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Serial Sister

  So she wandered off, leaving the boy, and going toward the blankness of her future.
  The first being that she encountered on her journey was a nut. As soon as she laid eyes on it, she knew what it was because she had seen an old woman who lived alone on the outskirts of her village holding a basket of such nuts - carrying them home. It was well known that the old woman harvested them to eat.
  Sister ate one, for she hadn’t tasted food in many days, and as she ate she had good thoughts and ingested positive dreams. She felt the true and deep significance of all she had done that was right, and it strengthened her to bear the vertigo of inevitability and the inevitability of wrongdoing.
  Eventually, she reached a valley of cool air and the blue stream of her premonition. A broad stream of clean, fresh water. There, she sat down to drink, expecting at any moment to have to carve language with the people of the circular, thatched houses who inhabited the valley. Their entire settlement had the odor of clay.
  But time passed, and her thirst was quenched, and no one joined her. She relaxed, and her relaxation brought memories of her trials as always. She thought of the family she had left, the son, the siblings with whom she had once shared a face, and whom, to her, now looked like strangers. Her body was covered in scars from the mouth of the beast whom she had gone to voluntarily and wed, in order to learn and help.
  It was midday. She was a site of destruction, aching. The orange sun rejoiced and raged. She observed the plump bushes that grew next to the circular houses, each of them blooming with pepper. She rested her back against the trunk of a tall tree that grew next to the blessed stream, and whose leaves were as big as empress’ fans, and she slept.
  A hunter woke her up. She knew him for a hunter by his dog, his charm, and his cutlass. She hoped that he would be able to tell the difference between herself and his prey, for otherwise, she would have to eat him.
  “Speak, that I may know whether or not you be a witch.”
  Sister didn’t say a word. The very worst thing that she could do would be to respond to him in his own language, for she could not have explained to him how she, a stranger, knew it. She was tired. He studied her clothing and her broken shoes.
  “Have you drunk from the river?”
  Subterfuge. She heard it for what it was, and still she could not prevent the harried questions that sprouted from her head. What significance could a river possibly have to a hunter, a dog, and a witch? The world was a minefield of symbols, and there were no right answers. Where else was a creature to find water in this horrid landscape?
  “Stand up and let me look at your ankles.”
  She stood and showed them to him, and from his facial expression, she deduced that they were blameless.
  “Turn back into a fish and swim away,” He advised her. “For if you don’t, they will murder you.”
  There was hope in his voice.
  She said, “Stop giving me orders.”
  She had surprised herself with this remark, but then she was at the end of her tether. His own surprise and awe showed in his slackened jaw. She had not spoken his language, nor had she used her own. She had chosen a third language, which was understood by everybody, but spoken only by very few, most of whom were not human. But these facts exhausted her.
  “Kill me, if you want,” she said to the hunter. “No one will avenge my death, for I have wandered far from home.”

  Sister had been in flight. The time came when it began to seem foolish to her not to acknowledge this. But he and the other people who were with him were helpless, and she had discovered that there was nothing sacred about the river.
  She, at least, could speak to time and understand the seasons, the five-spokes on the axle of the year. These villagers, like so many others, were hanging themselves with their amulets.
  The hunter refrained from showing her violence and brought her to the home of a learned woman. This woman could tell by looking at her face that she had given birth in the last year, but as she had studied books, she could not have told to what. The woman lived alone, and Sister suspected that she treated the villagers’ spiritual ailments and did so poorly.
  It was sunset when the hunter left her at this woman’s dwelling, and she was wrong about something. She had assumed that the reason why the hunter did not harm her was because he believed her to be a witch and was frightened. But in reality he knew her to be a witch and also knew what that meant. His mother was a witch, and now she spoke to him from beyond the grave. Because he knew that the dead live in us, he practiced his own, layperson’s magic, which was that of hospitality. He was not frightened.
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  The house of the learned woman, who had taken a liking to Sister, was full of tall, wooden figures. Ebony. They were all roughly the same - relatively short arms and legs, splendidly plaited hair, disproportionately large heads, and very frightened expressions. Their stances and the glamorousness of their hair did not match their apparent fright, which led Sister to believe that the fear with which the artist had chosen to imbue them was not an abstraction, but rather intended to strike the viewer as a natural feature, graven onto their faces by the circumstances in which they had found themselves often and historically, and in which their ancestors had found themselves often and historically. This was something that Sister could deeply understand. The sculptures were a species. That was the way she thought of them.
  Nevertheless, she didn’t feel she could stay in that place all night. The learned woman, as all learned women do, talked incessantly in her sleep, and what she said was gibberish. Sister listened to her quiet nonsense for over an hour, and what she apprehended during that time was that since she had left home and, before that, since her trials, she had been participating in a different kind of conversation: one that could be called the chatter of the ground and the constellations. But the chatter of the ground and the constellations wasn’t talk. In fact, it was total silence.
  Yes - it was a form of rest. Curiously, Sister reflected, human beings who had not faced the kinds of hardships that she had faced - who had not been objects of torture and humiliation - found it almost impossibly difficult to rest. And there was a third kind of person - but she could not allow herself to recollect him or indeed what, through him, she had become.
  When Sister was certain that the learned woman had lost herself within the infinite library of her dreamworld, she took on her true, or rather her truest form, and flew out through her small fold of an entrance. Creating a little lightning for a while, she hurtled and tore her way across the heavens, and then she sank back down to the earth and remade herself a human body using reddish soil.
  When she had made it, she came alive slowly and stood up in it and bathed it. It was not identical to her previous body, she observed while washing the arms - they never were - but the same could be said for everybody in every moment, and it would suffice. She was free. Her own ankles hypnotized her on the bank of the river. She adored her joints and found them so surprising. They held everything together and let it move.
  And then there was the splendor and false magic of the river. If it really was a deity, Sister felt, then it would have spoken to her. But it was just beautiful, and beauty, she had learned, was not a divinity, but a logic - in fact, the only logic. It was still worthy of reverence and worship, like ugliness. The villagers, if indeed they did worship the beauty in the river, were right about that. But beauty couldn’t speak.
  Sister stepped back into the water, and let its coolness zap her new skin. She sank down in it up to her neck. Its current was slow, and it was easy for her to anchor herself to footholds along the bank, slimy though they were. From above, because of the moonlight, the water had resembled sheets of white brass. But from down here, it appeared black and green.
  She had been thinking of white brass because earlier she had noticed that the hunter’s amulet was made of that metal, though there was no sign of a smithy in the village. She suspected that the hunter had constructed it himself out of something he had purchased from traders.
  The amulet had had what appeared to be a lid and probably contained some plant matter, or a poultice, or a charm. It was carved and dotted with a very fine pattern and also likely spoke a language of its own to the wearer. She had once worn amulets like that, made by her siblings, and had made some for them. Of course, she was a child then and she had not consciously known what she was doing. She was simply following the example of her forbears, just as they followed the examples of theirs. Probably, this was why her own amulets had not worked.
  But things were a little bit different now. Her son had not worn one when she left him, which was very unusual for babies from their region. Due to his paternity, there was a quiet assumption that such things would be useless to him, and perhaps that was the case, but Sister hadn’t wanted to find out. To the person whom she thought she was now, virtually any outcome would appear to be a tragedy.
  Of course, she could only have thoughts like these when she was in her human form, and that was a drawback. She gripped the harrowed roots of the tree against which she had rested earlier that day and pulled herself out of the river. She felt a diaphanous sense of loneliness. She had left her clothing in the house of the learned woman in case she wanted to go back, but she decided against it.
  She had a particular way of dealing with people, and it was not from loneliness. Loneliness turned everyone into dust, into gauze. It was itself a delicate emotion. Sister shuddered, and then she went to find something to eat.
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  The learned woman had a dream, which she was not to recollect when she woke up a few hours later with the Sun. In the dream was a creature like a man, who had no irises. The man or creature’s pupils were shaped like stars - no, rather like diamonds - and he was talking to her in an insistent way.
  The man related in words that the learned woman would not remember - in fact in verses, tired verses - all that had taken place between himself and Sister when she was mortal. He told of how it had happened and his role in it and the effect of the calamity on her siblings, all of which was absolutely execrable. And then he went to bed in a gurgling, seething, red-and-black mire that the learned woman could neither understand nor tolerate, and then, gradually and with warmth in her heart, she woke up.
  All day, the learned woman would have trouble focusing her memory on the songs and recipes that she had learned by rote as an adolescent, and which were her trade, but this loss would not begin to bother her for many, many weeks. By then, Sister was far away in the wooded portion of the valley, through which she had first journeyed to find the village of round houses. These were not like the forests in the region where she was raised. Those forests were dense, dark, and wet. Their floors were perpetually covered in dew. As children, they used to make a dare out of walking through them barefoot and hoping not to be stung by arachnids, including the glimmering, blue scorpions whose venom was deadly.
  The arrangement of the trees there had a way of muffling or rather stifling sound, of stifling speech deep in the body… Those dares and their pathway into silence were probably Sister’s first contact with the divine. As she thought about the jungle and her childhood, Sister realized that somebody was trying to speak to her from a great distance. She was aware of a certain hollowness in her mind, and that hollowness was producing and reproducing a strange echo, in which she could just discern halves of sentences. It was an illusion, of course, but that was the way that these kinds of communications tended to arrive.
  When she was mortal, such fancies were a common occurrence for almost everyone. Hearing your name in an empty room was thought to be a type of curse or an evil invitation. Curses, of course, were a part of life. But in Sister's current state of being, such communications carried a different valence.
  She stopped walking. It was a hot, quiet morning. Though she would be invisible to all but the most pure-hearted of mortals, she wished that she still had her clothes. There was only one being whom she knew who could speak to her like this and who spoke in words. Most mortals couldn’t reach her. The other divinities in the universe were not her friends. Not one of them had acknowledged her existence. It would be impossible for many of them ever to acknowledge it, Sister inferred, because they were not made to sustain such a change as an addition to their number, or really any kind of change.
  She had happened, as she understood in her clearest and most sorrowful moments, by a twist of fate. Her destiny, as she saw it, was no longer to be a being that existed because others did, but instead, hereafter, an occurrence in a vacuum. She was cursed to interact only with her catalyst, and that only once in her lifetime - or so she had hoped. Incredibly, he was here.
  Sister leaned her back against a slender tree whose bark was like silk and wailed. She wailed because she believed that she would never be free. She would and could never be free from the influence of the demon with diamond-shaped pupils who made covenants with mortals - even children. Especially children.
  She cursed the day that she had entered the cavern where he lived - a compound with no entrance, inside of a hill. Its walls had shone like sapphires, and she had been sure of herself. She would have staked her life on her own intelligence and bravery, but, as it turned out, she was a girl who knew nothing about malice. She was a parable, a fairytale.
  In the learned woman’s dream, Sister had been forced to bear a child she didn’t want - if indeed it could be called a child - but, in reality, that was the least of Sister’s trials.

  The child was growing unusually fast, which made him almost impossible to love. There was nothing that Sister’s three siblings would not do for her, however. They did love him, and as such they had named him Ẹde - secret. What was strange about this boy - one of the many things - was that he had no questions about what the world was and how he had come to be. On the contrary, he accepted every new phase of his life and every occurrence as though he had ordered it.
  All of Sister’s siblings had the same name - Etin. He never asked why that was the case, and he never had trouble determining who was being addressed or referred to. The youngest Etin, Three-Etin, who was one or two years older than Sister, had a theory about it. To her, it seemed obvious. Such cases were outlined in their cosmogony.
  The boy had clearly been to Earth before, and not in the sense in which that was true for other children, who were conceived in the heads of one of the other of their parents before they were conceived in reality. The boy was actually here. Very likely, he had existed as a shadow, or as a pair of eyes - as something innocuous. But, whatever he was, he had watched closely and bided his time.
  It had taken all of her strength not to ask the question of which she was sure he knew the answer. He seemed to be speaking to someone in his quiet moments. She didn’t ask it, but she thought it. Where is your mother?
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  The hunter desired luck and wealth as much as anyone, and so he built the trap. And then he walked with it in the gray and red forest, ringing a bell which he felt it unlikely that Sister would respond to, but which he had been taught and shown would deter other spirits. The mystery of the bell was that he who rang it was also always inevitably, in his own way, a spirit - that is, one who called. He must always, somehow, attract something or the other, no matter how lowly he was. The hunter knew of a proverb which said, ‘God is what attracts.’
  Shortly, he found Sister crying alone in the moonlight. She had wrapped both arms around the truck of a great, old tree. The tree was black and riven in ten thousand places. The hunter immediately made himself known and put away the trap.
  He didn’t ask her what had befallen her, for that would have been to risk a covenant - but then, in the end, he had to risk a covenant anyway by offering her a cloth to tie around her body. It was a white fabric with a red and black print. It was a fabric used for mourning. The black portions of the print constituted alternating rows of shields and hearts, minuscule ones, decorated with blood-red rings. The darker colors were so potent, despite the age of the fabric, that the white sections, the background, appeared light blue.
  Sister tied it firmly around her chest, as anyone from his own village would have done.
  And then she said, “You have to run. He is coming.”
  The gray tide marks on her cheeks were like scarifications.
  “Who?” The hunter asked, in spite of his better judgement.
  “The one who lives in the hill.”
  He misheard her. He thought she had said, the one who lives in hell, for the words were similar in his language.
  “Who is He?”
  “Don’t you know Him?”
  “No… Why are you so frightened?”
  “I lived with Him. You all must save yourselves.”
  The hunter thought of leaving the only home that he had ever known. Though he considered Sister to be honest, he simply didn’t believe in such a perversion of his life path.
  “He is pursuing you.” The hunter guessed. “What does he want?”
  He suspected that what the man from the hill wanted was vengeance.
  “Vengeance,” Said Sister.
  “For what?”
  If this god was a thief, then he wanted nothing to do with her. There were grudges that could last for all eternity, righteous grudges that, creating chaos in the realm where emotions were born, plagued and distorted the lives of the mortal.
  “I think that I shamed him.”
  The hunter reflected that her statement could mean many things. There were some possible definitions which he shuddered to contemplate, others which he was sure were outside of the realm of his conception. The hunter touched his amulet and shivered.
  “I may be able to help you. And I may not.”
  “No mortal can. The evil One wants another child.”
  “He has one?”
  “Yes. I am the child’s mother.”
  When she said so, the hunter fancied that a greenish radiance sparked from all her limbs. He started.
  “Why does he want another?” He asked, to conceal his terror.
  “Because he cannot go near the first.”
  The hunter feared the worst: that Sister had had to kill their child in order to preserve her own life.
  “Why not?”
  The hunter saw, to his surprise, that Sister was unable to answer. The silvery light bounced across the landscapes of the forest like a lynx, but the hunter was asleep to those wonders because he was very deep in thought. If Sister represented a grudge, then there could be no saving her, but on the other hand, there was no room within the hunter’s ontology for chance encounters.
  This affirmed for him something that he had felt to be true since the age of his earliest memories. Time was so old that perhaps no person who was born of two other people could be free of all curses. His family’s curse, or rather the curse of his line - so he had always suspected - was to be a stepping stone. That was the connotation of his own mother’s secret name, the name under which she had rendered her services - ‘the links,’ meaning the links of destiny. Their fate was always to help the helpless, even if it led to their own ruin.
  His mother, when she was forty, had made a philter for a wealthy woman, and the woman had lost her fetus, which was her desire. The woman had been married to a foreigner from a noble family, who had wanted to take her away to his own region, counter to the custom in the village where the hunter lived. Though she was deeply in love, the wealthy woman had been frightened of doing what no one in her matrilineage had ever done. But when it was discovered that she was no longer pregnant, the noble foreigner had made threats of war and had promised to enslave the villagers, unless his mother, the witch, was driven out of the village.
  They had driven the hunter’s mother out to the mountains in the middle of the deliberations, so as to take those who might wish to defend her by surprise. The culpable would not admit that she had died in the process, and so the hunter and his father and his father’s uterine sister had searched for her for months. His father must have found something. At the beginning of the dry season, he had committed suicide, leaving the hunter to be raised by his aunt among their enemies. But it had been twenty years, and the hunter’s aunt and many of those responsible for the tragedy had died.
  The woman who had refused to have a child had turned to study. The foreigner departed, leaving her with many texts that he had given to her as gifts during their period of happiness. She never remarried, of course. She felt it was her duty to try to fill the void which she accused herself of having created, for in the village there was no longer anyone who could tend to the ill, and in particular the mentally ill or those who suffered in spirit.
  She was not such a gifted healer as the witch had been, but over the years the hunter grasped her design, and he admired her for it.
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