Before the Flood

# book_id: global-pdf-5180bfc65c0648d1b2f213de91a9924e
# book_title: Before the Flood
# chapter_id: 1-before-the-flood
# chapter_title: Before the Flood
# book_page: 1 / 4
# chapter_page: 1
# language: en
# content_format: markdown
# reading_structure: unknown
# render_mode: prose

Beyond a slab of window, a Belgian forest bent in the rain. At the hospital, they called this stage the “pick-up.” Neutral. I see a pick-up has been scheduled for you.

She had traveled to Belgium because the procedure wasn’t legal where she lived. She wanted agency relative to her body and time. She hadn’t wanted this old story to be hers: window for childbearing slamming shut. Now, the sky beyond the window was gray green. Floods were ravaging nearby cities, but inside, fluorescent lights bounced from the metal bars of her bed. A nurse entered with clipped vowels. A shot was administered to relax the muscles. It will burn. It is normal. In a metal bowl on the bed appeared a cotton swab full of blood. Then she was wheeled down a corridor, through a waiting area where, earlier, she had waited—certain people and plants were still there—to a room where women lay on identical beds in identical hospital gowns covered by polka-dotted towels. Across a central aisle, they were sighing or sleeping; on either side of her, behind privacy curtains, just breaths, shadows.

The IV went into a vein in the back of her hand. Not a nice puncture, I’m afraid, said a nurse. You have an extra pain killer. It’s in your file. The bed moved again. There was a damp rush of air. Her horse stumbled over roots. Clouds parted an instant, filling the forest with near-blinding light, so that even the most seasoned warriors, those who had fought in Scythia, Thrace, Arabia, and Egypt, grew still with awe. The initiates, smelling of sweat, earth, damp leather, and salt, slicked their boots and tightened their bows, and she with them. Find them! the elders shouted. To pass initiation, they would need to collect the forest animals who made their homes in mounds of turned earth. Bronze-tipped arrows pierced the dens easily, pinning the creatures to their nests. Then they were slipped bloody into sacks, soil in their fur, and brought to where the mouth of the Thermodon kisses the Black Sea. Go! Find them all! said the elders.

# book_id: global-pdf-5180bfc65c0648d1b2f213de91a9924e
# book_title: Before the Flood
# chapter_id: 1-before-the-flood
# chapter_title: Before the Flood
# book_page: 2 / 4
# chapter_page: 2
# language: en
# content_format: markdown
# reading_structure: unknown
# render_mode: prose

She knew the way one knows a legend, eternally, that these ferret-like bodies with their ringed yellow eyes offered, even before they were skinned and roasted, the sacred gift of protracted youth. Escape! she wanted to warn them. Lingering with her horse by the creek, she sank her forehead into its hide. Until then, she had always leaned forward, into the wind.

In the darkness of the operating room, on a smallish monitor, follicles appeared like craters on the moon, dark spaces, valleys in shadow. Around the head surgeon was a team of women in white bonnets with names on tags like Camilla, Lotte, and Lyn. One of them asked, peering around a paper curtain separating her from her legs, if she was ok. They injected more anesthetic, careful to tell her at each step what they were doing. Then, pointing to the monitor, they spoke in Flemish, and laughed with their whole hearts. The paper curtain lifted a moment, and she saw, suddenly, her legs parted, instruments moving inside her body barely sensible, making images on the screen. She remembered then that it was a teaching hospital. Some of the women must be learning. Everyone was having a good time. Clouds sank again, blotting out the sun. She’d named her horse Infinity when she was a girl; even then she’d wanted all things.

Now, he shifted his weight as if nudging her on. At times, she longed to join the

Scythian women whose softness allowed their breasts to grow large, pillowing, and who would take their children to the river or sea’s edge on warm afternoons and glide with them in the shallows catching tadpoles. She wanted to see the farthest corners of the world, yes, but she but wanted something else too, something soft. Girls who didn’t pass the rite were sac rificed or sent with the male babies to cook for men the Amazons saw two weeks a year for procreation. No choice now but to be immortal, written into myth, history. Putting an arrow into her bow, she fell back into the shadowy woods, shooting blindly into mounds under new, sudden rain. Fog made the land a blur. NASJ | Göttingen University Press 2 There was no clock time in the dark room. The women were laughing again, and she watched them.

# book_id: global-pdf-5180bfc65c0648d1b2f213de91a9924e
# book_title: Before the Flood
# chapter_id: 1-before-the-flood
# chapter_title: Before the Flood
# book_page: 3 / 4
# chapter_page: 3
# language: en
# content_format: markdown
# reading_structure: unknown
# render_mode: prose

The head surgeon was smiling. It’s taking time, she said. There are so many. We need to find them all. She said more in Flemish to the others, who had things to do in that cavernous place where floodlights shone into her flesh, making the metal instruments and stirrups shine and flicker in the unsteady dark. We are sorry it is taking so long, said the surgeon. We need to pierce them all, take as many eggs as we can. Was it taking long? There was no time in that shadowy space, lit from below by bright bulbs. No time for thought, only running through the pines, taste of salt, and the raw odor of blood seeping already from certain mounds. She shot into the dry ones, pulling arrow after arrow from her quiver, hands pruned, fingers slippery in the rain. With the bugle call, everyone stopped, all breath, mist, panting.

The queen’s second in command spoke, asking the initiates not to look at the animals but to slide them into leather bags until they were full, sealing the top with a strap. Obeying, she crept close to a mound, spread the wet earth, and gathered the animal pinned there. She did the same at a second mound. Her sack grew heavy, the leather strap tightening, jutting into the back of her hand. At a third mound, she crouched behind a shrub and pulled away the earth. Inside was an androgynous creature, fur on the body but skin on the face, naked, dirty, vulnerable, pinned but alive. Why? it asked. It was not the taste of their flesh, which they ate to avoid waste, but their removal from the mounds that fed the women’s freedom, for the androgynous forest creatures would grow into great webs of cities, into grids of power lines, concrete tower blocks on beaches, barbed wire, borders.

# book_id: global-pdf-5180bfc65c0648d1b2f213de91a9924e
# book_title: Before the Flood
# chapter_id: 1-before-the-flood
# chapter_title: Before the Flood
# book_page: 4 / 4
# chapter_page: 4
# language: en
# content_format: markdown
# reading_structure: unknown
# render_mode: prose

They were the course of things, change, growth, and the Amazons fought to keep their possibilities alive. They held off a joy and terror after which they would wither, watch the world sink away when their children grew old enough to rule Themiscyra. Eventually they’d be buried by these children. More time. Was there a price? NASJ | Göttingen University Press 3 Laughter echoed in the operating room. They hunted all of them. We found thirtythree, someone said, and the instruments were removed, the pressure on her abdomen removed, and she felt wonderful, part of this amiable circus of women surgeons and apprentices. The bed began to move, revealing a brilliant panel of lights flooding the theaters of life and war, but she was already far away from the echoing laughter.

The cries in the forest grew triumphant, louder, but she could still feel the pillow beneath her in the recovery room, where she sighed and slept and watched the women across a central aisle flinching as IV’s went into hands, and everyone was personable, polite, and all-too-human, and she wasn’t afraid any more, for she knew she had minutes, if not hours, before the pain would begin. The forest wasn’t cold. The temperature was exactly right, sweat mixed with the odor of the rain, and there were twigs and sprigs of pine in their hair. The women moved with their leather bags to the horses by the creek, and then they were racing with great speed across the plains, mountains in view and the sea receding in mist. There was freedom. She felt a last jolt of longing to stay here among the strong and splendid, feasting on the meat of the creatures with mead in clay goblets, and dancing and swimming under the stars.

And it could end here, she thought, on this eternal ride, but the bed was moving again, wheeling her into the room with the slab of window, beyond which lashed the rain that flooded Liege that day, washing away houses, cars, livelihoods. Now, she was very lucky, full of hope, and she would wait in the metal bed by the window. She would wait for the pain to come.