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

punishment for us. They cut off my mother’s breasts and my sister’s ears. They lit my husband’s beard on fire.”
    We leaned on each other in our huddle. Night’s gluttonous arms gathered everything living, everything dead. Outside, the gawking houses and the grabbing trees. Every wall could easily become a window, every roof a wide-open path to God.
    The stranger stopped speaking. Her breathing changed and then she howled like a lost dog. Her voice became full and enormous, rattling off the walls. We were rattled, not only by the stranger’s howl, but also by the desperate seas of her eyes, the map of cuts all over her arms and chest. The flood of her voice was like the flood of water, sudden and determined, sweeping up everything in its path.
    “Do you need to be hidden?” I asked.
    “What’s left to hide from?” the stranger asked back.
    In the silence of that moment, our hearts kept us alive without asking if they should.
    “Everyone is gone?” I asked.
    “Everyone,” the stranger said.
    “Everyone’s children?” Igor asked, focusing on his crop of siblings.
    An old woman said, “I want to lie down,” and another old woman offered her lap and brushed her fingers through the threads of hair, warm and tangled.
    We lit a few lanterns because we had lost all the light from outside.
    Someone pushed a cup of soup toward the stranger, tapped the rim with the spoon to say,
Is this something we can offer you?
    The stranger took a small sip of soup from the bowl and then passed it along. We each put our lips to it so that they got a little coating of the hot liquid on them and then passed, wanting it to come back around to her still full. “Thank you,” we said, “it’s delicious.” And we were happy when it did come to her and she took full bites this time, filling the spoon and then pulling it clean from her mouth.
    The moment we were in
was a hinge—the past swung on one side, the future on the other. Everything that had ever happened led us here, from the very first day onward.
    Ours was a migrating people even in the beginning. The first man and the first woman, set out into the unknown world. Fields were tilled and lambs were born. Begets were begotten, and begotten again. A tribe of luthiers, a tribe of forgers. Winemakers, plowers, sons and daughters.
    Out the people went, fruitful, multiplying as they were told. The earth felt the padding of human feet. The tribes divided, God visited in dreams, in deserts, promised land to the ones he had grown to like. Men erected stones as markers, sacrificed calves. All the while, they told the story back: In the beginning there was a beautiful garden, and we were cast out of it, and we began again.
    Twice we built huge, beautiful temples to recognize God and everything he had given us. Twice, they were destroyed.
    The second temple, like the first, contained a chamber of knives, a chamber of oils and wines, a chamber of lepers, a chamber of wood. The gates were named for Music, Light, Sacrifice, Women, Water and Flames. The structure was made of white marble, rimmed with gold, and it stood for hundreds of years, and our people lived in the valley beneath. It would not be true to call that time peaceful, but from a distance, from this far away, we had allowed ourselves to dream of those days, because the next thing that happened was, an army appeared on the horizon, a swarm of men, sunlight glinting from their helmets, and we did not win the battle. We began to walk away in a million different directions: some went into the olive-green hills, some climbed over the mountains, some crossed the seas. Dunes collapsed under our feet. We slept in the bellies of creaky ships, disembarked onto unknown soil. All the while, we told the stories back, and they kept us alive as a people. Our bodies might have survived without them, but not our hearts.
    We began again and again, across the face of the earth.
    On a remote island there lived a powerful king with a hundred