This story is about Mr. Enemy \u2014 I\u2019ve said that before \u2014 but I want to talk about Emily for a while instead. For this book, just this one book maybe, I want to focus instead on Emily and the storms; on Emily and the lightning, Emily and the dynamite, Emily and the Keepers; to talk about Emily, who loves jaguars and yellow hats and Eldri, and most especially Navvy Jim.<\/p>\n
Only, Eldri is dead now, he got eaten; and Navvy Jim is dead now, I think, I mean, I\u2019m pretty sure; and the jaguars that Emily cares for most \u2014<\/p>\n
They spin around the Earth, in the cold blue emptiness of space.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s kind of cool and it\u2019s kind of cruel because they don\u2019t ever get to breathe.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think I could do it. I don\u2019t think I could look at a jaguar and say, \u201cYou know, one day, jaguar, the whole world\u2019s going to fall apart. So I\u2019m going to launch you into space and you will fall for millennia around the world and you will be cold and you will be airless but I will charge you with my sorcery to protect the life that breathes and flourishes below.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think I could do that to jaguar Chan or jaguar Ixchel or even to jaguar Yohl.<\/p>\n
And I know Emily couldn\u2019t have. I think. Because I\u2019ve seen her when she thinks about the jaguars. I\u2019ve seen the way she goes distant, and her face goes soft, because they are to her \u2014 I think they are a symbol of her inspiration to her, or of her hope. I think that ever since she was a child and she met the jaguar Bahlum, who fell to Earth, she has thought that the jaguars are the most beautiful and magical thing out there anywhere; that they teach her when they move, in and through that movement, that there is a thing that is beautiful and moving; that life is joyous and in motion; that it is OK, that it is somehow OK, that the world is so full of suffering and trouble, that it is OK that life is so very hard, because there are things bigger than that, more beautiful than that, more fiery and vast and glorious than that, in a long decaying orbit around our little mortal world.<\/p>\n
She could fall into despair, I think; she could drown in it; and then she could look up, and she could point at the jaguars, and the light of them would take her. It would flow through her, and the darkness and the ice and the despair in her couldn\u2019t hold. Despair is a stillness, you understand? It is only there in stillness. It ceases when there is motion. It breaks when there is life.<\/p>\n
And she would look up at the jaguars, right through that awful shadowing, and she would say:<\/p>\n
O See Them Move!<\/i><\/p>\n
And the dark would burst.<\/p>\n
That is what they are to her. That is what they mean to her.<\/p>\n
They are not that to me.<\/p>\n
Me, I think I kind of hate them because they are the doom of Emily, who is my friend.<\/p>\n
They are magical and beautiful, anyway, the magical jaguars. They go around and around the world. It\u2019s kind of cool and it\u2019s kind of cruel, and they are cold, and they miss the air.<\/p>\n
And if what she\u2019s going to do works, if what she\u2019s going out there to do now works, and she calls them down, then they\u2019ll probably just land<\/i> on her, or something, because they\u2019re jaguars<\/i>, and that is what jaguars do<\/i>.<\/p>\n
They will fall on her. They will be burning.<\/p>\n
You know how jaguars can be.<\/p>\n
They will land on Emily, and they\u2019ll rake her back, and maybe they\u2019ll even eat her some or set her on fire, and she\u2019ll be lucky if she survives.<\/p>\n
And then the scissors will fall again, afterwards, and they\u2019ll trash the house and get stuck in all the trees. And the Fan Hoeng aliens will land and they\u2019ll disembark and they\u2019ll say \u201cTake me to your leader,\u201d only there won\u2019t really be any leaders left, so I\u2019m expecting that they\u2019ll get a little tetchy about all that. And Peter will stagger out of his Fan Hoeng cell, where they\u2019ve been keeping him, I guess, and he\u2019ll be all mean and he\u2019ll punch people because he\u2019s Peter,<\/i> \u2019cause even if he\u2019s a saint of sorts I\u2019ll bet he\u2019s gotten back his punchy hand.<\/p>\n
What she\u2019s doing is going to be a total catastrophe, I mean, pretty much all of it, but the worst part will be that whole thing with the jaguars, because I don\u2019t want<\/i> them to land on Emily and kill her. It is a thing that I do not want to see.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s basically \u2014<\/p>\n
I mean \u2014 I mean, there\u2019s hardly anybody left.<\/i><\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not the way she looks at it.<\/p>\n
The thing she <\/i>says is this:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about time,\u201d she says, all smiling, \u201cI figure, that they all came down: that jaguar Yohl, and jaguar Ixchel, and jaguar Chan, and anyone else up there who\u2019s been fighting for us so very long and so very hard and without any air to breathe, gets to come down and take a breath on Mother Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
So she\u2019s going to dance the Thunder Dance, and the Earth will shake, and the jaguars will come down. And patch or no patch, and Navvy Jim or no Navvy Jim, when the jaguars and the scissors fall they\u2019re going to bury her alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This story is about Mr. Enemy \u2014 I\u2019ve said that before \u2014 but I want to talk about Emily for a while instead. For this book, just this one book maybe, I want to focus instead on Emily and the storms; on Emily and the lightning, Emily and the dynamite, Emily and the Keepers; to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"series":[47],"class_list":["post-4845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chapter-0-prologue","series-the-storm-that-saw-itself"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Hat_2_noBG1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4845"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6206,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845\/revisions\/6206"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4845"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=4845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}