The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

she went up the steps of the wall, having learned a long time ago that being a good leader was simply a matter of not expressing how you truly feel.

But none of them said anything, just as you had said nothing when your own father had left, for there are moments in this life that speak clearly for themselves.

They fought because it was the easiest language they spoke.

“I hope that their end was mighty.” “I’ve yet to witness an end that was,” he said.

You can fault the dancer, but more often than not, it is the dance itself that has to change.

“Judge not the parent who keeps silent to their child’s cry. There are too many reasons in heaven and earth to disappoint the ones we care for.”

He surprises you when he asks you if you are proud to be of its people. The question seems to come from nowhere, but the way he asks it tells you that this question is no frivolity. He needs an answer. Your instinct is to lie, but the truth comes out before you can stop it. Sometimes, you say. For most of your life it has been little more than a curiosity, this root that is caught on your heel. You would tell people about it to catch their attention, if they were the kind of person to be interested. You would sometimes hide it—and hide it you could, with your mother’s blood—if you wished to be part of the group. Sometimes you made fun of the fact of it. Behind your lola’s back you used to mimic the elastic twang of the mother tongue to your friends—no, you would heighten it, make it ridiculous, nonsensical—and you would make them laugh. You didn’t think twice about it.

“He became caretaker and torturer in one,” your father says. “A combination that is all too easy to fall prey to.”

Violence between the people rose as they fought for the supremacy of their reality.

you understand that you are not a representative. That like the spear’s journey through time, much of this dance is dictated by chance.

You are merely, crucially, no one but yourself, as anyone else is themselves—mere stewards, gifting recursively over the divide of time this spear, that memory, to the people and the place from which they had come—and who, in turn, gift back to you your strange, and sad, and wide-eyed futures.

My fucking god, this booooooooooook.