What Are You Crying For?

Tesilya Hanauer

            The trail down was steep and rocky, but easy to follow. I could hear dogs barking off in the village, the sounds of people’s voices. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I got to the village, but at least there would be people. I could tell them about the bridge and the river and maybe they would take me there. I knew I could find my way after I crossed the bridge.

            Everything around me looked new There were birds in the trees butterflies flying past me on the trail. As the sun rose, the wet ground steamed a little bit. I could smell the wet moss and rocks.   Ahead of me I heard a dog bark. I stopped on the trail and looked around to find it, but couldn’t see where the bark was coming from when all of a sudden a woman jumped out from behind a rock on the hillside above me. She was laughing. She had short brown hair and a skinny face. She was wearing plain brown clothes, like the ones that Jammu and Shoshone wore. At first I didn’t recognize her. She looked different. Her hair was shorter than it had been when she left. She looked more like a boy and less like the soft mother I now barely remembered, the mother with her long, thick honey-colored braids held down by a red handkerchief, her curls and frizz escaping and fluttering around her face. I had been waiting for her so long I’d almost forgot that she might actually come back. I forgot to look for her. I started to cry, the tears like a flood. And with the tears I felt my whole body start to shake. My heart was so happy, so excited, but it felt sad, too. It hurt so much to want her that bad. Now that I had her, I didn’t know what to do with her. I ran toward her and she came out from behind the rock and bent down to let me hug her. She was smiling big.

            “What are you crying for?”

            I couldn’t find the words. There was too much to tell her, too much I had been holding onto, like paintings I had made for her in my mind and meant to give her as soon as I saw her. But now that she was here, I couldn’t tell her about the lions that watched me as I flew, about how the stars had saved me when I thought I had landed on another planet, about the temple that could fly, the liquid sun, the babies coughing in the night, the fires that burned their bodies, the River Beas and the man who built the boat when the flood came. It all washed over me at once, making me dizzy. I clung to her like a rock, wrapped my arms around her neck and just held on. I could smell her skin, recognized the sweet smell of her, the soft touch of her skin to mine. I suddenly felt very tired, like I could just fall asleep on her shoulder and not wake up. She would hold me and hold me and stay with me, just the two of us.

            “Guess who I brought with me?”

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