by MacKenzie River Foy | Originally published in Village X Magazine vol. 5
They saw us. That was all the reason we needed to help them survive. They danced behind us like footprints, floated in us like we were the breeze and they, featherweight. These people could make music from anything, and the music they made was our mirror.
Oh, what a joy it was to be seen! For a quick moment we could catch a glimpse of ourselves in a percussive embellishment, a vocal riff, the taught timbre of the trumpet. In the clarity of brass and sweet winds, in the purr of a bamboo reed. Coming from fingers and wet breath, we were beautiful.
Still, there were people who could not or would not dance with us. But a snake you can see will not bite you, yes? We saw them, did not expect them to see us, and came to love those that did.
We melted into their flesh. We became part of them as we are of all free things. We danced for thousands of years happily and could have gone on forever if it weren’t for the other people. The ones who didn’t listen.
The girlchild, Bennie, would be our last dance with the humans.
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Bennie would watch the older children play from the wide window of her sunroom, the sounds of their shrieking laughter spilling in from outside. Her grandmother hadn’t let her play with other kids since a deadly virus had flooded the city with grief the previous year.
“Now you know you not going out there just to play,” she scoffed. “I’m seventy-fo. And I’m ‘sposed to die cause you got a crush on one of them crusty lipped kids? Shi-et.”
Deflated, Bennie stopped asking. Instead she would watch from this window, committing to memory everything she could hear. The sound of thin white cords tap-dancing on concrete imprinted in her brain. We suspect this was the way she learned to dance.
Bennie was a good listener, a natural talent as was her mother and her mothers mother and so on. She inherited the ability to hear music in everything, synthesize it out of the air and sunlight. Her rhythm was a natural fact, yet Bennie’s memory was scientific in its precision.
As years went on, she would watch her grandmother move through the kitchen and learned the sounds there.
Another spoonful of ginger slipping from the lip of the spoon into a crowd of red onions squabbling in the cast iron. Another bunch of berries from juniper tree. Another three nights beneath the waning moon. Her grandmother would pick twelve flowers from the bush, dry them in sunlight, crush them beneath sacred stones, grind them to fine purple powder. All the while, singing a song passed to her through her mother, and her mothers mother, and her father, and his mother and then her aunt before that. The song was from everywhere. It was Gullah, Yoruba, Telugu, Swahili, Creole, Brixton, Kingston, Harlem. There were sounds not quite earthly, melodies for which there was no notation.
Her grandmother would do each step with a distinct flair, in motions that seemed to sing along with her tune, a low hum that warmed her chest.
Dutifully, Bennie committed it all to memory, from the choreography to the moonlight glancing off her grandmothers smooth scalp. She knew each sound by heart – the whispering simmer, the crackling oil, the mournful tenor of the old oven door.
After her grandmother had gone to sleep, Bennie would practice the movements in her bedroom, reaching on her tiptoes towards where the spice cabinet would be, stirring the pot on the stove as she imagined it before her. We did this dance til the girl became a woman herself.
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It was the earth that changed first. You see, leaving was not easy. We could not help but wonder if we would ever be seen again. Avoiding the leaving was worse, and soon we could not deny that our time had come. The seasons and the sandy coasts were off-beat. Life in the sea seemed to expand, while forests were licked to desert by flames. Stress overtook our delicate, ancient dance with the soil, the rain. The surface became hard, cold, rock, and where rock wouldn’t hold, sand. The air seemed to either stand still or sprint by with enough force to lay a city flat. The edges of continents became quiet, save for the relentless drum of the ocean. We saw ourselves less and less. The people went into the earth by the handful, and gave us a warm shake of gratitude in their last moments. At least there was soil left for them to return to. Some would not be so lucky.
Bennie lived much longer than any of the children that she used to watch play outside. She was a witness to the earth’s transformation, a listener til the very end. Her home grew from a web of trees whose young branches had grown together, woven into thick locs that hugged her while she slept, cupped a steady burning hearth for her to eat around and stay warm, kept cool a supply of clean water and medicines. She lived a seven day walk from the coast, and would prepare to take this journey before each full moon, sleeping periodically at her favorite rest spots: a small brook, a flat rock beside a rapid river, an impenetrable web of vines above a muddy swatch. Three nights before the moon waxed whole, she would make her way to her grandmother’s old house, which stood still on the dry edge of a dwindling forest.
It was autumn in the year 2103 when she arrived to find that a burst of titanic wind had blown the house onto a slight angle, taking with it most of the surrounding trees and soil. She stared for a long time at the home sitting askew, placing her bare feet on the craggy stone surrounding structure. She wept silently, the stony tears of someone who has seen too much. She saw us as we marched melancholy across the jagged earth and into the flat horizon. She could see us leaving this house, leaving her earth, and the sight of it broke her heart.
Bennie sank to the floor and stayed like this until sunrise, eyes crusted with salt and sorrow. She did not find sleep that night, but when the sunlight warmed her skin she began to come back to herself. She noticed she was thirsty, full of grief and empty houses. She was hungry for the music of her grandmothers kitchen. Having seen us leave, she must have known it wasn’t possible. No one had walked these halls in decades. The land was too quiet now to create such symphonies. The rhythm had all but faded away.
Dragging her feet across the crooked threshold, Bennie danced in her grandmothers kitchen. Her footprints painted the floors as she waltzed to her toes at the spice cabinet, then sunk into her heels while stirring a pot she imagined simmering with honey and herbs and fruit rinds. The pot, rusted and broken in places, did not sing with her. The stove was dead. But still she sang her grandmothers song as the full moon rose and continued her journey to the edge of the water.
She walked east from the house, crossing over black stones until they became pebbles, then wet sand. She was at the water, and even in our retreat from the planet we could hear her singing. Thirst swole her tongue and words poured thickly from her lips. They slipped from her and into the ocean, who roared in approval. That was the last time we saw ourselves. In all our magnificence and heavy with age and grief. We mourned the listening people when we left them.
With the moon floating directly above her, Bennie sang one last note so clear that it cut through time and space. It crawled from her mouth and left her skin alabaster, a sharp contrast against the black coast. Coils and color washed from her hair, leaving it limp and white around her waist.
The note lingered in the air, and Bennie’s footprints began to glow in the moonlight. The song was so beautiful we almost stopped our procession off the surface, a heart stopping jolt of rememory. We saw that we were the relationship between time and love, all that freedom ever was. But, it seemed, the earth had run out of time. And so we left. Following us, Bennie walked into the sea and did not stop.
This was just the beginning. Bennie’s footsteps, trailing all the way back to the house one day’s walk away, glowed in the moonlight. The earthborn note that crawled from her throat picked each footstep up, rolling and twisting them along the edges until they formed scrolls, thick with black ink. Heavy with recipes and spells and other freedom songs. When it picked the last one from stone, the note sped into the night like a shooting star, traveling again through time and space.
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It was a full moon when Bennie’s note arrived in 2020, swirling through an eastside alley swamped with trash bins, machines, and other debris. Illuminated by a yellow streetlight, men in undershirts threw dice and drank from amber bottles. Spectators sprawled across the hoods of cars, tucked into folding chairs, and stood around with their limbs loose and never quite still. The smack of dice against pavement was followed by a snap every time someone lost, a burst of laughter if they won. It was a quiet ritual, a nightly prayer for good luck.
If they had looked across the alley, and upwards, they would have seen a lighter dance alive, and bring with it a plume of smoke. Someone else had come to listen, for good luck.
Bennie’s note swept over the alley and electrified the air. All the dice players heard, all the rodents foraging heard, all the birds sleeping heard, the writer in the window heard too. Everyone stopped and looked at each other, not daring to voice the question they all had. Instead, a thin man with a round belly threw the dice down, and won. He hollered and hooted and the other men felt at ease. Well sheeee-it, one said. Finally, one said. On the balcony, the smoker said nothing, but remained uneasy. The note stayed in their head beyond the spliff’s ending. They slept fitfully, and rose before dawn.
Half asleep, the smoker came to their desk and pulled out paper, a favorite pen. Its smooth ridges felt cinderblock heavy in hand, and pushing it across paper required the force of every muscle from their shoulder to their fingertip. They wrote into exhaustion, with the sun just cresting above the city skyline. The ten pages sitting in front of them were in unfamiliar handwriting. The smoker frowned. These seemed like spells, instructions, choreography. Recipes that used the moon. A kitchen witch manifesto. She would call them the Village X.