a lover that she had never before come to know. Finally she was going to jump in. Let it eat her, consume this wretched body bite by bite. She took one final wavering breath, the walking stick that had held her all these years capsizing, falling into the sweet dirt as her legs extended and she flew.
And yet. She did not splash. Did not die.
The Earth sang and spun round as something in her shifted. Those faithful socks she’d always worn: black, white, full of holes, wormed their way around her, became some new appendage. A tail. The grey of her sweater meshed like mud, clay, with her breasts; a thick ruff of winter fur entangled her neck. Her feet finally made sense. The dark nocturnal circles that had always ringed her eyes with such perfect precision at last had use, as paint they spread over her face. She was pale and starlike, wind and whiskers. A beautiful dancing thing.
And she made a noise. A shriek-laugh. A clatter-cry. Something between madness and mayhem and music. Everything was finally right. It was food and green and good.
Aika screamed like a bird, sigh-snarled like a snake at this town that had tried to tame her. It was behind her now, as dead and gone as the pain that had once devoured her; the one that had teased her, taunted her– that had told her she didn’t walk right. Everything she’d been and done and gone was back there in that city. She could shed it now, shred it up. Rip it out with the teeth of the heart that beat now in her throat. Hell. She had been there, lived there. Now she was free. God Almighty, she was free at last. Over the empty, all was new.
Aika had jumped in; she had jumped over the river. And she had landed, preciously, perfectly, upon the other side.
She squealed, snickered. And ran off.