Betweens | Stephanie Gibbs
It is often reported that, deep in the woods, lurks a being so foreign and so forlorn, so passed over by evolution and by civilization, that all it can do is shake its shaggy head and bellow, bellow at the unfairness of the universe to pass it by and leave it alone in the woods struggling to communicate with beings of too fragile a construction, too rapid a lifespan to ever be peers or companions.
Some say it resembles a giant elephant, some see a creature closer to a bear, some an aquatic variant, some a human thought to be closer to a Neanderthal, some a tiger, and some don’t believe it to be anything more than a fairy tale, the figment of imagination of a people whose own lives are so isolated as to create fantastic stories to explain what they cannot understand. They are wrong, undeniably, unutterably wrong, all of them, although none of them will accept this.
There is a creature, of course; there is a whole host of creatures, who live in world parallel and simultaneous to our own, who occasionally become lost in the woods and slip down the wrong hallway and suddenly find themselves in a world that doesn’t quite fit, the food isn’t nourishing, the beings lack grace and subtlety of movement and communication, and these lost visitors become panicked at the difficulty of making their way back to their own reality, the reality of if onlys.
If only God had created the world in two weeks rather than one. If only the Ark had been a slightly larger ship. If only the flood had lasted 40 millennia rather than 40 days. If only the Crusades had been settled with a round of charades, best two out of three, and a chess match, winner takes all. If only Marco Polo had traveled to Brazil. If only Magellan had sought the North West Passage. If only Ponce de Leon had recognized the fountain of youth when he found it, instead of allowing his horses to drink deep but not even filling his canteen, for the water was cloudy and filled with spiders, and he was eager to find cities of gold. If only France had kept Louisiana, if only Napoleon had been content with Josephine and without Poland or Russia, if only Mussolini had taken a moment to reconsider his actions, if only Lord Elgin had left the marbles in place, if only my violin teacher had survived her heart attack, if only I had used my turn signal.
In this world, this parallel reality of choices not made, decisions and alternative outcomes from thousands of years worth of consulting the stars, the fall of tea leaves, the intestines of sacrifices, the i-ching, the dictionary, in this reality of the alternative ways of being ramble creatures of unimaginable beauty and dexterity, flying, running, swimming, skittering through five or six dimensions, where their unusual size is no hindrance and they sing in a tonal scale unintelligible to our ears.
Whales take opportunities to dry out their wings on land, spending years on top of mountains before returning to the ocean. Bears have marsupial pouches that provide incubation chambers for premature kittens of tigers, and in return the tigers charm fish from the streams, left in baskets woven of rope like silk at the entrances to caves deep in the desert, many days’ journey from the forest.
Humans, too, inhabit this land, humans who decided to live in a world without reconsiderations or recriminations, a world where death, disease, discouragement are accepted without fear, sadness, or God, a world where neither the vacuum cleaner nor the pressure cooker are employed at house parties, a world where roses and Johnson grass are grown in pots on windowsills and aspidistras are tended with loving care and weekly fertilizing along borders of gardens of knotweed and clover. When the sun sets and the moon rises and the skies turn indigo and coral, small children play hopscotch with tree frogs and elephants beat out announcements of local news.
It is not that they are any more content or less full of existential anguish than we are in this world, it is not that they saw advances in Calculus and particle physics as treasonable offenses to be followed with a month in the stocks and a broadside of bad poetry; it is not that the speed of time moves a quarter turn for each of our rotations; but each of these developments reflects something deep in their psyche, reflects a love of the smell of the ocean before a storm, a voice which echoes the wail of the wind through bare trees, a foot that is designed to paddle a boat and climb a tree, a hand which holds tigers still and peels the bark of trees, a heart that grows heavy with longing at the full moon, and a soul that nurses an ambition to remember how to float as easily on air as it still can on water.
There is no sense of betrayal or of waste, for as the day slowly grows into a week, a year, nothing changes, and nothing is remembered. Everything is immediate, the past forgotten, the future inconceivable.
One day the nursing kittens awaken to discover they are tigers, not bears, shake hands with their wet nurses, and leave the desert for the forest, where the echoing emerald replaces the windswept brown they once could recall with perfect clarity.
The whale tumbles from the mountain after a drunken evening of spring water and racy limericks, forgetting to use its wings for propulsion, and falls back into the ocean, seduced by the cooing of mermaids and the promises held by the oysters, promises hinted at but never revealed, the sweet nothings of the mermaids never developed into stories, the whales not aware of any depth beyond where they lie, as the sun drifts down through the ocean.
Sometimes someone from our world falls into the world of parallel possibilities; rarely do they survive the transition from height, width, depth, and time to a world of other facets, other dimensions of which they previously could not even conceive. They are stretched, flattened, twisted, torn, taunted, spun about, and finally placed in a chrysalis of mango leaves to await their rebirth as a sentient being who can communicate tonally and float on the eddies of time, who trades memories and expectations for reverberations of instances of the now, without question or judgment.
Often, beings who survive the initial plummet scream, scream and yell and curse and shout in tongues, begging to be placed back in their home of Sunday roasts, Monday laundry, Tuesday casseroles, Wednesday meetings, Thursday spaghetti dinners, Friday cocktails, Saturday lawn mowings, a world of logical ordered sense rather than this chaotic, random, unprincipled kaleidoscope they’ve fallen into. Often, they are drowned, put out of their misery for their own good, although sometimes the mermaids play mischievous games with their memories before their dying breath.
It is the very young and the very old who best survive the transition, those who have not yet formed prejudices and those who have lived long enough to forget their prejudices. These are given a woven chrysalis of mango leaves, a month of silent feasting on twenty four carat goldfish and the effervescent waters of eternal youth, and when they hatch at the conclusion, they are transformed beings who shimmer and reflect the depths of the secrets of the universe in their eyes, being who have grown tails or gills or wings or all three, beings whose formed and forgotten memories are translated into the roar of the ocean and the explosion of volcanoes, whose heartbeats are earthquakes and whose stories are myths.
On dark, moonless nights, deep in winter and at midsummer, their songs can be heard, in the silences between the beat of butterfly wings and in the hesitation before a tadpole sprouts its tail, and there is nothing like it that you will ever hear again, anywhere else.