Feature #125: Maternal Mitochondria

Homeless Ranch/Threshold Anxiety

by Miriam Sagan and Isabel Winson-Sagan

ONE

Four figures, teenagers, sat around a bonfire at the end of summer. They’d cut through the barbed wire fence to this place, at the edge of a ranch in basin land.

“Let’s tell some ghost stories,” Marina said.

“Let’s not,” said Sarah.

 “Whatever,” Cool Boy said, fiddling with his camera in the dark.

 Kid Brother said nothing, picking at the start of a pimple on his nose.

 “OK then,” Marina said. “I’ll go first.”

 “Whatever,” Cool Boy repeated.

Marina began: “A long time ago, in this very spot, giants roamed the land. Mammals were small and lizards were monstrous. But what they don’t tell you… is about the bugs.

“There was a time when bugs ruled the world. Their long scaly legs were as tall as a house, and when they rubbed them together, the sound was so high and piercing it felt like a long piece of metal was being shoved through one ear and out the other. Their wings caused dust storms. Their eyes were the stuff of nightmares- huge and glossy, yourself reflected and refracted a thousand times.

“There were humans too. I know, controversial. But it’s true. And the humans were as nothing to the bugs, grains of sand beneath their feet. Imagine your family running, screaming, as an enormous bug put each massive appendage down, not caring where it trod.

“Obviously, we no longer have these massive bugs today. But do you see where we’re sitting? The pattern in the sand? This whole hill used to be a giant grasshopper. We’re on it’s back right now. And some say, the day will come… when the bugs wake back up.”

“Ugh,” Sarah said, glancing at her Kid Brother. He seemed to have picked a bleeding scab off his nose.

“That’s all you got?” said Cool Boy.

“No, there is more,” Marina continued. “Be quiet now. Can you feel that? That creepy-crawly sensation along your leg, you chest, and now on your chin? Something with six legs or eight legs or ten zillion legs is crawling up you in the dark. Don’t slap it. It will sting like hell. Don’t squash it, or poison will leak out and your lungs will breathe it in. Is the inside of your ear tingling? That might be because an earwig has crawled in. They eat you brains. That is what the name means in ancient Celtic—“eats first your earwax and then your brains.

“Have you ever thought about the word ‘fire bug?’ Those bugs live out here, in the long grass. They land in your hair and then—swoosh—burst into flames. And you are on fire. My cousin’s boyfriend laughed when she warned him, one night, right out here. He said they were just fireflies. She said there were no fireflies in New Mexico. Then, pop, one landed on him and burned his scalp and his beard. He is scarred forever. Actually, I think he might be dead.

“What can you do to protect yourself? If I were you, I’d just go home. Like right now. And take a long shower. When you go to bed, try to not think about beetles with baby faces or beautiful women whose nipples shoot fire. I think you should leave. And check your shoes.”

“I’m outta here,” Cool Boy said. “I’m going off to take some pictures.”

“In the dark?” Sarah said.

“Yes, in the dark.” He got up and left.

TWO

But not all of us can easily decide to leave a place, to take a photograph in the dark, or just go home. Sometimes there is no home.

Excuse me for butting in. But I am the spirit, the architect, of this place. Let me tell you about it.

“How fast does the air go?” a child asks. She will never meet me—I died in the asylum. I asked to be taken there. I was tired of fighting.

 I know the answer to all your questions. Sometimes the air moves fast and sometimes slow. This is called wind. It depends on how much punctuation you use. A period will cause a full stop and a lack of punctuation will cause a tornado.

 And so I left home. My mother died, then my father, the bank foreclosed, my sister married a neighbor, my brother disappeared. Wind ripped up what was left of the cash crops. Call it the hand of G-d.

I walked down the road. The wind said: “Don’t try to find my house. For if you do, I will be powerless.”

I met an old woman and asked “Where does the wind live?”

She pointed north.

I met a girl and asked “Where does the wind live?”

She pointed to her belly button.

I walked over basin land ringed by mountains. I met a man with one leg and asked him, “Where does the wind live?”

“About two miles that-a-way. At the edge of my ranch. Just this side of the barbed wire. The rest is county land, and the wind does not live in the county.”

I came to a little rise in the land, next to the fence. There were no cattle as far as the eye could see. But there was tumbleweed. I pitched the tent I carried on my back, and began to build myself a house out of cans and cement blocks and pipe and trash.

 Every night the wind knocked down what I had built. Every morning I built again. The wind had lied. It was not powerless at home.

The wind is a terrible roommate, a bad spouse, an evil landlord, a worse tenant. The wind began to blow through my mind and erase my memories one by one, cell by cell.

The wind said: “I’m going to give you a new name.”

“What is my new name?” I asked.

“Wind,” it answered, and began to blow harder.

THREE

Now a red feather floats on the wind. Could it be from a rooster? A robin? What bird has red feathers, and how did it come to this place, a tip of the land, never settled, never passed through, not important enough. Just an outcrop, nowheresville, somewhere for a restless mind to wander. Debris abounds, the leftovers of a life. A knocked over toilet, an abandoned can opener. Houseless/homeless, the switch in language begs the question—what even is a home, and how do we live there? What if your mind betrays you? What if your body gives out and you can do nothing but lie in the dirt, watching the air swirl above you? Is this where I die? Among the stumped juniper trees and gentle grasses? This is where I go mad, pushed by the very air, by the strange appearance of feathers but no birds, by masks backlit by the sun, with bits of metal and appliances strewn around the place, messy, an abandoned minefield. The king of the packrats says that it is dinner time. I want to ride the trains—just for the illusion of movement, of having a destination. I want to unhinge my mind and blow away in the wind.

FOUR

There is silence once the architect stops speaking, if you call all the sounds of the night silence. Cool Boy comes back and sits down, stirs the fire with a stick.

“Did you get some pictures?” Sarah asks.

“Yes.”

“Can we see them?” Marina wants to know.

“These aren’t the kind of photos,” he says scornfully. “They need to be developed. It’s film.”

“Nothing on your phone?”

“Well…maybe.” He hesitates, and then pulls up some of the photos he’s taken. It is indeed dark, but the landscape seems to glow from within, illuminating the scene.

The land is flattered, it can’t help itself. And so it begins to speak. It wants its side of the story to be known.

“Lava pours out of vents in the earth and cools to black crystals. Not here. The ocean laps at the sandbar that changes with the tide. Not here. Golden domes rise over the ancient walled city. Not here. People of all faiths and colors live together peacefully and bring each other special pastries on holidays. Not here. Bombs fall and flatten the neighborhood you were born and raised in. Not here. Your father hauls off and slugs your mother. Maybe here. You pour a shot from the bottle and then another. Maybe here. First there is the needle in the vein and then just the needle. Here.”

“What’s that?” Sarah asks nervously.

“What’s what?” asks Younger Brother.

“I thought I heard someone talking, didn’t you?”

Everyone shakes their heads.

The land continues. It calls to the spirit of the architect: “I know you,” it says. “You left home with nothing but a red feather in your pocket. You finger it from time to time, imagining the phoenix it must have fallen from. Not to overuse a metaphor. You stole it from your grandfather’s study—impossible to leave without taking a small piece of forbidden knowledge. All anthropological finds are theft anyway. But when you snuck in that last night, it was the masks that scared you. They seemed larger in the darkness, looming, empty eye holes and large painted leers. You were always forbidden to enter the study, and it seems like the masks knew this. They had an unsettling quality—doesn’t donning a mask mean that the true self is hidden, subsumed? By running away you were looking for the opposite—freedom, truth of identity. But ever since you entered the study, the masks have been appearing in your dreams. You know they can see you through the holes in their heads. You know they are not on your side.”

“I hear the guy who build this place went crazy,” Marina said.

“Yeah. I heard that too. Tried to kill his cousins. Walked into the police station and asked to be locked up. Died in an asylum.” Everyone looked at Cool Boy in surprise. He didn’t usually talk this much.

“Let’s go home,” Sarah said stretching. “School starts in just a few days. I need to get organized.”

“I need to get stoned,” Younger Brother said. Everyone laughed and went their separate ways.

FIVE

The classroom managed to smell like chalk and wet wool even though there was no blackboard and it was the end of summer. Ms. Hipster, the art teacher, was encouraging everyone to spread out the photographs they had taken over the vacation. Marina’s desk was covered in selfies, though of disembodied parts of her body: knees, toes, eyebrows. Sarah’s black and white photos were of small domestic objects that looked large: rakes, cups, baby dolls. Younger Brother had just talked his way into the class for the new semester and so he didn’t have anything.

Ms. Hipster’s piercings clanked ever so faintly as she moved from one student to another.

“OK, let’s start here.” She stopped at Cool Boy. He had so many he’d laid them out on several neighboring desks. They were the photos he’d taken at the homeless ranch, when he’d pointed at:

–a bug on a branch, dimly lit along it’s shell, no antenna visible in the blackness…

–the mountains, black against black, faint outline along the rim

–a footprint, bare toes in sand, grays and purples

–the side of a building, peering along it’s edge, trash piled behind it

–a juniper tree, barely more than a shrub, strangely lopsided. It’s berries had been eaten. The bark seemed to glow

–a flash of canine eyes, only one ear visible

–a red feather, mostly grey in the darkness

–a tree in motion against a dark sky with no stars (the wind)

–windows lit from within, so bright they are blown-out against the black walls

–a close up of straggly branches, like fingers drawn across the frame

–nothing, an empty square

–stars, blurry and barely there

–a lightpole

–some metal sticking up out of the ground, glinting like jewels

–a smashed TV

–his friends around the campfire… silhouettes

But these photos were all blank. Both Marina and Sarah gasped. Younger Brother stared ahead like a zombie.

“Well…very interesting,” said Ms. Hipster. “And so many! Well class, what do you think?

Let’s go round the circle and give some feedback.”

“It doesn’t work for me,” said the first girl.

“How will you display it? There’s no hooks!!” said the next person.

“How do you know it’s finished?” said the next.

“Reminds me of…something,” said a friend of Cool Boy’s, trying to be helpful.

“Where’s the soul?” asked Ms. Hipster.

At that point, Cool Boy went to the bathroom and didn’t come back.

Marina kicked Sarah under a table. She mouthed, “Meet me.”

In a minute they were in the corridor, followed by Younger Brother.

“What the fuck,” Marina said. “Those pics are intense. All blank! We have to go back. There’s ghosts out there.”

“Tonight?” asked Younger Brother.

“No. Fucking right now,” said Sarah. “There is something out there. I want to catch it.”

“Come on. I’ll drive.” Cool Boy had emerged from the bathroom. They walked towards the parking lot. “I don’t have permission to leave campus,” Younger Brother mumbled.

“Shut up. You’re with me,” said Marina.

SIX

It was a warm summer’s day, just a hint of autumn. They left the school and town behind and drove out on the rural highway. The cottonwoods were turning yellow along the river and soon the aspens on the mountains would as well. They parked in a dirt lot littered with beer cans and started walking. The path was as they’d last seen it, strewn with junk: glass shards, a broken can opener, smashed dishes. But when they came to where the ruin had been, there was nothing there. No buildings, no bulldozed heap, no fire ring.

Instead there was a lone pole, about ten feet off the ground. From it flowed streamers of silk: indigo blue, chamisa yellow, brilliant cochineal from cactus bugs. The brilliant colors shimmered in the wind. As one person, they held up their cell phones to photograph it. But none of the cell phones worked. They stayed blank. Younger Brother shook his, but nothing happened.

The wind picked up. Before anyone could gasp in amazement, a howling wind rose out of nowhere.

“Hold hands!” Marina shouted. She grabbed Sarah who grabbed Younger Brother who grabbed Cool Boy who without hesitation clutched Marina’s slightly moist hand with his own. The streamers danced. A handful of red feathers fell out of the sky. The wind died down, and stilled.

The four of them still stood in the circle. No one needed to say anything or to tell each other to never mention this to anyone else. It was obvious. They just stood there holding hands beneath the perfect clear blue of the sky.

---