An Alabama native, Amy Weldon is associate professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.  Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, New Haven Review, StoryQuarterly, Southern Cultures, The Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She blogs regularly at Cheapskate Intellectual.

Weldon says: "This piece began as an exercise I did with my students in my creative-nonfiction writing class.  Snail-shell fossils are common in our area of Iowa. And you can still see Vera playing her glass harmonica in Harvard Square. "

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Spiral

by Amy Weldon

Coiled in the brain, the hippocampus, Latin for “seahorse,” stores our oldest memories.  Maybe, then, it stores our selves, whatever that word means.  Seahorses browse their  aquarium floor like any horses, blinking and grave in the yellow light, lipping up grains too small to see.  Once the doors are locked and they’re alone, they might remember blurry faces through the glass, the tap of fingers pleading look.  Please look at me. 

     Vera sits in Harvard Square and plays her glass harmonica, a spire of interlocking crystal rims turned with a crank.  Its ghostly song sent 18^th-century listeners into fits.  Now, she offers passers-by their national anthems and their cradle-songs; “come here,” she beckons us, “and tell me where you’re from.”  A Taiwanese boy, an Irishman, a dark-haired girl listen to the dreamy hum and blink back tears. ­­­  In her house, she shows me picture-slides, images etched in gray and black like smoke-film on glass.  Austria, 1931, Vera’s relatives, affluent Jews, all gone.  A man on skis, a new car on a high stone bridge, a little girl cradling an empty birdcage on her lap.  “Who’ll take these once I die?” Vera asked.  “No one else remembers them.”  The wooden box trembles in her hands.  Slides whisper in their slots.  I will, I say.  I promise.

     The glassy quaver of the lullaby curves into the insect-hum of Alabama afternoons, with horses browsing past me through the grass in which my body leaves a flattened shape.  Deer and cattle sleep along the north-south axis of the earth, obeying creature-memory of body, light, and sky.  My mother turns a curl of antler in her hand.  Hold this close and look at it, she tells me, call it by its name.  A single fallen leaf slipped into my pocket, the seahorse’s delicate spine, a windblown wheel of cloud – what patterns and what traces, left, create the selves we think we know?

     Maybe that spiral in the brain is not a seahorse but a workhorse.  Outside a town called Harmony, an Amish boy rakes hay behind a pair of Percherons. The big horses bend their necks and turn, as smoothly as a wave.  Atop the wide rake’s airy teeth rides the boy, a little self borne up so lightly, by such great forces just-contained.  Semi-trucks whoosh past.  The horses never flinch.  Each driver prays, protect this child.  And hopes to be remembered in a stranger’s prayer, when it’s her time.

     Who would I be if I had never seen that boy?  If I had never held that glass slide to the light: the little Jewish girl, her birdcage empty on her lap?

     Another evening, as the sun goes down.  Another little girl sets a hidden treasure in my hand—a limestone snail shell fossil—and huddles close.  Her fingers curl, an open cage, a lit bright nest.  This ground we’re standing on was once the bottom of the sea.  Together, we trace the spiral with our fingers, wondering and wondering at what it knows.