And then, One Day, the Rains
And then, one day, the rains, the rains stopped raining down on our muddy river town, and all that mud that made our town the muddy river town that it was, all of that mud, it all dried up and turned to dirt. And the river, yes, the river, too, all of that muddy river water that made our muddy river the muddy river that it was, even the river and the mud that was at the bottom of the river, after not too long, it too turned to dirt. Yes, Brother, it was so dry in our dirty river town with a dirty river no longer running through it that when us brothers, when we walked down to where our muddy river used to be, what we found there instead of a river, there was just this dirt stretching out as far as our eyes could see. Water, no, there was no water anywhere that us brothers looked. And so, us brothers, what we did was, we walked out and across and out into the dirt hoping that where the dirt ended there would be water there and there would be the makings of mud there for us brothers to make into mud. And so we walked, and we walked, and we kept on walking on and on, across this dirt, walking with our faces pressing against the made-out-of-dirt sky. Us brothers, for four hundred days and four hundred more nights, we walked: in search of water, a river falling from the sky. A bird flying above us brothers would not have seen us brothers walking across dirt. All it would have seen was just dirt being blown across dirt. One morning, though, us brothers, we stopped our walking, and we found ourselves standing at the edge of a field of corn. This corn, it was growing up all brittled and stunted and brown up from all of this dirt. It was so dry, this corn, that when one of us brothers breathed, just the breath of us brothers breathing would make those corned stalks start to break. Or when we snapped off a shriveled-up ear and ripped off its papery husk, so dry were those skins that up from our hands they would blow and float away in a wind that was barely blowing. Inside, there were no yellow kernels to be found by us brothers: only the cobs themselves which would crumb apart and turn into dust. So what are we going to do? Brother was the one of us brothers brave enough to ask. I said to Brother that maybe it was time for us brothers to find something else for us to love: something other than river, other than fish. Something other than moon and girl and mud. But maybe I wasn’t thinking is what I think now. Maybe there was so much dirt in my ears that I couldn’t hear what it was that my mouth was saying. But we don’t want to love something other than river and fish and mud was what Brother said to this. We love river, Brother said. We love fish. And mud, we can never get us enough of mud. I nodded my boy head at Brother. I know it, was what I said, and I shook my head so that my ears could better hear what my heart was wanting to say. You’re right, Brother, I said, and I looked down at our dust-covered boots. I saw dirt there and everywhere underneath our feet. Dirt. I said this word, to myself, but I did not like the sound that this word made. I did not like the way that dirt felt in my mouth. It felt dirty on my tongue, this word dirt. Dirt was no good. The only thing dirt was good for was for turning dirt into mud. I did not have to say this to Brother. This, Brother already knew this. Us brothers, we looked across all of this dirt that was here in between us. We looked with this look that us brothers had between us. One look with this look and the both of us brothers knew that we did not need to make with our mouths another sound about this. And so, us brothers, us knowing this, we dropped down onto our hands and knees, down into this dirt, and like this, with our faces and fists pressed against the hardness that was this earth, us brothers, we began to hammer, we began to pound, we began to speak.
The Book of Mud
Tell us a story, us brothers said to Girl, the three of us sitting, down by the river, around the fire that the three of us had built. A story? Girl said. What kind of a story? A story about us, us brothers told her. But make it a story about us brothers that us brothers we don’t know. Once upon a time there were two brothers, so began Girl’s tale. But us brothers, we weren’t the best listeners. Girl could not get beyond the first line before we started cutting in on her with questions, such as: what are their names? Where do they live? What is this story going to be about? To these questions, Girl came back with these answers: that these two brothers both called each other Brother, they lived near a river, and that mud is what their story was about. But we already know about that, us brothers said. To this, Girl didn’t listen. Girl shook her girl head and then Girl started retelling her story. Once upon a time, she said, there were two brothers. And these brothers were brothers made out of mud. They were made out of mud and they didn’t even know it. How do I know? Girl asked, and the fire flared up into our eyes. I know, Girl spoke this out, before us brothers could poke in our boy voices, because I was the one who made them. I was this girl, Girl said, who always wanted a brother, so I decided, one day, to make for myself not one brother but two. I started from the bottom and worked my way up. Only the moon above me, full and white, watched as I worked the mud up, mixing in river and dirt, until what stood up along side the river’s edge on either side of my legs were these two made-out-of-mud brothers. The first words to come out of both of their mud mouths was the word mother. So that night, in a house not far from the river’s muddy edge where these made-out-of-mud brothers got made, I found a woman who was not yet a mother and in her dream, that night, I whispered to her and told her that soon she was going to become a mother. When this mother awoke in the morning, she was sick and white-of-skin and inside her woman belly was a boat being rocked to and fro on stormy seas. The brothers were sailors on that sailoring ship sailing for a world that they did not know about. Months later, they came upon a muddy river that was more mud than it was water, and here they cast out their rusty anchors toward that muddy river shore. When they set foot onto all that mud, it was, to these brothers, like walking on water. They walked up from the river’s muddy shore until they came upon the house where there lived this mother and a man too who these brothers would one day call father. Here these brothers lived and here they fished, and I watched without them seeing me, I watched them grow up, these brothers, into two muddy boys. And then one day I said to myself, it’s time these boys know from where they came. So I came out of hiding. Under a moon big and full and white, I rose up out of the river’s mud. Us brothers, when Girl said this, we leaned in even closer to this fire. This fire, it had grown bigger with each of Girl’s breaths, each of her girl sentences was a log that Girl had pitched into the fire. And now that Girl had stopped in the telling to us of this story, the fire was beginning to burn and fizzle out. Night swallowed us brothers up inside of its black-holed mouth. All the stars in the sky had fallen. The moon, it was a ghost of a fish blackened with mud. Us brothers, we got up and walked toward the river and then we kept on walking out into the dark and the muddy waters until the water was up and over our heads. In that underwater darkness below us brothers, with silver fish scales flashing in the spaces where the stars used to be, and with Girl’s moony-eyed face gazing down at us from up above us brothers’ head, we could hear the rivery gurgle of Girl’s girl voice: And they lived, these brothers did. They lived happily ever after, Girl said. And here, us brothers, us looking up, looking up at the sky that was now the river, we could see Girl’s hand closing in over the both of us — as if over a book — to hold us here in this place.