Ancient, Ancient

by Kiini Ibura Salaam

  “can i hold you?”

  i remember how jump me heart. i no answer, but i go close to him & lay in he body shape. i watch video. he watch me. time whole i thinking: do you believe? do you believe? me eyeskin tight slide on me eyeballs when feeling lips on me cheek, me neck. it almost too hard make stop george, but i keep control. i push he face off, but stay in he arm circle. he fingers on me face, me waist, me hips. yes. i like. he sleep, me head in he lap. i calling him. he no hear me. i sit up, he wake up. he no sleep until…until…until i put me head back in he lap.

  moth the elders send fly in room all night. i not see signal. i too busy feeling.

  WaLiLa watched George walk back over to where she was sitting & couldn’t help but think “what if?” what if i don’t have to go back? what if i could stay with my assignments? Her work in the field never allowed her to go past these first tender moments. She was an expert at the chase. Knew the rushing sensations of the first dates well, but what happened then? What did two months feel like? Three, four? The elders kept promising she would know the feeling when she got home, after the fieldwork. But what if they never took her off fieldwork? Some of the best were still in the field on extended assignments. WaLiLa knew the same thing could happen to her. George broke into her thoughts asking,

  “Do you realize we’ve seen each other every day this week?”

  WaLiLa shook her head, yes.

  “Do you realize how much I like you?”

  Silence.

  “I know, I know. I have to stop thinking like this, but I need to know how you feel about me.”

  “It no matter how I feel. I no stay with you. I leave soon.”

  “You will leave with Patrice & the other Americans?”

  “I no same like Patrice & the other Americans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just tell me how you feel about me.”

  She kept silent. It always came to this. A demand, a need to know that the tenderness in the air was reciprocal. Still, she would not speak. She preferred to focus on enjoying the tingly feelings. She couldn’t expose the real pleasure she felt in spending time with her assignments. Not to them. Not to the elders. Not even to herself.

  He brought her home in silence. When they reached her house, WaLiLa stepped out of the jeep slowly & waved goodnight.

  “WaLiLa!” Her name sounded like it was ripped from his throat. “Would you…could you come over tonight?”

  i run in house & get clothes & things. i no want contact elders, but i not can complete assignment with not talk with them. i get on knees & pull me hunterself out to get on knees too. me shoulder raise. i start with arm flick. the circle of life is beginning to strain. i curve me elbows & i make circle with me arms. they who do not believe in you, my elders, are winning. i push me arms tight to me side. i know you feel i am willful and disobedient. i chop down with final move. but i am afraid. i move arms quick in air around me body. the non-believers hope to exist and progress without feeding their predecessors. i brush me fingers from me belly to the floor. this desire is powerful, so powerful it seeps into the nectar and destroys the cycle. i bend back from me waist & lift me chest up to sky. this you know, but you don’t know how it feels to look into the eyes of the non-believers. i raise me arms & shake me fingers hard. they can kill. i move me arms in angle to behind me. my behavior does not ensure that george or any assignment is a believer. i sway me body from side to side. but i must follow my instincts. they tell me to get as close as possible so that i might feel what they feel. i roll my head around on my neck. you who are wise, please accept my apology. i touch me forehead to ground in front of me, close me eyes, & move me prayer to Ancestor First. i get me bag & me hunterself & run out door.

  When they got to George’s house WaLiLa’s eyes were so heavy with sleep, she could not keep them open. She knew the elders were trying to lull her into a state of unconsciousness to stop her from completing the assignment her way. She sat on the sofa & tried to appear lucid.

  “WaLiLa, I’m going upstairs to take a shower, okay?”

  WaLiLa nodded. As she heard the faint splash of water dripping on George’s body, WaLiLa slid off the sofa & fell into a deep sleep on the carpet. George returned to find WaLiLa curled on the floor. He watched her torso’s silent heaving motions. He examined her unguarded face softened by sleep. Sitting next to her, he caressed her sleeping body with his eyes. Laying with his back to her, he took deep stabilizing breaths & touched WaLiLa over & over in his mind. His cautious breathing woke her up. It was so careful & so loud. It was slowly passing its tongue over her ear. Come to me, it said. Wake up & hold me, it said. Come, I want you. Then the insistent breathing gave way to mumbling. The mumbling evolved into words. The words were asking if he could put his arms around her.

  “Yes,” she murmured through her veil of sleep.

  He wrapped his arms around her, & a current blazed through her, zinging her awake. He started mumbling her name again & pulled her closer. She ignored his call, acted as though she couldn’t hear.

  “WaLiLa,” he said more urgently.

  “Hmmm?” she whispered.

  “Lila,” he called.

  She turned over to face him. His face showed all the torturous emotions that were shooting through his body. WaLiLa knew it was time. Well, she looked up at the elders, I gather the nectar my own way. WaLiLa closed her eyes & kissed him. That one kiss, a simple touch of the lips opened a floodwall of actions & emotions. Tongues passed through the barriers of lips, clothing parted & lay rumpled on the floor. As their hips grinded to their own beat, WaLiLa remembered defending herself to the council of elders. Everybody has had to do fieldwork from the beginning of time, they said. Why, they wanted to know, why did she have to be so difficult? Why couldn’t she just do it the old way & get the nectar while he slept? It didn’t matter to them that nectar gathering was a richer & more fulfilling experience during lovemaking. The nectar that seeped through the skin during sleep was thin, almost translucent. But when she gathered nectar while the flower was open, its essence was so powerful, it almost knocked her unconscious.

  She pushed the council of elders out of her mind & extended her arms as wide as she could. To George, it looked like she was unfurling large wings, like those of a moth. He dismissed the thought, crediting the delusion to his happiness. She enfolded him in her wings & pulled in all of the energy, sweat, & fluids he released to her. His surrender released the potent nectar WaLiLa had been sent to Earth to obtain. She and hundreds of other fieldworkers spent the majority of their youth learning tactics and techniques to persuade humans to part with it. This nectar runs the veins with the blood and exits the pores with the sweat. It is active in saliva and tears, but humans hadn’t even begun to discover the nectar’s existence. No human language even had a word for it. In WaLiLa’s language, it was signified by a slow fluid motion from the head to the heart. The nectar of a believer could incite a shock in the body ten times as powerful as the adrenaline rush of an orgasm. But the nectar of a non-believer could freeze all life within the body starting with the slow petrification of the bones. It may be blood that sustains human life, but it is the potent nectar that ensures the continuation of the life cycle.

  George and WaLiLa lay quiet. WaLiLa wiggled her fingers & toes, & smiled. She was still alive—George believed! He believed in the ancestors, and this belief begat a new cycle of life. George felt a warm glow in the base of his belly. At this moment, he knew he was complete. He did not know about the healing touch. He smiled thinking he had found his better half in WaLiLa. With her, he thought, I can be whole. He did not know that this feeling was his. In exchange for his belief, WaLiLa had passed this completeness to him through his navel from the center of her being. He now owned this feeling, & tomorrow, when he called his mother, he would call her as a complete being, not expecting the successes of his life to be dependent upon her. Next week when his medical project failed, he would fail as a complete being, not
granting his failure to his thesis partner. And next month when he found a lover, he would come to her whole, expecting not fulfillment, but love. WaLiLa had given George back to himself. Absolved him from guilt & pettiness. Freed him to really be. George closed his eyes & began to drift off into sleep when he felt WaLiLa shift underneath him.

  “What?” he murmured.

  “I… I must go,” WaLiLa stammered. “Out I must go. I need have air fresh.”

  “Now?” George asked worried.

  “Yes.” WaLiLa wiped moisture from her eyes.

  At George’s insistence, they walked outside together under the canopy of the cluttered night sky. His concern for her safety made WaLiLa smile. Full with the moon & star constellations, the sky was calling her. WaLiLa knew her time was up, but she felt her connection to George still tugging at her hips. She glanced at him. He was walking slowly with his head thrown back, caught under the sky’s spell. WaLiLa lowered her head and wondered how George would react to her departure. He won’t remember, she consoled herself, and concentrated on how it felt to be with him.

  As their feet propelled them forward, they began to discuss stars & spirits & where it was exactly that the ancestors dwelled. Whoosh—a moth fluttered between them. George caught an anguished look on WaLiLa’s face. Two more moths flew by & took George’s attention. Soon a steady stream of moths were flying between them. So taken was he with this miracle of nature, he did not notice that WaLiLa had stopped walking.

  George turned to utter some phrase of amazement, and found that WaLiLa was not there. He looked back and saw her, standing in the misty night air with her eyes closed, her body eerily still. The moths were attaching themselves to her body, softly and gently. Her hands were open, palms tilted upward in a gesture of acceptance. George ran to her and began to frantically brush the moths off her body. But as he removed one, two more would replace it, until WaLiLa’s body was completely covered. He could no longer see his hands. George’s fingers were shaking in disbelief. The moths!

  Staring at WaLiLa’s moth-clad body, George shook his hands free of moths. WaLiLa’s arms floated upward, and in a graceful motion, began performing some kind of entranced dance; her body began to sway. In moments, George could see the flapping of one, two, then thousands of moth wings. Eventually, they took flight, leaving George stooped in the middle of the street, alone except for a pile of moth’s wings marking the place where WaLiLa had been standing.

  MalKai’s Last Seduction

  “the most powerful seductions are executed against the silence of few words”

  Sometimes, I feel

  shoulder shrug

  like a motherless child.

  cheek rub against shoulder

  Sometimes, I feel

  like a motherless child.

  body slump

  At twilight, when the earth is settling down for rest, MalKai is turning over inside. The colors of dusk pierce him like a rusty pin breaking skin. Yellow gets him in the gut. Auggghhh. It is the color of his home skies. Orange knocks him in the temple. Hhhhhhh. It is the color of his soil. Rose pushes against his heart. It is, like here, the color of love. MalKai’s spirit groans with aching for home. Nothing can soothe him. He spends his hours speaking the words. He has little use for human languages, but he feels the moan, he understands the feeling she sings about. The wail in that woman’s voice wraps itself around his loneliness and strokes his painful yearning to be among his people. He spends hours speaking the words, but in his own language: shoulder shrug, cheek rub against shoulder, body slump.

  The buzzing that had settled in Cori’s ears over the past couple of days was MalKai coming to get him. When the first “zzzzzz” licked his ear drums, Cori had swatted at the air around his newly-pierced ear lobes. A meddlesome mosquito—he imagined—hovering near. He made repeated attempts to shoo it away, but his arms soon grew tired. His shoulder ached from throwing his biceps into repeated attack arcs. His fist grew bored of finding no tender little bug crushed in its grasp. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and rescinded the attack.

  Like any constant noise will, the buzzing eventually disappeared from Cori’s consciousness. Seeing MalKai’s frame draped in a relaxed stance at the base of a huge sycamore brought the “zzzzzz” back into Cori’s awareness. The sound reconstructed itself gradually, like the pieces of a forgotten dream slowly becoming crystal clear. Cori didn’t connect MalKai with the buzzing. He peeked at MalKai’s body out of the corner of his eyes while biting at his lower lip. What Cori discerned through the thick of his lashes was a mass of pulsating energy. Cori felt it radiating from MalKai in waves. It buzzed around MalKai’s form, building a composite of legs, arms, and wings. Wings? Cori flipped his head quickly to face MalKai as though to catch a culprit in the act of thievery. All he saw was MalKai’s brown body swaying back and forth in slow motion like a heavy fruit ready to drop to the earth. No wings. Cori dismissed his vision as a hallucination induced by the sun’s glare. He lifted his hand to his forehead and brought much needed shade to his eyes.

  When Cori walked past MalKai, the buzzing exploded in his eardrums with a boom. Cori stopped short. The hair on the back of his legs felt like it was on fire. In the pit of his belly a million atoms danced a nervous rumba. His heart threw itself into convulsions, but he couldn’t look back. He felt if he looked back the zzzzzz would take over his brain and push him into insanity. He put his thumb between his lips, gnawed on his skin, and begged for his legs to unlock so he could walk away.

  The noise now had a source: MalKai (a mosquito he was not).

  Though MalKai’s skin might have felt like the brush of a thousand humming wings, it sheathed a strong solid body that could not be crushed with a smack. MalKai’s mouth was used for sucking, but not for sucking blood. The tongue housed in MalKai’s mouth was flat and thick and warm, quite contrary to the mosquito’s hollow tube. And the swell of a mosquito bite?—Negligent when compared to the swelling of the soul triggered by contact with MalKai’s lips.

  The soft brush of something against Cori’s skin roused him from his frozen stance. It wasn’t a mosquito that had been flying around Cori’s ears, as he had first imagined; it was a moth. Cori automatically responded to the moth’s flirtatious touch with a shoulder jerk and an ear swat. MalKai, who had been morosely passing time under the sycamore’s shade, straightened and focused when his eyes registered Cori’s motions. Those involuntary movements spoke volumes to MalKai; in MalKai’s language, Cori had just whispered come on in.

  Cori had no way of imagining a velvet people who spoke through balletic motions and muscle spasms, arced arms and bent necks. A nation that consisted of beings who were physically similar to humans but biologically distinct. A people who thrived on human nectar.

  MalKai did not wait for the ancestors to confirm that he had found his last seduction. When Cori’s motions fully saturated MalKai’s consciousness, his hands flew through the air in a gesture of relief. That he had some nectar to collect before he could return home, seemed a mere formality. MalKai had plans, plans that did not include a lengthy chase. Under the crushing pressure of his homesickness he made no provision for elongated discussions that could discern the safety of his assignment. He did not care to proceed carefully. By whatever renegade tactics he had to employ, MalKai was getting the nectar he came for, completing his last assignment, and going home.

  Now.

  Cori began the seduction. Only he did it in ignorance. Didn’t understand he was parading his openness when he turned to face MalKai and offered up a weak, uncertain smile. Didn’t realize he was making it easy for his seducer when he sat quietly under the shade of the next tree (an oak), close enough to make pursuit unnecessary. Was too ignorant to know it was on when MalKai appeared in front of him with a huge grin plastered across that velvet face. The grin should have told Cori something. It was all teeth, without calculation or hesitation.

  There was no shame either.

  It was MalKai whose voice rode the wind first. Cori
’s tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth to wet his lips in nervous preparation. He looked over his shoulder, scanning the area that surrounded the oak tree. His search for intruding eyes revealed his anxiety, but it was an unnecessary revelation. His anxiety was visible, he was suffocating in it, and his worried eyes were pounding out an S.O.S. on MalKai’s face. Those paranoid gestures were like spoken confessions. MalKai kneeled and skimmed his fingers over the back of Cori’s hand. Cori glanced up in confusion and found himself caught in MalKai’s brown eyes.

  The buzzing stopped.

  Cori could no longer feel the breeze. MalKai flipped Cori’s hand over and traced a slow circle on the skin of Cori’s palm. When MalKai pushed on Cori’s palm, Cori felt something wrap around him and squeeze out his secrets. He found himself releasing thoughts that had never before crossed his lips. Then somewhere, a little girl screamed, her mother cursed, and Cori blinked. With that blink Cori regained something like consciousness and jerked away. Heart first, then hand flying away from its resting place in MalKai’s firm grasp. Cori looked down at his hand, eyes clouded with disbelief. He could almost make out a trail of wildfire where the kiss of MalKai’s finger had seared his flesh.

  Something inside him cringed.

  The second his hand was free, Cori’s mind started buzzing. His mind buzzed all the way through chatty introductions, appraising glances, and MalKai’s smooth descent into a seated position beside him. The buzzing of Cori’s mind was nothing like the buzzing that MalKai had sent to sit in Cori’s ears. Cori’s buzzing was visual. It was composed of images of large square men tottering on tiny angular spiked heels. A television clip of a pedophilic priest and jagged pages from porno magazines displasying studs in ripped overalls.