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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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