Past-Part Fills Post 1 -- CLOSED
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the orphan game
the ragged winter game
that says, I am alone
Coming to Canada
There is a boy who has not forgotten, even if he had not understood at the time of remembering. It is not in a child’s nature to understand why, but to ask why. If there is no one around to answer, a child will know what happened, but not why.
There is a boy who remembers all, and above all else he remembers a time he did not feel loneliness because he did not understand what it meant to be alone.
He watches the first of the strange creatures, so like him and yet not like him, enter his lands. They are confused, because they recognised nothing of home in his lands. They are not scared because of the strange hide they carry and speak to as if it were alive. But it is not, so the boy stays away from these strange people who do not like his lands and talk to dead things. They do not cry when that shaman woman dies, and the boy does not cry when they disappear, their culture and silent god swallowed whole by the people who accepted him. He sleeps curled around the shaman woman’s severed head, waiting for the flaming rock of the heavens to stop remaking his lands anew.
He first feels loneliness when people who look like him but do not care for him take from him a man who does not look like him but does care for him. The people who look like him do not see him watching, eyes turned towards their hearts as they beat as one. They give their hearts names like Odin and Tyr, and think of them as beings separate from themselves. The boy does not understand why they say they believe in separate hearts that need other hearts to beat for it.
The boy knows what dead things are, but now he understands what death is, when the man who cared for him is taken from him and eventually stops moving. Death is the rigidness of flesh, the decay of the familiar, and the soft sound of wings like the ravens’ who eat his eyes but unlike the raven who gave him one of many suns. The boy cries for a man whose neck is broken for men who have forgotten that it is their hearts beating as one. He does not cry when the men who cared for the man who cared for him destroy the men who do not care for him. He does not cry when the sun-bearing raven drives those abandoned hearts from his lands.
The boy chokes on ash when a mountain in his North explodes and takes from him many people who care for him. He cries into the cold, soft chest of a man who calls himself Winter. He whispers into the boy’s ear that he will come when the boy needs him if he will make a deal with the man. He doesn’t understand what the man means, but he accepts the chain of iron around his neck if it means the man of snow and ice and wind will never leave him. He does not regret the chain of Winter, unlike others who are bound to the one they call General and he calls Father. It gave him people who in turn gave him a sun, a moon, and a constant companion. They call him Nanuq, and he calls his constant companion a friend.
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