Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

She moved me outside to the porch and I sat there for days, not moving except to make myself horizontal for sleep on the swing. When the sun shafted through the trees in the afternoons I’d examine my hair for stray greys, pulling them out methodically one by one.

Even after my body healed I was still hearing the trees talk; the mangoes and banyans, respectively proud and full of vanity. She would come home from fishing and I’d babble at her, talking about our summer by the sea. You see, Alia, for the first weeks I mistook her for you, even though she corrected me often enough, telling me her name was Sonia.

Now I think she was your shadow, your reflection. Perhaps if I’d constellated with my own twin I wouldn’t have drowned so easily in hers. Discouraged by my name calling, she locked me up in the pig barn, as though the sight of me disturbed her. I scratched at the walls, worried she’d change her mind, return with the villagers, with sharpened sticks.

She let me out a few days later to take me fishing, cheerful and chatty as though nothing unusual had happened. She said she knew secret ponds, hers alone, and blithely added that if anyone were to follow us I’d have to kill them. She armed me with an old fish knife, dull and rusty with neglect. Of course, it reminded me of grandfather’s. On the path to her pool she showed me where she’d marked the grave of an intruder. I didn’t ask her if it was real; it did my job for me, keeping them away. I knew well enough her people feared her, and not only because she caught more fish than anyone else in her village. It was one of the reasons she lived apart, to protect the locations of her pools.

I felt sometimes as though she kept me as an object for her profanities, her cruelty, yet while she was often unkind, it was still true she’d saved my life. She thought her people suspicious idiots, but kept me in the pig pens just in case. Or was I more amusing there? Poor woman. Her daughter, ashamed of her, had gone to live with relatives in the village proper. “With a mother like you,” she’d said, “I’ll never get married. ” True enough. A mother like Sonia might eat the bridegroom for breakfast on the big day. There were other days I thought she’d saved me just to upset the villagers.

Willows swept the shores; the musty smell of dead leaves seeped into our clothing. It was a nice change from the pig shed. Sonia’s little boat slept on the pool, its stern sinking slowly with the sun as it grew heavier with the day’s catch. She’d tell me stories those afternoons, about magic salmon, capable of returning the eater to his own true, lost path. We never caught any, and once I asked her why. You could only find them, she said, in pools more secret, more enchanted still than this one. She did go fishing alone sometimes, but never showed me what she’d caught. Sometimes I was even brave enough to laugh at her. Still, I believe it was true, that she really did; her mistake was to guard her catch too jealously, as though it might protect her from harm. I thought if she’d shared what she knew with her people they’d have been kinder, less hateful of outsiders. She was the only one who’d ever travelled.

But when we fished together a yellow dream fell over us and Sonia would smile. For those hours on the pond I could let my old heart out for a swim and pretend she was my lover as you had been. I wanted her, too, but she seemed so old. In truth she wasn’t much older than me, but there was something in her eyes you couldn’t go near without hurting yourself. My dreams fell into those eyes, and I was imprisoned again, by a woman who knew too much. It never occurred to me how those eyes must cut the other way, must hurt her also.

She traded fish for silver. She beat the silver into the shapes of little pigs, wearing them on a string around her neck. Fish into pigs, an act of transformation: silver between. Sometimes she’d count them. When there were enough she bought a piglet. I spent a lot of time with the little sow, trying to learn her language, as I’d lost hope for people. I called her Polaris, after the star that is at once the source and absence of all motion, the end of a little bear’s tail and the apex of the centre pole around which our sky slowly spins. A big name for a pig, who was after all a pig and not a bear. As I got better I hoped to have someone friendlier than Sonia to talk to in Polaris, but she never spoke to me. I thought it was her revenge for having been given the wrong name, but I knew of no pig stars to name her after. Still, I never stopped believing she was our lost dream child, Alia, that she’d found her way down the broken ladder at last to be with me.

We bred Polaris and when my second spring came she had six babies. I was as proud of them as she herself. Sonia moved me into the house right after that. Maybe she was jealous, or just afraid I’d turn into a pig. I moved up from the pig pens without ever having learned their language.

Sonia taught me how to be a human being again. She made me eat with a knife and fork, seated across the table from her. I’d eaten out of slop buckets so long I accidentally poked the fork into my cheek until it bled. “See what you’ve made me!” I yelled, but she just laughed, told me to do the dishes. I cleaned the house, wondering how many pigs she’d had before me, but when I was finished she opened a bottle of banana wine. After we’d drunk it she made me come to bed with her. It seemed I was still a human being in at least one respect, but I wasn’t quite sure I’d passed the test, as it never happened again.

I tried to run away one night but Polaris woke up and made such a noise before I’d cleared the garden. Sonia tied me to the bed that night and for a week after. I counted pigs to fall asleep.

After two years she told me I could go.

“Where?” I asked, really not knowing.

She laughed and said, “It’s not the ladder that broke your mind, but the villagers’ beatings. Still, you’ll survive, even heal. In three weeks you’ll go home.”

“The ladder?” I asked. “I never told you about the ladder. You’ve been up there too?”

“Of course. Once you’ve been up it shows, others can see it.”

She asked me to tell her my story. Night after night we drank guava wine and talked. I told her about life in our village, a coastal fishing village as hers was a mountain one; my months with you; the secrets you’d taught me; the yellow mist that enshrouded our camp the last night we spent together, and into which you vanished.

“Be careful of ignorant villagers,” she said. “They ruined your memory, but I’ll give it back.” She blew into my mouth and I said, “I remember the wind too, that peculiar wind on the plateau that sucks the spirit out and then blows it back in. I remember my grandfather. When I go home, will everyone I know have died too?”

“You mean like this?” she asked, and sucked in her cheeks, her eyes suddenly black and shiny, irisless.

“Stop,” I yelled, before she could inhale the whole room, myself included. She laughed and blew me out again. I ran to my room to pack, bolting the door. She knocked, but I wouldn’t let her in.

Sonia bought me a horse to make the trip. “Can you talk horse too?” she asked, making fun of me.

“Horse? I didn’t think horses could talk.” Yet it was true, in spite of my failure with Polaris, after trees and stones and stars anything still seemed possible.

“Don’t say that around him or he’ll be insulted.” She whispered something in the horse’s ear in a low guttural voice and the horse turned and looked at me, his eyes too that shiny dangerous black, like haematite, like obsidian.

“Sonia, please.” I turned away, hiding my face.