A Line of Ink, Stretching Back Like A Shadow
by Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Mamán loved words; this, Gre-mamán told me.
Mamán had covered her belly with writing, painted words on it in great loops and whorls. Words upon words within words, greater to smaller written across the brown paper of her skin. Lines of ink covered her belly, intricate as filigree, interlocked as hummingbird feathers.
This had been how Mamán had wooed them, Gre-mamán told me. The air thrummed overhead, full of unseen words gathering around her, heavy with silence before speech.
She raised her brush for the last time. In our village, the caravan merchants faltered and were struck dumb while hawking their wares; far off in the capitol, nibs trembled over vellum and ledgers and decrees as scribes struggled to write; priests on their pulpits stuttered and fell quiet as both orison and harangue fled from them.
When she closed the last loop, Mamán wedded her beloved words. They converged, all collapsed into one massive utterance that rolled across the savanna like thunder. Made manifest, the ink of her belly came alive and wriggled into the dark of her navel.
Shunned, Mamán had been chased out her village and into the wilderness for invoking the ancient tekne. Gre-mamán had led her to an old, holy place and carved out a home from an immense baobob, the tree’s round bole and crooked limbs a blot of ink dropped against the tawny page of savanna for leagues around.
As the moon of Mamán’s womb waxed, the tide of words receded from the minds of the villagers. The words and lines on maps blurred and flowed back up into the quills that wrote them. Inkpots across the realm emptied as Mamán pushed me screaming into the world.
Mamán had cried out my name as my birth consumed her.
She named me Caligrán.
Gre-mamán took me into her arms, amid her tears. She stroked my brow and hummed a low, wordless song and gave me the ink-damp end of a brush for suck until I stopped crying. She smiled at my inky black skin and cradled me for a long time.
This is what Gre-mamán told me.
The inside of the baobob, its gnarled wood worn smooth, was my earliest memory. Gre-mamán would leave me for long stretches of time, returning with old letters and scribbled lists for me to slurp. They had been enough at first, but far too soon I needed better words, more varied fare. I held love letters and old treatises alike by their corners and waited for the words to sag and tumble into my open mouth. Gre-mamán’s library shrank as I tore off page after page, ink dribbling down my chin.
As soon as I was big enough, Gre-mamán sent me out to gather wood. I took branches blown from windswept acacia trees to make ink for my supper. Living with only Gre-mamán out on the savanna, I had forgotten about the village she had fled with my mother.
“Hey, Tinto!”
The stone whizzed through the air and struck me hard as the words. I fell, sprawling in the dust. Twigs and deadwood flew from my limp and boneless arms, scattered, as I gasped great gulps of air. At the edge of my sight, the fallen sticks formed words in a language that squirmed out of my mind’s grasp.
A village boy, lost, gaunt and filthy tossed his stones aside. He loped through the bare trees and sere grass towards me. His face split into a slack, hungry smile as his hands curled into fists.
I scuttled backwards before I stood and ran, afraid of the knife-edge gleam in his eyes,leaving the wood where it fell until my breath kindled embers in my chest, until I saw the crooked branches of my home spread across the sky like an embrace.
I pawed the curtain aside, blinded by inky tears and clumsy with exhaustion. Gre-mamán glanced up from the codex she was illuminating, pen in hand, and her eyes widened.
“Mijo,” she said as she sprinkled sand over her work and hobbled towards me. “What happened?”
I shook my head, tried to tell her, but could only keen. On the open page Gre-mamán had been working, El Apóstol Darwin, with his prophet’s beard, regarded me. He stood upon the prow of his boat, one finger upraised as he named the birds and beasts like Adam. The Words of Creation traced the edges of his halo.
Gre-mamán bent over the pot hanging over the stone-lined hearth. She ladled steaming water into an ink bowl and returned with a rag in her other hand,dipping the rag and dabbing at my eyes, the cut on my brow, soothing the shame from my cheeks. She squeezed the rag into the bowl, curls of ink coiling into letters before dissolving. The story came stumbling out of me in sobs, great hitching breaths.
“H-he hated me–” I gasped, the story too big to get out. “–so much!”
Gre-mamán brushed a scrawl of hair from my brow, and after a moment laid her hand on my forearm. One yellowed fingernail pressed and dimpled my skin; held in the flood of outrage. She soaked the rag, squeezed it, the trickle of water filling the silence.
“¿Porqué, Gre-gre?” My dark tears tarnished my sight. “Why am I like this? Why can’t I be like–them?”
“Mijo.” She coughed. “You remember the story of Babél?”
I nodded.
“When you quickened in your Mamán’s belly, the work of the long ages since Babél reversed.” Gre-mamán’s hands curled and pulled at the air as if gathering nets. “At first, their written words unraveled, became part of you–“
“No.” My gasp was as soft as the flutter of a moth’s wings. The hatred on the village boy’s face etched in my memory. “How, Gre-gre?”
“They chased us away, but it was too late.” She pulled me into her embrace, sighed. “Writing became undone. From the scrolls in the shadowed Temple of the Lawgiver, to the sacred texts pored over by gray whiskered saints, to the maps caravanserai use to travel from the spice-laden markets of the deep West, to here. Their rills and streams flowed to join with the vast course of your river.”
My skin prickled, edges of words made flesh riffled against each other as I squirmed out of Gre-mamán’s embrace. I stumbled back, past the curtain–out, and under a sky bright as an unwritten page. My breath–hot with fury–knifed through me as I ran.
Gre-mamán’s cries faded, shredded by the hot wind.
I reached the clearing among a grove of acacias where Mamán rested. Her stone marker rose from the brown grass like the hump of a tortoise shell. I sat upon the ground where Mamán had been buried, a dull ache in my chest. I missed her, wanted her to be here, but then scoffed. How could I grieve someone I never knew?
Twigs lay scattered like accusations scrawled in the dust.
It was what Gre-mamán had told me, another one of her stories, but I was no child anymore. I pulled my pen out from its loop inside my sleeve, thinking. I could prove it–I would write the village’s name on my arm and see what happened.
Nothing, I was sure.
I smiled as I traced the nib across my skin, the loops spelling the village name. Something stirred under my skin, a strange shuffling feeling, as I finished. I expected a crack to open in the sky. Instead, a faint breeze swirled into my ears, filled with whispered and half-understood words.
I first saw the feral village boy, his edges slurred, dissolving. I plunged through him, back and back and back through his story and into his past.
His Mamán, who once sneaked him a corner of a honeycomb his father had given her as a gift, held her full belly with one hand. In her other she held a paper with a name in the other–the boy’s brother-to-be–but the ink of the name bled out of the paper while her belly bled out to nothing.
Until she bled out to nothing.
I fell through her, through her story, and fell into a deep well, dark and full of words, of stories thronging all around me and filling my ears with their whispers.
Gre-mamán told me a story to guide me back. I writhed, deep in my fever, drowning in words upon words within words. I followed her voice as if called forth from a river coursing under the Earth.
When I opened my eyes, she was sitting cross-legged next to me. Her chest rumbled as she hummed, the codex open in her lap. Her hand rested on my arm.
“¿Que pasó?” I groaned into a sitting position. Her eyes fluttered open and she gasped, tears glimmered in her eyes.
“Ay. Ay, mijo.” Her hands trembled against my cheeks. “Caligrán, that was very foolish–“
“Gre-gre, I’m–” I wanted to say, I’m sorry, but looked at my hands in my lap instead. “I doubted what you told me.”
“Why–?” Her voice rose before she stopped. “You put a fright into me.”
She shook her head. Her reedy voice rose and fell in a formless song as she stared into the middle distance, eyes dull as river stones. After a long time, she spoke again.
“What you did, how you did it–” she grimaced. I was about to open my mouth, but she pressed her fingernail against the skin of my arm. “We created words to tell ourselves stories, we gave them life after a fashion. Stories can live as well. I think you’re made of them, taking them in and nesting them within your own.”
“Will the village fade away?”
“I don’t know.” She was silent a while, her breath the slow, wet rumble of faraway thunder. “Maybe the village was like my own story, ready to come to an end no matter what happened.”
“Don’t say that.” I placed my hand over hers. “What will happen to me, if you’re gone, Gre-gre?” She slid her hand out from under mine.
“Tell your own story, your way. Make the world you want.”
Gre-mamán rose, left the codex open to the page she had been working on and shuffled off to bed. She coughed for a long time before she slept.
El Apóstol Darwin held up two fingers, as if in benediction. He, who had discovered the twenty-three Words of Creation, stories coiled within the marrow of every living thing.
Like the ape, which sits upon a tree branch, unaware of the sacrifice made by generations before–going back, back to the ink-dark sea, where countless fish flopped and gasped their last in the primeval mud.
Time passed, and fists became the only way the villagers could now speak–to me, and to each other. They stuttered and moaned, red-faced with the effort of coaxing words to come. In the end, they let their blows do their talking.
I stayed home, helped Gre-mamán finish illuminating the codex. She showed me how to capture stories within a few lines of ink until the wet thing in her chest took root. It grew full as she dwindled. Already slight, she was fading, a phantom weighed down by the pain in her chest. She continued to wake before the sun rose. I would rise to find her already working on another page by light of a candle, until the day I didn’t.
Gre-mamán’s breath rattled, and she was as hot as a desert stone at twilight. Her rumpled sheets tangled in her legs, her breath wet horror, eyes sunken under the weight of her grief. The cough took her words; she could no longer weave the stories she so loved.
I washed away her tears of shame, of rage, of defeat while my own tears scrawled requiems on my cheeks. I dipped the rag into the same ink-bowl she once used to dab at my own tears.
Gre-mamán raised two fingers and I leaned forward for her blessing. She pinched them together with her thumb, traced a feeble movement in the air. After a moment, I pushed a pen into her hand, digging out a blank sheet of vellum.
She grimaced, grasped at the page, missed.
A sob escaped my lips as the page fluttered to the ground. I picked it up, dusted it off, and put it in her hand again. Her knuckles felt like prayer beads under my hand. I wept, a thin, high sound coming from my throat.
She scratched out a handful of crabbed words, the measure of a life in a few drops of ink. It was not enough. Not enough for a life.
I knew what I must do.
I tugged the vellum away from under her pen, a long line of ink trailing off the page. She blinked at me, her breath as labored as if a stone sat on her chest. Gre-mamán’s face was my world.
“Házlo, Gre-gre.” I nod. “Do it. Your story.”
I guide her hand to my arm, the nib dimpling my flesh. As she moves the pen, I feel something yield; feel the story kept inside her every cell unspool and flow into me.
Her story makes me laugh and rage and weep, and at last see her. I see who I am to her–her hope, the hope of countless others. I am a Word of Creation made flesh, a library of stories, written in a secret language, brought into order by an unknown source. I gather stories into me–words, upon words, within words, from greater to smaller until all stories are coiled within.
I take the pen from her hand, hold it over the page, a single drop of ink clinging to its nib. I search Gre-mamán’s face for what happens next.
I watch her accept, no longer struggle, and wonder if the shadow across her face is a smile, or if it’s imagined–afraid to step closer, to be certain.
Karlo Yeager Rodríguez is originally from the enchanting island of Puerto Rico, but moved to the Baltimore area some years ago where he now lives with his wife and one odd dog. His fiction has appeared in Nature, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, Seize the Press, Pseudopod, khōréō, and Strange Horizons.
In addition to writing, Karlo has narrated stories in Strange Horizons, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Escape Pod.
He’s also an occasional guest on Rite Gud, and the main host of Podside Picnic.
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