The musicians tune their instruments to call in the cows. The usual sounds of morning in the city. Voices of violins clear their throats in endlessly sustained strokes over by the bakehouse. The funky chest bone-rattling bass notes reverberate on the banks of Main Stream while the solar amps buzz like wild honeybees in their heavy flights.
Most human people in the city enjoy the daybreak battle of the bands. Calling in the cows is part of the joys of living in the city. As natural as songbirds berating each other. There would always be some friendly rivalries between musicians, both for prestigious places to set up and play and, of course, for the affection of their devoted public.
Auntie Owen helps his kids set up their thunderclap band outside his household’s front door. He plucks a single tuft of cotton from a nearby patch, then worries out the cottonseeds for later. After forming the white lint into protective buds, he puts them in his ears and gives the debut band a you-got-this gesture. Ten-year-old Geremiah grins nervously behind his drum kit; thirteen-year-old Noora adjusts the reverb effects on her cello mic.
A neighbor stops to admire the young band. “Your household isn’t worried they’re going to scare the cows?”
Auntie Owen removes a cotton bud from his ear and raises his eyebrows. “Sorry, what was that?”
“I was wondering how much convincing the Warrens and the Davtyans needed for the choice of venue?” she repeats.
Auntie Owen shrugs. “Some were excited about the band’s potential. Others … needed gentle reminding that the development of culture through creative experimentation should be encouraged. Even if it’s loud. Besides, some cows might like it.” He puts the cotton bud back in his ear. “People are weird.”
Cattle are enthusiastic audiences and come running at the first strains of music.
The sun cracks the horizon and little Geremiah exuberantly smashes the cymbals on his drum kit, then lets a low, pounding rhythm build. Noora hooks a strand of her long black hair behind one ear, then joins in with her distorted cello. She starts to growl and howl and sing, beckoning the cows to come closer.
The local herds move in from their night pastures. Many of them are drawn to the violins; a good portion delight in the accordion down the way. But three—no, four—stop at a respectful distance from Noora and Germ and the buzzing swell of sound they’re creating. Their huge eyes reflect Germ’s frantic arms hammering the beat, and Noora’s bright-orange knit cap as she sways to her song.
Some kids from the neighboring households step forward to tend to the cows. They feed the attentive listeners treats laced with red seaweed to alter enzymes and ease digestion. One cow permits a child to milk her, but he takes only enough to make specialty cream and butter for nearby households. Milk isn’t the reason the city calls in the cows.
Another cow lifts her tail and deposits a steaming pile of dung on the ground. Noora smiles up on stage before wailing out the conclusion of their song. The other two cows lift tail in appreciation, then begin to wander off, trampling the manure in the process.
Auntie Owen rushes the stage. “You were phenomenal! Did you see? Four cows!” He squished their grins with his embrace. “Wait till we tell your folks. Come on. Let’s go help spread this wealth around.”
Auntie Owen and the band join the others to process the manure. Most is dumped directly into the household’s communal compost bin; it will be key to building nutrient-rich soil. True riches.
With the morning routine done, the kids join up with friends and move in rambunctious puppy-packs toward The Tangle, the way children do. They flow into the crowds—merge in alongside the unfurled porter carts, weave among kneecaps, and trail behind mobility devices. The morning dance. Noora’s feet skip over the uneven pavement stones, the imperceptible variations in hue and texture more apparent after it rains. At darkfall, the stones themselves fade to negative space as the multicolored fungo spores growing in the spaces between illuminate the ground like a silver spiderweb.
But it’s day now, bright but not too sunny, and Noora breaks away from the pack to visit one of the storytellers perched on the edge of The Tangle.
The storyteller is an ageless, woman-shaped person—more curves than angles. The silver-white curls on her head appear sometimes to be coiled like snakes, sometimes thistle-frizz, depending on humidity. Today her hair glows in the overcast like unruly mycelia. All her other features are dark, including the faint mustache on her upper lip and untamed chin hairs sprouting wild. This particular storyteller is known to be visited by companion animals. The fox generally comes at nightfall when the fungo begins to shine. At the moment, the giant wild boar is resting her large head in the storyteller’s lap, and only moves when young Noora comes running. The boar’s sense of self is wrapped up in making room for others, so she does not mind making space for the child—
• • •
Oh, you recognized me? Yes, there I am. Adjusting my position to accommodate a child who has outgrown a lap but not the need for one. And you. How have you enjoyed my story thus far? What did you make of the ritual of calling in the cows, I wonder? If I recall correctly, you are alive at a time when your society drew hard lines between urban and rural life. Drew hard lines around everything, I believe. Prisons, borders. I have to admit I have as much trouble imagining what that must be like as you must have comprehending a scene of coaxing wealth into a neighborhood through creative collaboration.
You are confused; how can I be telling you this story when we’re so far away from each other? It’s not such a daunting distance to cross. One short century apart.
Though we might need something more than a common language to bridge the century of changes. How can I help you find your way? Hmm. I’ll attempt to adapt the tale to the conventions your generations are familiar with. I would hate to make assumptions about you, but all storytellers must. As a reader from the tail end of the blip generation, you’re accustomed to your stories having a very particular shape. A recognizable structure. This narrative is likely to be new terrain. I’ll be your guide. Watch where we place our feet and make note of landmarks. I want you to be able to find your way back here.
• • •
The boar let out a shrill squeal and another sound so deep Noora only felt it as a vibration rattling her chest bone. She wasn’t afraid of the animal—despite its massive size, or its tiny, disinterested eye and its wet, extremely interested snout.
Noora wasn’t afraid of the storyteller either, not that her size was formidable—Noora had surpassed her in height last spring—but she knew some people found the storyteller intimidating, sitting there at the edge of The Tangle like a spider waiting to ensnare. Noora came to visit because the storyteller listened—nearly as well as an auntie. Maybe that’s why the others were more wary. Maybe it wasn’t wise to capture the attention of a storyteller.
With the confidence of a child who could hoist her soprano voice as high as the generator kites, Noora shared the details of her dawn debut with the storyteller. Prattled excitedly about how nervous she’d felt, then belted the refrain for the storyteller.
The storyteller squeezed her hand in appreciation of the sharing.
“Your hands are tiny,” Noora noticed, pressing their palms together to compare.
“I know, look at that stubby little pinky finger,” the storyteller marveled, wiggling it. “Useless.” Then she used it to scratch the boar behind the ear. The boar grunted out a rhythm of contentment.
Noora considered the ways she could arrange the sequence into a new song.
“You’re getting big.” The storyteller struggled to keep Noora balanced in her lap. Hard to say who grunted more with the exertion, the storyteller or the boar. Noora giggled.
“Already taller than me, too.” The storyteller appraised her. “A shame,” she teased. “That means you’ll have a more difficult time holding on to the perspective of a child moving through the world.”
Noora scoffed. “That’s not something I can lose.”
The storyteller smiled one of her sad, faraway smiles.
Noora nestled into the storyteller’s arms. She thought she might like to be a storyteller someday. Perhaps. Though she wasn’t really sure what a storyteller did all day.
“A storyteller makes choices,” the storyteller interrupted her. Unnervingly. “We gorge ourselves on the world until our minds are as distended as wolf tummies. Then, from everything we’ve seen and been told and digested enough to understand, we let the story take shape on our lips on its way out.”
“Gross.”
“No, it’s not a pretty process. No,” the storyteller agreed, “but every part of a story is a choice the storyteller has to make. Our skill is to constantly reassess or revise.” She grew quiet. “Or allow the story to reveal the consequences of our mistakes.”
The skin on Noora’s arm bristled with chicken skin, until the coarse hair of the boar’s flank brushed firm against her, comforting her.
The storyteller’s fingers worried one of her chin hairs until she came to a decision about something. “Noora,” she began, “will you trust me to tell you a story?”
• • •
The wild boar is not native to this area.
This boar here. Her family was introduced by colonizers. For hunting. And they were hunted. For more generations than you can count.
During the final years of the blip era—that swollen, pus-filled anomaly of colonialism—there had been a reported increase of boar attacks against humans. A statistic people insisted to mean that the animals should be considered dangerous. More dangerous than a shark, or bear, or wolf combined, not as dangerous as the tiger, crocodile, or elephant. (They didn’t bother to count mosquitoes.)
I could tell you the number of people harmed, but, Noora, the number didn’t matter. What mattered was the story they tried to get the number to tell. The story that made it acceptable for millions of feral hogs to be trapped and slaughtered or used for death sports because they were dangerous and invasive and destroying ecosystems. Most of all, those highly adaptable hogs were on land the people didn’t think they should have to share, and that made them a threat.
A threat, from those landowners’ point of view.
I’m not convinced that it’s a useful exercise to view the world through a fearful person’s eyes. Fear seems to me a settler’s invention. A misunderstanding of position. When settlers came to this land (bringing their diseases along with the pigs), they bashed back nature, murdered neighbors, and built forts deep into land that did not welcome them—that they never gave a chance to welcome them. Their aggression muscled them deep into a place where they did not belong, did not pause to understand how they could belong, and then they imagined themselves vulnerable. Surrounded on all sides by aggressors. They saw themselves as beset upon, overrun, in a powerless position. One that must always be protected.
All violence was defensive when justified by this self-shaped fear.
That frightens me.
We share histories. The wolves. The boar. The first peoples. The enslaved. The bear.
I have a very tight bond with the boar, the feral pig, all hoglets … Not only this affectionate individual, but their story and history. And their instinctive, obsessive urge to poke at a problem. Nudge at the dirt repeatedly. In their intense, seemingly single-minded pursuit for something they imagine can be found down there. They have a feeling, a sense of something just beyond the tip of their nose. But they also enjoy the process. Delight in it.
I think that’s why they were slaughtered in the numbers they were.
Those people who saw their actions as disruptive—ruining crops, destroying golf courses—couldn’t stand the revelry of the feral hogs, the wild boar, and their javelina cousins. Couldn’t abide the joy they seemed to take in what “landowners” assumed to be destruction. These animals were not only a threat from their point of view, but to their point of view. That was dangerous, indeed.
Even though my friend here is not native to this area—despite her displacement and disrespect—this boar and her kind quickly resumed their role, their relationship to land. Their rooting behavior. To break up the deep, matted roots. The misplaced fear interwoven so tightly with tiny mycelial structures, so tangled in the dark soil that we can’t separate that fear from the ground we stand on. The darkness, the underground, the unknown. All knotted together.
• • •
The bright greenhouse tower wasn’t the best place to mope. Especially since the sun had muscled through the clouds while the storyteller completed her terrible tale. Noora had run off, seeking a hiding place among the hydroponic garden beds high up in the tower, a safe distance from The Tangle and the storyteller’s words. The hard light now battered against the solar glass. Spiderweb-fine filaments in the windows shattered the wavelengths into fractured rainbows that dotted the dark hairs on Noora’s arms and bare legs. Her face was buried in her arms, hiding her tears. She sniffled.
Whistling gardeners kept pushing wheelbarrows past her, up and down the spiraled ramp, as they tended to vanilla orchids, cocoa beans, and chili fruits. Music and laughter and weed smoke drifted out from the artists’ living quarters in the core of the greenhouse tower. Their hammocks and tools and trinkets were partially hidden from view by the leafy sprouts twisting to take in the sun.
Noora had never felt so betrayed by the storyteller before. By any storyteller. Weren’t they supposed to be skilled in weaving together a narrative a person wanted to hear? Needed to know? Noora didn’t always understand the tales the storyteller told her, but she expected to enjoy them. Sometimes stories were like a seed planted, which she could only later make sense of once she experienced enough to complete the tale. It bloomed, then, like a memory recalled.
This one was a barb. A spiky burdock pod clinging to her sock.
The long saga of the boar’s slaughter … it didn’t make sense to her. It had felt too close, too overwhelming alongside the warmth of the animal trying to console her. What her families had to survive, what they’d had to break up and break through each generation. Those matted roots of fear and darkness.
It gave Noora a little maggot-wriggle shiver to think of it.
Noora lifted her head to look out the solar-glass window. There was her city below, wild as a meadow, adapted from the wreckage of climate disasters and continuing to grow. She could still see the places where asphalt had been eroded by floodwater; Main Stream had once been a highway that cut through the city back when an architect, committee board member, dictator, or combination of the lot had designed it to isolate some and favor others. Auntie Owen had told her cities had been drawn from an eye-of-god perspective by men who favored the aesthetics of neat grids and parallel lines for some reason.
Noora’s home hadn’t been designed, it grew. From up in the tower, she could see how The Tangle was the place where paths converged. Shaped by the footfalls of climate survivors with the same emergent navigation process that ants and slime mold use to build their cities.
Each generation, craftspeople cut stone and placed the shards to memorialize the well-trodden routes, and coaxed fungo to grow in the cracks between.
She couldn’t recognize the people from this angle, not neighbors nor neithers. They moved as silent as ants in their daily activities. She placed her hand up against the glass.
Noora could see the storyteller’s white dandelion-fluff head far below, and the boar beside her—
• • •
No, no this is wrong. Peeking over the child’s shoulder like this. Leeching off her emotions and using her youthful perspective to process something you ought to already know. I am ashamed that I’ve allowed you to ride her senses to carry you through the story, as if she were a beast of burden—an analogy she wouldn’t even understand.
I chose a position and perspective I assumed you’d find familiar. Relatable. Comfortable. Now I wonder if those expectations aren’t part of the worldview that brought your generation so close to ending the ever-generating world.
But that’s a conversation for a meal at one of the community taverns. Later, perhaps. If I’m successful in bringing you through the narrative; if we meet together in the end.
• • •
Come here. Closer, closer.
Come sit here beside me. Maybe you can detect the scent of cookfire on my clothes. The eucalyptus rub I use to keep mosquitoes disinterested.
Any less pleasant odors, I blame on the boar.
Sit, sit. Here. Press your cheek to mine. This is an intimate position, yes.
The afternoon sun burned through the cloud cover and I’ve stored its heat in my skin. This close, you can feel it.
Why does this perspective feel uncomfortable? Closer than riding the consciousness of a third. More intimate than first-person point of view, where the storyteller invites you to inhabit their skin. To see out through their eyes?
I want to show you something. And you have to see it through your eyes, not mine.
Look up.
No, not at the colorful kaleidoscope of community kites silently harvesting wind.
There, at the underside of the tree canopy. Look up at it. This is a perspective more instructive than an eagle’s-eye view looking down.
You see the tangle of branches. See how they cut precise patterns in the sky. Veins of blue-white peeking through the clusters of leaves, an improbable path of lightning delineating individual trees. Crown shyness.
The shapes are beautiful.
And familiar?
Notice how those slivers of sky mirror the negative space between the cobblestones in The Tangle.
That wasn’t planned.
Simply the result of the inherent organizing principles of nature.
So complicated we can barely perceive them as patterns.
Fractals, fluid dynamics. Chaotic beauty.
Stay here. Keep your cheek pressed to mine. Now close your eyes and face that late afternoon sun.
What do you see? The tangle of veins through your eyelids. A canopy of pinks and oranges inside of you.
Patterns repeat. And fold you back into the fabric.
The wetness mingling where our cheekbones meet.
Ready for that meal at the community tavern?
• • •
The interior of the tavern is the same pinkish-orange as closed eyelids turned to the sun. This trick of the light has been accomplished by the careful application of specially cultivated fungo in the decorative murals along the burrow walls. Though the shadowless bioluminescent light suspends the interior in a perpetual golden hour glow, the motions of the people aren’t frozen in amber. Children wield knives in the steam-hissing kitchens. Arriving guests cheek kiss the matriarch, delivering armfuls of today’s harvest for tomorrow’s meal, while eyeing appreciatively what friends had made today from yesterday’s bounty.
We can nestle in here at this overcrowded table. Scooch right in beside me.
The food weighing down the table gleams in the nectar-hued dining area. The basket of dinner rolls glazed with honey glows faintly in the fungo mural’s shine. Steam rises off the roasted potatoes, gives the illusion of a dancer with swirling veils.
Someone passes you a bowl of spiced and roasted walnuts. I spoon the tiny brains onto your plate. Bizarre vegetables are shared and served. Curly pea pods, pomegranate seeds, pink broccoli tufts, and glistening wedges of seasonal fruits. You spear what looks like a small, crispy lizard onto your fork.
Something is bugging you. You’re still not clear what horrified me so much about using a third person to show you around. If not Noora, why couldn’t you follow the life of an auntie? Or a medic while she trained a puppy to detect and diagnose illness? Or someone from a storm crew as they read the skies then leapt into action to reel in the blimp generators at the precise shift in air pressures? Or why not a technician isolating an enzyme to develop a new algae-based kite plastic? Or the crew of an airship following the moonlit migration of moths to wrangle decommissioned satellites? Or any one of the people in this tavern—whether gossiping in the kitchen or gathered at table?
You could’ve, I suppose. Though I hope that in the process of laying out the seeming variety of positions, you can see for yourself the obvious limits in all these supposed choices. Could the pinhole camera perspective of an individual organism discern the pattern of a tangled ecosystem? I had to make choices, never any easy ones, to get us past a polyphonic first person experience of our world.
It didn’t feel right to draw your attention to a single conversation when I wanted you to listen to the background murmur of tavern talk. The booms of laughter, the multilingual chatter. All the voices, all at once, sound like the static of stars off-gassing since the moment the story started.
You’re the only one who could tell me if any of those old techniques could immerse you in the story more deeply than my invitation to sit you here, beside me, watching the colors of the murals change. The shifting shades of dusk mimic the purpling sky outside.
• • •
The darkness shifts like stars, wafts like smoke. Cold night wind teases the hairs on your arms and breathes life into the percussion organs of insects. The ceaseless hushhh of the rapids replace the murmur of tavern voices. Just as loud, maybe not as comforting. Frogs call—not the melodic symphony of amphibians, a variety of croaks and trills—it’s the chorus of a single note, repetitive and loud. Less like an orchestra. More like an alarm call.
It’s still too dark to see, but even if you could, you wouldn’t recognize the place. We’re back outside in The Tangle.
I know I’ve been whipping you around. Abruptly repositioning you in time and space. I’d ask you to forgive me, but I never apologize.
Storytellers have our reasons, and I hoped you could trust me by now.
Ease your hand into mine and let your eyes adjust. It takes time for the full brilliance of night fungo to emerge.
The negative spaces between the stones glow, connecting the darkness in its shimmering spiderweb. This silvery light is an illusion … the random dispersal of multicolored spores between the cobblestone cracks combine to give the impression of a whitish light. Like pixels on a screen. It’s not a lot of light, but it is enough.
Look, can you see the faint outline of my hand against the rest of the darkness? Quit staring at my malformed pinky, I know it’s freakishly small. The important thing to notice is the contours of a storyteller’s hand just visible in the faded light of the web. If you look carefully, you can glimpse the hand of a storyteller in every story.
The relationship between the spider and its web is a lot like the one between a story and its teller. More than you might imagine. The web is built to interpret the vibrations of the spider’s environment. It’s the spider’s thoughts, outside its body. How is that any different from a story? A book? A collaborative textile stitched and passed down?
Storm clouds roll onward and starlight winks on above, and so do the reflective eyes of the night creatures. Raccoons, deer. That asshole fox who thinks we’re friends.
There. Can you detect the scent of that wildcat passing unseen in the darkness? There’s no mistaking the musk of a predator.
How do your cities smell? That intoxicating sweetness of burnt fossil fuels … The scent must’ve been alluring, you never wanted to stop. The human cheese smell of crowds, or construction pits … that whiff of something timeless in the gaping wounds unearthed. You had the tang of people pee in pedestrian tunnels, garbage ripening in the summer heat, or charred bodies in the wildfire wars. Oh, you don’t know that smell? You will, unfortunately. It will singe your nose hairs and turn your tummy. All smells are particulate … that means once you notice the stench, they’re already inside you.
The stink of that fox, the humus of active soil, even fresh cowpat before processing … These odors are preferable to the death smells that could’ve been avoided—probably still could be. I’m telling this story to show you the ways things could be different, so you can navigate sure-footed to safety. Perhaps with a destination in mind, you could recognize other trails to get you here. And maybe, you could bring more of your friends. To the meeting place of future ancestors, the tangle of lives, the web that catches and connects us.
But even if all you can do is stumble and grope in your dark, dark night—I hope you remember this. The feeling of your hand in mine and mine in yours, the darkness tingling each of our senses, alert to the unseen. Each day taking a tentative step into the future. Trust that many feet found their way here before you, alongside you, will continue to follow any path you reckon through the dark.
You probably don’t have to walk through fire to get here. Indeed, I recommend you take another route.
• • •
Come. It’s soon dawn. The musicians tune their instruments to call in the cows.
• • •