Where Stories Live

We all want to know where we come from. Not only is it natural, but in my opinion, perhaps our most divine right as human beings. They told us that we were from serum 6, a combination of DNA and computer codes. I understood the process from which I had come, but not the inexplicable. Why was my hair brown and not blonde? Why did I have a hunger to make up stories that I could not find any pictures to depict? Our language is so complex, but the expressions to me have always seemed to fall short.

I invented something today. Our teacher told us to emoji about our holiday. I took out my pad and imputed a smiley face. Then I deleted it. There had been smiles and some laughs but that was not all the feelings. And there were things about the holiday that I had experienced seperately that had no feelings, observations and imaginative thought waves.

Sometimes our teacher allowed us to use the stylus function if we needed to elaborate on our emoji logs. I started to draw and then I paused. I looked at the ground realizing that a stick was quite like a stylus. I picked it up and began to weave it through the dirt. When I was done I smiled in a way that no emoji could ever capture. There was a light in my smile and a deep sense of satisfaction. I had drawn my holiday. I could see the waves of emotion, but it was not straightforward. The sadness of losing my grandmother was in the folds of the rolling river. The beauty I had experienced at wearing the key necklace she had left me looked out from the eyes of an owl I had drawn perched in the cottonwood tree. The imagination of what the key could lead to was foretold in the stepping stone path that rose to the clouds and hid in the mist of a sky based seashore. My teacher did not understand. She said that playing in the dirt would not qualify as homework and insisted that I rub it out with my hands and then go wash up. Some of my classmates laughed and others never even bothered to look up from their pads. I went to the river that I had put in my masterpiece and did as she said, washing my tears there in the bank. Hoping to let them run dry before returning to class.

When I turned around a small girl was peering at me. I realized all at once that she was the girl I liked whose beautiful brown eyes had found their way into my owl in the cottonwood tree. She said nothing but offered me a handkerchief and disappeared. Something fell out of the handkerchief. It was a print out drawing of the land. I could see where she had placed the emojis and then warped the lines to create pictures of real places. There was a long line where she had dragged the stylus to a waterfall I knew well. It was a gathering place for our people. There she had pressed an imprint into the page. It was an exact imprint of the key around my neck.

In wonder, I forsook my classes and ignored the instructions of my teacher and started the trek for the waterfall. When I arrived it had begun to rain steadily. I wasn’t dressed for hiking and my clothes began to plaster against my body. Upon arriving at the falls, I ducked behind the watery veil and found, much to my surprise, a small cave. I could scarcely begin my examination of the limestone walls therein before I heard faint footfalls. As my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the cave, I saw her! The girl who'd given me her handkerchief! How had she known I would come? I waited for her to speak, but she said nothing and took my hand. I realized then that I had never heard her speak. She drew me into the darkness of the cave and placed my hand firmly against something cold and solid. But not so solid. I realized then what she was showing me. Nestled into the limestone was a wooden oval door with a brass keyhole. She nodded to my necklace and smiled at me. Her smile was sunbeams and buttercups. That’s how I would have symbolized it for my teacher, but my teacher would not have had the same rumbling in her stomach as I had, delighting in such imagery.

I placed the key in the keyhole and at first, nothing happened. The door had not been opened in so long, we had to push together to get it to move against the corrosion of time. When it opened, the girl lit a small flame from a torch and the walls came alive before me. Before us lay a most fantastical collection of capsules. I had seen one before. I knew that capsules were what had brought us many of the plants here and even some of the animals from eggs. The girl pointed to these capsules looking grave and then placed a finger to her lips. She then made a slash in the air and a motion of slapping herself on the wrist.

“These are forbidden?” I asked solemnly. She nodded. We spent the rest of the afternoon pouring over these strange pictured pages. None of them had emojis or the usual symbols. There were pictures of children like us with two big people, one male, and one female. There were strange black slash marks that seemed to be repeated over and over in different shapes like some sort of code. These were what fascinated me the most. I noticed that the girl was looking at them differently than I was as if there was a sort of order to it like dressing or preparing food.

She sat still and elegantly holding one of the square objects with the wafer-thin inserts and looked at every blot and etching one insert at a time. She would pause before turning each one and take one dainty finger and moisten it with her tongue before going to the next.

It took months for me to understand her. I learned her name was Lena and I told her mine was Paul. We had to develop our own sign and symbol talk before she could help me understand the mystery that was the square objects. Books she called them. I learned such wonderful things from the books. Mysteries that had alluded me for so long like where children came from before the serums and before the interplanetary settlement. I liked the names of the authors. One of my favorites was a man by the name of Longfellow. He wrote of a man named Hiawatha who spent a lot of time by Lake Superior and the Tahquamenon River. He had a speech impediment, but he was still able to unite tribes together under one language. Lena and I can both relate to this man. Though we have never met him or ever will in the traditional sense, the books have acquainted us like old friends.

Lena says that our world is not ready for these stories yet and we must be patient and cautious. But I have noticed many things sense discovering the books. I see the eyes of my classmates staring out the window. Some to the forest and others to the hills. I have seen the teachers boredom as they scan our homework and heard the deep sighs of restless yearning. I know that I am not the only one searching for something more. I am not the only one with questions and hunger for knowledge beyond what we can see in the here and now. They may not be ready yet, but they will be. And when the time comes I will fight for the written word to be restored. I will not let these books return to the dust, but resurrect their ashes and plant them in the hearts of those who are ready for so much more.