The Archaeology of Spilled Marbles
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
The brass locket had arrived in a padded envelope with no return address. Inside, two photographs—one of a woman who looked exactly like my mother at twenty, except I'd never seen this photograph before, and one of a man whose face was scratched out so thoroughly the metal beneath showed through. When I held it to the light at precisely 3:17 pm (the time my mother always made tea), the scratched face revealed itself for just a moment—it was my grandfather, but younger than any photo we had, and he was crying. My mother examined it for a year, the circle of kitchen light playing off the backs of both bracelets.
I sat with her. She cupped her hands over mine over the locket. Over humid tea my mother told the story of the time she met God in the bowl of a rusty spoon, how he tasted of rye and salt and sang about a need so big, so deep, it took creation to answer.
I stopped listening. I no longer believed in God. My mother closed the locket. I waited, hoping she'd begin again. I poured her more tea.
I didn't dare tell her how I'd dreamt of my grandfather as a young man crying to the gods, a locket in one hand and an old spoon in the other. I'd tried to dream myself inside the locket, nested with lost memory. But I could not. Instead, the dream made me listen harder to the space between myself and my mother.
The locket clenched between my mother's hands, she said, then said again: I can no longer speak of things that matter. She closed her eyes, then pressed the locket against my forehead to cool the fever—and I knew my daughter given up for adoption now lived with my mother and my daughter held a locket between her hands. And I did not know if it was all a dream, nor which dream was mine and which hers. I wanted to warn her—I'd seen my daughter drown, holding the locket against her cheek.
Just keep repeating the stories, I whispered $o that my daughter would hear. Just keep repeating the stories of all us, the ones holding open our throats to drink from each other before sinking.
Sleep, child, sleep. And we will both inquire into each other’s dreams.
Even if we lose our grasp and spill ourselves back to the gods, marbles in the hands of children, we will find each other, we will listen to each other’s whispered memories, we will hold each other secure. I dreamt you, and you dreamt me, and we hold hands.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title