Eternal Fire in The Belly

An excerpt from a fiction

Dusk was setting over the land, last rays of the dying sun melting over the horizon, turning clouds from bright yellow and passionate red to tender pink and moody purple, then finally growing cold dark blue.

She kept walking up the hill with the kind of stubbornness that only some would dare call a gift and most would consider to be a curse.

Her bare feet found each step intuitively, almost as if the rocks beneath the weight of her slender body yielded themselved to her will. Perhaps the will wasn’t even her own, but some greater Will that flowed through her, an unseen force that she allowed to possess her and carry her forward.

“Is a tree stubborn for pushing its roots deeper underground?” she contemplated, “or is it merely surrendered to the Life force that wants to make itself into the shape of a tree?“

Her hand reached out and grasped a smooth barkless branch that was silhouetted in her darkening path, knowing that it was there almost without looking, as she pulled the weight of her body forward.

“Does the tree suffer when its roots grind against the rocks beneath the earth, coiling under pressure, as it digs down for water?”, her internal monologue continued.

Her hair was matted by the dust, making her blend in even more with the earthen landscape, dissolving into the dark breath of fast approaching nightfall.

“When the tree trunk twists itself into strange shapes, buckling against the winds, does the gnarled specimen think itself ugly and wish it was straighter, like the neat rows of its brethren down below?” she asked herself.

The knife hanging off her utility belt jangled against the water canister, making a rhythmic clang with each step, dissonant and reminiscent of an ancestral chant.

“Down in the valley, the water table is just below the surface of the ground.

The trees grow fast and stand tall, but their roots are shallow. When the big storm comes, they tip and fall over like matchsticks,” she reflected.

“Yet the twisted tree on the hill can stand for a thousand years.”

She stopped and took one small gulp from the canister as she looked back over the valley. Orange campfires burned here and there, and the wind carried the smell of smoke and the threads of words she could not make out from the distance.

An eternal fire burned in her belly, the fire of a thousand sons, a vortex linking past, present and future. Her womb vibrated with the resonance of the unbroken lineage of mothers and grandmothers, going back to the beginning of all creation.

From a certain perspective, the lineage looked like a sequence: great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter. This is how the historians saw it, in Chronos time. But she knew that in Kairos time, all the ancestors that have ever lived and all the descendants that were yet to come were alive simultaneously in one cosmic moment.

Lineage was a living being that existed inside of her, breathing through her lungs, standing in her bones, swirling in her blood, speaking through her lips, beating with every impulse of her heart.

She looked up at the waxing Moon, rising in the sky as the night set in. The Moon appeared to have a tail of clouds trailing behind her, like a windblown veil.

The sky was full of stars and planets, separated by millions of kilometers yet moving together in sync, a celestial dance as old as eternity.

“We managed to continue human life, didn’t we”, she reflected to herself silently.

Out of nowhere, a gravelly voice spoke out loud, as if replying to her thoughts:

“Much is yet to come“

Momentarily startled, Mara looked back toward the mountain path and noticed a dark figure standing just meters behind her.

“You… do you have the knowing?“, she questioned the shadow.

“I know many things”, the shadow replied, in the unrushed voice of a grandmother who has just about seen it all.

“But your destiny is yours to walk“.

To be continued…

The above is an excerpt from a fiction about a post-collapse world.

All photography by the author.

EDIT: I realized that I originally posted an incomplete version of this piece. Fixed now.