Thrust

by Lidia Yuknavitch

It was much easier, Laisvė had found, to study the emotions of another than try to feel them for yourself.

I could not love this girl more. In fact, sometimes I think this is all I have left of love. The way I carry it in my body—it may kill me. That’s what happens when love is desperate, when it’s filled with a skin-shivering terror.

But Laisvė understood that the earth had spit the mammoth tusks up as a test, to see what her species would do. Every time the earth did that—as with diamonds, as with gold—humans had a choice.

I have never felt homesick. Instead, I feel hope-sick.

Stories get overwritten that way. In my home country, slavery was rewritten as discovery. When French colonials came to Saint-Domingue, they devoured the population as if we were the raw material for their own story of themselves.

“Be wary of travelers arriving during a storm,” he said. “The stories that come across water have teeth in them.”

Sometimes, when we were drinking together at night after a day’s work, John Joseph, David, Endora, and I would talk about what might have been: if the woman we built had been allowed to represent emancipation—broken chains in her hand, the original story, her form standing on the bones of the Indigenous killed there, not as a monument to killing, but as a reminder that the birth of this place carried death with it in a way we’d need to reckon with. What if she had stood within that story, the Indian warrior her sentry and companion overlooking the Narrows? What if that had been told as the story of America? Instead of the story that came?

Each child held an apple in a half bite in their mouth. They stood in a great circle, all apple-mouthed. Then, on my command, each child knocked the apple from another’s mouth, so that the rest of the apple flew away, leaving only a small bite between their teeth. The force of knocking the apple from another’s mouth a reminder that anything a woman or child wants in the world will be forcefully taken from them unless they bite down—an animal truth.

The story of workers is buried under the weight of every monument to progress or power. Our labor never reaches the height of the sacred. No one ever tells the story of how beautiful we were. How the body of us moved. How we lifted entire epochs. May our story survive the rise of this city.

Bal’s voice inside the belly vibrated her whole body now. “Here is a story for you—about your species. We will all die, we whales. But your species will not care about the history we are carrying. You won’t care how much older we are than you, how we care for and carry our dead, how we emerged from the time before time, how much older water and mountains and trees are than you. Your species will likely continue to obsess on things like whales being sea monsters, or black being dark or without light—or on idiotic economic things, like the fact that the Antarctic current helps preserve shipwrecks from wood-boring shipworms. You’ll keep searching for buried treasure, at the bottom of the ocean, in the melting ice of Siberia, under the ground. You’ll keep destroying yourselves. “You will all die too, is the thing. But you haven’t figured out how to make death-stories, and death-places, that have generative power.”

Man-made highways don’t lead to anything larger than themselves.

She said, Just studying a thing isn’t the same thing as being part of a thing. She said, Don’t take things that are not yours. She also said, Step into stories at the places where they cross each other, at the cruces. Bring gifts. Let go of them.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. At certain moments in life, it can hit you so hard that your whole body vibrates with it, almost like you’re on the verge of time travel.

Her age, it seemed, was aging her faster and faster.

Lilly sat on the plush couch and thought about how many skins a woman must shed in order to survive a lifetime.

So many things we put to water to try to give them meaning: Petals. Bodies. Wreaths for the departed. Coins for luck.

You can feel the ghost of all the workers before us—the people who labored under orders from others, the people who built the original structures. The battles over working conditions and wages that happened here, the New Deal, most of which didn’t apply to us. Our well-being has not been part of any story. Some

Victor bowed. “History and Liberty sat on crates talking . . . while a cranky little turtle ordered them around.” Victor’s laugh filled the space between their bodies with light.

We are coming for you. Someday we will be enough. Children, I mean. And our imagination. We are relentless. Insurgent. You can’t kill the future in us.