The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

There’s a bridge across the Golden Gate, a bridge laid down on fog. I follow a child, a girl running, out onto that bridge. Wait for me! Wait! I follow my daughter who was taken from me into the dark, into the fog.

I don’t like to let Baby into my room. Angels come in with her. They stand at the window to deny my comfort.

They’re often with her when she’s awake. I’d like to see one watching over her when she sleeps in her crib. It would be a tall guardian in the shadows watching her with a brooding face. I saw a picture like that in a magazine. When she’s running about the garden in the sunshine, when she goes out like a little soft bundle in the rain, then they’re there with her. She talks to them.

The angels never smile even when they look at her. They’re stern.

Only when I’m tired of the angels, then I go to church with Dorothy to get away from them.

I liked thinking of him free. It wasn’t much, compared to what we had, but it was something. Now it’s nothing.

When I left Lafe she didn’t approve, but she never said I should go back to him.

Poor me. I’ll never be a widow. I’ll never know where he’s buried.

I thought, Oh, what happens to them? My heart wrung itself like a dishcloth—what happens to the lovely boys?

He had to run after them, crying, and his feathers lay there on the sand.

Edward’s no afterthought, they just never thought at all.

Bright and sweet, and they never turn around to him.

It was hard, because I couldn’t breathe right from crying, and I felt sleepy with her holding me. I could hear her voice inside her saying I see and That’s all right then, and then Mother came and sat down on the bed too.

The sun struck in through the east window straight across my work. It freed itself from the spruce branches and struck my face a blow. I closed my eyes, blind with the beating of the light. Warmth shone itself through me, clear through soul and bones. I sat there, clear through, and I knew the angels. I was pierced with light and made warm. I was the sun. The angels dissolved into the radiance of the sun. They are gone.

She thought how her husband the Judge looked at the child with his white eyes like the eyes of a poached trout, his eyes that knew everybody was guilty.

“Hello, Niece! Are you out alone? It’s dangerous!” “I know,” she said, but did she know? How could she be free, and know? Or even half free, and know?

The waves broke on the sand, broke around the chariot, broke in foam, and the woman was there, the girl, the foam-born, the soul of the world, daughter of the dust of stars.

She looked at the world and saw it a bubble of foam on the coasts of time, that’s all it ever was. And what was she herself? A being for a moment, a bubble of foam, that’s all she ever was, she who was born, who is born, who bears.

They’ll all cry, in the kitchen of the world. Crying together, warm tears, women in the kitchen far from the cold sea coasts, the bright, salt, shining margins of the universe. But they know where they are and who they are. They know who keeps the house.

I never know the heron as it flies, at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one’s own name written in a strange alphabet, and recognizing it I say it: the heron. Summers

She followed, Sacagawea.

“Yes, it was true, mother, mama. Listen. I lost a baby, I had a miscarriage, early in June. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to make you sad. But now I want you to know.” “Oh, dear,” with a long, long sigh in the dusk. “Oh, dear. Oh, and they never come back. Once they’re gone.”

What is it you really want, Virginia?” “That is what we shall never know,” she quoted unkindly; she had become unkind, unfair.

“My last book,” she said in a low voice, without enough breath, “was a failure. A miscarriage, propped up in a, in a perambulator. I’m not denying anything. I just want to stop going wrong. To go right.”

I can’t live on what you breathe out. I can’t make your oxygen any more. I’m sick, I’m afraid of dying, I’m sorry that puts a strain on our relationship!”

He’s very guilty and very happy, just what he likes best.

“That’s all right,” her grandmother said stiffly. After a pause she added, with more ease, “You generally get what you want, Virginia. Make sure you want it.”

I should have known. But I didn’t fear evil.

I cannot breathe now. I want to tell him to fear evil, fear evil, my good son, too late.

But the sea down there bashes its white head against the rocks like an old mad king, it grinds the rocks to sand between its fingers, it eats the land. It is violent. It will not be still. On the quietest nights I hear the sea. Air’s silent, unless the wind blows hard, and earth’s silent, except for the children’s voices, and the sky says nothing. But the sea yells, roars, hisses, booms, thunders without pause and without end, and it has made that noise since the beginning of the world and it will go on making that noise forever and never pause or stop until the sun goes out. Then will be death indeed, when the sea dies, the sea that is death to us, the uncaring otherness. To

The stars burning make that noise. In the silence of my being now I hear it. The cells of my body burn with that noise. I lie here and drift like a drop of spray, a bubble of foam, down the beach of light. I run, I run, you can’t catch me!

She misses him but she doesn’t really miss him, she doesn’t need him. She is complete. Like a round world. I love her because she looks at me out of her round whole world and brings me in, so that I’m not out at the edge, under the open sky. I can’t walk on the beach, under the open sky, by the sea, not since the war started.

Not since the angels. They’re gone, but I still fear their wings, out there.

I did what I could, and it was nothing. What can you do to evil but refuse it? Not pretend it isn’t there, but look at it, and know it, and refuse it. Punishment,

The Bible God, vengeance is mine! And then it flips over and goes too far the other way, forgive them for they know not what they do. Who does know? I don’t. But I have tried to know.

I have to pursue, for the pursuit creates the prey. Somewhere in these mists I am.

So she was born out of me on that last long wave of unutterable pain, and runs free now. She returns, she comes home, home at four in the afternoon, milk and a cookie, can we play by the creek, never yet gone longer than overnight or farther than a school excursion, but she runs away from me. I feel the string stretch, the fine cord of ethereal steel that she’ll keep pulling out so long over the years, so fine, so thin that when she’s gone I’ll hardly know it’s there, not think of it for weeks, maybe, until a sharp tug makes me cry out for the pain in the roots of the womb, the jerk and twist of the heartstring. I feel that already. I felt it when she took her first steps, not to me but away from me. She saw a toy she wanted, and stood up and took her first four steps to it, and fell down on it in triumph. She went where she wanted to go. But I can’t run after her. I must not pursue her, making her my prey.

She gives me something, a cup, a nest, a basket, I am not sure what she gives me, though I take it. She cannot speak to me, for her language is dead. She is silent. I am silent. All the words have gone.

If I saw Lafe Herne coming down the street: I thought of it when we passed where the Alta California Hotel used to be.

I want to tell him that I never found a man but him worth the trouble.

I’d like to see him. He’s sixty now. It’s all gone.

But it doesn’t come round like that. You don’t take hands but once. And I was right to let go. But I do get tired.

He was a Percheron, mottled grey like the sky over the sea sometimes is.

For this I was born, to serve glory patiently.

I CLOSE MY EYES AND see the fireworks. Flowers of fire opening, falling like bright chrysanthemums over the dark beach. Aahhh! everybody says. Fireworks may be the nearest thing to perfect satisfaction in this world.

But still it troubled me she’d speak that way to him in front of us. Women talk to their sons that way, like they despise the boy for being something they expect him to be.

Those rooms above the grocery seem so dark now. It’s like her life is dark. I feel that darkness when I’m with her. Yet she takes pride in me, I know that. It is the ground I stand on.

There’s that look in his face, no mistaking it ever. It’s like smelling something. When they get fixed on you that way, when their body’s attention is on you, you know it like you know it’s a warm day, without thinking.

I don’t know what I want; I don’t know that I want anything. Only to know some soul better.

It’s like there’s a country in me where I can’t go. Lafe might have gone there, but he turned away. And other people have that country in them, but I don’t know how to find it.