(sometimes all I am doing is existing and suddenly 1000 words worth of imagery pops in my head and they’re just wasting away in my hard-drive so alas, a new post-series)
There was a woman whom I met just briefly. The most brief of moments, truly, for it was in a passing thought. A dry blink. The stutter of newly-unfolded wings. But it was so rich and complete and real.
Her name can’t be pronounced, for it is old. Ancient. Her name is in the peat, spoken by only moss. Her name is the morning dew as it settles atop the red clay, where she lives.
Her feet are bare except for the dried clay. It builds up in layers and protects her feet well enough when she runs. She has tried using furs before but it takes away the feeling, she can’t feel the earth on furs. The others do, they walk in fur boots.
Her feet are bare.
Dried clay laps at her ankles like small white waves, like a drawing against the deep brown of her skin. When she first saw it, she took wet clay into her hands and painted her whole body. Sometimes it helped to cool her when the sun got too warm. Sometimes it helped to keep her skin tight when she was healing a wound. Sometimes, she just liked to paint.
Trees are sparse where she lives, and their trunks are thin. They do not have forests, no grouping of trees is dense enough. They don’t even have a word for ‘forest’.
She paints clay handprints around tree trunks.
Two Hands is a landmark her people know well.
The branches are bushy and lush, many people are often found laying in its shade by midday.
Other people are there one day. They have flowy, woven scarves. She trades with them for cloth.
Everyone trades with them for cloth.
The people are beautiful and tall with dark hair and dark brows. Their eyes are wise.
Typically, this ancient woman I met would be found in her odd open-air hut.
The walls are rectangles, human-sized picture frames, made from stripped limbs lashed together at the corners.
Something akin to a harp is strung within each rectangle. Dozens of strings, beaded with bored-through rocks and precious stones – which means little to her for name but most for the prisms they would toss about – and sun-bleached wood. And, each rock and stone and twig attached to yet another string that disappears outward to end at Two Hands. Or Four Hands. Or a water source. Or a building.
From within her framework hut, she has a three-hundred-sixty degree view of the immediate surroundings.
She knows the sound of bored children striking a line.
The frantic skitter across her strings of an animal caught in a trap. Not hers, never hers. She doesn’t believe in traps. She has no word for them, but instead an unwelcome feeling which gnaws within her.
The melodic drum of a deliberate reply – her created way of communication with someone on the other end.
She learns what local animal activity looks like, as it relates to rocks bobbing on strings.
She can direct hunters where to go for the best chances of dinner.
She can know what areas might need a scout to be sent to.
For her work monitoring this intricate web of information, the people of her tribe bring her food every day. They pray to her. They beg her to bless their children. They consider her advice. They do not fault her for spending hours in her framework hut.
Others keep their fires burning through the night, but she only uses hers for cooking. Even she thinks the main fire, overseen by another woman nearer the homes, should be put out if not absolutely necessary. She does not comprehend there is a natural gas vein that the others are utilizing. It scares her to think about it, because she doesn’t understand it and no one can explain it to her.
But at night she watches the stars, the fire of the homes far enough away that she can pretend they do not exist. She lays on her back and feels the heat of the earth radiate through her, like it is trying to get through her and out to space. Like it might take some of her with it so she can be closer to the stars.
There is a tinkling at her left ankle; typical this time of night, as it’s where a nest of small, furry prey animals live. They come out at dusk this time of year.
She watches the constellations slide across the sky. She has repeated them in clay drawings on the walls of every building she has ever known to exist.
Someone brings her a pelt.
“For warmth.”
They did not speak — no one can speak to her, no one knows how – but she knew that is what the pelt was for. The temperature would not fall for weeks, but they always made sure to gift her anything she may need before they prepared for themselves. She had tried to refuse, many times – when it got colder, she had a more sufficient space to call home which she would retreat to – but they insisted. For decades, they insisted.
The woman of peat.
Of moss.
With no name anyone knows.
written 4/7/2025
Fauna Lewis Writes 