by Amy Lee Scott

THE NEW WORLD BEGINS TO UNDERSTAND

When the Spanish conquistadores arrived at a then unnamed peninsula, they felt confident.  They had already “found” Asia, established forts and slavery on various islands, and slapped together a few monasteries in their spare time.  As Human Resources was important in their line of work, they had also learned a few key phrases in the native tongue.  They were good at their job.

After watching a man stick a Spanish flag on a hill, the company’s mapmaker felt it his duty to get some information about the village.

“What’s the name of this place?” he asked in Mayan.

Blank look.

“What’s!  The!  Name!  Of!  This!  Place!” he yelled so that the Mayan would understand.

“Yucatán.”

The mapmaker smiled and patted the Mayan on the cheek.  He shipped his calligraphied masterpiece home without bothering to learn that Yucatán, in Mayan, means I don’t understand you.

 

ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

In 867 AD some Vikings decided they wanted to see Coldingham Monastery. When they landed they were disappointed to see that it was just another boring stone building.  They politely surveyed the garden and regrouped in the library.

The Vikings knew they looked bad; their hulking mass of horns and long braids imposed upon an island of sacramental mendicants.  They didn’t mean any harm.  But the monks with their weakened eyes misread the Vikings’ presence; they sounded the alarm.  Sheepish, the Vikings fled.  Gold leaf fluttered in their wake.

Mother Superior at the nunnery next door pricked her ears at the clanging bells.  Assuming the worst, she raised a knife and her voice: “To be chaste, expose thy face!”  The knife descended, slicing off her nose and upper lip.  The knife passed from face to face.

A shortcut to the boat took the Vikings through the nunnery, they glanced at the nuns, then blanched—retreated.  In his haste, one Viking knocked over a candelabra.  The building burnt to the ground.  Inside the nuns expanded and contracted, reduced to ashes—chastity intact.

 

LONELINESS BREEDS DESPERATION

The female angler fish spools away the hours by chasing her bacteria-powered lure.  She spends the remainder of her time swimming to and fro, fro and to.  Maybe once in a lifetime the female will stumble upon a male.  

The male angler fish is born without a digestive system but with a strong olfactory sense.  His only goal in life is to survive.  To do so, he must find a female.  He sputters blindly through the dark until he catches a whiff of her pheromones.  He wastes no time with foreplay—he simply bites her flank in a saucy How-you-doin?  With that, he releases an enzyme that digests her skin into his mouth.  Their blood vessels fuse together, circulating nutrients into his system.  

By some joke of Nature, his happiness cannot last.  First his smell goes, then his organs, finally his brain.  He atrophies until he’s nothing more than a pair of gonads that exist to serve his lady whenever she feels the need to breed.  

When my friend Devan Jagenath feels lonely he thinks about this story.  He’s still lonely.       

 

LOYALTY HURTS

Every autumn Mary Ann Daher plugs her headphones into the monitor to listen for his call.  Since 1992 she has tracked a lone whale, “with a voice unlike any other,” as he wanders through her radio signal.  

Mary Ann can’t figure out why the whale comes at all, alone like this.  But every year, when leaves crinkle like tissue paper beneath her corrugated soles, he returns.  She wonders if he has lost something, a beloved mate or perhaps a calf.  What else could call him back to the same stretch of exiled ocean?

As the years pass his voice deepens slightly.  She still recognizes it.  Lately she hears him moan, casting a strange, lonely cry down to the Pacific’s depths.  It clangs against reefs, echoes in caves, and tapers like a trailing ribbon.

Mary Ann presses her hands against the headphones and waits, hoping to hear a refrain.

 

THE GOODBYE

The train started to pull away while a man ran to keep up with it.  He ran until he caught hold of his daughter’s hands.  Every time he thought about letting them go, he just ran faster.  He ran and held her hands and didn’t let go.  He couldn’t.  So he pulled her from the moving train and back into his arms.

She survived five concentration camps before the War was over.

She thinks: How would my life have gone had my father (not) loved me so much that he let go of my hands?

It’s hard to think: He loved her so much that he held on.

It’s harder to think: She wanted to say goodbye.  She wanted to let go.

 

WHEN TO STOP

Turkey’s 9,000-year-old Çatalhöyük contains the world’s first known map and the history of a people with no ruling class or alleyways.  They lived close to the sun, accessing each other’s homes through rooftops and ladders.

Ian Hodder, Cambridge archeologist, took over excavations in 1993.  He discovered an entire world hidden in a shallow grave beneath one of the kitchen hearths.  It contains a woman’s skeleton curled in a fetal position.  She is holding something and together they form a heart.  It is the skull of a man.

Ian cannot bring himself to disturb them.

 

PROOF OF LIFE

Berlin’s East Side Gallery is a stretch of wall patch-worked with aging murals.  At first you only see bright, Easter Island-esque heads splattered across crumbling concrete.  A step closer presents peeling paint.  Another reveals silvery graffiti, but it’s only when you reach out to touch the wall that you see the faint marks of hurried hands:

“Dance to freedom”

“No more borders”

“Dinos for peace”

“Mexico ’68, jamas se olvida!”

“Thoughts are like races of birds in heaven”

“When you read this we are far away”

“How can I be nostalgic for a world I never knew?”

“Andy was here → maybe not”

“William, I was here for you.  Juju.”

 

“I’m here.”

 

 

Amy Lee Scott is an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Iron Horse Literary Review, Quarter After Eight, and Brevity.