Gods and Monsters

I am the last of my kind. It’s hard to explain how I first discovered this, but think of it like a feeling of eerie despair. The kind that implies an emptiness extending infinitely in all directions, with you alone at the center. I got the gut punch one morning; it was early, pale gray and many shades of green, and I was fruitlessly hunting a small thing that kept diving into holes and crevices I couldn’t perceive. So I was already quite hapless, outwitted and hungry, when my stomach dropped like the heavy end of a scale that’s suddenly––definitively––out of balance. And I knew I was alone, more so than I’ve ever been.

It had been many years since I’d met something like me, so long that I can't remember his face very well, only the broad outline and certain distinguishing features like a much larger mouth and longer legs than mine. I believe I’m generally quite small, but with no more means of comparison, I suppose I’m the standard now, neither long nor short, large nor small, friendly nor standoffish––though please believe I’m friendly, except when I’m hunting, for which I have learned to be ferocious. But it’s like someone else’s skin I inhabit for a few hours a day, any longer and it grows itchy and unconvincing.

The other one I met that day many years ago was not friendly. He was cold and easily offended, barely wanted to share where he’d been, what he knew of our world. When I asked him what his Seer looked like, he snapped. “Why would I tell you that? I don’t know you. We’re strangers to each other.” I told him I would share how mine appeared, and he scoffed. “Keep it to yourself.”

To me, everything that happens––anything, anywhere––is information waiting to be known, and no one’s to keep or covet. If the Seers can know it all, then there was no point hiding your history, it wasn’t yours to hide––it just was or was not. This is why we’re done, I’ve often thought––this clutching to a myth of our own private experience. Another self-inflicted wound.

My Seer came to me as a four-legged thing, dignified, barrel-chested, with long black hair draped on its head, its back. It appeared as early as I can remember, then disappeared periodically, to my great dismay when I was young. When it returned, I greeted it with anxious relief and many questions, including “Where have you been?”, which I never meant to sound as desperate as it did, but I was always so lost without my Seer. It responded calmly, and would sometimes stroke my little head to soothe me, saying “I'm right here.”

It told me that no two Seers appeared alike, that––no––it wasn’t my father or my mother, that it was there to witness and to catalog.

But it did much more than that, it also taught me to hunt and make fire, and which berries I could eat, and how to speak the language of my ancestors with growing fluency. In my middle childhood it led me to the tribe who would eventually betray me, and then it led me away to safety.

––

Things moved quickly when I was the only one left. My Seer came that night, while I nursed my sunken stomach feeling by lying face-down in my favorite small pond, blowing bubbles, occasionally turning around to stare up at the moons and let out a soft moan, just loud enough to carry on the water, until it died somewhere out there in the darkness. I never knew who was hearing me, seeing me, but having my Seer made me quite used to this sensation, I think. Not comfortable, really, but I could put it out of my mind, store it in the dormant place––that unspoken knowledge that another’s senses could always be trained on me. “I saw you were crying,” it would say to me after some weeks away. “I heard you screaming from a nightmare––was it terrible?”

It already knew what my nightmares contained. But it was sensitive, my Seer, and a good listener––it let me tell many stories that it already knew by heart. “I like the way you spin the tale,” it said. Another version to witness and catalog.

My Seer approached as I blew my lonely bubbles that night, aware as perhaps only it and I were of my aloneness, my singularity. It beckoned me out of the water and offered me a fruit I had never seen, deep green skin with bright yellow flesh, tangy and sublime. We didn’t say anything while I devoured the fruit, though its sighs were frequent and heavy, disturbing the ground where it paced, scattering debris. It seemed agitated, which I wasn’t used to, though I myself felt calm in my new, eerie despair. And then the unthinkable happened: my Seer took me with it to the others, away from my ponds and dark nights and small, clever, burrowing prey. “It’s too dangerous now,” it said.

But there was no journey, or at least none that I can remember. I was there in my home until I wasn't, until I joined the Seers here, in a place where I wait for food, for sleep, for nightmares. I wait in a place I never learned to love, that’s neither warm nor cool, light nor dark, where all the berries are safe to eat. I wait for death, I suppose. So the Seers can witness and catalog me, along with many others, my Seer tells me––others unlike me, others I’m not allowed to see.