My sister, aptly blogging at @QuilledSister, writes short stories on her blog. Read her stories! She is a good fiction writer. I am not. But sometimes I get inspired to write a response. This is one of them.
Original Story
Mislaid
My Response
It was always the same. A trudge down a clean, brightly-lit path, a longing gaze up at the dead thing as if it could somehow hold the warmth that the living thing once had.
People are weird that way, I’ve noticed. They have all these memories of something alive—a father, a sister, a lover, a dog—and yet instead of sifting the memories to find the love they believe has left, they look at dead things instead: drawings, statues, tapestries, as if somehow the pressed and dried trees or rocks or wool marked with crushed flowers and snails have some sort of meaning that their own spirits don’t.
At least this one can tell the difference. I watch them inspect a marble face that isn’t right and dim stony eyes that never held light, clearly comparing the vibrance of memory to the icon of legacy.
Should I tell them? They’ve believed so long they probably wouldn’t understand; that’s another thing I’ve learned about people. They get an idea in their heads, and then they make choices based on that idea, and then they make choices based on those choices, and soon it’s impossible for the idea to have been wrong. They call it “belief,” which I suppose is as good a name as any.
But I shall tell you, since this one seems lost in thought staring at that door again.
There was never a chosen human. Thousands of years of “prophecy” of a Chosen One from a people that believed they were just barely younger than the dust of the ground. There’s that belief again; would it matter if they had all been born just as the latest war was starting? Was it important that they be old?
(They are not old. I am old, although there are many who would laugh at my youth. But this isn’t about me.)
There is a land, they say, where the people climb up mountains for fun. Just to do it. And in this land is a particular mountain that is the tallest. And as if there is more to see at the top of the tallest mountain than there is in a cup of hot tea, these people climb it.
It turns out they’re quite bad at it. Their lungs are not adapted to the altitude, and their fur is too thin and light for the cold, and their legs are really meant for distance running, not mountain climbing. For one thing, their knees go the wrong way.
But there are some other people who live near the mountain, whose lungs and hair are adapted for the mountain (although their knees still go the wrong way). When they climb the mountain, these two groups always go together: the adventure-seekers and the locals.
When they get to the top, who has climbed the mountain?
The one who saw it as a triumph to be achieved? Or the companion who made it possible to accomplish? The latter would never have left their home without the former; the former would never have reached the top alive alone.
Now that I’ve told you this fable, and you are to them as I to you, what prophecy would you write of these opposites who go up in the cold? Light and dark, thin of hair and rich of mane, backward of knee and—seriously, if you want to climb a mountain, look at a goat. Which way do their legs bend?
Anyway, I wrote that prophecy, and I said there would be a Chosen One. And there was. But who is to say which was which? The one who is dead or the one who mourns the dead thing by staring at a rock?
Their lives cannot be pulled apart any more than the threads of the tapestries depicting them could be unwoven and the image still stand. Their prophecies are not just intertwined, they are the same.
But for some reason, this allegedly wise old culture decided in the unremembered past that there can be only one, and they believed it so hard that they made it come true.
Well, sort of. One is remembered, and one remembers.
Humans are weird that way.
