The Place beneath Falling Stars
(novel except)
My grandmother stood differently after she saw the world end. Those who remember say before, my grandmother looked as though she were a fairy merely alit upon the earth who might be blown away by the next breeze. Only one foot would anchor her – the other seemed always to be drawing patterns in the dirt. Her fingers even fluttered a little as they hung at her sides as though the wind had the power to stir them.
But since then, she stands solidly in place, both feet flat against the ground, both hands at her hips, her head always raised; eyes watching the horizon. She looks to the distance then looks at me, looks off to the wayfaring sun then back at me, considers the quickening moon and studies my face. For sixteen years, I’ve grown up watching her gaze move fluidly from tender, when I’m its subject, to fiercely alert when she looks off into tomorrow.
She presses her fingertips more firmly into her pelvic bones, wrinkling the symbols woven into her robe, and looks down to where I am kneeling on the forest floor in my farm plot. I have intercropped twenty plants, and I seek the last sown. They await me under sallow gold nightbloomers clenched tightly as sullen mouths against the evening light. They have risen, their slender stems a green barely more opaque than the iris of an eye, covered with fine hair like mammalian skin. Mbuya’s Flower. They are named for my other grandmother, my Grandmother Nour’s slain co-wife, who created them. Unaltered, they spring up a mass of sharp double-triangle petaled flowers, fair blue diamonds that look like the stretched open mouths of baby birds. You see them and think you hear cries. I’ve always imagined a series of “whys?” But these here in my plot are my transformed version of her creation, hybridized until six times the original amount of petals form a circle around the calyx. My flowers suggest sound, too: a revelation’s “oh.”
Brewed into tea, Mbuya’s Flower gives you an energy slow to kindle, slow to fade like a melody laboriously fixed in the memory and hard filtered from it. I’m trying to create a version whose effects are concentrated within the span of a day. I push the nightbloomers farther back, so Grandmother can see. She nods down at me.
“That’s good, Yaa. They came up. That’s the first thing, little girl. Now you’ll just have to test them and see if they work the way you want and if they’ll reproduce.” She turns her attention from me back to the far off.
“Thank you,” I whisper to the forest, hooking my index finger around the stems of several close grown plants and snapping them free.
I go with Grandmother out of the woods back to her home. I live with my parents but am often three houses down in our family compound with Grandmother. She is twice widowed, having survived both my grandfather and my other grandmother, and death seems to render stark and over-bright the round, white-resined, earthen walls of her one-room home. The white has a merciless purity, is under-tarnished. The hard dirt floor is swept rarely, its smooth darkness little troubled by footprints. There is an expectancy within her eight-hundred-year-old walls as though the air is poised for a call and a reply. Grandmother opens her carved ebony door, and I prepare to build a fire for the experimental tea. I lay the flowers on the floor. Too casually gathered to be a bouquet, they seem like wilted sky fallen through the smoke hole of her thatched roof. Grandmother looks at them for a moment, then goes to retrieve a portrait from where it lies face down on a small hibiscus wood table.
My grandmother holds the photograph of my other grandmother delicately, without touching the surface, the fingertips of each hand pressed against the edges of the portrait. “She would have loved you,” my grandmother always says of her to me, and the assurance of her love has always summoned the reciprocation of my own. In the picture, she is robed with keen simplicity. Her hair is in squash blossoms, bordered with cornrows, glinting with gold chains fine enough to have been spun by spiders. The photograph is sepia. Loss seems intrinsic to sepia to me. I imagine if you looked at a sepia photograph of someone still living, it would seem marked by the past perfect tense.
There is a riddle to photographs. Some make their subjects look as though they are caught behind glass, inaccessible and silenced. Others render their people suspended, stilled as though waiting to be hailed like a saint statue in a shrine, listening for your call, ripe for weeping for you. It is not the photographer who determines on which side of the dichotomy the subject falls. It is not the sitter – or the captured – either. Something within the subject dictates which type of picture she will be, and it’s something intrinsic and beyond her power to disguise or alter. The wonder of pictures is this – some people look as though they are alive forever in them, as though when you turn away they turn as well and return to their business in a world to be found within, beyond the paper, and when you turn back, they turn back, smiling at you, waiting to be retrieved. Some people in pictures can be summoned. But my other grandmother – like a hand raised too quickly for the shutter to capture or the blurred beating of wings – she looks as though she is already gone.
This is so fluid and seamless…and reads almost like a song. Wow.
‘Brewed lightly, it’s the color of twilight; the longer you steep it, the more it approaches dusk.’
‘The photograph is sepia. Loss seems intrinsic to sepia to me. I imagine if you looked at a sepia photograph of someone still living, it would seem marked by the past perfect tense.’
‘There is a riddle to photographs. Some make their subjects look as though they are caught behind glass, inaccessible and silenced.’
Those lines are really, really beautiful and vivid.
Well done. I really enjoyed reading this.
D’accord! This is writing at its most rarified. Very exquisite level of delivery and a mastery in the rendering.