The Wakening

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. They painted the night in soft, gooey hues and turned time into something taffy-like—malleable and sticky. Most of us hardly noticed its presence. It was an embarrassing inconvenience like monthly bleeding or doctor’s visits to be covered up and dealt with out of the public eye.

I usually slept through the wakening. Everyone I knew did too, slept through it or shut their drapes against the light and shook in the awareness that it was going on while they lay safe and protected in their steel towers. I don’t know what pulled me from my bed that night. Maybe I had not quite closed my blinds fully, or else I took my pill just a fraction too early so that that drowsy lullaby of the drug wore off before the wakening ended. Perhaps I had developed a tolerance. People spoke of that sometimes. When an entirely normal son or daughter or neighbor slipped off into the haze.

Whatever the reason, I pulled myself from my bed and rose, sheets tangling about my legs and then falling to pool, slick and silver, onto the cool tile. I knew that I should not go to the window, that if I were to rise during the wakening, I should find the quietest, darkest place in my apartment and wait for morning. But I did not. I threw aside the curtains and looked out over the cityscape, red and pink and purple with the brilliance of the sky. In that light, everything was changed, the small, manicured trees lining streets and parks turned wild, their roots thrumming even beneath the miles of concrete below them. I saw their branches quiver, saw the shadows they threw up the sides of glass skyscrapers in the strange half-light of dreaming, and I felt my feet solidly against the ground beneath me. Connected. Whole. I felt that if I could only touch my soles to the same earth as those trees, I could sing.

So, I went. My mother’s voice went with me. She’d told me of the wakening and its dangers when I first menstruated—maybe eleven or twelve. I needed to be a lady, and she spoke of it in the same way she spoke of other things ladies must not do. Like shaving above the knee or wearing open-toed shoes after Labor Day. Worse even. My mother ranked going out into the wakening with a woman appearing naked in public or showing her emotions in the workplace. This was a man’s world, after all. Surviving meant becoming men in some ways and, at the very least, following their societal rules.

She did not speak of how we all hear the call. Women and men and those who see themselves as neither.

I left my apartment building in my pajamas, my feet bare against the sidewalk beneath me. They turned away from the paths of my everyday life, away from the subway and the office and the same chain cafe where I bought my coffee every morning. When they found the dirt beneath those trees, I did sing just as loud as my untried voice could, more noise than I had ever made and it felt like joy, wild and eager. I didn’t question it. I just let it pour from my throat until I reached the park and its thicket of tangled woods, parting now to let me pass.

There, the sound died from my lips because others stood in that empty, root-threaded space. Nine or ten women ranging in age from teenagers to elders. In the sudden presence of other people, my old fears returned. I couldn’t sing here! They’d hear me. They’d think I was too loud or too out of tune or too untalented, and it would hurt like rejection. I was afraid of that pain, so it was safer to be small and quiet.

The others were quiet too, all but a single old woman, heavy around the waist and with thin, delicate skin marred by liver spots. She met our eyes without embarrassment, staring past that jellied surface and into something deeper. Then, the woman opened her mouth and screamed. She leaned forward with the force of it, her knees bent, and her mouth spread wide until the scream resolved itself into words. “I will not be silent!”

It rang for a moment beneath those lavender clouds, beneath the pink moon and her egg-yolk halo, and I laughed. It burbled out of me like bubbles blown on a hot summer afternoon, like cherry spitting and the smell of spring-sharp pine. I laughed because I would not be silent either, and my whole body sang with that freedom. My voice joined the first woman’s, and our bodies followed. We all danced together in the blush, their faces as raw as mine, blinking past in dazzling flashes.

I found within myself an ocean of anger scrabbling at my body for purchase and squatted to meet the edge. It was in me, in letting myself be used. It was in my grandmother’s violent death at her own hands, in my little sister locked in a room with a cruel boy she did not want. The howl in my belly sounded like a fighting cat, like the crack of tearing thunder. It spewed out of me like vomit or lava, hot and stinking from beneath my belly. Rising from the floor of me.

“I will not be small!” it said— I said. “I will not be used!”

Ragged breaths tore my throat, and I quivered, my body low and centered above the earth. My fists met the loam and tore into it. Clawing. Spit flying from my mouth. I looked up and into the eyes of the other women, and they were in that rage with me. They were me, and I was them, and I did not have to leave that fury to meet them. “I didn’t know! I would have done anything for you! How could I have known?”

I was on my knees, palms pressed into the dirt, my elbows weakening in little trembling fits. An ant crawled lazily over the tip of my pointer finger, and I could feel every minuscule twitch of its hair-like legs. My body convulsed, my hips contorting, my belly wheezing with sobs. Sobs like hammer blows, like gasping for breath. Drowning. I pushed them out. I pressed the hurt from my fingers and toes and shook it from the roots of my hair. And when I was done, I fell, one shoulder hitting the earth, and a deep, rich plume of dirt smells mushrooming around me.

I lay still for a time, just breathing. The darkness was gone, and in its place, I whispered the things I desired. Peace. Strength. A voice to speak when I needed to. I held myself beneath a sky like valentines and listened to the thrumming heartbeat of the world while my sisters in that timeless clearing washed with the scent of sweat and pine needles.

They came to me and to each other, asking for a hug or touch and I let them, warmth spreading out through my limbs. They had witnessed my darkness and I theirs and I loved them for it. I met their eyes and saw their power and wept. They were all so full.

I didn’t want to say goodbye. We sat beneath purple clouds dancing in a blushing sky and wore crowns of stone, our backs draped in the thin gossamer of spider silk capes until the sun came and burned the sky gold. I held the women there, held them as they held my eyes and saw into the heart of me, but they slipped away. And soon the clearing was nothing more than a tangle of ill-shapen trees, a little trash-choked, in a park near the city center.

My belly was so full of the air in that clearing that I hummed with it, and that buoyancy carried me floating through the streets, staying even as cars rumbled past in their whining voices and the clamor city life spun back into its familiar fever pitch. I relished the smells and tastes of it. Pastry dough and gasoline and fresh cut flowers and filth. If they had been there before, I hadn’t truly noticed them. Stranger still, others moved out of my way. Me in my stained shirt and pajama shorts, walking barefoot through them like a queen.

It still makes me laugh, that first taste of purple clouds, the earth shaking beneath my toes. It changed everything. Oh, I walked the same path. Apartment, cafe, subway, office, subway, apartment. But my mere presence there changed it and those around me. Perhaps my presence always had, and I only believed that I was small.

No longer.