Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

George and WaLiLa lay quiet. WaLiLa wiggled her fingers & toes, & smiled. She was still alive—George believed! He believed in the ancestors, and this belief begat a new cycle of life. George felt a warm glow in the base of his belly. At this moment, he knew he was complete. He did not know about the healing touch. He smiled thinking he had found his better half in WaLiLa. With her , he thought, I can be whole . He did not know that this feeling was his. In exchange for his belief, WaLiLa had passed this completeness to him through his navel from the center of her being. He now owned this feeling, & tomorrow, when he called his mother, he would call her as a complete being, not expecting the successes of his life to be dependent upon her. Next week when his medical project failed, he would fail as a complete being, not granting his failure to his thesis partner. And next month when he found a lover, he would come to her whole, expecting not fulfillment, but love. WaLiLa had given George back to himself. Absolved him from guilt & pettiness. Freed him to really be. George closed his eyes & began to drift off into sleep when he felt WaLiLa shift underneath him.

“What?” he murmured.

“I… I must go,” WaLiLa stammered. “Out I must go. I need have air fresh.”

“Now?” George asked worried.

“Yes.” WaLiLa wiped moisture from her eyes.

At George’s insistence, they walked outside together under the canopy of the cluttered night sky. His concern for her safety made WaLiLa smile. Full with the moon & star constellations, the sky was calling her. WaLiLa knew her time was up, but she felt her connection to George still tugging at her hips. She glanced at him. He was walking slowly with his head thrown back, caught under the sky’s spell. WaLiLa lowered her head and wondered how George would react to her departure. He won’t remember , she consoled herself, and concentrated on how it felt to be with him.

As their feet propelled them forward, they began to discuss stars & spirits & where it was exactly that the ancestors dwelled. Whoosh—a moth fluttered between them. George caught an anguished look on WaLiLa’s face. Two more moths flew by & took George’s attention. Soon a steady stream of moths were flying between them. So taken was he with this miracle of nature, he did not notice that WaLiLa had stopped walking.

George turned to utter some phrase of amazement, and found that WaLiLa was not there. He looked back and saw her, standing in the misty night air with her eyes closed, her body eerily still. The moths were attaching themselves to her body, softly and gently. Her hands were open, palms tilted upward in a gesture of acceptance. George ran to her and began to frantically brush the moths off her body. But as he removed one, two more would replace it, until WaLiLa’s body was completely covered. He could no longer see his hands. George’s fingers were shaking in disbelief. The moths!

Staring at WaLiLa’s moth-clad body, George shook his hands free of moths. WaLiLa’s arms floated upward, and in a graceful motion, began performing some kind of entranced dance; her body began to sway. In moments, George could see the flapping of one, two, then thousands of moth wings. Eventually, they took flight, leaving George stooped in the middle of the street, alone except for a pile of moth’s wings marking the place where WaLiLa had been standing.

At twilight, when the earth is settling down for rest, MalKai is turning over inside. The colors of dusk pierce him like a rusty pin breaking skin. Yellow gets him in the gut. Auggghhh. It is the color of his home skies. Orange knocks him in the temple. Hhhhhhh. It is the color of his soil. Rose pushes against his heart. It is, like here, the color of love. MalKai’s spirit groans with aching for home. Nothing can soothe him. He spends his hours speaking the words. He has little use for human languages, but he feels the moan, he understands the feeling she sings about. The wail in that woman’s voice wraps itself around his loneliness and strokes his painful yearning to be among his people. He spends hours speaking the words, but in his own language: shoulder shrug, cheek rub against shoulder, body slump.

The buzzing that had settled in Cori’s ears over the past couple of days was MalKai coming to get him. When the first “zzzzzz” licked his ear drums, Cori had swatted at the air around his newly-pierced ear lobes. A meddlesome mosquito—he imagined—hovering near. He made repeated attempts to shoo it away, but his arms soon grew tired. His shoulder ached from throwing his biceps into repeated attack arcs. His fist grew bored of finding no tender little bug crushed in its grasp. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and rescinded the attack.

Like any constant noise will, the buzzing eventually disappeared from Cori’s consciousness. Seeing MalKai’s frame draped in a relaxed stance at the base of a huge sycamore brought the “zzzzzz” back into Cori’s awareness. The sound reconstructed itself gradually, like the pieces of a forgotten dream slowly becoming crystal clear. Cori didn’t connect MalKai with the buzzing. He peeked at MalKai’s body out of the corner of his eyes while biting at his lower lip. What Cori discerned through the thick of his lashes was a mass of pulsating energy. Cori felt it radiating from MalKai in waves. It buzzed around MalKai’s form, building a composite of legs, arms, and wings. Wings? Cori flipped his head quickly to face MalKai as though to catch a culprit in the act of thievery. All he saw was MalKai’s brown body swaying back and forth in slow motion like a heavy fruit ready to drop to the earth. No wings. Cori dismissed his vision as a hallucination induced by the sun’s glare. He lifted his hand to his forehead and brought much needed shade to his eyes.

When Cori walked past MalKai, the buzzing exploded in his eardrums with a boom. Cori stopped short. The hair on the back of his legs felt like it was on fire. In the pit of his belly a million atoms danced a nervous rumba. His heart threw itself into convulsions, but he couldn’t look back. He felt if he looked back the zzzzzz would take over his brain and push him into insanity. He put his thumb between his lips, gnawed on his skin, and begged for his legs to unlock so he could walk away.

Though MalKai’s skin might have felt like the brush of a thousand humming wings, it sheathed a strong solid body that could not be crushed with a smack. MalKai’s mouth was used for sucking, but not for sucking blood. The tongue housed in MalKai’s mouth was flat and thick and warm, quite contrary to the mosquito’s hollow tube. And the swell of a mosquito bite?—Negligent when compared to the swelling of the soul triggered by contact with MalKai’s lips.

The soft brush of something against Cori’s skin roused him from his frozen stance. It wasn’t a mosquito that had been flying around Cori’s ears, as he had first imagined; it was a moth. Cori automatically responded to the moth’s flirtatious touch with a shoulder jerk and an ear swat. MalKai, who had been morosely passing time under the sycamore’s shade, straightened and focused when his eyes registered Cori’s motions. Those involuntary movements spoke volumes to MalKai; in MalKai’s language, Cori had just whispered come on in.