As Featured in Under the Wing by O.G. Rose
Hoop
A Short Story
I am we, chosen by the Old One, swiping father’s bone-knife at the light to fend off the heat. My bare toes press on the cracks in the dry land; my family’s brown cowhide wraps my pregnant belly. The fairest of the Warmiful, I pull my weapon back to my bald head, and with its teeth, scratch. Ahead of me, the back of the trudging man, once white and bright with our sun-god, blisters and peels red. We are the Warmiful tribe, a tribe which knows no other tribes, a tribe which is the world. If we do not survive, we will be the death of the living. I want to satiate the sun, for it to burp rain. I want to make my family proud.
The left side of my face bulges and lacks skin from its carving during the Sun Feast: I am ugly. My lips crack like the flat and empty earth around me reaching from sky to sky; the Warmiland is a brown, calm, and hard ocean. As the ground begs for painlessness and haste, words too heavy to speak, I silently plead the sun to forgive me for slicing at the light and for him not to prefer sound for hearing. The bone-knife slips between my fingers like spit and lands hard like stone. Though I see everything through god, god is not in the wind to help spin water into myths: my outburst was naïve, hopeful, and wrong. All gods are god, but trees, newborns, and the sun do not remember that they are one, and in their forgetfulness — with us — fight.
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