SWIMMING IN THE GHOST RIVER: X

by A. A. Attanasio

Ten

Sunstone

White Owl Goddess surges higher into the sky, beyond blue and indigo, into the garden of galaxies. 

Is this her killing field? Your whole body lights up with fear!

But Snow Owl is a goddess. She recognizes you. Like the engendering spirits who untangled you from the Spirit Fox’s trance, she knows you are not food. You are a love-gift of the Dream.

She shapeshifts. Slowly. Into the disheveled glory of night. And your energy waves become the atomic particles of your body standing on the gleaming shore of the Ghost River. 

Nearby, exiled animal souls flurry and migrate on the broad embankment, fragile as fog and as beginningless and dense.

You throw your gaze to the far shore, seeking the Sunstone. 

Its unearthly luster in the night spills a path on the river. For a dizzying moment, you peer at this luminous road, surprised at the hard gloss of ice. 

You laugh! 

Everything that delayed you – nearly drowning, getting lost in the mountains, and then tricked by the Spirit Fox – everything that stymied you has actually advanced you to this dicey chance to cross the river without a boat!

You walk onto the Ghost River. Frost crunches underfoot. Wide panes of frozen water crack in starburst footsteps. Quickly, you tiptoe over the buckling ice. 


A giant step, a gutsy jeté, lands you on the far shore!

The Sunstone squats atop a gravel knoll. It's small as an ingot and almost invisible in its radiance, smudged to a shadow. You lift it easily. 

Staring ahead through the Sunstone’s bright aura, you peer across the Ghost River. You catch sight of the Ghost Deer. Her phantom body dazzles into many overlapping spectral deer, a Cubist painting, a kaleidoscope. 

What you observe is the Many Worlds. They appear like prism planes inside a diamond, chromatic reflections of all the possible histories in your given life and all your possible lives. The Sunstone combs them with its rays.  

Among the prismatic swirl of possibilities, you spot where the ice gives way and you vanish in a slurp of black gelid water. And there, spangled facets of time untangle the slippery paths that cross the river safely. 

Follow them. Bring the Sunstone to the exiled souls of animals slain without consecration. Already you feel the Sunstone revealing its truth: The light you carry once burned deep in the stars. Now, that light is you.

~the end~

(or is it?)

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