The men hang together inside the cave, poised like panthers in the shadows. They take turns, the cycle repeating over and over. I used to feel connected to them, as if we were all one, but now I am afraid of them. The mind-numbing clacking ricochets off the walls. Clack. Clack. Clack. When one grows tired, my hope for peace blooms, but then another one takes his place and the bloom withers and dies again. I can’t rest. I busy my hands to keep myself from listening.
It helps when we go afield to forage, far away from the noise, but today the fishing nets are piled outside the cave’s mouth, their odor rising, hastening the women to work. At least we remember that with the sun come the flies. We skin, filet, dry the meat on the rocks. The rhythmic slaps of flesh on stone clash with the clacking inside the cave, and it feels like the world has lost its balance. The great heart that beats through everything is no longer steady.
From the hill, I can see the older women in the valley, collecting locusts from the dry bushes. I watch as the wind sweeps into the basin and lifts my mother’s hair as she takes a shell from her basket and bites it, her gaze resting on the horizon, where the sun shimmers on the lake. She is in no hurry; the summer has been good for tubers and fruit, and the dried fish should last through the winter. I am proud of our stores in the cave, a vibrant mountain of color honoring our hard work. I hate that the men sit with their backs to it, ignoring what we have accomplished. Day and night, they hunch in a circle around their rocks, baring their teeth with frustration.
And this incessant clacking. It makes me notice the flies more, the buzz of the sun beating down and drying my flesh, too. This maddening heat has likely spurred the men’s obsessive behavior. It has weakened their discipline. They are maniacal, focused only on one object, special because it is new.
I wish they would give up. In the meantime, big game wanders past our camp unhunted, and predators have been spotted in the valley. My sisters and I bring the men food and leave them to their experiments, but our tribe cannot go without their attention much longer.
It started at night. We stood here, on this ridge outside the cave, looking out onto the great lake and its rocky island in the middle. We watched as lightning licked out of the sky and struck the surface. The power was so strong that it surged, drawing a shaky silver line across the earth. The line touched the dead grass and receded, and in its wake rose a hungry spirit, a gas that shone in the darkness, contained of its own light. It was the same orange as the sunset over the savannah, a color that told us it was hot.
The thing climbed the trees and devoured them, rendering them into husks of black dust. We watched in horror as the spirit kept eating until a storm finally broke and the rain soothed the spirit. It lost its color and billowed into towering, gray clouds. Clouds like these had been reported in the distance before, usually in the hottest summer months, but none of us had ever seen them so close. In the morning, the island was denuded of all its growth, but the spirit’s workings had thankfully disappeared. I was glad; whatever had danced on the coast that night was wild, insatiable, and best kept far away from us.
But the men didn’t agree. Overnight, they seemed to have transformed, just like the trees. They were transfixed by what they’d seen. They too became insatiable and could talk of nothing else. They argued in loud postures about how to explain it. They used sumac powder to draw it on the cave walls. They retold the story for the children, moving their fingers like wind in the grass to mimic its motion.
Together, the younger men decided to swim to the island; at great risk, I thought, as the water is opaque with salt, and crocodiles cannot be seen. But they went, racing each other to the shore. They investigated the remains of the tree and brought back pieces of the rock that had taken the silver light. They swore that when they had thrown it, they had seen it spark again. They banged the rocks together to prove it to us, but their brows grew heavy when they could not recreate what they had seen. Since then, they have kept on banging, desperate to see it again. Even the old men and little boys have become infected, and their competitive, hunter spirits have kept them in the cave, away from the wind and the daily work, striking the rocks together, panting to be the first to find the power again.
I comforted myself that they couldn’t go on forever, but now as I watch, a loud smack shimmers glitter down from their hands. They all stand up, their mouths open, as the light falls onto dead brush and catches hold, eats the tips, and curls the edges, changes from white to yellow to orange. They are hooting with pleasure, but there is fear in them, too, an urgency to please this elusive god, to make it stay. A young man pushes in more grass, which the thing takes hungrily. It grows, and a healthy breath roars in the cave.
The men begin to screech and jump in a circle. The women hear their celebration and run up the ridge to see. The thing’s light casts new shadows on the men’s faces. They’ve become strange, unfamiliar. They keep feeding it, whatever they can spare: a grass bag, a broken spear, the rocks they were clacking. It has grown to the size of a small animal when my mate reaches in as if to stroke its back. He brings his arm back with a yelp, the fur from his knuckle to his elbow gone, his skin red hot and cracked. They have forgotten this is a dangerous power, a killing thing. I get a sour taste in my mouth to see my mate’s injury does not deter the others. A few boys reach into our food stores and heave fans of leaves into the spirit’s gulping maw. Their eyes widen with delight as the leaves slowly vanish.
I salve my mate’s arm. I do not want this thing living in the cave with us. I can already feel its otherworldly heat warning at my back. I think of what it will do to our food stores, how it would steal their colors, turn them into a melted, dead thing. How it could change an animal, how the body could turn into something unnatural, how the heat could bubble the creature’s insides even before it dies. And what will happen to the men when they finally harness it? Will they eat these desiccated fruits, this perverse meat? What unearthly power will it give them; how much bigger would they grow, how much taller? How much unstoppable energy and strength will they have then? Will they use it to hurt each other?
I wish they had never seen it. What is this sinister thing the men are so intent on becoming?