From the sky it’s easy to drop down directly onto the symbol as the full moon lights up the large polished stone like a landing pad. As I land I feel a whoosh of power surging up and through me, imbuing me with strength and who knows what else.
I take the stone out of my pocket and compare it to the stone below me. The designs are exact and the two stones hum in concert with one another as if they wish to be joined. But there’s no magic treasure map hidey-hole in which to place the stone, turn it counter clockwise, and reveal all the secrets of the universe or anything. I want there to be, but there just isn’t. I search for the better part of an hour before I give up realizing there’s no easy answer, like in the movies.
I lie down on the stone, depressed and worried. I really thought this was the answer. I feel drained and hopeless, and within minutes I can feel myself sprawled across the symbol, as if I’ve never slept before, my stone clutched in my hand.
She’s standing before me and at first she looks as solid as the stone beneath me, not feathery and soft like she always is in my dreams. But as she moves I see her split into more women, she splits and splits and splits, it seems like countless times, until I am surrounded by flickering, half-translucent Braverman women. All strong shoulders and red hair. They’re all dressed differently, marking different time periods and they all have something about them that defines them uniquely. Making them different than me, different than my mother, yet the same too. I try to absorb them all, to see and learn everything, but before I can even begin to count them or understand their meanings they shuffle back behind my mother’s image like a deck of cards, like a thousand thinly sliced paper dolls all propping each other up. With the women behind her, my mother’s image becomes more solid, more opaque again, and she speaks to me as clearly as if she had never stopped. Her voice is dark and smooth, like tinted glass, and it slides over me, like love.
“We have no answers for you,” she says, her eyes piercing right into me, responding to a question I haven’t bothered to think up, let alone ask.
“I, I didn’t ask anything,” I say.
“We all had the same questions once. The questions are always the same,” she says, emotionless, as if she is not my mother, but a hybrid of all the Bravermans that ever were. She doesn’t acknowledge that I have spoken. “You have come to us and we cannot help you, there is no help. We are your mother, we are you, but we cannot help you from where we are. What you do, you must do alone,” they say.
“What must I do?” I ask, confused by the soliloquy. It’s as if they are talking to something that is not there, as if they are an ancient tape being played on a loop.
“It is geis to help. Prohibited. It is beyond our power, it is beyond our desire. You must make things right,” they continue, without acknowledging me. I sit still hoping there is something useful on this tape from beyond. “You cannot be killed; she cannot be killed. It’s the way things are. It cannot be undone. It cannot be unlinked. In over a thousand years it has never been undone. You must find a way to keep things as they are supposed to be. She can never die; you can never die. We can never die. It’s the way for all time. It cannot be unlinked without desire.”
“But I totally have desire,” I mutter to myself, barely acknowledging the seemingly useless tape women now. As I say it, my mother pulls from them, toward me, her body arching to me as they struggle to drag her back into them. She looks even more like my mother than before, more real and human, and I can see she is concentrating very hard to make me see her this way, to separate herself from the deck of ancestors.
“You must not do this, Bonnie. You must promise me you will not do this. It’s dangerous. It will have consequences. It will change everything, more than just you and Lola - everything.” She is snapped back from me and into the fold.
As they shuffle themselves, I see something in the background, very deep, behind the last of the paper-women. A field filled with giant stones. The image flickers like an old timey film, and a woman, a huge, powerful woman, tattooed nearly from head to toe is wearing the stone as a necklace and raising her hands up to the moon, almost as if she’s making a request. A large group of women and girls surround her, all different shapes and sizes. I can’t see any of their faces, as they are bowed in supplication, or trained on the woman and the bright moon. One woman with bright red hair kneels at the center of the circle. There’s a brilliant, pulsating light and when it clears the girl in the circle has fallen and so has another girl, one with pale blonde hair, whose body is now slumped half-way in and half-way out of the circle. The giant tattooed woman has vanished. But as I lean forward to see more, to understand what I’m seeing, the paper women shuffle in front of the scene.