Chaos

Men name wars to pin them to paper, fold them up, tuck madness and destruction into a pocket. Forget. Never forget. Gain distance. Relive it. Blame. Ask forgiveness. Tidy up chaos into sentences and chapters. A title. A timeline. Statistics.

True chaos, khaos, cannot be scribed into dots and lines. No. Your people have forgotten that khaos is the void, the abyss.

7 June, 1941 CE

Oxford, England

"Lady Harris?" She heard the words as if she was far under water. The name drifted past, paling to an echo. She barely recognized herself by that name, or any other these days. Cold washed over the exposed skin on her arms and she instinctively drew the cape closer around her. It was more a work of art than a garment.

31 May, 1942 CE

Oxford

Floats. Water. Wings. These words tumbled together in Charlotte’s head coming to rest at the gate to her memories on the bank of the Thames. The gates opened with a click and the words rearranged into a vision of the ghost plane drifting silently past the girl and the tree. More memories came spooling out, some Charlotte couldn’t understand, didn’t recognize as her own. She sat very still while her insides whirled like a crazed carousel.

May, 1945 CE

The Village of Ash

Once there was a story and no one to tell it.

As Grandmother spoke, the girl settled herself closer; the pair were excused from the work of women and girls in their village lest their strangeness spoil the bubbling disks of injera as they baked or taint the healing essence of the plants hanged to dry in the African sun.

“Tell about the tree and the bird and the girl by the sea,” Asmeret begged.

9 July, 1960 CE

Tree, on the Red Sea

Once a year she startled awake, gasping for breath. Reached for him as he slipped away. Wait! Wait.

When she was younger, Asmeret could still see his blue-black-blue face, the color of the ancient kings and queens of their tribe. Smell the blood of their mother on him. Hear his breath. Feel his heartbeat next to hers as it had been for the time in their mother’s womb and the no-time in the no-place before that.

June, 1949 CE

The Village of Ash

“Don’t encourage her,” Arsema snapped.

Bilen and the other Parrot Girls clung to each other under the thorn tree where they preened in the shade. They screeched in mock terror whenever Asmeret stopped running in circles to bare her teeth and snap at them with that weird grin on her face.

NEXT

What came next is this.

Asmeret stared at the card in her hand; curls of blonde hair escaping the helmet, intelligent blue-gray eyes full of questions. Eyes, she realized, that couldn’t see her, though they seemed to try. Asmeret looked from Athena to Hestia. Then to the wisp she understood was her grandmother, now an ancestor.

1949-1953 CE

Somewhere on the Coast of Eritrea

The little dog growled softly, backing away from the tracks. “Stick close to me,” Asmeret cautioned her, “I won’t let it get you.”

Asmeret squatted, laying her palm flat and spreading her fingers wide, trying to fill the print. The girl glanced around and sniffed at the air. The stink of the animal lingered. It was nearby.

Muck-North

They lay askew there in the muck—a stillness so complete you would think them dead. Silt billows up in dark, languid puffs. The body has settled on its back, not quite flat. Arms splayed, outstretched, palms to the sky; back arched, as are the feet, curling into the seabed as if grasping for purchase.