Page 172 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
P. 172








the brambles of bygone times, nose to the ground, sniffing for the ragged remnants of 



the old ways that will bind the sorrows left behind by history. Each woman carries a story 


bundle packed with grief and loss; each is seeking redemption of suffering, piecing 


together a crazy quilt of meaning from odds and ends of memory, dreams, visions, the 


hard truths of the body, fragments of bones and scraps of animal hides.






Their stories work to free us from cages of imposed meaning, the baited leg traps of 


thought, the colonization of mind that drive us into confusion, that drive us mad. They 


are root medicine harvested from the bone yard of memory–astringent, ferruginous, 


cleansing –an antidote to poison and amnesia.






Known to each other only through happenstance or hearsay, Anna, Sophie and Louise 


live in places like Mountain Road and Scantic Gap, shimmering places between 


civilization and wilderness. They are women who when noticed at all are judged as 


eccentric, witchy, maybe even scary, certainly strange. They are the kind of women your 


mother tells you to steer clear of (unless she happens to be one of them herself). 



Ranging in age from middle to late (Lou/Louise’s story is her midlife recollection of her 


childhood), they make brief and sometimes surprising appearances in each other’s lives. 


As do the local four-footeds–coyote, deer, fox–whose lives and pathways cross trails 


with the human ones. In fact, it is the animals in these stories that are the unwitting 


game-changers.



“Some would say Anna is a toughened woman, strong spirited, raw boned, the lines of 


grief imprinted on her face. But right now she is perplexed and not a little frightened.” 


Thus begins Reckoning.
















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