"Hold my hand in yours, and we will not fear
what hands like ours can do." — The Epic of Gilgamesh
HANDS LIKE OURS
Prologue
Sometime before dawn, she awoke. For a few moments, she thought she had gone deaf, or blind. Nothing in her feet, or hands, her own body foreign to her.
The moon is thin, and wavering through the clouds, the landscape of the snow and the mountains behind it unbetrayed. She could have been in the desert and it would have all looked the same. The wind and the snow had stopped, so for that time, all she could hear was the sound of her own breath.
She did not know how long it had been—how long it was going to be. She remembers finding cover from the wind in the dips of the peak, between rock, an almost-cavern, had told herself that she could rest for a moment before moving forward. Had told herself—for a moment, only for a moment.
She cannot see or hear the wolves, but she knows that they are there. These are the only things that make sense to her now. The give and take of it.
The wind picked up again, lifting the new-fallen snow around her like dust, sifting in the air. For as long as she could bear it, she remained like this—her body still and the snow moving beneath her—until she finds her arms and then her hands and then picks herself up, bluntly, the motion too familiar.
She steps out, again, like this, back out into the cold. She does not ask this question so much as it has come to define her, to give shape to her as a glass gives to water: How much longer. How much longer, alone.
She says her own name under her breath as she moves forward, with each step, like a heartbeat—the rattling sound of it—to remember the feeling of being known, of calling out and being called out for in return.