Gather
The women gather across the flat world of my tv. They cry out for justice, for humanity, for their rights and my rights, too, though I am distracted by the shell, glistening in a pool of morning sunlight. I only halfway hear the women protest as I hold the curving white calcium, lifting it to my ear. The muted surf of a faraway sea still echoes in the spiraled chambers, churning up fond remembrances, buoyant and purified, rebounding in the little white house, that once provided shelter. The monolithic fortress of the most powerful man on earth flashes on the screen. I place the scrubbed, pearlescent shell on the coffee table so that it lines up perfectly with the White House on the screen and then pause to consider the two white houses. Both are pristine. Both are chipped around the edges. I get up to make the coffee, but not before the flashing news of an ancient glacier breaking loose. Now freed from its icy mooring, the glacier floats away to certain demise as the sea rises to cover the land. Round and round, these tumbling thoughts while I grind the coffee beans to the fineness of sand, like the sea would have ground the shell, had I left it behind. The protesting women have not returned. Instead, a tightly framed closeup of another kind of shell. This one with the luster of smoke and brass, empty of the singing sea, noted and numbered at the scene of the crime. The deafening sound of a deathly bullet that the gunmaker said could not be stopped. Our freedom, lethal but guaranteed. The sun has moved beyond the seashell, leaving it bone colored and dull. I barely notice it now as one horror after another unfolds on the morning news. I realize how much I long to see the marching women, gathering up small treasures as they proceed in steady assent, delicately maneuvering the broken shells in a quest to stop humanity from coming loose like the glacier and melting away in the warming sea. |
Brewing coffee. I wait for the drip drip drip to stop, impatient for the rich brown liquid to revive me. I have retreated from the droning news, hearing only the rise and fall of voices, a murmuring tide, almost hypnotic, as I stand in the kitchen, half awake, and miss the exact moment when the women reappear. The coffee sloshes in the mug, burning my hand as I turn toward them. More women have gathered now. I feel the heat of their protest, their faces distorted by the steam rising from my cup. I wonder if, somehow, they could have broken free from the flickering screen to beckon me toward them on a rising tide of indignation pouring out through the glass so that I lose my bearings, and bump into the coffee table, upsetting the shell, sending it to shatter on the red tile floor. The shell, my prize... gathered on a gentle summer day of golden sun and sand, warm water lapping at my feet, the frothy wave filling the shore before pulling back into the sea, and leaving in its wake the gleaming shell that now lays in pieces on the ground. Tears stain the silk robe that matches the color of my eyes. Hard won silk, from a foreign place, now ruined by salty tears. The women chant, ancient words, their eyes looking far away to the seaside and the glacier, and the route the silk has traveled. The women shake small, bony fists, their voices no longer quieted by phantom waves, once coiled and flapping, trapped inside the shell. Along the shoreline, where the jagged, broken reefs cut through tender flesh, I am with them now, these women as they emerge once again from long waves of humanity and gather on the shore, to reclaim and deposit one more treasure. Copyright by Shari Cookson/All Rights Reserved |