Solar Storms

I don’t know how to measure love. Not by cup or bowl, not in distance either, but that’s what rose from the pot as steam, that was the food taken into our bodies. It was the holy sacrament of you we ate that day, so don’t think you were never loved.

The curse on that poor girl’s life came from watching the desperate people of her tribe die. [...] That was how one day she became the one who hurt others. It was passed down.

From the first time I saw Bush, I knew she, like myself, understood such loneliness. She, too, had only thin, transient bonds to other people, having grown up on the outskirts of their lives.

By then I knew what she meant. Indifferent elements, and cold. She meant that a person can’t blame the wind for how it blows and Hannah was like that. She wanted me to know that what possessed my mother was a force as real as wind, as strong as ice, as common as winter.

Those dreams of mine, if that’s what they were, lived inside the land. Maybe dreams are earth’s visions, I thought, earth’s expressions that pass through us. Although sometimes, to make myself seem larger than I was, I liked to think I had visions.

And one day, as I sat close to him in the truck, Tommy touched my face and said, “Tell me about the scars.”

I looked at him. I thought how I’d asked Bush about my scars. I thought of the last time I’d seen myself in the little piece of mirror in my bedroom. I thought how scars were proof of healing. “What scars?” I said.

I thought how different my own people were from the ones I’d lived with in Oklahoma. Here, sleeping with a man wasn’t an offense. True sin had nothing to do with love; it consisted of crimes against nature and life.

Death had tricked us. Dora-Rouge’s life would be unbearable after Agnes’ death. And she blamed herself. It was only later that I learned how she believed Agnes’ death was part of the deal she’d made with water.

But the domain of gods and spirits and demons was larger than that of humans, even now, and the men were satisfied, even to be locked up, knowing they had returned the world to a kind of balance: they had made the world right for their people, for seasons and thaws.

It was so others could live that they did this, and I’ve thought about it for years. Wars are fought for far less than this.

Her desperation and loneliness was my beginning. Hannah had been my poison, my life, my sweetness and pain, my beauty and homeliness. And when she died, I knew that I had survived in the best of ways for I was filled with grief and compassion.

She found a knife on one of the boys, put it in her pocket, and threw their liquor out, emptying their cups on the ground. One of them cried and wanted to stop her. But she herself was crying. “No,” she said. “No more.”

And Bush told them gently to come back sober. “Tomorrow,” she said. “We need you. We really do.”

The next day they were there.