Brooklyn Arts Council

�Your brother is sick,� Auntie Rayneta says, pulling a ball of yarn from the corner basket. Nasta looked up at her with wide eyes, waiting for her to go on. Her brother? But instead, Auntie Rayneta begins to loop the yarn onto the knitting needle. Nasta goes outside under the blue of the sky to climb apple trees and dig holes and play with the cats and do other things that eleven year olds do. She wonders why Auntie Rayneta�s face got so cold, why she is knitting despite the arthritis. Nasta didn�t realize that she had a brother. But there�s a brilliant yellow bird a little ways off so she does not find answers to her questions. Instead she pays attention to walking quietly in the direction of the bird. And picking up yellow feathers and other things she finds on the ground. And she continues to play. Nasta remembers a mother. She had a sweet voice and would sing to Nasta and make her apple pies. But there was something heavy in her and that�s why she left. She couldn�t stay in the deep forest like Nasta and Auntie Rayneta. She would play in the apple trees in the same way that they did but she would hide from the rain. She�d either hide inside with her back to the windows or she would run from it. That was what happened when she left. She ran out of the cottage, trying to hold her arms over her head to block the rain, though she was sopping anyways. She comes back sometimes, but the visits have become shorter and shorter and Nasta can barely remember the last one. She never brought, or even mentioned a brother. The sun shines for days and days. And Nasta plays and plays until the sky is no longer blue. Instead it�s a strange grey and it fills her stomach; it�s thick to breath, and she moves unsteadily through it as if it�s pushing her in certain directions. Her brother is sick, she can feel his sickness in the thickening of the sky. How can they heal her brother when they don�t even know where he is or what sickness he has? She can�t pretend that her brother will be healed by strings of yellow feathers. When she goes into the house Auntie Rayneta is sitting in the same chair by the window. She�s staring, her eyes glossed over, as if they�re staring at something much further away than she could possibly see. Her face is pale. Her hands lay motionless in her lap, her fingers barely holding the knitting needles. Pooled around her feet are yards and yards of knitting. It must have taken her weeks to knit that much, if she was knitting without stopping. Nasta stands in the doorway, her arms hanging from her shoulders, her bottom lip barely attached to her face. Without turning to look at her Auntie Rayneta says, �I�m too old, I�ll never make it. You�ll have to find him.� Nasta hangs for a minute more, not able to formulate a sentence or even a coherent thought. �Take the bag that hangs in the kitchen. You�ll have to leave first thing in the morning.� �My brother?� Her voice is thin; it drips from her mouth like water. �Should I leave now? What do I do? Where do I go?� She moves quickly in circles, maybe looking for the bag, maybe for the things she�ll need to fill it with. Maybe looking for her brother. �No, it�s not right. Rise with the sun. You�ll go with his protection. You should sleep now, you have a big journey ahead of you.� The whole time that she�s talking, Auntie Rayneta is staring out the window. Nasta turns and goes to her bedroom. She curls in the corner and pulls the blanket over her head, trying to keep thoughts from coming in. How will she find him? She�s never been past the edge of the apple trees. Further than the cats play. And when she does find him, how does she make him well again? But if she weren�t able to, Auntie Rayneta wouldn�t send her out. And he�s her brother; she has to help him. She doesn�t sleep. She waits for the sky to turn from black to grey. And when it does there�s a loaf of bread on the kitchen table, slightly warm. The bag is also sitting on the table. In it are extra socks, a pocketknife and some snacks. Nasta wraps the bread and puts it into the bag. She goes into the other room. Auntie Rayneta is sitting in the same chair, staring out the window at the same thing. Nasta pulls her sweater off the hook. She watches her aunt�s throat rise and fall. Auntie Rayneta�s lips purse and she closes her eyes for a moment. Slowly she gets up, setting down the knitting needles that were on her lap. She takes the thing that she has made, it�s not really a scarf; it�s much too long, a little too wide, but she wraps it around Nasta�s neck several times, over her shoulders. The ends trail on the ground. She kisses Nasta on the head, opens the door then goes back to the chair by the window. Nasta stands in the doorway for a minute, then closes the door behind her. She holds her head straight as she passes the window so as not to see her aunt�s distant stare. Nasta sets off, carrying the weight of the grey sky as high above her head as she can. The cats follow her as she leaves, but they do not go far from the house. One by one or two by two, they drop away, and when she is left with only one, she knows she is far. She�s no longer playing games. Auntie Rayneta told her once what happens beyond the edge of the apple trees. Had it not been for that story, she would have thought the whole world was apple trees. As she passes the last apple tree, she reaches up and fills her bag with apples. They sit heavy in her bag, and their familiar weight pulls tightly across her shoulder. The last cat stands at the tree and watches her walk away. She doesn�t know where to go, but she knows what�s out there. At least a little bit. She can pretend to know, at least. Just to make her feel better. Or she knows that it is different than her home at least. She knows that it�s a big world. And somewhere, her brother is out there. And there�s also something out there that will cure him. She takes a deep breath and puts one foot in front of the other. And for now that�s enough. Because it�s that much closer to her brother. She tries to catch her brother�s scent in the wind. She watches the ground for his footprints, things that might have fallen out of his pockets along the way. Leaves scatter across the path. Dry and empty, bordering on the edge of mocking. After a long while, her feet bring her to a fork in the road. She stands for a minute, feeling the direction of the wind. She brushes away the veil of sky, and takes the left fork. Just as her feet move one after the other after the other, so do the days, winding around her, trailing off like the length of her scarf. Following the path of thick trees and the dwindling of food from her bag. She tugs at her bag. She realizes how far she�s come from home. She puts her hand in her pocket and feels the apple seeds that she�s been keeping there. The path changes, just for a minute. The trees thin out and instead of hearing the crunch of leaves under her feet, she hears her footsteps echoing through the hard earth. When she sees something ahead, she assumes it�s a leaf, but when she gets closer she sees that it is not. And exactly what it is, she can�t quite tell. It seems to be a skin of some kind, an onion, but not quite the right color. An empty shell of some sort. She holds it in her hands and feels it�s texture, it�s weight. It�s thin; she can see even the diluted, grey light through it. The veins that run through. Or are they strands of his hair? Carefully, she smells it. Yes, she�s on the right path, but he�s sick. And once she finds him, she�ll have to help him. But she�s on the right path. She holds this onion-y skin between her thumb and finger for a long time before she carefully puts it into the pocket of her bag. And she keeps going. She searches the entire area for miles around where she found his shell but she can�t find a direction. She searches every blade of grass, but she can�t find another strand of hair. She can�t smell him in the wind, she can�t see footprints, she can�t find any other part of him. For days and days, weeks and maybe even months. She goes to the tops of the tallest mountains and climbs the highest trees. She can see for miles around, she sees something far away, the cottage where she lives? She sees the bridge and the river but she can�t see her brother. She looks down the fastest river and into the deepest lake and sees a face, a timid face floating on the surface of the water. Her heart leaps, she clings so tightly to hope. But as she straightens her uncombed hair, a leaf falls and her reflection breaks away. Nasta is exhausted. She�d been searching for days, her feet hurt, she�s cold and she still has no idea where her brother is. She�s empty inside. She sits down on the damp grass and pulls the last of the bread out of her bag. She eats it all. She stops holding the sky above her and lets it fall over her. Suffocating. With her scarf wrapped around her, and her stomach full, she falls asleep. And in her sleep she walks. And she searches. She goes through the valley of roses, orchards of pear trees and stalks of corn. The air is chilly as she walks through the ebony forest. It�s very thick and dormant. The air is almost stale, as if it�s still enough to be un-breathed. She walks with her head bent, avoiding dry leaves and the echoes that crack through the forest. Because she walks like this, trying to blend into the stillness, she doesn�t notice until it is upon her. The ground is clear and when she looks up she sees that there is a wide circular area without trees. And in the middle of the clearing is a boy. His breath is heavy, as if he had been running. His face is flushed and his long dark curls are falling, becoming still. But he hadn�t been running. There�s a rope around his neck. Her eyes follow it to the tree that grows in the middle of the clearing. Nasta stares. She stares at his deep eyes that seemed to hold too much. She stares at the angles made by his protruding ribs. The way his chest rises and falls over his breath. She stares at the raw corner of his mouth, as if he had been gnawing at the rope. She stares at the redness of his neck, the skin wearing away to the rope. The roughness of his knees. The way he crouches over the ground. And he stares back. Her wide eyes. The way her mouth hangs open a bit as she stares. The smudge of dirt over her forehead. The pink of her cheeks. The bag over her shoulder. The bulky scarf wrapped around her several times and underneath the shoes on her feet. The smell of apples that seems to hover around her, both exotic and familiar to him. They stay that way, staring at each other. Maybe for a minute, maybe an hour. Maybe it�s months or even years before Nasta crawls back into the forest and covers her head. She stays crouched like this for some time. Snowflakes on her cheek wake her. She crawls slowly back to look at him. He�s stretched out on the ground. Asleep. She knows now what she�s about to do. She walks to the tree. He�s still asleep. She knows that his fingers can do this too. She unties the knot. And she knows that his fingers haven�t done this. But she can do this. So she does. She leaves before he wakes up. She goes back to the river. She washes her face and pulls the tangles out of her hair. She sits and watches the afternoon sun. It�s bright and warm as it dances on the water, through the leaves onto her face. When the sun is low, she begins walking. As it runs pink across the horizon, the cats come to her feet and the apple trees grow around her. Ahead she can see the cottage. There�s light in the windows and she can see Auntie Rayneta rise from her chair.

Marcy A Chevali