Page 71 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

Trinkets

Dana Anastasia

they don’t grieve for their dead, she murmured.

i shifted in my seat. felt something hard pressing on the side of my tailbone. pulled a thin slice of

obsidian out of my back pocket.

what did you say?

they don’t grieve for their dead. they just bury them like tulip bulbs and walk away.

i thought about what she was saying. what does it mean to grieve? i wondered. what does it look like?

streaked faces and puffy eyes? lips lined with broken capillaries, chapped and cracking like a dry pond?

do we turn muddy with our grief? skin crawling with primeval creatures as we sink into the silt of our

sadness? do mourners dissolve into the soils of burial grounds, lining the edges of the ditches with the

fecundity of heartbreak?

elephants grieve for their dead, you know. but we’re killing all the elephants. poaching them for ivory to

sell on the side of the street. who’s going to grieve once all of the elephants are dead, huh?

i imagined some old woman somewhere clutching an ivory totem, sitting in front of the TV. the

headline: last elephant dies.

her heart clenches. her palm sweats into the hard furrows of her trinket.

Note:

It has long been said that elephants are some of the only creatures besides humans who experience

grief. Perhaps their capacity for grief is directly linked to their ability to remember so far into the past.

The elephant here is a symbol of the need for humans (particularly those living in denatured,

73