Grassland

It doesn’t seem to matter anymore where I come from- where any of us come from. My mother and father loved me from the day I was born, my cat was hit by a car and died in my arms on the way to the vet, I was fired from my job because I stayed out all night with a boy in his car, and men have wanted to marry me. So I’m not so different. I come from California, where the air is all but tangible, and the ocean calls to me over here in the dry country. I live in the Rockies now.

I went to Europe but I wasted half my time there because my head was stuck in a tin can. Or it might as well have been. I only saw Big Ben once, coming out from the Underground on my way to Westminster Abbey. My chin lifted slowly and surely as if on a string and I thought, wow. I spent my one night in Scotland crying in a bathtub that ran only scalding hot water, but in Paris the air and sunshine washed over my eyes and I could see again for a bit. Paris fooled me, with Notre Dame standing yellow in white moonlight. And it’s at times like that, when I’m normal, that I think, what a silly thing. That wasn’t me. That was a mood. It passed, and I am myself again with my love for seashells and horses like any normal girl, without an inkling of what it’s like to be enclosed in that dark, small world where people come and go and it doesn’t make any difference.

That’s when I walk through the long, African grass with the sun on my shoulders--wearing safari shorts just to be impudent--and imagine that there are no lions about. But my numb brain doesn’t stop the lions from existing, and sooner or later they sink their jaws into my throat. My miracle is that I can survive these attacks. You see, I lie very still for awhile and feel the heart of the lioness beating against me. And she drains me and drains me until I’m white as kindergarten paste, but I just lie there, waiting. And when she lifts her heavy body off of mine and retreats into the grass I stand up slowly and sew up my throat without a mirror and shade my eyes for a moment to get a good idea of the location of the sun. It’s about five o’clock, I think. (Because when I went out it was morning.) And I’m so mad with joy at being able to stand up and breathe again that I rush about and start digging for petroleum in the middle of the Sahara. It doesn’t matter if I find it or not, it matters that I’m digging. And that’s my miracle. It’s fucking beautiful. Because a punctured throat and a few crushed ribs and vertebrae can’t kill me. And all the blood that the she-lion took seems to have been replaced, because I can feel it oozing along in my veins again. The whole effect is stunning, really, and if anyone notices my willy-nilly stitches they don’t say so.

But someone once told me that after a while, fractured ribs get to sticking at the lungs. Maybe that’s why sometimes it’s hard to breathe.

There are times when, while my heart pumps slower and slower under that weight, there is another heaviness added to my bones, and another set of teeth at my throat, only this one is almost comforting. Because under the pressure of the lesser I can forget about the pressure of the greater, so to speak. I think to myself that it is easier to be wanted by a straight, calculating figure than by a calm, senselessly greedy mass of animal. And it’s almost a relief when he doesn’t want me again, because the lion leaves for a while, but always comes back for more and more and more of me.

The thing is, I’m not a bit like those tragic characters in V.C. Andrews novels (even if all the cover paintings do portray her heroines as pies waiting to happen). I come from California, remember? And I’ve always had food to eat and a bed to sleep in and none of my uncles ever raped me. So what business have I to be attacked by lions? None at all, I expect. The theory I have come to is that lions are not at all particular. And another theory that I have is that since most people have never even seen a lion except on T.V., they sit there shaking their bowling ball heads at people who claim to have been attacked by them. Perhaps it’s me who shouldn’t believe them, because after all, who can walk day after day in Africa without being pounced upon by a lion or two?

But in the end I’m left not really caring about any of it, because I’m crinkling the tall, paper thin grass again, quiet and empty as Anarctica, and pressed out of the sun by the great, golden darkness that is beginning to feel vaguely familiar to me. In the very back corner of my brain tissue there is the slow idea that lions ought’nt to take blood like a vampire--that they hunt for food--and, “What do they want with me, then?” But the purple African sunset cannot touch me down there, and that idea is smothered out of me along with everything else.