The Cave

The Cave

Long Before…

We’ve walked here across the time of two moons. We began when it was a sliver in the sky, the size of one curled finger and it grew and shrank as we travelled. We would not have come, but one frozen night this winter my mother closed her eyes and did not open them again.

The ground shook the day after. It put a crack in the wall of the cave and rained stones down on our heads as if it too grieved her loss. 

That day I forgot my old name. The wind blew it from my head and I became Woman-Who-Paints in her place.

I knew we had to leave and go north. I could not take her name until I made my mark on the Womb.

So we went, tracing the steps of our last migration backwards. Through the mountains we call the Old Ones. Over the plain we call the Little Yellow, and the one we call the Big Yellow. Past the River of Many Fish and the River of Mud in Spring.

I have been learning how to make images since the first moment I could hold the brushes and the hollow tubes. My mother taught me herself, taking me into the deep cave we call The Womb just once before we left to walk south, following the mammoths.

“You will need to come back here,” she told me. “When I die and my flesh becomes meat.” 

She trusted me to bring the people back to this place. The sacred place where I must go to earn the name I now carry.

The Womb will decide.

And its choice is final.

***

Now

I read the email again, eyes burning as the train creeps along the line. 

Rebecca,

You should take the long weekend off.  Don’t work on your thesis. 

My eyes blur, a feeling like panic closing my throat. I had wanted to be done last spring, and now the leaden November sky snags on the low roofs outside the train window.

I know you don’t want to hear it. But you’re driving yourself crazy. Step away for four days, then come back to it. Go home, see your family.

I only live half an hour away by train, but the house I grew up in might as well be in the south of France. The hours stretch before me, blank as snow, until I can go back to my tiny apartment.

Your thesis is strong. You’re ready to submit, you’re just hung up on why it matters so much to you. Take a break and the defense won’t seem as overwhelming. 

I know you hate this advice. Buy some wine, connect with some friends.

Stop obsessing.

K.

But obsession is the air I breathe. My thumb hovers over the tiny GoogleDocs triangle on my phone homescreen. A Study on the Lascaux Cave Paintings; The Importance of Art and Its Connection to Species Survival.

It’s too dry. 

Or it sounds too dry?

But it’s not. It’s the richness of paint, the breathing torch light in the caves. I’ve only seen them once but prints cover the walls of my tiny apartment.

I just don’t understand why it matters so much to me. And I’m afraid that when I stand up for the defense I will freeze and be unable to stammer my way through all the well articulated arguments I have for why we would die without the creative arts.

"The amount of time early Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis spent engaging in the creation of cave paintings indicates that the artwork played a role in the day to day survival of the group. Whether it was a ceremonial purpose, part of an animistic religion meant to evoke the spirit of the recorded wildlife, or a practical record of hunting technique will never be known. But the time spent gathering the supplies for painting, accessing the caves, and creating the artwork hints at the vital role they played for the painters." 

The argument feels so clear, laid out neatly on the page. But when I go to say it out loud, the words stick in my mouth, gummy as tar.

I chew my thumb. Then click the button.

***

We are nearly there, our two moons of walking almost behind us. The wind from the wall of ice cuts like a knife. It swallows the light in its blue mouth, all jagged teeth and howling. In the winter the ice creeps forward, churning the earth. 

In the summer it moves back, exposing raw mud and scraped stone.

These things are a gift. We can shape the stones, grind them to make the sacred dust. The wall of ice is the edge of our Great Mother, the frozen wind her breath and the gush of meltwater the fluid of birth.

But nothing is given without something else taken.

Some have died in our long journey. The small ones, the old ones. We scraped our hands raw to dig a shallow place for the bodies. The soil was not thawed enough to dig far, so we covered them with stones. It won’t matter. The animals will come. They always come. 

We are animals too, our spirits born from the same dark place. When we come upon the frozen body of an auroch we carve raw, bloody slabs from its flesh to cook over our fires. 

We cannot blame the cave lion for doing the same.

***

“Mom, you didn’t cook the stuffing inside the turkey did you?”

My little sister’s voice is a whine. Incredulous, even though she has never once offered to cook the Thanksgiving turkey. She wouldn’t want to dirty her kitchen island, which is so flawlessly done with quartz that it shines white like a glacier.

“No, Amelia.” Our mother barely looks up from the careful jigsaw of dishes on the crackled vinyl of her kitchen counter. “Please don’t give us another lecture about salmonella.” 

Amelia tucks her sleek hair behind one ear. “It’s not my fault. Anyway, we should fry the turkey. I saw it on Tiktok, it’s supposed to be the best.” 

“Isn’t it like, super easy to blow your house up doing that?” It is the first thing I’ve added to the conversation and it makes me feel like a bored teenager instead of a woman of nearly forty.

My phone sits in my pocket like a shot put ball. I should re-read the first section of my introduction. The sentences read as so mechanical. Too utilitarian. But I’m stuck on the still vibrant color, the rough texture of the cave wall.

It would have been so much easier for them to paint those images on the sides of mountains, rather than crawl into the deep, dark places carrying torches and paints. 

Amelia looks down at her phone. “We’d do it outside. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” I say to no one in particular. 

***

The Caves are ahead.

The open one we call The Living Place. The less well suited one we call The Other Place. 

And the deep one. The Womb. 

The People will settle The Living Place. They will dig up the ashes of the fire pits from the last time we made our home here. They’ll fix the hearth stones, and light new fires from the coals they carry in the auroch horn.

They will wait to light my hearth. They will clean it, lay the stones, set the tinder and the kindling. They will stack the little branches and the big branches.

But they will wait. When I come back from The Womb I will put a coal in the tinder myself. A new one, from the fire I lit in the cave while I painted.

I will tell them what the cave demanded. We will beat on the auroch skin drum and the smoke will carry my words and the music up into the air and across the great wall of ice to the place of the animal spirits.

It is the time of melting snow. The beginning. I will do this well. I will shed my old spirit and become Woman-Who-Paints. With the images I create I will call the grazing creatures to come: the bulls, the deer, the horses and the woolly rhinoceros. The aurochs and the mammoths. 

My mouth waters. The salt of long winter-hunger burns on my tongue. 

I must do this. If I fail in The Womb it will be for nothing. I will not take my mother’s place and those creatures will pass us by.

We will starve.

***

The clock on the mantle ticks into the quiet. In my mother’s office, her computer whirs. 

“It’s uncivilized to eat dinner in the middle of the afternoon,” Amelia says. 

I roll my eyes, but privately I agree with her. I’m either too hungry, or not hungry enough. 

I’ve been up since dawn. It could be 7:00 pm for all my body knows.

“Well, your father wants to watch the game,” our mother says with the same, indulgent smile she always uses.

“Besides,” I tell them. “I need to get back to work anyway.” 

Amelia slips her phone into her back pocket. “How’s your dissertation going?” There’s a note of real interest in her voice, and my heart clenches. 

“Pretty good,” I lie.

“Maybe I could help,” Amelia offers.

All at once we are children again, hiding in a cave made of blankets, flashlights held up to our chins.

We would tell stories, and I loved the way it seemed secret. A place warmed by our breath, private, just for us.

“Suddenly interested in art history?” I joke.

“Don’t snipe at each other,” our mother tells us, her voice a knee jerk. Honed in the teenage years almost two decades ago.

“I’m not,” I say.

“She’s not,” Amelia meets my eyes. 

And grins.

I smile back, unfurling it like a ribbon. Maybe this will be it, the single step we take towards one another after a decade of absence. Those long years where she was in school and then living the busy, city-slick life of someone coming up in the tech industry. And when I was burrowing deeper into the complex labyrinth of getting my masters. 

And figuring out what to do with that masters.

“I could show it to you,” I offer. “If you want.”

When we were little, sometimes Amelia and I would hide in the bushes in different parts of our yard, spying on my mother and speaking through our old walkie-talkies. 

I imagine the crackle of static between us now, the ridges of the button beneath my thumb. 

Amelia pats the phone in her pocket. “Sure, I could read it. But I meant I could help with your library. My company is looking to get into the non profits. Maybe we could make a pilot program together. Then you’d have more time to work on your dissertation.”

My smile slides into a grimace. “I don’t think we need Claude’s help with this.” 

She shakes her head, perfectly tinted hair swinging against her back. “Of course you do. You’re always saying how much work you have. Claude could replace two people. Three even!” 

“I don’t want some computer program to replace people. I want us to hire more people,” I answer.

Amelia laughs. “I mean like, sure but with what money? C’mon, this is a good thing. Claude is useful if you just trust him.”

“I can’t trust it.” My eyes are daggers, boring into the table between us. “Because it is just a thing.” 

She sighs. And takes out her phone. “Trust me. Claude is the next thing.”

My stomach hurts. This last summer my library was only open Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9 am to noon. Budget cuts. Not enough staff. The libraries rotated on and off through the city this way, like fireflies blinking in a field. Fewer of them now then there ever used to be. The only reason I kept my job was because I was already part time.

And the question of what on earth I will do with a masters in art history looms like a distant mountain.

“Not in my world,” I tell her anyway.

“Fine then,” she says, without looking up. “Starve.”

***

“Do you have the sticks?” 

Nod.

“The brushes? The dust?” 

Nod. Nod. There is a rhythm to my head, the steady beat of a drum. 

“The waterskin? The torch?”

I shove my dark hair from my face. I’m sweating, a shivering slickness on my skin.

“I have them all. And the hollow bones. Stop asking.”

Oldest One blows a stream of air from her mouth. She ate fish that morning and my stomach growls. “I’m trying to help.”

“You cannot help with this. I am the Woman-Who-Paints.” There is a fist in my chest, instead of a red, beating heart.

I did not eat that morning. I fasted the way my mother always did, but it was better that way. I was afraid that if I ate the salted fish I would throw it up. 

Then the people would smell the sick and they would know that I am not sure if The Womb will accept me.

My sister's face breaks open. She is afraid. Her fear has the flavor of the darkest part of night, the yawn of the earth, the vanishing water. All of the places The People do not go. 

“You might die,” she says.

What she means is that I might fail. She reads the worry in my eyes the same way she reads the waving grass for grain. One search, one sniff of the wind and she can find it. 

I shrug, forcing my face to be remote. Still like a pool of water in a cave, untouched by the wind. “We all might die.”

It is her turn to nod, erasing the lines of her fear like a person sweeping footprints from sand. “Then go. Be careful. And come back.”

The inside of my body is an empty darkness. I must crawl deep, deep inside.

***

The turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing make me want to sleep. I think I could lay down on the couch in the living room and not wake until morning. 

On the table, the cranberry sauce glows like jewels. Amelia made it herself, there is a perfect twist of an orange rind sitting on top. She took the tiniest spoonful, which she did not eat. Too much sugar. 

“Did Claude make the cranberry sauce?” 

My tone is snide, and I regret it. I hate this about myself. I am a much better person when I’m not at home. 

Amelia smiles a sweet, perfect smile. “I cooked it. But Claude gave me the recipe. What did you think?” 

I frown down at my plate, which is painted with a rich purple red. “Too sweet.” 

It wasn’t too sweet. It was perfect, tart and tangy, with just enough sweetness from the orange. It made me think of bogs, though I am not sure whether cranberries actually grow in bogs, and thick rubber waders and ducks that fly in a skein overhead through a woolly gray sky.

“Too sour for me,” our mother says, making a face. “That’s why I get Ocean Spray. Why you girls care so much about homemade, I’ll never know.” 

My mother’s cranberry sauce sits in a tube, the ridges of the can still clearly visible. She has sliced off two perfectly jellied circles. One for her, and one for our father.

He has not eaten his. It sits untouched beside his salad.

“It’s better that way,” Amelia and I say in unison. 

Our mother smiles, a quick, tremulous smile like the sun flickering out after rain.  “Now don’t gang up on me girls,” she tells us. 

Amelia takes a miniscule bite of her salad. Chews. Swallows. 

“I’m writing a book,” she tells us all. “Or rather. I wrote a book. It’s finished.” 

I straighten in surprise, a genuine rush of joy sparkling in my stomach. “You did?” 

All at once I see her as a little girl again, her hair a mess, running up to me with her notebook. She would write the stories and I would illustrate them with our jumbo box of colored pencils.

“That’s great, darling!” Our mother beams, as if she has been waiting for this kind of news. “Do you have a publisher?” 

Amelia rolls her eyes at me. “Mom. You don’t just get a publisher. It doesn’t work that way.” 

Unexpected tears prick in my eyes. I must be hormonal, getting my period, because I could cry with relief. It means that all the TikTok perfect reels, the glossy Instagram pictures, the tech job and AI programming is just to make a paycheck. Inside she’s the same person she always has been.

“She’s right, Mom.” I take a quick sip of my wine, to cover the catch in my voice. “I have so many friends who write. You have to query, find an agent, pitch a publisher…” 

Amelia waves her hand. “Oh I’m not quite there yet. I need to put my query packet together.” 

“I can help,” I told her. “I’m a great copy editor.” 

She smiles, all white teeth and flawlessly tinted lips. “Oh I have Grammarly for that.” 

“Then I could read it,” I volunteer. “What’s it about?” 

We could curl up on my old sofa, make popcorn. Wear fluffy knitted socks the way we used to when we slept on the old futon in the basement and stayed up until almost dawn watching old movies.

“How about I give you the first copy,” she says. “Hardcover. I’ll even sign it.” 

“I’ll clear a place on my shelf.” I’ll clear a whole wall, just in case she writes more. “When will you start querying it?” 

“In a month.” 

She places her hand over her stomach, as if it is a baby rather than a book. I could knit her a bookmark shaped like a bootie. She would love it and our mother would groan and complain that she’ll never be a grandmother. 

We could do a newborn photoshoot.

“I just need to do a final pass to make sure I took all the prompts out,” she says, and takes a sip of wine. 

“The what?” I ask. 

Her lipstick leaves a perfect semi circle on the glass. 

She waves a manicured hand. “Oh, you know. The prompts. The questions I put into Claude so he could generate the first draft.”

***

I am crawling into the dark. The tunnel presses in around me. A breathing thing, with a heartbeat. 

Drip. Drip. 

Water. But it could be the slow movement of blood. Or the fluid that pours from between a woman’s legs when she gives birth. 

Drip. Drip. 

On my back; the pack. In one hand; the torch. My other hand feels along the rough wall. It is my own breath that rasps against the stone. My own heartbeat that drums in my ears. 

It is only a little bit further.

But this is the first time I’ve come to The Womb alone, and it did not feel this strange when I crawled behind my mother.

She taught me how to press my hand against the rough wall of the cave and spit paint through the hollow stem of the horsetail plant until I left an impression behind of my own fingers. 

I WAS HERE.

Surely I should have come to the end by now, felt the passage open up around me so that I could pull the coal from the horn around my neck and set it to the dry tinder. Light my fire and do my work.

If I’ve gone the wrong way I might crawl into the guts of the earth. 

So deep that even the Cave Lions won’t find my bones.  

***

“I’m just saying that doesn’t make you an author.” I’m gripping the stem of my wine glass so tight my fingers ache. “It makes you a prompter.”

“Wow,” Amelia says. “And who are you to decide the difference?” 

“Girls!” Our mother’s voice is shrill. Like the scrape of a knife on the fancy china plates we’re using. The ones she can only wash by hand.

She glances at our father, sitting at the head of the table. It’s the same, old appeal she used when we were twelve and fifteen, shrieking at one another over who could use the computer after dinner. 

Our father ignores her, mixing gravy into his mashed potatoes.

“But it’s not the same thing.” I sound like I’m scolding a child.

“Well, maybe it’s just the new way,” our mother placates. 

Amelia raises one plucked eyebrow. “They’re my ideas, I edited all the words.” 

“But you didn’t write them,” I insist.

“I made Claude write them!” She carefully sets her wine glass down. “Its not like Claude just came up with it and I copied and pasted. He works for me.” 

“But he did write it–I mean it did.” The argument feels like a slippery fish. I’m sure it’s there, but I can’t make my fingers catch on its scales. 

“So you’re writing your dissertation by hand?” Amelia asks. “Typewriter?” 

“No, I mean I’m using a computer–” 

“So you're using spell check.” She folds her arms across her chest. “Google? It’s all the same shit you know.” 

“Amelia! Language,” our father warns. 

He lifts his fork. He is trying to dredge the dry, breast meat of the turkey through the gravy. Our mother stopped giving him the drumstick after the last visit to his cardiologist.

“It’s not the same thing at all!” I tell her. 

Our mother shifts, uncomfortable, in her chair. “I mean I use box mixes for cake,” she winks and stage whispers to us. “Just don’t tell your father.” 

“What was that, dear?” our father asks. 

He has been pretending not to see the Duncan Hines boxes for years. Each time he eats our mother’s yellow cake with chocolate frosting he proclaims it the best he’s ever had. 

“But baking isn’t art,” I say.

Amelia pounces like a lion. 

“Oh it isn’t? Tell that to my friend, Grace. Her cakes are famous on Instagram.” 

“And I bet she doesn’t use box mixes,” I reply, trying to scramble for purchase in the slippery dark. 

“Oh maybe she should,” our mother puts in. “I’ve seen those cakes. So pretty. But you girls are so busy these days with everything. It might be a real time saver for her!” 

The wrongness crawls over my skin. It’s as if I’m buried beneath ice, and stone, and earth. As if something vital is lost. I’m so articulate in class, or when I’m talking to my advisor. Or at the library when I teach.

Somehow around my family I become unsure.

If I can’t even defend myself to them, I will never manage my thesis defense.

“Just do it yourself,” I tell Amelia. “If it’s all your prompts then just sit down and do it. You’re smart. You can figure it out.” 

Amelia fiddles with one long, gold earring. “Yeah but like, with what time? It’s not like I’m a student. Some of us work for a living.” 

“But you’re not doing the work.” I’m so angry the words come on their own. 

She rolls her eyes. “Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not work.”

“But if you want to write a book it matters to know how, it matters to try.”

I think of Lascaux. The leap of an auroch. The twist in the body of a horse, as it’s looking back over its shoulder at the painter.

Amelia is staring at me. Even my mother and father are, and I realize I have tears in my eyes. 

“It’s like the cave paintings,” I say. “The people who made them. They had to crawl in through tunnels. They had to bring everything with them, even fires to light in there so they could see to paint. It mattered enough to them to do it.”

My mother waves her hand. “Oh. Well, we know people like painting. I’m taking a class, did I tell you? Watercolor flowers. I feel like Georgia O’Keefe!”

I could take the bait. Ask her to show me what she’s painted. I think of all the grocery lists she makes, carefully written down in the same, faded notebook. There are always flowers, and birds drawn in the margins. Fanciful things, blossoms with dripping petals, birds with impossibly long tails.

“But you don’t understand,” I tell them. “It wasn’t just about loving art. I mean, it was. But it couldn’t just have been that. They might have died crawling into those caves. And that was time they could have spent hunting, or gathering.”

That is what I think of every time I look up at the paintings pinned to my wall. The effort it took. How vital it must have been in a time when any extra energy spent was a risk that might mean death.

Amelia shrugs. “Ok. So isn’t it good that we have AI now? It makes it easier. No one has to crawl into a cave.”

I glance at my mother. She is gripping her fork like a lifeline, willing me to stop talking. 

It would be easier if I could just say, yes of course. Agree and let the argument crumble to dust, something that can be sucked up when my mother switches on the robot vacuum she keeps in the corner.

But I think of the painted curve of the horse’s back. The bold line of its mane. 

“I don’t think this is good.” I take a steadying breath. There are pieces coming together here, I can see the edge of them like pot shards buried beneath a layer of fine silt. “I think the work of art is what gives it meaning.”

“And Claude can’t have meaning?” Amelia asks.

“It’s not a human. So, no. It can’t.”

She raises her eyebrows. “But it’s just a tool. Like a paintbrush. Or a pen.”

Slowly I shake my head. My blood beats between my ears like a drum. “No. It’s not. We’re spending our lives teaching it how to create, while we forget how to do it for ourselves.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Come on. Don’t you think that’s a little bit dramatic?” 

The silence presses in around me like a cave. “No. I think it’s essential.”

***

The Womb opens around me and I am slick with relief. 

I can smell myself. A raw animal sweat alongside the dripping must of stone and the deep stillness of the air. 

I uncap the horn. Lay the torch on the floor, hoping it won’t go out. Blind as a newborn I scrape a hollow in the grit of the cave floor, groping for dry earth. I pack the tinder and roll out the coal.

A flash. 

A slow creeping warmth. 

The fire builds and I nurse it like a mother. 

Bit by bit until it spreads its light in fingerprints across the floor. 

Not too much. Just a bit or the smoke will choke me. I’ll go to sleep like Eldest One did in the cave last winter when the snow froze over the smoke hole and my head ached for three days.

There! The wall ahead of me. It flickers and shifts like the hide of an animal, breathing in the dark. 

I take out my waterskin. My ground dusts. In the red light of the fire I scrape small bowls in the dirt of the floor and pour in first a little dust, then a little water. Mixing and mixing until the color becomes an oily living thing. Blood, ochre, black.

Then I pick up my brush.

The wall will tell me what animal to paint. There are layers of other creatures here, generations of them stretching away into the darkness of The Womb. Some are tiny, just the length of my hand. Some are huge. Mammoths with their curving tusks almost reaching the ceiling. The shape of the moon, so small I could cover it with one finger.

All of them flicker and for the space of one heartbeat I imagine them crowding in on me. All the spirits captured by the Painters who have come here to sit alone in the dark.

Later when I tell the people about this I will make myself sound brave. I will tell them how I sat in the dripping silence alongside the watching spirits. I will show the people with my hands how tall the pictures stretched, or how small. I will speak of the warm browns and blacks, the rusty reds. They way every painted creature breathed in the firelight, leapt and moved and lived.

I will not say how my own breath went high and fast. Or how my hands shook, my palms clammy with sweat.

Slowly beneath my brush the shape emerges. A horse, broad bodied and leaping. Away from the hunter? Or toward? 

It is the size of five of my hands, its head twisted back, mane flying. 

Leaping away then, but looking back toward the hunter. 

Great Mother. Woman of breasts that pour milk. Stomach as large as the dome of the sky. Send us the body of the Horse. Send us its warm fur and thick hair. Send us its hooves that we may boil to make glue. Send us intestines to fill with fat for winter. Send us its stomach for a waterskin. Send us its brain to tan its hide.

I am the Painter. If I make an image with enough beauty, enough power, the Great Mother will listen and we will live. 

If I fail, make an image without spirit, or soul, she will send nothing and we will wither. 

I will know when I set the brush down. If the image flickers and breathes, I have done it. If it stays flat on the wall I’ve failed. 

I paint and paint. 

I am afraid to put down the brush.

***

“Please,” Amelia scoffs. “No one will die because I used a tool to write a book.”

“Well, of course not honey,” our mother soothes. “Really you girls. Arguing like teenagers.” 

“What about my fishing stories?” our father asks.

We all turn to look at him in surprise. The tips of his ears turn red.

“Well. I wrote those. With a pen and paper too, the good old fashioned way. I used to tell you girls those stories at bedtime. You begged me for them.”

Amelia’s eyes slide to the side. She actually loves Dad’s fishing stories. For his birthday last year she had them printed and bound in a book. 

Dark green hardcover. With golden, gilded letters. 

She keeps a copy on her desk. I saw it, just off screen, blurry but unmistakable, in one of her Tiktoks about making green smoothies.

“What about them, Dad?” she asks. 

He shrugs and picks up his fork, chewing his dry turkey with a wince. “I don’t know. I wrote them without some computer thing. Bet you could too.”

“You’re good enough to do it on your own, Amelia,” I tell her.

“But why does it matter so much?” She studies her plate, drawing her fork through the perfect spoonful of cranberry sauce. “No one has time any more. We’re all just trying to survive.”

I roll my eyes. “Survive? Now who’s being dramatic. You make six figures, you’ve got no kids. What’s so hard?”

She bites her lip. Chews it. My heart turns over a little, she did that when she was a little girl, too shy to go up to the other kids at the pool.

“You don’t know,” she says. “My life isn’t so easy. I have to be perfect, all the time.” 

“Says who?” Suddenly I’m angry. I want to yell, and fight. I want to survive. And I want her to survive too. “Screw them. Screw perfect. Do it anyway.” 

***

The horse is still on the wall. No wind in its mane, no drumming footsteps. No breath of life. 

“Please,” I rasp.

Nothing but the yawning dark. A shudder like the pulse of birth. 

I lift my hand. I scraped it against the stone crawling in and I suck blood from my palm as if it might feed me. 

Then I lower my hand. Dip the brush into the well of blood. 

And paint the line of the horses back. Its belly. 

It leaps from the wall.

***

My sister tries to roll her eyes. Her brow furrows, but she can’t quite manage it. She’s watching me. She’s listening. “It doesn’t work that way, Rebecca.”

“Why not?” I ask. “Who gets to decide what’s perfect anyway? Why is it up to anyone but you?”

I watch Amelia waver. There are two possibilities here. An eyeroll and a dismissal. Or a step back together. 

“But it’s so hard.”

She gives that answer like it’s simple. She’s not pretending, or deflecting. It’s exactly the way she told me she could never learn to swim, that she would never understand it.

I pull out my phone. Open my email. 

Kiera

You were right. Too much obsessing. I know what I need to change, then I’m submitting my thesis this week.

We can discuss Monday.

R.

I hit the send button as if it is a victory, but I know it is such a small thing. A thesis that no one will read about 20,000 year old cave art.

“The point is that it’s hard,” I tell her. “The point is that it costs something.”

My thesis will be buried in a library somewhere. Maybe for a millenia before someone unearths it. A piece of writing written thousands of years ago, about a piece of art created thousands of years before that.

The scope of time is comforting.

I turn my phone around to show everyone the email. “I’m submitting my thesis this week. I’ll let you know when the defense is scheduled.”

My hand shakes a little. 

Amelia reads the email. And smiles. A wide genuine smile, and it strikes me that even though she is not the person I text late at night when I’m spiraling, she still knows what this means to me.

“But what if it’s not perfect?” she asks. 

I shrug. “Nothing is perfect.”

Our mother is watching us, brow slightly furrowed as if trying to work out whether we’re still fighting.

I take a breath, pretend that I’m standing in the auditorium, surrounded by faculty. My scalp prickles with sweat, almost as if there are bright floodlights. 

And I imagine one, leaping painted horse. 

“Making art is one of the first things humans did,” I tell them all. “It didn’t have to be perfect, it just had to be real. And it meant enough to us that people twenty thousand years ago risked their lives to do it.”

My family is watching me and I realize I’m using my teacher voice. The calm, certain one that sounds so confident. 

“Every moment those people spent gathering supplies for paints, or practicing the craft, or crawling into a dark cave was time they couldn’t spend gathering food or finding shelter.” 

I think of them, those people whose faces we’ll never see. Whose story we’ll never know. I can almost hear the drip of water in the cave, and the sound of a person breathing in the dark.

“We can’t forget how to do that work,” I tell Amelia, or all of them, or the whole world. “We won’t be human if we do. It’s the best thing our species has ever done. Write the book yourself. I can help. I work in a library. I study art. Let’s do it together.”

She grins at me, a flicker of a little girl in her face. “Even if it’s not perfect?”

“Screw perfect,” I say. “It’s better. It’s human.”

Her smile stretches. “All right. Screw perfect.”

“Well.” Our mother folds her napkin. “I suppose you girls know best.”

***

The opposite wall is thick with hands. All of the ancestors. My own mother’s hand. 

I fill the hollow reed with paint and press my hand palm down against the warm, living stone. 

Spit paint. 

Until a negative impression is left, my body remembered by the empty space it occupied. 

I WAS HERE. 

What I did mattered. 

I painted the horse.

My people will live.

© N. Aujoulat (2003) © MCC-CNP