Crow Dance
by e rathke
[this is the third in the three part series–
read Crow from the beginning, here]
Crow dances bathed in fungal light. Elliptical, she spins cycles around us, her arms draped in extinction weave through the air, showing us a new life, a path through death and destruction and desolation.
I was eight when I first saw Crow dance. Already old but when she moved—lithe and fluid, powerful. My mother called her crazy. They all did. Back before the world collapsed.
Before the oceans rose and swept nations away, before the fires burnt what remained. And when the industrialists escaped the burning, drowning earth, we were left with nothing. Not even hope.
But Crow never abandoned us, nor did she forget us.
Her voice booms as she flows through and around us.
“We dreamt of better worlds, of new ones bursting through the husk of this decaying earth. Let the oceans rise, let the sun burn; shatter the concrete and let the towers collapse in waves of dust and debris.
“Bloom and bust—the algae wilds these decrepit cities. The fungi swallows the pools of spilled oil, consuming the asphalt and plastics of the world we poisoned. All to make a new world. A new life.”
We close our eyes and feel the promised world pummeling against us in perpetual waves. Her voice reverberates in our skull, rattling through our bones, galvanic against our skins.
I remember the old world. The one with animals and ice, with plastics and instant communications. I do not miss it.
A dead and desolate world. We exchanged it for blooming life.
Crow. Always Crow. She saw and she knew and she led us to this brave new world bursting with fungal life and light.
“Grow and grow and grow. Light up the night with bioluminescence, with flowering mushrooms awash with moonlight. Digest the world we inherited to grow and bloom, to brighten and spore the night skies.”
Crow’s voice fades but our eyes remain shut, dreaming this new world, as she dances all around, calling the future to us.
And for a moment we forget our pasts. Forget the brokenness, the derangement, the dying earth and the dead gods, and we luxuriate in this vision of a new earth born from the disasters we unleashed upon her. We dream of new gods. Not of spirit and faith, but of mud and blood and earth and light.
Crow dances and Crow sings and we believe.
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