Stolen Tongues

by Felix Blackwell

There is a brief moment at night when the brain is neither awake nor asleep, but somewhere in between.

“You know, there’s this thing called pareidolia. See, our brains come with a kind of software application that’s pre-installed when we’re born. Facial recognition, pattern recognition, that sort of thing. It helps us recognize our mothers when we’re babies, and helps us—”

“You know when you’re a kid and you see a shadow on your wall at night, and it looks like a monster? Or when you see animals in the clouds? That’s pareidolia. And it happens with sound, too. The wind blows through a cave or something just right, and people think they hear a voice. Your brain even makes words out of it, in the language you know best.”

I now had to admit what I could not before. Whatever it was that had found us at the cabin had followed us home.

“but don’t get so caught up in protecting her that you forget – she’s protecting you too.”

“My people gave him the name At’an-A’anotogkua,” he said quietly. “The term refers to water, and how it is formless until it fills a vessel. Angela wasn’t wrong when she called him the ‘hollow one,’ because there is no direct translation, really. Maybe it is more accurate to call him ‘the Impostor,’ because this being fills himself with the life force of his prey.”

Doesn’t matter where it is; land is all the same. You can even purchase land

you’ve never seen before, never visited, a thousand miles away – and now it belongs to you!

“This is not how many Natives understood the earth when the settlers came. The land doesn’t just belong to us. We belong to the land. We were given to it, just as much as it was given to us. S...

Colonists have always used bribery to turn Natives against each other. Made them fight in their wars. It is said that the Ineho found out about these bribes and killed many of the Pozi, then dug holes and buried them with their feet sticking out of the ground. Legend says they wanted the wolves to eat the meat on their legs, so that the Pozi could never make the journey back to their homeland – even in death.”

I suppose that if you speak long enough into the void, someone is bound to start listening.