Let Us Not Be Boxer

Anya’s grandmother only took her there once. She’d had to claw the way through the bushes, one gnarled hand shoved branches and thorns out of the path, as the other held Anya’s small soft hand. When she looked back, as an elder, Anya wonder how much the journey had hurt her grandmother. Her swollen, knees assaulted by aches, her bare feet must have screamed over the course of the trek.

The journey felt much longer back then, and Anya’s short legs moved as fast as they could to keep up. Her grandmother had kept one eye tracked to the storm clouds above, and the other on the roots that curled below. They went only three acres deep, not too far for a loud holler to reach the nearest farm, and perhaps that’s why the grandmother swore her granddaughter to not make a sound. But the grandmother knew how to make an adventure out of every journey.

Anya asked, “Are we close, Grandmother?” as her youthful engagement had started to leak away as her youthful boredom grew larger. And Grandmother grumbled to herself through gnashed teeth, as she kept the screams of her aged body to herself.

“Shh,” her grandmother rebuked, but added softly, “Almost.”

She had told the truth. Soon enough the two came upon a broken but mammoth structure; a place that felt older even than the grandmother’s cracked flesh and grey mane. The place fell upon the earth, and the creeper plants made a carpet where Anya could not see where nature ended and man began.

The ground below them had started to transform. No longer were her small feet caught up on roots that stuck up and out over the ground, rulers of the land. Now the ground below grew soft; not soft enough to get sucked down but soft enough that the gently smoosh sound made her assume they tread on marsh lands. But the grandmother kept her pace, a slowly forward walk, and held small Anya’s hand as she went to what was once a door.

She stopped suddenly, and looked at the desolate and decayed structure before her, at the empty space around her.

“Where are we?” Anya asked, as she pulled a soft fragment from the ground. She held the bound set of papers, once cream colored, turned brown and broken from age and mold and nature. Along the edge, and all along each sheet, were smears, that had been blurred by years and water logged, so strange to Anya’s young eyes. Each page was covered from almost top to almost bottom by shapes that part of her felt she should know, but none of her could recall.

The grandmother spoke soft and reverent, “We are at what was called an athenaeum,” and she paused because a catch of sadness caught her throat and held her words almost hostage. “Before the war, they were everywhere. They housed what were called books.”

“Oh,” Anya answered, not sure she had much regard for the red blocks that made the walls of the destroyed form, but enthralled by the sheets she held, “But what are these?” she asked, and shoved the wet sod of pages up to her grandmother’s face.

Her eyes grew damp, and the tears reflected the storm clouds that had fully gathered.

“That was a book,” she answered, as her gnarled hands reached out to touch the object held before her. But she drew them back suddenly, burned by a memory, “Those etches would tell you a story, just as your Momma and me tell you each sunset before bed. But we wrote each story down, so people could share them. Forever,” she ended.

Thunder crashed above, and the sky shone as a flash sprawled out so strongly that both sets of eyes burned from the afterglow.

She turned to Anya then, and her eyes held a struggle the youth never seen before, and had no way to understand. The grandmother cast her eyes around sharply, and bent low to her, and pulled an object out of her apron.

“Do you know your letters?” She asked, barely above a murmur.

Anya blushed before she dared to reply. The blush was not from the fear of the laws that had declared no one was to know the letters, or the “Alphabet” as the tzar called them. Her grandmother had never had much thoughtfulness for the tzar, and had taught Anya well, secretly and among the shadows. They went over the letters after sundown, when Anya was meant to be asleep, and Grandmother asked over and over for Anya to repeat back each and every one, so that they flowed as water off her tongue. She had yet to know how they went together, but she knew one day Grandmother would teach her.

The blush came from the fury of the thought that her grandmother doubted Anya’s memory of the lessons.

“Of course you do,” she answered herself, a response to Anya’s umbrage, “And you love a secret. Take hold then,” and she forced Anya to take the object that seemed a perfect and clean copy of the one Anya had held. The object had the letters that she knew, as no water had destroyed the surface.

“Spell those out for me,” she asked, and the request boarded on a beg.

“AY EN EYE EM AY ELL EFF AY ARE EM,” Anya read back, and made sure to say each letter loudly enough for only the two of them to hear.

The grandmother’s tears overflowed then, and she pulled Anya so close to her chest, the young one thought she would never catch her breath.

“Do you know the way home?” She breathed onto her granddaughter’s head, her arms clasped around the wee body. Anya nodded, as drops started to fall from the clouds above.

“Go home,” the grandmother ordered. “Do not look back, and tell them not where we went. Go home, and put the book amongst your most beloved secrets. And when you are alone and your mother stands next to you, tell her you saw the place where four legs are good, and two are bad. She’ll understand what you mean.”

She turned Anya away from her then, as the drops turned to sheets, and her knotted hands shoved Anya’s shoulders forward, back towards home.

“Run, Anya,” she yelled. And Anya ran. She wasn’t sure why, or what pushed her so hard. But she ran harder than she had before, because she trusted her grandmother, and the urgency of how she spoke. And she never spoke of where they had been.

________________________________

Her father begged Anya tell them where they went, when she got home and her grandmother was nowhere to be found. Anya swore she had gotten separated as the storm had washed the ground below them away. The tzar’s men screamed at her small face, as they demanded she tell them where they had gone. But she assured them they’d stayed among the town boarders.

Eventually, one early morn, as the dark held close to the sky, her mother crept to Anya’s room.

“Anya, my love, do you know where Grandma has gone?”

Anya felt the love and hurt her mother held, the ache for her own mother lay heavy on each word.

“We went to where two legs are bad, Mother, and four legs are good,” Anya answered, as she pulled the cover to her mouth, full of fear that she had spoken out of turn.

Her mother paused for a moment, her face a canvas of thoughts that battled to be felt. The edges of her mouth turned up, and betrayed a small thought of solace, though heartache overflowed her eyes. But she placed a hand upon Anya’s cheek, pulled her close, and told her that grandmother would be proud.