Java Sparrow Press

There’s nothing but land – gray and brown – vast and never-ending. Steeps and hills, mountains and below sea-level lands. There is no sea. I am moving without a body, but able to see without eyes. The land could be anywhere but something about it feels like home. Home is a vacant wasteland with a sky that isn’t blue nor is it bright and sunny. Gray without clouds. I have no memory of a dead sky or a land without vegetation or water.

“This is the beginning,” A voice says, the only sound in this eerily silent place that is devoid of any life-form at all. Except me. But I don’t get the feeling that I am life. I’m certainly lacking form yet I can hear and see. “You are the beginning.”

The voice regal and full, round and robust, meant to not only be heard but received and obeyed. It is feminine. Why do I know what feminine is?

“The planet is ready for you. Life is about to begin.”

“Life?” I say, or think, or feel or whatever I do instead of speak.

“There are no life forms on this planet. It is ready for life. You are life. You are not alone. There are many with you.”

“How are WE life? What ARE we?”

“Water. You are water. The land must have water. There will be rivers and sea, ponds and streams, waterfalls and dams – it will rain for a very long time. So long time will cease to exist. You will exist in the water. Life forms will begin in you. The planet is ready for you. Spread out in her. She is expecting you.”

* * * *

I am alive. This is what it feels like to be dead and alive at the same time. No one ever talks about the in between. Limbo, they call it. When you feel dead, you remember dying in some way but still being here in the body feeling the pain of what should be the end. The body is sore, throbbing like a pulsating artery leaking blood with every pumping of the heart. I’m breathing, still. Slow and steady with my shoulders doing work to hold me up, keep the lungs moving, and giving direction to my diaphragm.

Machines burn out after a certain time, don’t they? Like some factory switch makes it go off so a consumer can buy another. Even without electricity, I am still running – a machine without a motor.

* * *

I’ve been dying since I was five years old, the year my mother committed suicide. The snow was just beginning to stick to the ground. I was dressed in layers. The radiator clanked and hissed in the background, like a man was beating on the pipes throughout the two flat apartment building. The hissing of steam signaled the end of my reading from sitting on a cushion on the radiator by the window, and to the kitchen table. Mama was standing at the stove with a mug of something. When she smiled at me, there were tears in her eyes. I put my book down and hugged her legs. She picked me up, kissed my face, and sat me at the table in my chair. She smelled like sweet wine and cigarette smoke.

“Start without me, baby girl. I have to go to the bathroom.”

I dig into my cornbread before the bathroom door even closes.

A gun shot from too close goes off, making me jump so hard my milk spills when I kick my barbie cup off the table. I turn around but don’t leave the table. The bathroom door slams opens against the wall with mama falling to the ground, watching me. It all happens at the same time, seemingly. Tears come out of eyes that don’t blink. The gun is in her hand.

Mama is laid out half on the bathroom floor and half in the small hallway. There’s more blood coming out of her. Her lips move but I can’t hear her. Then her lips stop moving. All of her stops moving.

The floor is filled with blood that feels like a lake to me and I’m scared to get out of my seat. Maybe, I’m going to go to sleep in the blood lake next.

‘Go outside’. A voice without a body says to me. I don’t move. The blood lake is moving like small waves at the beach. Mama said she was going to teach me how to swim. ‘Unlock the back door. Go out the back door.’ The voice says again. I’ve never heard it before. But it’s soft, it sounds like it wants to give me a hug. I move my chair to the back door to take the chain off, then to unlock the bolt which takes my small hand a few turns to get before I can turn it and open it at the same time.

I knock the chair down trying to get out without stepping in blood or milk. The back door is just a small landing then stairs going down. It’s not much of a porch. I stand there and I can see mama looking at where I was. I can still feel her looking at me but not seeing me. She’s not getting up. She’s still not blinking. She doesn’t grab her cigarettes. Her glass of wine is still on the counter top. The plate she’s supposed to be making for herself is still empty and unmade. My food is getting cold. So am I.

My feet are standing on the dusting of snow in December. It’s cold but maybe I can’t feel it because all I can feel is my mother laying on the floor and not getting up even again. ‘Go downstairs. Get help’ the voice says to me again. I don’t move. I hear the voice. It’s a clear as my mother’s voice once was but I’m scared to leave her like that. Alone.

Within minutes large hands grab me up to take me away anyway. It is the last time I see my mother.

When I die the first time, I am having a baby that I can’t deliver. I’m dreaming of a woman having a baby. There’s more blood than baby. She’s dying. I am dying with her. we’re both screaming for help until the scream gets drowned out by the blood coming up in her throat to spill out of her mouth. Then she’s gargling her own blood and choking on it. The pain of pushing a thing that can’t be pushed out has my little body locked up in frozen pain. When the woman dies, so do I. I woke to my grandmother beating me, yelling for me to shut up.

I died twice more before breakfast in dreams of black women who were in their last moments of life.

* *

Night turned into day. Days turn into tomorrow and next year. The past is the present, and the future wraps itself around today. Time is a disjointed limb. Nothing in the mind is ever in order. Some of it isn’t even happening here.

*

That night, the storm began. What I didn’t know then when I stood on that back porch, on top of a dusting of snow which was probably just frost, was that I was the storm.