Amber Sparks - May We Shed These Human Bodies

After death they can sometimes be found in constellations, scattered over the surface of the sky like seed pearls.

They speak no language at first. They are grunters, groaners, squealers, squawkers; guttural sounds grow up through their vocal cords, wild and tangled and green. They do not sound like their animal brothers and sisters. They try but cannot quite replicate the sounds the muzzle or the wings or the long nose and narrow jaw produce. There is a buzz in the ear, a slight imbalance, a tremor in the tongue with each attempt. Their animal speech is accented, a reminder that these children will not stay wild forever. Not wild and free like wind, like biting like galloping and snorting and swimming and nuzzling and guzzling and piling up together in good raw wet fur smells forever.

Never forever. There comes a point, always, where the wolf-child or the goat-child or the bear-child or the monkey-child is discovered by humans. There is power in this inverse of the usual myth: A child is found, is a foundling, will be founder of the new civilization or dynasty or world. There is power in the second beginning, the tumbling out from the wild woods’ womb, the original loss glossed over and made to disappear.

And so the child is brought indoors to be tamed. The child's head is bowed, or the child's head is high, or the child's head is level, full of inherited knowledge, innate superiority. The child is taught to speak and shave and compose a sonnet and lead a people or a nation or an expedition. Sometimes the child is older, or sometimes the child is difficult, or sometimes the child is not willing to be torn from the pack, to be made to sit, stand, fetch, obey. Sometimes the child is no longer a child.

Sometimes the space between the child and the humans is wider than seasons. Sometimes the child grows up in two worlds, a beast-thing, snarling and spewing strange syntax, a deformed and hideous attempt at personhood. Sometimes the child creates a world to grow up in. This child is Atalanta, fast and strong and genderless. This child is Enkidu, friend and muse, inspiration to escape death. These children are Romulus and Remus, conquerors, builders of empires, first in a line of firsts. These children are given love tempered by fear, by worship. They are tied to the human race with a strong cord of feeling and fervor.

Sometimes there will be none of these. Sometimes there will be only a still-raw, feckless, fettered child left standing at the edge of the map, ready to push the human race into something uncharted and wild and new.

The Boys

We will never grow up. We used to tell her that all the time, our little mother in the kitchen with the frowning face and the Marcia Brady hair. Oh, boys, she would say, everyone grows up someday. Not us, we would say back. We would tell her, we will never do our own laundry, never take out the trash, never scoop the litter or get jobs or pick up after ourselves.

She is ours. She is green-grass-eyed, fire and pink through her white-icing skin. She is beautiful, our little mother, and though she is not our real mother we never remind her of that. We love her and bring her the best fruit, the brightest flowers, the most buzzing insects dumped in a jar with the lid screwed on tight.

When the jealous fairy shot her, we cleaned and dressed the wound and built her a little hut with sticks and twigs and vines, and we guarded it day and night. We guard it still. We are eating berries until we are sick, because our little mother cannot tell us to stop. We are vomiting in the under brush, we are leaving our stink outside for the crocodile to find. We are trailing the little fairy and now we are strangling her half to death until she promises us one wish and so now we are letting her go. Everyone says video games, but then our leader steps forward and says we want to be boys forever and never ever grow old.

And we all listen to our leader, so we say okay. We are saying that wish is okay with us, though we are thinking we would have liked video games, too. The littlest ones are crying but our leader puts his light hands to their faces and dries their tears and tells them to sleep. And so we sleep, and we are waiting now, waiting for our little mother to get well. Waiting forever to never grow up.

The Mother

Of course I’m not their real mother. How could I be? I’m only thirteen. I’ve never even kissed a boy. I’ve never been to a dance, except for the silly little dances they invent for themselves and their imaginary friends. I’ve never made out in a movie theater, never lost my virginity in the backseat of some car. Never been dumped and cried over it. Never fallen in love. I’ve never had a wedding, never even been proposed to. Never developed a tan line on my left hand under a thick wedding band. Never had a love of my own. Just theirs. And now my heart is stuck through and weeping, a little wooden arrow, undoing all of my love. All of it escaping through a tiny hole and still no one understands how much I want it back, how it hurts to lose it, how I will wither and die without it in this small and pathetic leaf-shack built by overgrown boys who don’t quite realize how much like men they already are.

The Leader

I love her. The mother. In ways that aren’t anything like appropriate. I dream about her sometimes, at night, and I wake up wet and panting like one of the dogs after a long swim. I know it’s too late for me; I made that wish for the others. They can always love her for everything pure and good and true that she is, can cry and be comforted by her soft fingers. I think of those fingers, small and graceful and white, and I think of them in places they shouldn’t be, places I shouldn’t even know about but somehow do, and I think about how we are beautiful, proud things, she and I.

I should not be burdened with all of these feelings, leaden and acid all at once and coming up in my brain like a new kind of bile. I know it will drive us apart, these feelings, will send her so far away from me, from us. These are dangerous times, a dangerous age for us to be always on the brink of, to be rolling over like tanks over land mines. We should be sky-sailors, always. We should be dream-bringers, pain-healers, and yet now she lies in pain and may never fly with me again. I can only think of what she is to me. Of what she is to my world and how small it will shrink down without her.

The Queen of the Fairies

A door without mystery is just an open door. We are the total histories of wind, of weather, and no one could be hungrier than I for love, always love. But he is in love with her, though he foolishly wishes he weren’t, and so she will vanish in the wake of events like green fields under a wall of water.

I am not of this world. I am not of any world, and I am not bothered by these feelings he speaks of. I am vengeance, I am small but mighty, I am a silver thunderbolt flung down from the gods and I show no mercy. In the age of vending machines I have survived by wrapping myself in massive shadows, in the darkness of a different time. I will not be sorry for one small girl or a pack of wild boys, not when I have seen my own children dead and gone for eons. I live and sometimes love and when I do, the world must watch its back. It is the only way to live forever.

The children’s choir has come to sing carols to the old people, just like they do every year. When the children arrive at the senior center they see the old people seated in neat rows of metal folding chairs and in beige polyester slacks.

The old people smile at them, all pink sticky gums and few teeth. A hasty conference is arranged among the children, and a quick consensus is reached: the old people smell nothing like roses. More like musty towels and mold, like stacks of newspapers and magazines buried under dust and slipcovers. And their heads move too much when they talk. It’s funny and creepy, the children all agree.