The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
Once a woman fell from the sky. The woman who fell from the sky was neither a murderer nor a saint. She was rather ordinary, though beautiful in her walk, like one who has experienced freedom from earth's gravity.
When I see her, I think of an antelope grazing the alpine meadows in mountains whose names are as ancient as the sound that created the first world.
Saint Coincidence thought he recognized her as she began falling toward him from the sky in a slow spin, like the spiral of events marking an ascension of grace.
There was something in the curve of her shoulder, a familiar slope that led him into the lightest moment of his life.
He could not bear it and turned to ask a woman in high heels for a quarter. She was of the family of myths who would give everything if asked.
She looked like all the wives he'd lost. And he has nothing to lose anymore in this city of terrible paradox where a woman was falling toward him from the sky.
The strange beauty in heels disappeared from the path of Saint Coincidence, with all her money held tightly in her purse, into the glass of advertisements.
Saint Coincidence shuffled back onto the ice to watch the woman falling and falling.
Saint Coincidence, who was not a saint, perhaps a murderer if you count the people he shot without knowing during the stint that took his mind in Vietnam or Cambodia—
remembered the girl he yearned to love when they were kids at Indian boarding school.
He could still see her on the dusty playground, off in the distance, years to the west past the icy parking lot of the Safeway.
She was a blurred vision of the bittersweet and this memory had forced him to live through the violence of fire.
There they stood witness together to strange acts of cruelty by strangers, as well as the surprise of rare kindness.
The woman who was to fall from the sky was the girl with skinned knees whose spirit knew how to climb to the stars. Once she told him the stars spoke a language akin to the plains of her home, a language like rocks.
He watched her once make the ascent, after a severe beating. No one could touch the soul masked by name, age and tribal affiliation. Myth was as real as a scalp being scraped for lice.
Lila also dreamed of a love not disturbed by the wreck of culture she was forced to attend. It sprang up here and there like miraculous flowers in the cracks of the collision.
It was there she found Johnny, who didn't have a saint's name when he showed up for school. He understood the journey and didn't make fun of her for her peculiar ways, despite the risks.
Johnny was named Johnny by the priests because his Indian name was foreign to their European tongues. He named himself Saint Coincidence many years later after he lost himself in drink in a city he'd been sent to to learn a trade.
Maybe you needed English to know how to pray in the city. He could speak a fractured English. His own language had become a baby language to him, made of the comforting voice of his grandmother as she taught him to be a human.
Johnny had been praying for years and had finally given up on a god who appeared to give up on him. Then one night as he tosses pennies on the sidewalk with his cousin and another lost traveler, he prayed to Coincidence and won.
The event demanded a new name. He gave himself the name Saint Coincidence.
His ragged life gleamed with possibility until a ghost-priest brushed by him as he walked the sidewalk looking for a job to add to his stack of new luck.
The priest appeared to look through to the boy in him. He despaired. He would always be a boy on his knees, the burden of shame rooting him.
Saint Coincidence went back to wandering without a home in the maze of asphalt. Asphalt could be a pathway to God, he reasoned, though he'd always imagined the road he took with his brothers when they raised sheep as children.
Asphalt had led him here to the Safeway where a woman was falling from the sky.
The memory of all time relative to Lila and Johnny was seen by an abandoned cat washing herself next to the aluminum-can bin of the grocery store.
These humans set off strange phenomena, she thought and made no attachment to the thought. It was what it was, this event, shimmering there between the frozen parking lot of the store and the sky, something unusual and yet quite ordinary.
Like the sun falling fast in the west, this event carried particles of light through the trees.
Some say God is a murderer for letting children and saints slip through his or her hands. Some call God a father of saints or a mother of demons. Lila had seen God and could tell you God was neither male nor female and made of absolutely everything of beauty, of wordlessness.
This unnameable thing of beauty is what shapes a flock of birds who know exactly when to turn together in flight in the winds used to make words. Everyone turns together though we may not see each other stacked in the invisible dimensions.
This is what Lila saw, she told Johnny once. The sisters called it blasphemy.
Johnny ran away from boarding school for the first winter with his two brothers, who'd runaway before. His brothers wrapped Johnny Boy, as they called him, with their bodies to keep him warm. They froze and became part of the stars.
Johnny didn't make it home either. The school officials took him back the next day. To mourn his brothers would be to admit an unspeakable pain, so he became an athlete who ran faster than any record ever made in the history of the school, faster than the tears.
Lila never forgot about Johnny, who left school to join the army, and a few years later as she walked home from her job at Dairy Queen she made a turn in the road.
Call it destiny or coincidence—but the urge to fly was as strong as the need to push when at the precipice of any birth. It was what led her into the story told before she'd grown ears to hear, as she turned from stone to fish to human in her mother's belly.
Once, the stars made their way down stairs of ice to the earth to find mates. Some of the women were angry at their inattentive husbands, bored, or frustrated with the cycle of living and dying. They ran off with the stars, as did a few who saw their chance for travel and enlightenment.
They weren't heard from for years, until one of the women returned. She dared to look back and fell. Fell through centuries, through the beauty of the night sky, made a hole in a rock near the place Lila's mother had been born.
She took up where she had left off, with her children from the stars. She was remembered.
This story was Lila's refuge those nights she'd prayed on her knees with the other children in the school dorms. It was too painful to miss her mother.
A year after she'd graduated and worked cleaning house during the day, and evening at the Dairy Queen, she laughed to think of herself wearing her uniform spotted with sweets and milk, as she left on the arms of one of the stars.
Surely she could find love in a place that did not know the disturbance of death.
While Lila lived in the sky she gave birth to three children and they made her happy. Though she had lost conscious memory of the place before, a song climbed up her legs from far away, to the rooms of her heart.
Later she would tell Johnny it was the sound of destiny, which is similar to a prayer reaching out to claim her.
You can't ignore these things, she would tell him and it led her to the place her husband had warned her was too sacred for women.
She carried the twins in her arms as her daughter grabbed her skirt in her small fists. She looked into the forbidden place and leaped.
She fell and was still falling when Saint Coincidence caught her in his arms in front of the Safeway as he made a turn from borrowing spare change from strangers.
The children crawled safely from their mother. The cat stalked a bit of flying trash set into motion by the wave of falling—
or the converse wave of gathering together.
* * *
I traveled far above the earth for a different perspective. It is possible to travel this way without the complications of NASA. This beloved planet we call home was covered with an elastic web of light.
I watched in awe as it shimmered, stretched, dimmed and shined, shaped by the collective effort of all life within it. Dissonance attracted more dissonance. Harmony attracted harmony. I saw revolutions, droughts, famines and the births of new nations.
The most humble kindnesses made the brightest lights. Nothing was wasted.
I understood love to be the very gravity holding each leaf, each cell, this earthly star together.
Perhaps the World Ends Here
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
(c) 1994 by Joy Harjo. All rights reserved.
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