Amber Sparks: May We Shed These Human Bodies

You have grown up and old in the shadow of the great technologies; here is another to tell your story. We will stop up all that leaking light, filter it through until it burns clean and true. We will bottle you and keep you. We will sell your warnings like wishes.

I.An amber glow suffuses your mother's chambers and you are born, in furious noise and rending. The blood that follows you pools a deep chocolate in the soft, forgiving light. The blood that follows you follows and follows, and cannot be stopped. Your father, off at war with Russia, will soon return to find you his only child, and he will name you after the boy you should have been. This scene establishes your long familiarity with loss. It marks you for sorrow, for tragedy, and most of all for survival, for your own stubborn refusal to be fragile in the early half-light of your first moments and then always after.

II.This is what we refer to as your cowboy period, though of course you never saw those films. Nonetheless, it is an easy metaphor for us, to translate you properly into our tongues. Freedom as a prairie hung with dust. We paint a sepia tone over these scenes, as you grow wild and unformed. Look closely. You may see your father, forever away in foreign lands. You learn from him to speak the language of business like a man. You learn to dream of money but mostly of buying things with money: jewels, travel, furs, horses, cars, music, lovers. You speak five languages. You ride like a man but you dance like a woman, all hips and knees, all arms and long white neck. You are a jazz swan. You are more yourself than you will ever be again.

III.The first night of your marriage is a long, deep azure. You are painted head to toe in white, shy and nervous because yours is a love match. You will buy a house, move to the city together. You will be a good wife. After the ceremony you still wear the traditional white hood, to show that you will always be a good wife. We do not understand, for all our meaning is housed in our faces. But we see you are still lovely; you are still a swan, but soon you will no longer glide over jazz. Love will make you less yourself, more a wife and then a mother. This will leave you full, some days, to watch your children grow, to stand aside and let pride for your husband bubble up and around your little family for protection. It will leave you empty, too, much later than today. It will leave you utterly alone. But for now you follow your new husband into a darkened room, where the warm night slips over your skin like smooth hands, and all your shyness falls away with your white gown.

IV.Yellow for the great flash, for the blindness in the air that wounds the brain as much as the eye. As you gape, on your knees before the nothing, the great blast wave compresses all your tissues and organs. You don’t know what this is, and truly, that is the hardest part for us to bear. We know. We see the trail of wreckage stretching forward even now. But you only know pain, first, then fear as the release comes and the winds scream through and tears your house down, tears at your face and hair and dressing gown. You are knocked clear across the yard, and you cannot find your two little girls. Your husband is beside you, unconscious. Everything everywhere is a bright blur, a sulfur smear. Like the sun has gone wrong. We shield our eyes.

V.Red for the firestorm. Red for the sudden flames eating your house and your children. Red for your daughters' cries, red filling your brain as you watch your babies burn. All those years gone to dust. Blood soaking the ground to mark the spot, a grisly X of ashes and brick-colored mud.

VI.A sickly green for the strange, writhing tableau before you, for you are sick in heart and mind. You are sick in body. You lie in a makeshift hospital, watching your husband's skin slough off and his insides spill out. He is a volcano, an unstoppable emptying, almost over. There is nothing you can do. You watch the nurses weeping, praying. You put your hand to your head; feel your hair slide off your scalp in a slippery chunk. You are watching it all, recording everything. Children with no faces. Screams that rise from the underbelly of the world. We scream for you. Cots, floors, tables, walls, all stacked with bodies that are coming apart. The world is coming apart. It cannot be put back together.

VII.This scene is pedestrian, tinted in simple, tired violet for the dusk of your life. Just you and a desk and a calculator. You and your business sense, useful again in this economic boom. Though not really you. Not you-the-whole. Only you-the-part, the part that didn't burn away, the part that baked in the fire and hardened. Now you are rainbowed like a diamond. Now, with all of our light upon you, the glow is phosphorus, a glow in the jaw and the fingers. A glow in your old face. You tell us the ugliest deeds of the world look uglier still in floodlights, and we pull the plug at last, ashamed, willing to give you shade. Willing to admit we never really understood you at all, despite our marvelous tools. And so you live your last days the color of elderly hair, of doilies, and of certain calming teas. Of endings, but not quite yet. Of stories like yours, warnings to the world blown loose like handfuls of dust.

We were good at being trees, long ago. We had been years with our knots, tallying the rains and dry spells with careful accuracy. We shared conversation with the wind, the squirrels, the spiders. We shared quiet with the clouds before they burst.

We were good to look at, too; we were tall trees, well-grown. We stood eighty feet high and three feet around, our bark a flat, glassy gray, a few fissures mapping our journey through seasons. In the winter, our buds were the color of coffee, dark brown and velvety, and each spring we exploded green. The animals walked our branches, the breezes pushed at our leaves, and the wind helicoptered our seeds to bury almost-trees in the earth.

We were experts at being trees. We still had a hundred good years left, and we weren't interested in being anything else.

But the Three were walking in our wood one day, and they noticed how tall and proud we were. They asked would we mind being humans, and though we didn't know what that was, we said we would mind very much. We pointed out what fine trees we made, and the Three threw back their heads and laughed like wolfhounds. Then, we were new things, human things. People. The Three took our soft pink hands in their hard hairy ones, and gave us new names. You are the first, they said. You are the beginning.

The Three knocked their hard heads together and made a fierce storm, and when it was over a kingdom of people had grown up around us. The Three encircled it with a vast sparkling fence: a dangerous necklace around our throats. And we learned to sing and speak, and to hunt and swim, and to climb into the branches of trees that were still trees and beg for death. We wept to be so unanchored, but we did not die. We missed the wind's chattering company, and the clouds' damp silence, and we sighed to see our animal friends shrink and run before us, and yet we did not die. We grew and changed and multiplied for many ages, until the gods themselves passed out of the world and no one remained who had known us as trees.

We are not good at being people. We are weak, our minds and bodies soft and pliable, our histories marred by violence and loss into unsteady seasons, bearing ragged bark and stunted fruit. It is easy to make new people, but difficult to grow them, these restless ones that take so long to leave the nest. We are unsure always. Even now we long for leaves, for years marked by measured change, by rebirth and regrowth — and we sometimes leave this world early, hoping that, like Dante's suicides, we may shed these human bodies for the punitive grace of greening branches and deep, steady roots once more.