Earth
forty-one years after
Time spins, around and around.
In this age, raging dust storms plague your land, and my red dirt dims to ash. Once, wildflowers bloomed across my prairies, my soil rich and fertile. Now, this quarter-mile stitch of my robe alongside Crooked Creek has become a desolate wasteland. It’s springtime, but I cannot find her.
I’m tired.
I’m congested and diseased, brittle and broken.
Heartbroken, with the agony of being unheard.
Dust chokes my throat, my skin grays, my ankles scab with itchy, dry skin.
I age. But I must chronicle the heritage of this land.
The women keep speaking, their voices coalescing into a roar.
Their interwoven lives create a history.
Not the sort you find in blundering history tomes of wars and political intrigue, but women who created something new with their remarkable bravery.
Women who are stunning because of their unrelenting hope amid the everyday agony of life.
Under the midday sun, a woman tips forward into the windstorm, and like me, she’s thirsty down to the marrow of her bones.
Do you recognize her yet? Gail’s skirt snaps against her calves, skin gritty with granules of dirt, boots sliding across the hot sands.
A storm’s coming. She lowers her handkerchief shallowly in a water bucket, then layers the damp fabric over her mouth so she can breathe.
My once green and fertile prairie is now black, smoke, fire.
She doesn’t remember when the grass vanished.
It dissolved slowly under years of torrential dust and wind, so now she wonders which parts of her memory are real, which parts invented. Memory is such a thin, shifting thing.
There’s a roar on the horizon.
Gail looks northwest, where the black blizzards typically attack. A cloud plumes, more expansive than the roomiest cumulonimbus this sky has ever seen, the black roller gobbling up loose soil as it rushes on forward. She picks up her skirts, and she runs.
Time continues.
The narrative of this land evolves and balloons, stretching on through wars and famine and change.
Today, I’m still screaming, but most do not listen.
Today, my throat’s sore, my body’s achy, and I’m so dizzy I feel a slosh about my middle, a throb in my side.
Today, the storytellers speak of grand adventures.
Of innovative technologies, a race into the future, journeys beyond myself into the stars.
Time continues to turn, around and around I spin, and I listen, as your legacy endures. Sometimes you notice me. You bend down, watch my soil simmer aboveground in a wind eddy or study the noises made in tree hollows. Sometimes you even say hello.
Minnie, keep listening. I will tell you such tales. I tell you so you see yourself, I tell you so you see me.
The legends are always beginning again. Let’s restart.
This is my story. A handful of tales, from a single stitch of my robe. My stories are endless, endless.