As it was, it had been the annihilation of a tribe.
Piles of wide eyes, blanched faces, and stiff limbs.
Three years had passed, and I hadn’t been the same since.
Day and night, a constant flow of people surrounded me, never allowing me to be alone and also reminding me of how lonely I had indeed become. I had once read there was a difference between alone and lonely, but somehow my existence could smear these words together into one. People turned their heads, steered their eyes, and shut their jaws when they slipped past me. They not only ignored me, but they also avoided me.
Some did not see me at all.
Mother was right. I didn’t need them. I didn’t need anyone.
However, on days like this, when the shunning became unbearable, I wanted to be alone. Truly alone.
During the mid-summer days, I enjoyed coming to the lake to watch the storms roll. Aside from my sketching, it was entertainment. I’d leave my fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth books under a shady tree and wait until the rain broke apart the pewter sky like a drawing back of curtains in a theater. The earth was the stage upon which musical thunder and rain performed like a symphony.
I was the conductor, and at this moment, the rain was almost here.
I removed my gloves, linen shirt, trousers, and burlap sack from my head. Naked and carefully avoiding my reflection, I sank into the refreshing and remote water.
The lake was like ice against my skin as I floated above the surface. The cold rain came down on my flesh, my face, my lips, and I closed my eyes, imagining them to be fingers. Delicate, adoring, and everywhere, this was how I believed it should feel to be touched by a woman.
So, I floated, imagining the one from my drawings—her face painted on the backs of my eyelids—with the riveting sound of rain piercing the water and pulling me into her embrace. A warmth spread throughout my body, keeping me dizzy and in the moment.
I was tempted to touch myself, the mutilated flesh, the ugliest part of me, but without my gloves, it would only take me back to the memory of three years ago when it had happened. Even with gloves, I couldn’t find pleasure in the thing that reminded me of the night that had become my recurring nightmare.
Nevertheless, this was enough, with my deprivation and imagination keeping me spiraling by her. The rain. The water. The music.
At once, a commotion had come from the woods.
I flinched, recoiling into myself, sinking below the surface, a sudden shamefulness consuming me for feeling an ounce of pleasure. My fingers twitched atop the water, about to take off into a swim to retrieve the burlap sack. But I paused, letting the sheet of rain sweep across my face with one last invigorating kiss.
“What is it?”I asked the handful of women huddled around our cabin. But they all stared. They always stared. I imagined them seasons from now suffering the same fate as I had left the others. If, perhaps, they attempted to bring me to my knees, too.
“Your mother passed on into the next world,”one wept in her native tongue, and it felt as though everything inside me had become cold.
Mother had been sick for some time, and the tribe had done what they could to bring the fever down, but I had selfishly left her alone to swim. All I wanted was a moment of peace.I should have been here.
My vision was fogged, tears welling in my eyes as I pushed through the doorway and fell to her bedside. “No!” I pleaded with a thickness in my throat, taking Mother’s hand. “You’re stronger than death.”
“Her body may be gone, but her spirit is with you,”Hopi confirmed carefully, keeping her distance from me. Even so, her brown eyes still emitted ease and comfort, but nothing could soothe this ache.
How could I go on without Mother? She was all I had.
“No, I detest it,” I said out through gritted teeth, gathering Mother in my arms. I left the small cabin, her feet dangling from one side and her head on the other. She weighed close to nothing. An armful of bones and flesh.
The crowd broke apart as I marched past them into the forest.
I lifted her head and rested it against my chest when a memory from when I was much younger came to me. Ten years of age, perhaps. It was different than seeing the past from touch. This one didn’t live in anything but within me.
It’s nighttime,and I’ve spent the last few hours strolling the muddy streets of Baltimore without a sight of Mother.
As I sit on a bench drawing in my sketchpad, women in starched petticoats point at me, the boy wearing a sack on his head. And men encased in buttoned overcoats, finished off with top hats, stare as they pass me by.
Across the way, inside a home, a father carrying his son snuffs the candle in the window, and it brings a burn to my chest. Then a landau clatters by, its wheels spraying mud and saving me from the heartache. I look down at my drawing which is now dotted with mud.
“This is why I prefer a writing desk and a door,” a voice said.
I freeze, staring down at my drawing, unsure of what to do.
