THE FLUTTERINGS
Beth Thomas

I. Processional

Night leaves me longing for something, and I tell myself: I am young.

We are young. We are so young we have been drinking blackberry wine all night. We are lovers of moonlight, folding time and putting it in our back pockets. I reach out blindly for a kiss, and you throw your hands up in startled response. My wine spills onto the clean white tablecloth. Each drop spreads dark and mysterious into a pattern like tea leaves from porcelain. Read them for me.

Brilliance. My ceremonial dress hangs in silent glory behind my bedroom door. Nine thousand ivory beads catch the moonlight and the whole thing glows.

Morning. Mother weaves my hair into braids, then twists the braids around my head into a crown. "The positions of the stars and the warnings of the planets may not be enough to save you," she advises. "Your own six senses may be all that you have."

II. Ceremony

In the center of this town of drying gardens and patchwork adobe, we gather. The men dance in the streets with turtle shells tied to their ankles, feathers in their wild hair. The women with children at their skirts, and women holding babies tight to their breasts look on, beating a syncopated tom tom tom with the flat of their bare feet against the ground. The sun is bright and forms coronas around them all, shrouding all in an undulating veil of mystery. A dream, like an enchantment, a vision, with sounds of turtle shells and the smell of roasted corn and frying tacos.

Amid a late-summer snowfall of cottonwoods laying down a blanket of seeds, we recite the litany of our desire. The spirits keep their silent council from up in the church bell tower. The forebears standing in the very back shield their eyes from the sun, agree, disaster.

We kiss and your mouth tastes of blackberry wine. You raise my arm in a show of Victory, and the music begins again: a homemade flute, turtle shells on ankles, rawhide stretched tight over a wooden bowl. You turn this dying town to song.

The drink pours from ceremonial pitchers. For hours we dance, drink, dance, sing. My gown weighs heavily on my shoulders, magnifying my gravity. Near dawn, congratulatory words slur into questions and questionable language.

III. Recessional

Night leaves me soaking in memory, and I tell myself again: I am young.

I am young and I have a baby growing inside me. It squirms with the waning and waxing of the moon. It is anxious. Now I know your eyes to be those of something dangerous, and I am without a chain. There is no way to handle you. Now I know that the demons of my childhood imaginings are not illusory, and I pray that even the dusty gods will eventually open their arms to me.

The round aspen leaves shimmer and rattle like coins in the cool mountain air. The screen door slams and near the corner of the yard, a growing ball of spiders stirs.

© Beth Thomas 2005

Beth Thomas (winterintheblood@yahoo.com) is a working writer living in Oxnard, CA. She has been published previously in Edgar Literary Magazine, and online at Fuzzynet. She has an M.A. in Writing, and a B.A. in Journalism. She is a technical writer by trade.

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