Susan’s Calling

Written with the prompts: be able to answer that call, are we there yet?, shit no!, you are told what to think but, a faded newspaper picture, why they did what they did, intuition, water can get hot, dream or fantasy, guidance, let’s look at this from a different perspective, I am in a body, sticky

Even as a young girl living high in the frosty thin air of the Sierras, Susan felt she had a calling she needed to pursue.  It was an amorphous feeling, an intuition that she needed to follow the crystalline water as it melted and rushed, carving deep crevices and sculpting tiny furrows through stone, seeking the water until it puddled in lazy green lakes beneath trees sinking into meadows and swamps in the valley, finally watching it spread into a veined pattern, like blood vessels from heart to fingers and toes:  delta magic settling into the sea.

“Are we there yet?” she used to ask her mother when they drove down what her mother jokingly called the hill.  “We’re here,” her mother said finally as they arrived at the north coast.  But Susan was disappointed.  The ocean water was so cold, so gritty, so slap in the crotch rude. She wanted to go where the water was hot and she vowed to find that spot.

In a dream or fantasy, Susan is opening a cardboard box filled with jelly jar glasses, crystal candy dishes and thin china plates all swathed in bubble wrap and the glossy pages of torn magazines.  On the bottom is a faded newspaper; Susan lifts it with interest because the date will tell her when this box was packed.  April 1978. She turns it over, surprised to see an old photo in the paper of her grandparents, young, not yet married to each other, climbing over a cyclone fence into the yard of a munitions plant above an article telling how a group of teenaged rebels were arrested and released, fined and sentenced to community service.  “Shit, no!” Susan murmured.  “I didn’t know.  No one told me.  I didn’t know.”

We are taught to believe, we are told what to think, they control what stories appear in the newsfeed.  Then it happens, a new perspective appears, you make a quarter turn, just 45 degrees, and the sun casts a different shadow.  Why did they do what they did?  Susan never believed in leaving things to fate, she wanted to steer her own course, but if she’d been fed a false narrative, where could she go for guidance?  She knew her answers were sticky now, and they lay in basics, the body, the land, the sky.

She sat down to meditate, sipping a cup of tap water.  The water now, even the tap water, is always hot.