Beneath Ceaseless Skies #172 Read Free

paper? My body tells its own story, less permanent than pages upon which words fall.
            I cannot leave to anyone the ink that his teeth sank into, but I can say his hands were the hands to needle it into my skin. He wrote upon me and I across him and we still never spoke quite the right words. I love you is a construct, a triad of words that can never encompass all one feels. In the end, words will fail—just as they will fail to tell this story and what became of us in the mountains so far from the lake and the river and the sea.
    * * *
            Jackson’s iron train remains rooted in my memory, next to that of my mother. I can no more forget the lines of the train than I can forget my mother’s eyes, her smile anchored there instead of within her mouth.
            The train was long and black, and when we walked up to it Jackson was bent against the old locomotive, cheek pressed to metal. His eyes were closed, hands splayed flat against the arch of the engine body. His body swayed into the engine and he nodded, as if listening to a voice no other could hear. This behavior was familiar to me and Gugán, so we did not linger; we looked instead to the others who worked to load the train for its journey.
            One could call them a family; we eventually did. They had less in common than our own people, for they were every color and size and shape, but what bound them was their differences. Where the world would have shunned them, they made their own space and way upon this train of Jackson’s. The first to see and greet us were the Silver Sisters. Gemma and Sombra moved as we did, two separate beings clearly bound to each other. One was light upon water, the other shadow within forest, and sometimes they were exactly opposite of that. They were inseparable, drawing us into the train with four hands that felt somehow like six.
            It was the last car we entered where a woman sat peeling the skins from rarely seen citrus fruits. She did not discard these peels but instead let them fall into a green-yellow-orange riot in the bowl braced between her knees. Despite the chill in the air, she was barefoot and wore a dress of thin cotton. She looked at us with a welcoming smile, all fierce teeth. Something in the air here spoke to the division between elements; as the water is divided from the land is divided from the forest, this is how the train car felt.
            We were given warm rolls slathered in lime marmalade. This was a shock to us; we had never tasted its like and were warned that it might cause us to remember things we rather wished not to. In that first bite was the bitter moment of my birth, when there were whispers, how there should have been two children, so they had always said, but there was only one. One possessed of two spirits. This sticky lime marmalade conveyed more of my childhood with each and every bite, and I could only wonder what Gugán was made to recall with its sweet tang. It was a thing we never spoke of, those early moments on the train. I suppose in all the nights that were to come, we already knew we had both been pulled backwards, into memories that were forever a part of us even if not present every day.
            Gemma and Sombra guided us through the train as it prepared to leave the city; it was a circus train, they told us, though “circus” meant little to us. They were performers—this we understood—and had completed a series of shows meant to entertain those gold-rushing men. I saw the glitter of money in their eyes and a transformation as the light sister became the dark sister, and knew we had found our path into the mountains.
            This path was not easily had. There were gold-seeking men upon the train, having asked for passage to Dawson City. They were possibly as eager as Jackson to reach the depths of the mountains on these narrow rails, crowding every car with bodies and equipment, wedging themselves