This piece is part of the Imagined Histories folio, which features art by Devyn Mañibo.

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EREM AND THE HOUSE OF HERITAGE

And so the adage stands: “To draw in the desert is to add sand to sand.”

Where does the story of sand begin?
          Where does sand’s story end?

One Book says the story of sand starts at the house of Erem.

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 DESERTS

Before the desert, there was Erem and his father and his father’s father’s land, lush with the mangoes and the lychees and the buzzards beyond trees. 

Before the desert, there was life. But too much life. Life like rind after rind after rind peeled around an Earth forever-rampant and rot-free. 

And before the desert, there was the sound of a thread in a sumac wood pan.

HOME

Erem killed his mother by way of his birth. This, he thought, was why Father built four walls with no windows and called the red claystone their home.

Know that Erem was, in a way, obedient. And that his father was, in a way, a recluse. So Erem never questioned his father’s command when his father had said, “Stay home, Erem. Stay safe, here inside.”

The house was beautiful, anyway. Four walls framed four roofless red corners, beige cloths bent up against cold wind and spring Sun. In one corner rose a sumac tree, short with thick drupes above swollen green leaves and old roots that settled under semi-white stones. 

There was fire in a pit, good food and two beds. Art that aged on the walls.

In another corner sunk a hole.

JUNGLES

Nine years had passed before Erem learned to ask:  why stay?

“These walls,” his father said, “they protect us. That jungle out there, Erem—that jungle cares little for you. There are snakes and panthers and people who would cut off your hands if they could.”

Erem looked at his hands. His palms knew only tan bark and clay rocks—why would the snakes want his hands? 

Because, he thought: snakes have no hands. Explains how panthers think, too.  

But people? 

A HOLE, SOME THUNDER, AND THREAD

Consider the hole.

Therein piled decades, centuries, millennia of words all carved in wood, sculpted in clay, embedded in gold and steel and engraved with the idea that God, and time, and brothers, and grains and almonds and nectars and fruit all connected in some way. That this way was the ancient way, the right way. The way most valid, most true.

By his sixteenth birthday, Erem grew big enough to climb down this hole. His legs, now long, reached crevice after crevice; broad arms and strong hands helped Erem descend too.

Then he let go.

Erem landed on his knees among the treasure that his father had hid, having thought all the while: here lies Mother’s tomb. The clay smelled like clay, the ground felt like ground, but Erem looked around and saw nothing like home. 

Then, a rumble arose.

This sound like trapped wind, like slow booms, like water that falls and beats into threat—this drum filled the innocent head of Erem. His steps followed the hum of that rumble, those thuds, and his heart became thunderous too. 

There below a Book made of stone sat a bowl made of wood, carved into the shape of a gourd. Atop the wood gourd stretched three ice-white slim threads, waiting for fingers to find them again.

Erem walked closer, lifted one string with his thumb, watched that strand indent the lines of his skin. 

Then he let go. 

Though his father came down and forbade him to play, we know that Erem never swayed.  He played every day while his father just prayed that no one should hear him—that no one would see him—beyond their dense walls made of heritage and clay. 

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BODO

Six hundred years ago and at the age of sixteen, Bodo received from his mother a pan. Arisa stretched tanned skin atop circled-grain wood, and he learned to keep time with his hands.

She died a year later. 

Throbs of blunt sorrow swam straight through his arms, though out from his wrists came a fertile, calm song. A sapling of sumac sprung up far away.

Bodo smiled. 

SAND

Bodo beat that dirge with his drum for over half a millennium. The land grew lush with the mangoes and lychees and buzzards beyond trees, and people moved closer to hear him.

One summer noon on a day with no clouds, Bodo heard the reverberation of rain. Some string and its melody had mirrored his dirge—

Bodo listened, then learned.

But before the rain fell from his mind to his hands, a man standing close turned into a pile of sand.

RAIN

Months passed this way, and then years: every living thing fell at the sound of the rain.  

But people saw no rain, heard no rain. They heard only our Bodo’s familiar long dirge, and watched monkeys and weeds—and orchids and mothers and sisters and seeds—all fall into sudden piles of sand.

A stranger came by, one crisp autumn dawn. Bodo woke up beneath a crying fig tree.

“Bodo,” he said, “your drum beats no life anymore.” Sunlight soaked his cracked lips. “We’ve made a good home for you and your sound. Stay there, Bodo, please. Leave us to live.”

Bodo looked around at throng upon throng, their eyes pleading, or hating, and sad. Pain grew roots in his hands. 

He carried his pan to those limestone-lit walls, closed the pine door and played nothing for years.

People still fell into sand.

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EREM

Erem mourned his father’s death with music that thought nothing of thunder. He drew the sharp sound from the rocks and the leaves, from drupes and old art and that hole in the ground, and then he knocked down the clay walls.

All around and as far as he could see, life teemed. People had gathered to hear him. 

But Erem mistook culture for kinship.

One day as he played for these people, his pride, he saw a tree in the distance fall into sand.

Erem paused.

Then again he played for these people, his pride, and he saw a man in the distance fall into sand.

No matter which note he played, one thing alive turned into ten pounds of sand. But no matter how much he lingered, the people around him urged his hands on again.

BODO AND EREM

Erem continued to play for these people, their pride—for those who could only hear in one way. They faced forward, enraptured, as Erem sat there, entrapped, witness to the piles of sand at their backs.

When his sumac tree died, when sunset approached, a man atop limestone dropped a drum in the sand. 

From far away, Erem watched him inhale. 

Then he ran past the rubble, down his clay hill, through the swollen-pink land filled with nothing but fear.

 
“You did this,” said Bodo. Somber, he neared. 

 “But they made me,” said Erem. 

EREM AND THE HOUSE OF HERITAGE

What lies on the land between    this life    and    that death?

Is it rubble?

Is it heritage?

Is it sand?

This, we do not know.

But we do know that there lies the story of Bodo, and there, the story of Erem. One heard thunder, and the other heard rain, though all that remained was blue sky and red sand.