Fauna
by Kirin Khan
Samira Abbassy, Bound By her Fate / As She swallows Their Fate, two panels, 24 x 18 inches each, oil on panel, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
Fauna
KIRIN KHAN / NOV 2020 / ISSUE 3
Three days before the final ceremony, Husay walked barefoot in the evergreen dark. Surrounded by her elders, with their flaking black trunks and branches clawing strands from her six black braids, she tried to pass through as incorporeal as the low clouds curled away from her body with each step forward, only to close up behind her, erasing her path. She needed to find the right place. The village depended on it.
*
A long time ago, a tribe of Pakhtuns traveling just north of Usho forest in late summer were surprised by a peculiar snowsquall. The temperature dropped overnight, and they awoke to the beautiful greenery of the previous day, now blanketed in snow, the sky white, the narrow paths blotted out. They could not traverse their usual route. There was a reason the tribes avoided travel in the winter. Trapped in the wooded saddles of mountains, they hunted, fortunate that the animals were just as confused by the freak storm and had not migrated.
*
Her mothers and fathers began preparing her for this day as soon as winter began to lift. They gave her the best of their food, scarce as it was. Her mothers taught her when to hide, how to still her breath so it would not cloud in the brisk air and reveal her, and how to fight with her small knife against the snow leopard, if she must. Every week, her fathers washed and braided her hair with gentle hands made rough by their daily work. But every day, she struggled to quiet the leaden feeling in her body, the voice inside her that told her to leave. Husay said nothing when, three days before the ceremony, one of her mothers, Naghma Mummy, with her hazel eyes and soft line of hair connecting her brows, told her it was time.
*
The snow did not melt, weeks passed. There was no way for them to signal to others where they were. The few brave men who tried disappeared—if they somehow found their way out, they certainly could not find their way back. The tribe reinforced their temporary shelters.
The snow did not melt, months passed. The summer and autumn skipped over the clan, until true dead winter locked them in. Their camp turned into a small village.
*
Now far beyond the land she knew, Husay saw that she didn’t have much time—the sky was beginning to bruise and the air cooled with her every breath. The forest shut like a trap once the last flashes of sun drained from the sky. She would not be able to find her way back. She had to find it today, and soon.
She whispered a prayer to her elders, their eye-hollows filled with yellow mushrooms, their mouths frozen in mid-howl, the grain of their wrinkles solidified in bark. The tree ferns rustled.
*
The snow melted, winter passed. But the forest around them had shifted, encroached upon them incrementally under the snow. The paths, already narrow, were now overgrown. Even the old landmarks disappeared. The familiar stars were scattered incomprehensibly into the night sky.
*
Between sparse pine branches, enormous, ash gray corkscrew horns cut an angle across the vertical pines. Husay froze. His shoulders near level with hers, his horns easily as tall as she, the markhor stepped out of the brush, massive and silent. His winter coat was already full and thick, black and brown striations in his long mane camouflaged against the spruce and fir, against shadow and flecks of light. The markhor moved in power, straight towards her in a slow, measured pace.
Her heart whispered leave, but Husay did not dare move.
The markhor stopped at the tree next to her and rose to his hind legs, his forelegs on the trunk. She felt her own smallness, her hairlessness against the waves of fur. His scent overwhelmed her. His broad flat spiraled horns rustled the branches as he stripped bark and chewed.
He crashed down, looked her in the eyes, huffed, and thundered away, into the dense thicket where he would find higher ground.
She ran her fingertip over scratches and smooth spots on the trunk where bark used to be. This one, then. Water that smelled green and sharp sprayed her skin. Horripilation in the cold, the wet, the lush shade. She stepped closer, put her face against the trunk, and inhaled.
Deodar cedar. God wood.
Deodar made sense, the way its oil clung to her skin, medicinal, an insect repellant, a fungus killer, with wood strong but too brittle for fine carving, wood that splintered, uncompromising. Like family.
She tied a red ribbon from her braid to a low hanging branch. As the sun fell beneath the tree line, Husay followed the broken twigs, branches, and disturbed earth left by the markhor until she could hear the drumming of her mothers in the village. She wasn’t far, then.
*
One morning, not quite one year after the blizzard, a young woman went into the forest to gather firewood, and maybe, with luck, some berries and edible roots. She did not return. By late afternoon, a group of men went in search of her, but they returned quickly, empty-handed, before dusk. Once night fell, they could see no further than their hands, even with torches.
*
As she entered the square, the mothers rushed to surround her, warming her with their body heat. She tried to imagine being a mother, having her life and children’s lives depend on a mere girl. Rather than feeling sorry, she felt a longing for what she would never know, a sprig of anger that so much depended on her. The drums hammered in her bones, and her heart flashed against her chest, an urgent alarm.
Now that her tree was chosen, the villagers softened around her. The muscles around their eyes slackened and their smiles came easy. Even the children seemed lighter. And still her heart whispered leave.
*
That year, as winter descended, the snow did not. The tribe watched as the peaks around them whitened, but their village remained untouched. The trees seemed to grow taller around them, and others traveling through the mountains passed them by unnoticed. The tribe was safe and content.
Except for Sohrab, who could not grieve until he knew what happened to his sister. Every day, he searched a little further in the woods. On a day when he no longer recognized his surroundings, when the village was far from sight, he found a scrap of a woman’s embroidered dress. He kept searching. Through the trees, he noticed something sparkling in the twilight. He ran towards it.
*
When the day came, Husay’s clan woke her early in the morning. Her fathers packed a small purse with dried fruit and nuts. If she succeeded, she would find food well before she ran out. Her little sisters heated water for a bath as she ate an egg and soft, wild rice. The youngest, Mina, ran up to her with mischief in her eyes. Husay grabbed her arm and Mina shrieked and squirmed and laughed, and the mothers shouted at them to behave, without raising their heads. Husay mushed together two fingers of rice and some bits of egg and fed her the bite. Mina licked Husay’s finger, and Husay was reminded of the importance of her duty by the slight, hungry scrape of Mina’s teeth.
*
In the middle of a clearing, he came to a tree unlike any he’d seen before. It twisted and curved as though shaped by the weather, but no other tree was curved just so. A hollow in the trunk turned upward to the sky like a mouth, open in scream.
*
As she dressed for the last time, her fathers put on their sadars and stood outside her home, singing. Husay stepped outside into the milky light and saw them standing in front of her, with long sprays of forsythia gathered in their robes. They wove switches covered entirely in blossoms into a crown for her, a nest among the curls, her hair wild and loose for this day. Hundreds of golden blossoms, butter-coated flowers caught the breeze, floated kisses through the air. As mothers joined the circle and sang and drummed, fathers danced an Attan and used floral branches in place of swords.
Dread beat into her flower crown. Did the petals tremble too?
*
Hanging on a branch, he saw it glinting—his sister’s necklace, silver with blue lapis stones set in a star pattern. Small mirrors from her dress were scattered about the ground. They winked at him like the eyes of a spirit much older than he, older than the trees, than the mountains themselves.
*
The villagers walked behind her, a wall keeping her from turning back. Leave. Her pace slowed and the trees magnified in front of her. Every step from the village was a step away from daylight, the shadows of Deodar branches stretched drooping claws towards her. First the grass shifted from fields of soft chartreuse to a courser myrtle green, then ferns started to appear in clusters. Moss and lichen signaled entrance to tropical montane.
The sun never warmed the day. It faded at the border of the woods.
*
Night erased the break between earth and sky. Sohrab could almost see creatures prowling upside down in confusion, and confusion was ripe for jinn to unravel from the treetops and drag their backward legs through the dirt to hunt him. He could not find his way home, and he moved slowly, as though unseen bodies weighed him down.
*
The tribe stopped walking but they kept singing, to make her brave while her coward’s prey heart urged her to run. Only her clan moved with her towards her fate as the gloom overtook them.
She yanked her arm from her favorite father, Rokhan Baba. He smiled at her under his red beard. His expression hardened as her blank white fear revealed itself in her face. He adjusted his grasp and did not look at her again.
As they walked, Husay felt herself become sharper, her vellus hair felt the moisture in the air as it condensed on leaves and drizzled down trunks. She felt clouds crawl close to the earth and swirl like the Swat river. Viridian ferns, black against gray fog, seemed to wave only at her. In the fecund forest, Husay saw how the shadows held all possibilities.
She wrenched free and bounded into the shadows, crashing through branches and leaving her clan far behind.
*
Back in the village, as evening turned to night, the tribe grew worried. The men lit fires around the village, hoping Sohrab could see the light. The women gathered in a circle and sang and drummed. They beat their chests, they beat hand drums made from skins stretched taut. They drummed until their whole bodies ached, they sang until their lungs burned and their throats tightened.
*
When she could no longer hear singing, shouting, or footfall behind her, Husay slowed to a walk. Rustling leaves whispered. Her pupils dilated to take in what scant light glanced off stones. Her hands out in front of her, she would feel her way out, surely. The bones of a mouse caught a scrap of moonlight and she saw the dead scurry.
*
Hungry spirits seemed to scatter as the song and drumming reached fingers through the trees and guided him home. As Sohrab came closer, the warm orange light cut between black trees, and only as he felt the light fill them with hope did he realize it had slipped from him, that he would have succumbed to the gravity of the forest.
*
A cedar spiked through fog, and she stopped just before walking into it. Its musk permeated the humid air, fresh and amber. Her ribbon lay wet and shredded on the ground before it.
Impossible.
She saw now that her elders would never release her. There was no way out, she would only wander further and further into an endless midnight. Her blood called for her to tear through the underbrush, but there was only heaviness and hunger before her. Hunger—she remembered the scrape Mina’s teeth. Husay could wander, but she could never escape, and the wandering would only leave the ones she loved hungry, cold, and vulnerable.
*
When Sohrab returned with only the necklace and scrap of dress among them, the tribe mourned with him. But every year after, they sent another girl deep into the cloud forest, to be recomposed by the great green darkness.
*
Husay slid her hands around the trunk, bare and twisted, its cloudbursting quills verdant above her head. Her toes dug into damp soil. Her arches stretched. Her thighs ready to run, legs flexed. She couldn’t help it, her body fought even as she tried to give in. She strained, but her capillaries reached through the earth, the rush of nitrogen and phosphorus through her veins. She began to root. She began to panic.
Husay jerked to the right, but her legs could not move. To her side, no further than a few feet, white branches among the shadows. She willed her eyes to focus. What looked like a dead tree revealed itself as her eyes adjusted, the full and bare skeleton of a markhor, trapped between two cedars, bonebright.
Her roots furcated. Her skin splintered, and her spine twisted windward. She didn’t want to do this, she changed her mind, she lunged, but only her head moved, her face turned up to the sky.
She saw the canopy above her, a net of hunter green needles tightened. The scent of pine and wet earth. The branches crawled up and up, she felt them drag through her skin, shatter and spread through her skull. She, silent as a god, rendered solid. She, petrified, her jaws frozen agape. Ravens built a nest in her hollow, open mouth, her lips ringed in golden forsythia. The tight fist of her heart unfurled and burst into leaves.
Kirin Khan is a Pukhtun writer from Albuquerque, NM who lives in Oakland, CA. Her work centers on trauma, the body, sports, violence, grief, immigration, and queerness. An alumna of VONA/Voices, Las Dos Brujas, Kearny Street Workshop, and the Tin House Writers Workshop, she was a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, SF Writers Grotto Fellow, a Steinbeck Fellow, and a recipient of residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Tin House. Her essay “Tight” was nominated by Nat. Brut for a Pushcart Prize.
Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Iran and moved to London as a child. After graduating from Canterbury College of Art, she showed her work in London for ten years before moving to New York in 1998. There, she established and co-founded the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and EFA Studios. She currently has a lifetime tenure at EFA Studios. During her thirty year career, her work has been shown internationally in the UK, Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Her work has been acquired for private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the British Government Art Collection, the Burger Collection, the Donald Rubin collection (Rubin Museum, NY), the Farjam Collection, Dubai, the Devi Foundation, India, the Omid Foundation, Iran, and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery Collection. In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired The Eternal War Series #2 for their permanent collection, and in 2015, the 12 panel painting was shown alongside pages from the Shah-Nameh manuscripts to which it refers, in the Kevorkian Room, Islamic Dept. Metropolitan Museum of Art. The drawing acquired by the British Museum was shown in 2016 at an International Touring Exhibition: “The Human Image - Masterpieces of Figurative Art From The British Museum.” In 2013, Abbassy was nominated for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She has been awarded grants and fellowships by: Yaddo, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, (x2) NYFA, and an artist in residence fellowship at the University of Virginia. Her work was showcased at the 2019 Venice Biennale in the exhibition “She Persists” presented by London-based Heist Gallery. Her exhibitions have been reviewed by numerous publications including by Benjamin Genocchio in the New York Times, Ariella Budek in Newsday, Nisa Qasi in the Financial Times, and the Boston Globe.