Chicken Little OR Donkey Consciousness
I'm saving the first chapter for last but sharing a scene from the beginning.
In the rosy hour before the sun rises Dañyaa grabs her bow and arrows. She stalks a lone javelina. Mortally wounds it with a clean shot. She prays over it then takes the time to remove its scent glands, both fore and aft, before dragging it back to Cedar Rail. She hoists it in a tree, someone else can skin it.
Danny’s hair grows fast. She cuts it short with a knife and wears it under a trucker cap. She throws shells, bones and stones, to divine messages over the airwaves, channeling for entertainment while listening for instructions, for survival. Later she will say, “Urgency can be found in the moment you begin, for something has been decided and put into action.”
Jethro purrs when he smokes refer and calls it asthma. Otherwise he’s pale in the way children of famous parents lack color, not just melanin, but also crucial amounts of dopamine, motivation or ambition. But he's good with electricity, not just electricity, he’s good with the entire electro-magnetic spectrum. Radio waves are his favorite. That he loves Dañyaa is not the point. She has work to do. She is the sorcerer for the little tribe-let on the outskirts of nowhere.
The interior of the trailer seems larger than its exterior. Outside the News-seekers’ donkeys were huddling together facing the pinyon pine. One was apart from the others, looking sad and lonely. I should know better than to ascribe human emotions to these creatures. They have donkey consciousness. DañXiyaa had once asked Jethro which ones were sterile, donkeys or mules.
Mules, he said, were the offspring of two species, a male donkey and a female horse. Mules with their odd number of chromosomes can’t reproduce, but they’re intelligent and rarely ill. They’re stronger than horses and better equipped to cope with the current predicament: impolite weather, and parched pavement buckling under droplets falling in restless torrents, forth and back towards the thunder.
A flock of pigeons stirred close enough Danny could hear their wings. Not everything has to be explained.
Jethro entered the tear-drop trailer, saying, “You’re here,” like he hadn’t expected to find her.
“It’s show time.”
Jethro pushed his hand through his hair. “The top of the trailer is pocked with hail marks and the wind bent back the cafe roof at the southeast corner.” Against his long white fingers his wavy locks were dark as Snow White's.
“The chickens never stop cockle doodling. They sing, hey hey, the sky is falling.”
"What's up with you?" He shook his head and turned on the make shift mic. “Transmitting live, to all you survivors out their in the vast open wasteland. It’s time for the Oracle Hour.” He pushed the mic in front of Dañyaa.
She proclaimed, “Hello tomorrow,” her way of starting the show. Somedays she said hello to today or to yesterday, even to last week or next year, to be fixed in time rather than place. “You are here now.” Cedar Rail’s sorcerer tossed a handful of objects across the table. Her collection of bone and porcelain objects shaped by her own hands and sanded to textures acceptable to her fingers resembled tattooed fossils. The triangular coccyxes and sacra, rubbed smooth and coated with clay had symbols scratched into their surfaces. One skittered over the edge.
Jethro picked up the rounded cube from the floor and placed it on the table.
Without missing a beat Dañyaa said, “Someone on the edge is returning, an unexpected turn of circumstances. That’s when adventure happens.”
Only Dell was tuned into the Oracle Hour, listening on a crank radio as he patrolled the outskirts of the compound. He was hoping Danny meant Zedowie when she said, someone on the edge is returning. Her odd voice floated out of the speaker. In places like this, nothing rots, the air is too dry, but when it rains… in places like this. Ancient gullies expose fragments of prehistoric species, and everything you planted in the dry river bed gets washed away.
“Shit!” Dell thinking about his cannabis plants sprinted towards the river bed.