Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

mama sees fear in my eyes. clasps my hands. “Equi, you’re safe here. No one’s going to hurt you. Don’t you know who they are?”

point again. shake my head, no words. back away. hold on to the tree. men step closer, then stop. one of them eases a sack off his shoulder, rests it on the dirt at his feet. light hits the globe sticking out of his sack, my legs go slack.

“my… my… headg-g-g-ear,” i stammer. slide down the tree with trembling knees.

mama squats down, looks me in the eye.

it’s as if the metal spiders have stolen my tongue again. i croak out strange, broken sounds. my hands fly around my face, fluttering over the wounds, trying to show mama what my mouth can’t say. i see them over mama’s shoulder. they don’t move. they don’t move.

mama shakes me softly, begs, “Equi, please, these are your children. They have been waiting for you all their lives.”

hurt shadows their faces. my children? the question pokes at my chest, tries to pierce my panic. have my boys grown up to be so like my attackers? my skinny, scabby sons whose hunger drove me Under? mine? could these big, frightening men be mine?

mama speaks again, all the softness gone. “Equi, don’t do this!”

mama knows, has always known, what i’m going to do before i do it. she knew i was pregnant before the pain in my breasts sent me to the doctor. knew i was going Under before i told her i’d signed up for training. knows what my face looks like when i’m ready to run.

“Equi!” mama’s voice reaches me, but i can’t focus on her now. grip her without seeing her. my heart beats wild against her bony chest. she doesn’t ask me to go near them, she just says my name over and over and over again.

only for mama, i look at them again. only for mama, i try to find myself in their faces. but these are strange creatures, not children. i can’t bear to look in their eyes. i look instead at their hands. try to judge the size of their fists. wonder if their hands know the weight of metal spiders, if their cheeks know the bulge of the pasty white drug. i chance a glance at their faces—what do they know that mama doesn’t?

fear pants just behind my ear. she doesn’t know what they do at night , fear whispers to me. she trusts them but she doesn’t know . my eyes fall on the shiny globe of my headgear. my headgear. other than mama, it is the only thing that makes sense on the Surface.

i can feel it already, the water. i can feel its pull, its weight, its silence. i look at mama. in that half second, my eyes tell her what my mouth cannot. my eyes beg forgiveness, they weep for my wounds and flash my guilt. then i squeeze mama tight. i don’t look at her when i push her away. i don’t stop to see if she fell or if she’s panic-stricken. i am in flight. i let the urge to flee have me. scramble across the dirt, crab-like. grab my headgear from the sack without another look at the man-children. no more spiders and needles, no more metal disks and memories. no more NewsNet and mumblers. no more home.

run. reach the space where the buildings meet. don’t look back. block out those hurt, angry faces. block out mama’s pain. scratch my skin on the stone buildings. run wildly. listen to the echo of my breath. listen to my feet pounding. run. feel the tightening in my chest. push people away. startle them. don’t stop. run. turn corners blindly. don’t ask questions. no more words. run.

sweat.

sweat stinging eyes. sweat dripping down neck. calves burning. gray sky. hear a squawk, loud and rough. up. look up. see the great white wings. see the orange feet. see the beak. run harder. follow the bird to water. don’t stop. shove on my headgear. let it lock into the groove in my skin. no suit, no tank. i can make it. need the hush of Under. need to hear the echo of my own breath. need the wet weight of the ocean to erase any trace of home.

The spring that Marie lost her baby, Soho was full of scaffolding. Whenever one stretch of scaffolding would come down, a new configuration would rise up a few feet away. It seemed to Marie, as she strolled beneath the constantly transforming metal frames, that these were ancient bones disguised by peeling paint—the skeleton of some defunct beast that could be dismantled and restructured but never completely destroyed.

That spring was a hazy maze of missed appointments, memory lapses, and sluggishness. Despite the fact that she was remarkably light on her feet for someone so heavy with child, there was no quickness about her. The baby growing inside her made her distracted. Her apartment was perpetually scattered with open books, the kitchen counter littered with ingredients for dishes that were never made, tools from incomplete home improvement projects were left strewn on the floor, and the corners of every room were cluttered with clothes she planned to donate.

Her husband bore the messiness of her downward spiral with a bemused grin. The grin masked his exasperation. He began to lie to her constantly. He lied about how annoyed he was to find a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich on the edge of the bathroom sink. He lied about the inconvenience of always having crushed papers underfoot. But mostly he lied about time.

He cushioned arrival times without revealing that he was infuriated by Marie’s hopeless lateness. At first he exaggerated by only a ten or twenty minutes, but by the end of Marie’s pregnancy he was inflating their arrival times by a few hours. The appointments they kept in those final weeks of pregnancy were due to Steven’s cunning. Marie never noticed his dishonesties; she was too gripped by the bizarre happenings inside her body—the squashed bladder and compromised lungs, the odd pains in her abdomen and hips, the heat rash and heartburn, the otherworldly sensation of a sentient being moving around inside her.

During her third trimester, Marie spent an inordinate amount of time resenting the scaffolding. After living in Soho for four years, she had turned dodging teenagers and tourists into an art form. But the scaffolding disarmed her. It hemmed her in, turning wide, open sidewalks into narrow corridors. She couldn’t dart about, couldn’t zigzag around leisurely shoppers. Steven had heard so many complaints on the topic that he refused to listen to another word. She was left to hate the scaffolding silently, blaming it for everything from her lateness to the anxious tightening in her chest that flared whenever she had to navigate around strollers and slowpokes.

Mostly she resented the scaffolding for stealing her sunshine. The winter had been hell: the coats, struggling with layers, the flashes of sweat that engulfed her when she was finally all bundled up. When she started seeing the sun, and feeling warmth when she pressed her hand to the windowpane, all she wanted to do was go outside and let it soak into her skin. She would smile anticipating the flush of the sun’s rays on her cheeks as she leisurely strolled to her appointments. But the sunny meanderings she longed for would rarely materialize. She would waste time reorganizing her file cabinet, cleaning the edges of the kitchen hardware with a Q-tip, or shredding junk mail with a pair of scissors. By the time she left her apartment, strolling was not an option. She had to make a mad dash for a cab as soon as she made her way down her front steps. She would stand in the shadow of the scaffolding, hand raised to hail a cab, with an angry scowl on her face.

Sunshine was not something Marie grew up chasing. Warmth came early in the bayou where Marie grew up, and hung around—thickly—for most of the year. But here, in New York, spring brought a giddy eagerness that Marie knew her brothers would have teased her for feeling. Their teasing, once the torturous backdrop of her childhood, had become the language of their newfound closeness as adults.