The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

you hear other voices, our voices, voices whose tone and timbre are stitched to your memory, no matter how long ago your last meeting may have been—for that, after all, is the nature of family. We are never far. And we are here, ready to help end this story.

she grins at you anyway, as if she has heard you, as if I were never truly gone, and you are caught off guard by how much you missed her sly smile.

But though I cannot help but wish that when the world quirks and shudders, we have the wherewithal to listen, even I cannot deny how difficult it can be, to accept that sometimes, to survive, we must change our course.”

And when I look at you, I feel so many things, so much pride and worry and regret, that it is easier to look away. Easier to pretend we are strangers.

“The signs of the wasted world unheeded,” your lola says. “No time spent worrying over the lowering tides of the coast or listening to the troubled dancing of the wind. There was only the concern of mortals, who knew only of what was facing them, not of what was coming up from the back. No stopping.”

A spear, he told me, that would cut through any boundary that might one day part us.

that from the start, their motivations had not been to the Family but to the stubborn fruit of love.

“Not the most interesting of ends for the scribes to record as they finish your brief, unsatisfying biography.” “A satisfying biography was never my aim,” she said.

“It is all I have of him,” she would say—adding, with a sneer, “and what do you know of love?”

Shan, for her part, was terrified, but she had learned from the best how to hide any emotions that would get in the way of her and what she wanted, and what she wanted was her father.

But then, he thought about the spear. He thought of Araya, trampled into the dirt. He thought about Shan, cut down by a sword. What do you know of love?

I searched desperately for my driver. I just wanted to see the lazy ass again. I just wanted to make sure he still breathed.

“Fuck off,” he said, which, to Keema’s ears, had the same melody as I love you.

MAN.

I asked Jun through our link if he felt it. The sounds. The Rhythm that connected us to the wave. And he told me that he did. And I knew that together, we could do it. So I held out my hand.

And I asked him if he would dance with me. When Jun took his hand, Keema wanted to laugh, because for his whole life he wished he was brave enough to ask this question, and in the end it was so easy. The meeting of their hands seeming almost inevitable.

One day in the endless loop of history, in the circular currents of its water, where there was no future, and no past, these steps would be inscribed in the shaft of an antique wooden weapon, and would tell the tale of these two warriors.

The two of them slumped against each other, shoulder against chest, like two rocks balanced over some great chasm in an act of trust that seems both impossible and ancient, before they were swept away on that incredible tide.

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

You are merely, crucially, no one but yourself, as anyone else is themselves—mere

“You feel like the sun,” Jun said.