"Magnolia Blossoming in Swamp"
by Josh Strigle
The
wind often spoke my name as she played skillfully in the branches
above, daring me to chase her into the fields beyond where the forest
ended and the real world began. She rushed through my auburn hair,
tickling my nose, whirling the sand and leaves before my large brown
eyes. I chased the whirlwinds to the edge of the woods, to the cruel
barrier that I detested to cross—the line between my world
and world of mortals. I stepped back waiting for her to return with
a new
gust from a new direction, one that did not cross into reality where
my name is Amber and myth exists only in story books.
The Cherokee ways of the past told me much of why I loved the woods
so much—why I toddled at their feet in awe of their majesty.
My granie began to tell me things of the past, things about the
ancestry
that should have been so very much mine. The shaman’s daughter
that turned her back on her people, yet told the story to her daughter
and passed down the legend throughout the generations—mother
to daughter and granddaughter. Great stories of how I came to exist,
and how, when the shaman’s daughter died, the Indians came
to get her only a moment after her soul found freedom. They buried
her
next to a beautiful stream, celebrating her in death their way even
though she denied them in life.
The stories my granie told of the spirit animal that will come and
protect each of the family when it is revealed to them—stories
that contradict the sins that would send one straight to the fires
of hell, according to Sunday preachers blasting their voices through
the ears of already frightened children. Tongues of fire licking at
damned souls—the worst fears revealed beyond the flickering of
flames; the gnashing of teeth biting into flesh that would regroup
to be bitten time and time again. Angels of hell dancing and laughing,
playing screeching, blood covered harps of sinner’s flesh and
bone.
When
I was nine, my animal came to me while I was walking through the
wood, minding my
own little bare footsteps ever so carefully.
Foxes are strange creatures that wander
but normally run from humans such as myself simply because of man’s
despicable past with the animal world. It was a mother fox with her
two pups. I froze my body into concrete, not wishing to scare the
mother fox or to incite her wrath. Mother animals of any kind normally
will
do anything to protect their young. She stopped, looking at me. I
continued my statuesque pose, watching the mother fox carefully,
intently, not
realizing the omen. The mother fox walked up to me, while I stood
in silence, balancing my breathing carefully between thin wisps of
the
wind that swam around the fox and me, whirling us into that other
world. The world where foxes are not compelled to flee from the dastardly
children of man.
"I
sucked in a great gulp of it, tasting the sweetness of the wood and
wind."
It
seemed time stopped. The pups stood still watching their mother smelling
my shoeless feet. I slowly reached
my hand down
as the fox
tested it for evil. She found none and allowed me to scratch her head.
I did so gently, still fearing that just the slightest move would cause
her to run and take this moment with her only to leave me wanting more.
The mist in the wood shrouded the fox and me, hanging in the air like
honey sticking to a messy child’s fingers, thick and full, causing
my shallow breathing to be stifled. I sucked in a great gulp of it,
tasting the sweetness of the wood and wind, reveling in the air, capturing
the moment in time when I was as much a part of the woods as the fox
that extended, as if part of me, from my hand. I closed my eyes, wishing
that time would remain so suspended above the rest of the world.
I
opened them only to discover that I was returned. I saw the fox running
in the distance—her two pups following carefully behind—all
three only stopping for a breath to look back and let me know that
I did not dream what had just occurred. I remained standing in the
concrete that I had formed my body into, not wanting the moment that
had just ended to be lost with the dissipating mist. It seemed the wind
had whisked me back into the real world.
The
moment was gone.
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