This is the Time Just Before Spider Woman Meets Kiviuq
My sod-roofed hut is sodden without and within.
The roof is drenched with the mist which always shrouds
this vale of scrubby trees and sphagnum.
And the inside?
Ah, that is the moisture from my cooking pot.
Men are stacked around me in neat piles.
Today is the boiling day,
when marrow bone femurs
seep their flavours into richness.
The meat isn’t fatty enough, so
I add seal oil until
it swims on the surface.
Round floating islands grab at one another in
a large amber slick,
then scatter like lemmings
when I stir the pot and
poke down any protruding bones.
I sing to myself while I cook.
My eyebrows hang down over my eyes,
blinding me to all but my work.
Off to my side I hear a moan.
The men stacked like firewood speak to me.
“Push us into the cauldron,” they say,
but they shall have to wait their turns.
Spiders creep like lichen across my arms.
They are my children, and
tonight we shall sup well.
The roof is always making sounds.
Bugs burrow in,
making nests,
making worms,
until on the rainy days water and maggots
patter down onto my earthen floor.
I scoop them up and eat them by the handful,
or feed them to my children.
This is the best time to be alive!
I have no use for the frozen times,
so I die,
we die,
and when the rains come to melt away the snow
and drench the bogs with water and larvae,
I resurrect myself and weave
an orb as a cradle for my youngest.
The sounds of the creeping things bring me comfort.
The sounds of my fire bring me joy.
The sound I hear now brings me confusion.
What is that great noise?
I don’t know it.
It is not the sound of my stew,
of my crackling embers,
my shaking fire,
my sprinkling rain,
my moaning stack of corpses,
no. It is something new.
I look up, but my eyebrows dangle in my way.
No matter.
I don’t need them on my face, anyhow.
I slice them off with my ulu,
pop them into my mouth,
and look up into the shocked
face of a living man.
The roof is drenched with the mist which always shrouds
this vale of scrubby trees and sphagnum.
And the inside?
Ah, that is the moisture from my cooking pot.
Men are stacked around me in neat piles.
Today is the boiling day,
when marrow bone femurs
seep their flavours into richness.
The meat isn’t fatty enough, so
I add seal oil until
it swims on the surface.
Round floating islands grab at one another in
a large amber slick,
then scatter like lemmings
when I stir the pot and
poke down any protruding bones.
I sing to myself while I cook.
My eyebrows hang down over my eyes,
blinding me to all but my work.
Off to my side I hear a moan.
The men stacked like firewood speak to me.
“Push us into the cauldron,” they say,
but they shall have to wait their turns.
Spiders creep like lichen across my arms.
They are my children, and
tonight we shall sup well.
The roof is always making sounds.
Bugs burrow in,
making nests,
making worms,
until on the rainy days water and maggots
patter down onto my earthen floor.
I scoop them up and eat them by the handful,
or feed them to my children.
This is the best time to be alive!
I have no use for the frozen times,
so I die,
we die,
and when the rains come to melt away the snow
and drench the bogs with water and larvae,
I resurrect myself and weave
an orb as a cradle for my youngest.
The sounds of the creeping things bring me comfort.
The sounds of my fire bring me joy.
The sound I hear now brings me confusion.
What is that great noise?
I don’t know it.
It is not the sound of my stew,
of my crackling embers,
my shaking fire,
my sprinkling rain,
my moaning stack of corpses,
no. It is something new.
I look up, but my eyebrows dangle in my way.
No matter.
I don’t need them on my face, anyhow.
I slice them off with my ulu,
pop them into my mouth,
and look up into the shocked
face of a living man.
Jan / Feb 2024
Fairlies are reprints of work published in a print medium more than a year prior to publication in WTR and written by a BIPOC author. "This is the Time Just Before Spider Woman Meets Kiviuq" orginally appeared in emerge22 Anthology, 2022.
Shantell Powell is a two-spirit author, artist, and swamp hag who grew up on the land and off the grid. She is an alum of Roots Wounds Words, the Banff Centre for the Arts, The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, and the LET(s) Lead Academy at Yale University. Her writing appears in Augur, Solarpunk Magazine, Yellow Medicine Journal, The Deadlands, and more. She is a recipient of the 2022 Waterloo Arts fund for her manuscript in progress. When she’s not writing or making things, she wrangles chinchillas or gets filthy in the woods.
Art: Donna Morello, Collage