Split Tooth

by Tanya Tagaq

Sometimes the old woman would come in and smother us with her suffering love. Her love so strong and heavy it seemed a burden. Even then I knew that love could be a curse. Her love for us made her cry. The past became a river that was released by her eyes. The poison of alcohol on her breath would fill the room. She would wail and grab at us, kissing us, kissing the only things she could trust.

Smells unleashed from the spring thaw lift us into a frenzied desperation for movement. The air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged. You can smell water running over shale. Lichen smells sweet. The green lichen smells different from black. In the spring you smell last fall’s death and this year’s growth, as the elder lichen shows the young how to grow. The freeze traps life and stops time. The thaw releases it. We can smell the footprints of last fall and the new decomposition of all who perished in the grips of winter. Global warming will release the deeper smells and coax stories out of the permafrost. Who knows what memories lie deep in the ice? Who knows what curses? Earth’s whispers released back into the atmosphere can only wreak havoc.

Life has arrived! The ice begrudgingly recedes, promising vengeance in a few short weeks. Winter always wins. The sun scoffs.

All children on the cusp of puberty seem to understand that this magic time will end soon. Greeting the future and yearning for maturity and yet planted firmly in the moon. Revelling in our youth, wishing it would never end. Never seeing past the tips of our noses as we are driven through our bodies with the perfect lightning strike of growing cells and perceived immortality. We transcend time and pluck smiles off each other’s faces. Dig giggles out of rib cages and shoot insults as if they were compliments.

Around the periphery of the lake, there were small pools that held baby trout. I trapped one and put it in my mouth. I let it swim down my esophagus; its tail tickled all the way down to my tummy. It was delightful. The flesh was so fresh. Something awoke in me, an old memory; an ancient memory, of eating live flesh. It is a true joining of flesh to flesh. My spine straightened. When flesh is eaten live, you glean the spirit with the energy. That is why wild predators are so strong. The farther away you get from the time of death, the less energy meat carries. We pretended to be seagulls, not even chewing the fish and feeling them swim down our throats. We gorged ourselves on them. The energy of the fish’s life was readily absorbed into my body, and its death throes became a shining and swimming beacon into the sky. If we acted like seagulls, then perhaps we could transform into them, screaming and soaring. We would fly home.

Money won’t save you, even if you save it Money has spent us, as we have spent it

After we die the spirit must be consoled after the trauma of flesh and then unravelled back into energy.

Murder can heal if applied sparingly. Murder can feed us. Life murders us every day.

Arqsarniq. I sing for you. Humming shakily at first, thin tendrils of sound. The trepidation dissolves and a throbbing vibratory expulsion of sound emerges. Thicker, richer, heavier. Sound is its own currency. Sound is a conduit to a realm we cannot totally comprehend. The power of sound conducts our thoughts into emotions that then manifest in action. Sound can heal. Sound can kill. Sound is malleable. Sound can be a spear or a needle. Sound can create the wound and then stitch it. Sound can cauterize and materialize. No one can hear my song but the Northern Lights.

I mourn them, but I understand that there is danger in mourning for those who would not mourn for you in return. Empathy is for those who can afford it. Empathy is for the privileged. Empathy is not for Nature.

Time mates with gravity to put you back into the earth.

Time has a way of eternally looping us in the same configurations. Like fruit flies, we are unable to register the patterns. Just because we are the crest of the wave does not mean the ocean does not exist.

Fear is learning to run from me, not the other way around. I am not afraid anymore, as if meekness is slinking away into the deeper corners where it cannot dominate my psyche. The night with the Northern Lights changed my whole life. They say that the insane never doubt their own sanity. The night with the Northern Lights was real. The pain was real. This is where my lesson was learned: pain is to be expected, courage is to be welcomed. There is no choice but to endure. There is no other way than to renounce self-doubt. It is the time of Dawning in more ways than one. The sun can rise, and so can I.

If you are living in silence With violence in your bones Sorrow in your marrow Blood running cold Heal I beg you Heal I beg you Heal I beg you Heal

I do not forgive and forget I Protect and Prevent Make them eat shame and repent I forgive me