Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

I remember watching her touch the tall grasses, singing to them as they drifted under her fingers. The image of the kelp beds dancing under Pahe Pahe’s song come to me, and I see that my mother, like Pahe Pahe, is singing to the grasses of the earth. Her song makes magic as she pulls certain grasses from the earth and begins to pass them through her teeth. “The grass needs to be softened before it can take the shape of the basket,” my mother says. Some grasses make the journey through her mouth, others remain undisturbed. “We save some for next year so that there will always be baskets for the coming seasons….” I can hear her voice so clearly, so sweetly, that even in my mind, after I have spent all this time locked away in a laboratory that keeps me alive for my blood, I feel her strength seep into my bones.

Her fingers shape the tough grasses, softened by her mouth, into a knot of a cross. “This is the heart, the beginning, of any basket,” she says. My fingers, tiny, follow hers, moving the softer pieces between the tougher ones, her patient and loving hands guiding mine. “Baskets hold water, seeds, grass, even babies. The baskets hold our hearts, keep us connected to the earth, to the sky, to the sea, to one another….” Her hands are gentle as she guides mine, and when I am finished, my basket is lopsided, uneven, filled with little holes. My mother laughs and holds it up to the sun. “This one is good for collecting acorns,” she says, her smile coloring her voice. “We’ll need those for good soup.”

When they came to take me away, my mother wasn’t laughing. She made no sound at all as the dark matte of blood oozed out from the wound in her head where they had shot her dead. It spilled onto the red dirt as it pooled in the setting light of the sun. My mother’s blood was weak, they said as they pulled me from her arms. Not enough Indian to make a cure, they said.

Get up, Mama , I screamed in our language. Get up and chase them down!

Her eyes were open and empty as they pulled me into a helicopter, the sound of the blades drowning out my screams.

My father does not come for me….Only his voice seeks me out in the darkness, in the crying-out voice that tears across my mouth. He is there, too, his body lying not far from my mother’s. He does not move. His blood is thin, weak; yet it is the same color as mine.

I lost my name that day. It was then I became “2231.” “It.” “Redskin.”

Dirty Indian.

My father’s voice is singing in my mind when I feel the kindly ones’ fear shift into something different.

Something is happening. I can taste the shift in their fear upon my tongue. I can taste their blood between my teeth as it pumps, diluted, through their veins in a failing attempt to graft my immunity to their weakness. Their fear tastes of metal, hard and cold, and the death stench is soon upon them.

Their fear fills my eyes, my nose, my lungs. Stronger than ever in my mouth. Time slips past, and their entrances into my chamber grow fewer and fewer. They are losing their war against this plague, and they curse my strength as their own death marches forward in the blackness of their blood. Inside me, gaining strength from my mother’s song, my blood pumps stronger and stronger. Their taking grows less frequent, and I feel the renewal of my blood bloom within.

The door opens and the bloom withers. They have come once again.

The air changes around me. I’ve not felt this one before.

A fresh anger moves in waves across the room, and I strain against my binds to see who this one is. Her scent is not of fear. She is not dying. Her blood is pure.

A woman comes to my side, and I see her clearly. No mask, no veil to hide behind. She is beautiful, her face dark against the harsh lights. Her eyes are black like mine, her hair is pulled back from her face, and beauty shines from her. I look up into her eyes, and in them I see a sea of night stars, an ocean of inky darkness, and she looks at me, hard.

Her mouth is moving, but I can hear nothing from her mouth, only my father’s song from a distant memory.

Oh my darling, how I love you so …

Am I dreaming? I have not been able to do so for as long as I can remember.

Stay right by your side forever, yah hey yah.

I’m too lost in the woman’s eyes to make out the pattern of her words that string along in my head.

I’m not so far away from you, ya hey yah. In your dreams I’ll sing how I love you so…

All I can see are the stars in a dark expanse of ocean and sky. I know the place of each of them in the night sky, the name for all the plants and animals. The name of the people.

So close your eyes and dream. I’ll see you on the other side. Hey yah ha, hey ya hah, ho!

My mouth opens and I try to speak, but nothing comes out. She reaches out, her hands resting upon my face, and the expanse of night sky swims in her eyes. I think she is crying when her words begin to form in my head.

“Sela.” She is saying, over and over. “Sela, Sela, Sela…”

Sela.

My name. My name is Sela.

IV.

“Sela. Your name is Sela.”

My grandmother’s words float over the wind and reach around me, comforting me in our language. I know my name.

She takes my face in her hands, those dark eyes with oceans of stars staring back at me, and my mind struggles to focus on her. We are outside, standing at the mouth of a dark cave in the homeland of our people, staring out at the shadow of Pimu Island in the setting sun. We have traveled far—that I can tell by the rising and setting of the sun three times. She’d gathered me into her arms, breaking the bonds that tied me down, and whispered over and over. “Your name is Sela.”

I had been speaking when she came in. “2231,” I was saying, over and over. The roll number they had given me when they stole me from my mother’s arms and brought me to that place. Where they took my blood, with the hope that they would one day find a cure for the disease that turned their own blood black and their skin into pustules and oozing death. “2231. 2231…”

I stand nearly as tall as my grandmother, maybe even taller, as I gaze into her eyes. I am weak from my captivity. She tells me they have held me for three years.

“How old am I?”

She doesn’t hesitate as she answers: Thirteen. She had been searching for me, and when she entered their facility, their compound, the war was nearly over. There was no one left to question her when she rode up to the lab in her black Army-issue Jeep Wrangler, dressed in black fatigues and a headband holding her braid back against her head. “Your name is Sela. You were named for me,” she says, speaking over and over, as if I can’t understand. “I’m Isabella. Your grandmother….”

She presses something into my hand. Something warm, soft to the touch, yet firm. Pliable. Grasses woven together in the shape of sticks crossed against one another, and bear grass woven between the spines. We are standing among the tall grasses, the breath of the ocean moving up the cliffs and through the swaying stalks. As she is speaking, my fingers begin to form a pattern in the strands, and I weave the strands through the spine into the beginning of a new basket.

Her words sing in my head as she tells me how she has searched for me all these three years, staying under the Army radar, posing as a doctor, pretending to search for a cure for this disease that my captors have let loose in the world. Blackpox, they call it. “It has killed them like it killed our ancestors, my own grandmother…and now our blood is our immunity. Our blood is what will survive this war.”

The sun drops down against the western sky, and all around me the sea foams and surges. In my dreams I stood at this very spot, against the caves in which our ancestors rode out the storms that tried to extinguish us before. I look into my grandmother’s eyes, and I can hear my father sing as she wraps me in her arms. The basket is in my hands, and tears form in my eyes as I see there are no holes, no crooked patterns in this thing I have created from the memories in my blood. Tears fall onto the pale grass and, like the kelp in the ocean, the grasses float upon the breath of our ancestors. I imagine I see Pahe Pahe’s tail glistening like the stars under the sea that surrounds us in this place that is now, always has been, and always will be our home.