A chill rises from the east. I can’t tell if it’s just me, or if the days are really getting colder. I wish I had some innate, native American understanding of the weather, like some whittled down sense of an oncoming cold front. Is that racist?
I’ve made some incremental progress with whom I’m assuming is the tribe leader. He’s a formidable fellow named Wind Harness. Yesterday, he trotted up to my outpost and shoved a natty, stinky pelt off his saddle and onto the floor. I could tell it was meant to be a gift, so I was sure to make many gestures of grave gratitude. Then we sat down across from each other and began our slow form of communication.
Through a series of pictographs and hand gestures, he told me his story. Apparently, once, a long time ago, he caught the soul of a whale and now keeps it in a leather satchel. Either that, or he chucked the soul over a cliff. I wasn’t quite sure, but I kept my face in an expression of curiosity, as seemed appropriate to the situation. Then he was looking at me expectantly, and I understood that he wanted me to tell him my story. Soon I found myself, through a series of ever unwinding tangents leading farther and farther away from the original point, as is my conversational technique, trying to explain what it was like to be in a big box store like Target or Kohls.
I think I was trying to explain some emblematic experience of living on earth or something like that. Motioning wildly I was like, “Big, like the plains. But inside. And filled with boxes. And you can never find anything. And always too cold.”
Anyways, he wasn’t getting it. So I just drew a quick pictograph that indicated I’d been birthed by a pyramid and then set down here by a flaming Pterodactyl. By the way he was looking at me, I couldn’t tell if I’d said the exactly right or exactly wrong thing.
Before he went, he bestowed on me another gift. He opened his palm and inside was a tiny bug, lit up from in inside like our lightening bugs, except even more luminescent. He hummed three tones, and then the bug sparked into a small flame, and then almost immediately flared out. He put one of the bugs in my hand, it was warm, I go, “Thanks?” It was only after he’d ridden off that I realized, idiot that I am, that he’d given it to me so I could make a fire.
But I have been humming to the bug and it will not spark. I even went out and got kindling and everything. The bug just beetles around like it’s having time of his life. I guess I haven’t gotten the tones right. And it’s like trying to unlock a door with a faulty key where you just keep jamming it in and the thing you really need to do is stop, take a deep breath, and try it again…anyways, now I’m just blabbing.
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