BY ANDY LOPEZ (ART BY EDWARD LEE)
Before the end, before they burn all her maps and lop off her head; before the Mapmaker in her execution gown, throwing her head back to laugh, I swear, even there on her knees braying a sound like she was seeing something wondrous; before the Council’s festering fear; before they pluck every precious petal from the flower of her miraculous life; before her body, offered up cold like a truce with the world, her final words: you think you’ve killed us, but the maps are in our hearts, and you should’ve seen it, how the sickle sundered the air and finally took her from me; before the myth, her disembodied head still shrieking in open-mouthed delight, rolling across the floorboards and the civil guards chasing her down into a flour bag weighed with stones; before her last plummet into the sea, too late, for we had seen it, ten thousand of us from our floating houses watching the broadcast unfold in the sky, and the final country, rendered in the Mapmaker’s familiar loping script; before her parchment blackens into curls, while around us, our old bones slowly slide home like magnetic needles reorienting its new north; before the boats, turning around like a great migration of returning birds; before each slope and scrawl of that dream country can take root in our mind’s eye: clustered lines curdling into swamplands, stairs accordioning into terraces, valleys greening on your tongue, and your favorite, triangles, unfolding into forests where a lone rafflesia might unfurl its eye into a world of roses, and maybe circles emerging into islands, or were those sinkholes maybe seeds, before any of us can get the details right; before the ocean touches my belly and it swells with you, oh you; before you grow into a child with salt in your hair and questions, so many questions: why do so many of us have hooks for hands, why do we moor our crafts on some distant seascape, what are we seeking there, will we ever arrive?; before the shipwreck on the fifty-seventh island, and you lose me to the water; before your many sisters drag you from the ruin, inconsolable, and moving on; before the winter the colony falls as the keel of the Council’s ship fractures our formation, and atop the fore, stands the woman whose face fills the pages of your sketchbooks, and you feel betrayal of the worst kind; before she calls you Tala and not sinta, like she did on those rare, calm nights that you sleep like two commas, your back tucked to her chest as the ship cradles you across a blue dream; before she cocks a harpoon at your craft, demands you to draw a map of the lost country or they’ll take your hands, too, the way they took mine, and the mapmakers before me (but that’s a story buried in sea foam and time), so won’t you do it for me, darling, you were always so damn stubborn; before your smile debouches into the open sea, poisoning the distance between you while cry, suck on my big fat—; before the pod arrives like another invasive species, summoned by the spell of your fury and sinking each enemy ship beneath the waves, one after the other—even yours, too, because they are old and cannot imagine a world where humans finally set them free; before one day you wake, disoriented, alone, in ways no one prepared you to be; before years of isolation, mistaking clouds for the shoulders of giants; before the dreams, again, then again: gurgling creeks and pineapple fields and blue caves or were those sinkholes were those seeds; before something essential breaks in you; before you wake up one day to build a boat, craft a sail pregnant with the north wind, too late to notice your own belly thickening with promise; before you bear your daughter in the company of the sea, screaming bloody murder; before storm after storm scatters you like an archipelago, and you sink to your knees in grief, here again with no mother, no sail, no map, huddled with your daughter who asks if she will ever see this island in her lifetime and will she have a playmate there?; before, up ahead, dancing below the sky’s navel, you nearly miss the sound of a thousand drumbeats, and aren’t those your sisters, thundering their heels on deck, still dancing, still dreaming irresistible dreams, laugh-singing a shanty you never thought you’d ever hear again, we are not dead yet, we are not dead yet; before you turn your craft around for good, hold that memory tight like a pearl of great price and know we’ve always had a place to moor—we just needed to see it once.
Andy Lopez is a writer and advocacy communications manager from the Philippines. Her work has been anthologized in the Best of Small Fictions 2021 and can be found in Longleaf Review, CHEAP POP, Non Plus Lit, Underblong, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter at @andylopezwrites.
Edward Lee is an artist and writer from Ireland. His paintings and photography have been exhibited widely, while his poetry, short stories, non-fiction have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. He is currently working on two photography collections: 'Lying Down With The Dead' and 'There Is A Beauty In Broken Things'. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com