By sid sibo
The bear stands steady on four deep legs, ears alert against the empty horizon she’s watched for millennia. She knows many secrets of emptiness. She knows the ripe sustenance of overlapping human traditions here. Hoon’Naqvut, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Shash Jaa, Ansh An Lashokdiwe: different songs rich with nourishment, filled with energies that have powered dancing feet over centuries.
“You mean like the Energizer Bunny?” My son Sean is Tobacco and Rabbit Clan, and sometimes hears my thoughts. Like me, he’s a terrible dancer. But his endurance is half-way legendary. He can keep going.
“Don’t you have some race you need to be at?” I drop my arms from a sunrise greeting and glare at him. “Some hundred-miler over a muddy mountain. Somewhere far away?”
“I love you too.” He’s upside down, voice muffled as he stretches his long gallina legs, open hands on chokeberry-colored rock. The back of his t-shirt sports a hand-stenciled Water is Life meme.
“Now what’re you raising money for?” My question half-hearted.
“Campaign against importing Estonian radioactive waste to store next to White Mesa. Last thing we need on top of our water system is more hot rock.”
“Huh.” Somedays my word-barn echoes empty. Which, like the space between here and the hazy horizon, is full of pulsing, invisible things.
“I’ll make new shirts tomorrow to resist the upcoming oil and gas sales. Want one?”
“Can’t you combine that campaign with the anti-alabaster, anti-uranium and anti-coal mines? Or the anti-ATV park that dude wants to start in the monument?”
“S’not the monument anymore. Or all this wouldn’t be happening.” He rises, arms over his head as if he remembers. But he’s just stretching. It takes lots of stretching to keep going.
I lower myself onto crystal-rough rock and listen to the wind. Not, of course, that the wind makes a sound, but it plays on the edges of rocks and tips of grasses. On the cartilage of my ear. Instruments, all of us.
Sean runs in place, arms pumping. The earth’s tight skin a resonant drum I hear with my ribcage.
I watch. “Well, are you going?”
His cheeks puff out, and air bursts from him in popping rhythm. “Why do you stay?”
“Pfft. Their shit don’t scare me. She’s still here.” I toss my head a little sideways, toward the bear, without looking at her directly. Eye contact can be unnerving, not to mention impolite.
I catch the flash of Sean’s teeth bursting white in his gotcha smile as he kicks it in gear and lopes away downhill.
The scent of pinyon rises in his wake. Sean’s passage leaves behind dust I can taste, and my feet ache. The sound of a circling jay falls around me. What dance have I ever offered? Stillness rises from granular rock, into my interlocking backbones. I feel the morning desert changing, plateau light bleeding as if at a fawn’s birth. Soundless dancers with dark blue skin shimmy across mesa space, stretching from unseen cloud toward unknowable earth.
Living on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, sid sibo recently won the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award and an Honorable Mention in the Rick DeMarinis Short Story contest. Publications include Evocations, Orca, Cutthroat, Brilliant Flash Fiction and Artscapes. An environmental analysis job seeds a variety of creative work.