Suddenly there were no more superheroes with intergalactic weapons- there was instead Jaguar and Snake, Fish, and Pink Dolphin. In the Amazon, the kids changed without effort, in an easy shape-shifting to their animal selves. As I told my story, I felt my face hardening into a contempt that carried me far away from these young pursuers, deep into the Amazon jungle where Rat and his computer armies couldn’t follow, where all their space-age equipment had to be shed until there was only hand-to-hand simple fate. And who was going to play Carlos now that all the tribe knew his crime? I took on the role. So yo, man, he offs her without a second thought.”īad dude, indeed, this Carlos. For that, Rat said, “This dude decides Katie’s to go down. At a party Carlos had misinterpreted Katie’s videotaping her friends dancing as witnessing a big drug deal. We determined that the murderer was a man named Carlos, a drug lord who used local gangs to deal cocaine. Rat began the questioning and performed the early detective work. Another character joined the hunt: Fish, whose translucent belly was a shining “soul mirror” that could reveal one’s true nature.Ī fierce commander of this hunt was Rat, whose army of computerized comrades could read brain waves and call down lightning lasers as weapons. Unicorn, with her truth-saying horn, was declared judge. All right? Who wants to begin the story?”Īll the superheroes joined this quest. We’ll call him to stand trial before our tribe. Now we’re going to carry out jungle justice and find Katie’s killer. That was a time when we still listened to animals and trees and didn’t think ourselves so alone in this world. “Listen,” I told the group,“We’re going to talk story the way they used to long ago when people sat around at night in circles just like this one. Because she had given it to us, we needed to witness and receive-and perhaps tell it back to her in the ancient tradition of tribal call and response. This story lived in her, would define and shape her young life. It explained her self-imposed exile during lunch hours and while waiting for the bus.Īll I knew was that she’d brought this most important story of her life into the circle of storytellers and it could not be ignored as if she were a case to be closed. I did not know what to do with her story she had offered it to a group of kids she had known but three days. The kids shifted and took a deep breath, although Sarah herself was barely breathing at all. When I woke up, Katie was gone, dead forever.” Sarah stopped, stared down at her feet and murmured in that same terrible monotone, “Cops never found her murderer, case is closed.” A bullet grazed my skull, too, and I blacked out. “Then one day last year in L.A, Katie and I were walking home from school and a red sports car came up behind us. Her eyes fixed inward, her voice dropped to a monotone. Sarah stopped, gave me a furtive glance and then gulped in a great breath of air like someone drowning, about to go down. She had freckles like me and brown hair and more boyfriends-sometimes five at a time-because Katie said, ‘I like to be confused!’ She was a real sister too and we used to say we’d be friends for life.” “She was my best friend from fourth to tenth grade. “My imaginary friend is called Angel now because she’s in heaven, but her real name was Katie,” Sarah began. It was on this third day of group storytelling that Sarah jumped into the circle and told her story: “ I asked if someone might imagine a living world, one that survives even our species. After three days of stories set on an earth besieged by climate change, environmental evacuees, and barren of nature, I made a rule: No more characters or animals could die this first week. So far, their story lines portrayed the earth as an environmental wasteland, a ruined shell hardly shelter to anything animal or human. She never met my eye, nor did she join in the first few days of storytelling when the ten boys and four girls were regaling one another with favorite superheroes. This shy fourteen-year- old girl, Sarah, had struck me on the first day because she always sat next to me, as if under my wing, and though her freckles and stylish clothes suggested she was a popular girl, her demeanor showed the detachment of someone deeply preoccupied. Our first assignment was to introduce our imaginary friends from childhood. Over the next two weeks we would become a fierce tribe, telling our own and our tribe’s story. Here were kids from all over the city-every color and class, all strangers one to another. She stood in the circle of other adolescents gathered in my Seattle Arts and Lectures storytelling class. once,” the Latina teenage girl began, head bent, her fingers twisting her long, black hair. TIKKUN magazine, March 6, 2019, originally published in ORION magazine
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