Woman on the Edge of Time

“No, no, a memorial. Nothing to celebrate, fasure. In winter we make time for studying, communing. Often villages send out a traveling group who go around till they get worn with being on the road … . We’ve been chewing on–Bee, Otter, White Oak, me–going around with a skit on Shaping. This troupe is from Garibaldi on Mystic, where they make pasta, computer poppers, and breed grapevines. A beautiful place, Otter says. When person was eighteen, stayed a month during harvest working and coupling with Vittorio, who’s with the troupe. Otter is crazy with pleasure to see per again … .” They were strolling among the booths, hand in hand. Bee was using a very small holi projector which produced one moment a box of a children’s breakfast cereal from her own time called Sweetee Pyes and the next an image of braceros picking lettuce. He looked at once so serious, frowning at the Sweetee Pyes and rumbling deep in his chest, and at the same time so fine, with the delicate tattoo of the bee rippling on his arm, she lost track of what Luciente was telling her.

Hawk came dodging toward them. She greeted Connie and then burst out, “Luciente! I’ve fixed. It’s time to travel. I’m going on with this troupe. Bolt’s coming with me.”

Luciente put her hands on Hawk’s slight shoulders. “Do they agree?”

Hawk quivered with excitement. “They say we can learn the parts of two people who want to go home. I’ll learn Italian and get to see villages, and when I find one that warms me, I’ll stay on and work.”

“When do you go?”

“Thursday morning. Tomorrow they’re doing an opera. They say I sing well enough for the chorus, if I start working on the music.”

Connie remembered Hawk setting out for her week in the woods. “How are you going to travel?”

“By dipper. Then, when we’re further south, by bike.”

“Do you own a bike?”

“Own? Like I dropped a rock on my own foot?”

“A bike that’s yours.”

Hawk scratched her ear. “Any bike not in use, I can use. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to everybody!” Hawk stood on one foot. “You think Bee would like my painting of per? It’s not … top good, but it has a lot of colors in it.”

“How not?” Luciente kissed her cheek. “If person should be so blind as not to want it, I want it.”

“I’m in velvet we’re done with taboo so I can say goodbye properly to my mothers … . Don’t tell Bee I’m going–I want to tell myself, hold?”

“Hold” Luciente shook her hand and Hawk skipped off.

“I love winter,” Luciente said as they strolled on. “Eating and getting fat and going tobogganing and ice skimming. Talking and talking and talking. I’m redding Chinese, sweetness, fifteen hours a week till even Bee picks up from hearing it so much. Also our base, we’re monitoring last year’s results from all over. And I play in a new mojai group every Friday night, last Friday we went on almost till morning. Mojai is music like this … .” Luciente began beating out a complicated rhythm over rhythm with two hands on the edge of a table.

“Shh, Luciente!” Morningstar rebuked her. “We’re listening.”

“I blather.” Luciente drew Connie away. “Such hardness in your mind tonight makes me babble more than usual. I fear for you.”

“But it was you, your people, who taught me I’m fighting a war.”

“Then fight well, Connie!” They walked out into the cold clean brisk air. Luciente paused to grab a jacket and drape it over Connie’s shoulders. Big disks of snow came tilting and turning down where already several inches lay thick, rounding all corners and softening straight lines, an expanse of white across the square marked only by the tracks of children playing.

Luciente touched her shoulder. “You want to ask if I still mourn … .”

“I wouldn’t ask!”

“I know. But you want to feel how I am. Yes, I mourn. But I work too. It hurts, but I can’t let the pain bind me … . Diana has helped. Otter has helped. Bee has carried me! … I want no new lover and I dread spring … . But look!” Luciente waved her hand at a snowball battle swirling around the statue of a funny bird dancing on one foot and a barricade of benches. Briefly Dawn ran through a pool of light, whooping and waving.

Lazy flakes drifted onto the arm of the borrowed jacket. “Luciente, do you think it’s always wrong to kill?”

“We live by eating living beings, whether vegetable or animal. Without chlorophyll in our skins, we have no choice.” Luciente caught flakes on her outstretched palm.

“I mean to kill a person.”

“How can I face something so abstract?”

“To kill someone with power over me. Who means to do me in.”

“Power isviolence. When did it get destroyed peacefully? We all fight when we’re back to the wall–or to tear down a wall. You know we kill people who choose twice to hurt others. We don’t think it’s right to kill them. Only convenient. Nobody wants to stand guard over another.”

“In my time people are willing to stand guard. It’s a living. I guess maybe it’s power, too.”

“You brood on killing someone, my friend?”