Looking back, he attempted to resolve a two thousand year old grandmother whose heal he’d seen rise and disappear over a cracked and wormeaten threshold.
Maybe she’d held a bird in her hand. Maybe she’d called and the sons and daughters had dashed off and out of ear shot to frighten her or make her believe even more in ghosts. Maybe there had been weeds erected like wires in the porch cracks. Had she approached down that hallway he remembered whose far, sunlit portal had seemed so remote and blurry. What is the distance between one thousand years and yesterday?
Dragons, she’d answered.
Everyone has experience high winds, everyone has a sense of death when wriggling in the claws of a giant bird who’s swooped in to snatch at the screaming village children, everyone has suspected poison in the pools that appear after the clouds have broken against the mountains, and everyone has waited for that thing to appear out of the woods just moments after the leaves have rustled. Everyone will fall in love.
Expressions for which his father had his own answer. Brief, reasoned, accompanied by charts. His grandmother had refused to weep. Instead, she had taken and burned his papers in the fireplace. She turned to his crazed smile and said, That’s how I make ash.
You don’t see a bird in your hand, he said. What you have is dry rook wings in a jar, a waymark at the edge of the world, or the echoes of love, which reminds me of night. When you imagine it in Russian, it’s yellow; in Spanish, it’s red; and if you happen to speak Mongolian it will become yakbrown and it’ll scuttle off like a victim of poorly planned transplants. You know the ones, the ones with an arm where their ear should be.
Such was the father’s calculation. But he had his own calculation. If you were a monument, you’d attract a thousand violations, not too few bird splats.
God, his father said, the irony of what you say.
When the mule fell in love and forgot his work, she herself hoisted the yoke and sounded the ground for heartbeat, sowed next and next year’s suppers, dreamed the graves of her children (the knowing know why). When the frogs erupted in the shadows, she watched the sun enlarge like a bloody eye, and was that a purple star smashing against an orange to make what my son calls gas?
He cut his hand making a sandwich. Yes, he heard, she made her own bread, but god how it tasted like wood, god how it churned up the plague in our guts. How had it come to him in these foreshortened years, tinkling chips onto the plate, that the birds were smaller and not a dragon had been seen in these climes for centuries? Out of that blurry distance, he saw her emerge, that two thousand year old, smiling grandmother, young and lovely, and this her future.
