Flash Fable: Origins

There comes a time when a choice is not a choice. It is the only direction. The alternatives vanish like lightning strikes over a vacant desert, and the answer arrives like a hard hand across the cheek. Nothing and no one will save you except yourself.

Owl calls woke her. The moment her eyes flew open, a comet slung itself across the sky, tail long and blazing silver. Her neck arched up from the curve of earth where she had curled with a blanket woven by her mother, the worn place where the long grasses pressed flat in the shape of resting deer. They had lain in this spot together many nights when the weather was right, her mother whispering star stories, ones that had been conjured by the healers from the old days. Look to the sky for your place in the world, daughter had learned. And when you wake, make your own life a constellation of stories worth sharing.

When the owls signaled, the dream’s words still wet in her mouth, she knew she had no choice. She repeated the message to herself now that she was wide awake: Nothing and no one will save you now except yourself.

At the pulling of the season’s first fruit each year, her mother had carved a small “x” of gratitude into the apple tree. Her nimble fingers fiddled in her apron for the sheath of the elk bone knife she had kept with her since the day she had kissed her mother goodbye.With little light to guide her, she rose up, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, and crept to the apple tree just up the rise. She felt its scaly bark then bent to kneeling and used her open palms to find the scatter of notches that indented the bark.

So many years they’d made home here. She knelt a long time, her mind a quiet lake reflecting scenes that reminded her of all the ways she had grown, the sweet and the bitter. No more history worth proving, she decided, slipping the knife out of sight. Her mother was dead and her brother and father. Just as the stars disappeared into dawn, she pulled the edge of a low bough and twisted the stem of the nearest apple for her pocket, a memento guarding fresh seed. An offering of hope for better soil — far from this undone garden.