On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

All I knew was that I wanted to tell so I could save my sister,

“To turn it into a red jewel,” I said. “So that if her grave is ever dug up by a new civilization in the future, they will see it and know she was a queen.”

“Where would we be if no one had ever said the word God? Had never said the word heaven? Hell? All those things which deepen the shade of the ripe fruit. Where would we be without a creation story? Without the say of sin? Where would we be if we could just live without the fear that the life we’ve had has not been good enough to spend eternity with the harps? No sense of shame or guilt or of doing the wrong thing. Who was the first idiot to say, ‘We are more than evolution. We are morals and ethics and creation. We are the feel, the made, the what that has come from the hip bones of a God above.’

“I’ve never really thought of me without her,” I said.

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then

we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

“So we can kill the monster together, Daffy.” She smiled. I have never forgotten that.

And even when I’m in a room full of people, I am always astonished at how lonely I can be, because the one person I need isn’t there. A daughter is a woman lost at sea. A mother is the one who saves her. But if she’s not there, the daughter will always be lost.”

Like the ark that saved everyone from the flood. You’re my ark, you always have been. There to save me when the flood has come. But the thing about saving someone in the flood is that you have to get in the water, too. Sometimes you don’t get back out. I drowned you with me, Arc.