No One is Here Except All of Us Read Free Page A

like a dream, meaningless and impossible.
    Wheat blew against the ground in surrender. The sky flattened, the cottonwoods slapped leaves against leaves. The rain kept coming and we kept watching it come. The froth-white river tumbled all of her stones.
     
    And a mist ascended from the earth and watered the entire surface of the ground.
    After hours of waiting
for the airplane to return, after the rain quieted to a soft dust, under the palm of a cool pink sky, our river sounded like our river again and we crept out to see what the world looked like now that it was coming apart. The air was thick with the scent of soaked sheep. Our feet stuck in the mud, our clothes caught on blown branches. We stood in the wind-combed wheat above the river. The mountains where the explosion had taken place looked no different from how they ever had. The sky was the sky, vast and prickling with light.
    The riverbanks were alive with slapping fish. Beached and afraid, they curled up like question marks. “Something to save,” I said, grateful, and I began to gather the fish in my skirt. I walked carefully, the mud slippery and deep, my skinny white legs browning, my socks falling down, until I threw open my bundle in one shining, silver delivery. Back in the water, the fish flicked their tails and disappeared. Everyone joined in, filling dresses and pants pockets and arms with slipping, flapping fish. The fish, stronger than they looked, swam out of our hands and made us laugh. We chased them, saying, “We won’t hurt you. We’re trying to take you home.”
    As we worked, the banks stopped glimmering with the jewels of trout, but the river receded to offer other treasures. I picked up the spout of a teapot, filled with silt. The front half of a piano smiled with its teeth punched out. The butcher found a gentlemen’s wool hat with a ribbon around it. From the muck we pulled two bowls, one jewelry box full of mud, a doll with no legs, a matted sweater, some cut logs, a hand-drawn map of the summer constellations smudged but readable, and a woman. A woman—hair, teeth, feet, fingers all. And she was alive.

THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD
    T he healer’s living room walls were painted bright yellow, and the windows were trimmed with blue. He had a huge bookshelf reaching all the way to the ceiling. I could read the titles:
Engravings from Specimens of Morbid Parts, The Medical and Surgical History of the War, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity Intended for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians, The Science of Life; Or, Self-Preservation.
    Today was no longer a day of rest. God was going to have to forgive us because it was not our fault. The healer boiled several pots of water for tea over the woodstove. The damp wood whined. The healer took everything out of his cupboards—some stale cake, half a loaf of bread, a honeycomb, a jar of last summer’s apples. We dried the woman from the river, the wet and battered stranger, with thread-worn rags. “What happened?” we kept asking, and she kept shaking her head.
    “Who are you?” my mother asked while she cleaned the mud out from between the woman’s toes, wrapped her in blankets. Igor served her real tea in a toy teacup, which she drank in doll-size sips. No one said the word
prophet
, but everyone thought it.
    She said, “The plums fell behind me and broke open bloody.”
    Wind howled in the trees. It was something alive, something hungry. We drew closer still, felt each other’s warm skin as she whispered, “The living taken by their necks like puppies, and yelping that way, too.”
    “By water?” we asked. “By the terrible river?”
    “The river saved me. I couldn’t run anymore. My feet were bleeding. The river carried me away. The river made me into a stranger.”
    “Now you are safe. Now you are
our
stranger,” I said. She began to cry.
    “The soldiers were allowed to do whatever they wanted to us for twenty-four hours,” she said. “A reward for them, a