Ancestors
Grandmother’s voice still clung to me, even over the roar of the fire. She used to sit by the embers and speak of heart and soul, of the spirits that watch us and the law of the forest we were never to forget.
“Every tree, every stone, every shadow is alive,” she’d say, words cut short by coughs that rattled through her chest like a rattlesnake, but still she pressed on. “The land remembers. The water listens. Respect them, or they will answer.” Her breath smelled of sage and cedar, her eyes as sharp as flint.
I never thought those words would be more than stories.
That night, they came back to me in broken fragments—half-whispers, half-commands—as the sky ripped itself open. Lightning speared down and split a pine so wide the crack rang in my chest. Fire bloomed at its roots like a ravenous flower.
The wind turned predatory, whipping the flames into a frenzy that didn’t just burn—it hunted. It hissed through the dry brush, a sound like a million snakes waking up at once. My family had been a knot of shouting voices and gripping hands just a moment ago, pulling each other through the dark, but chaos has a way of untying even the tightest bonds. We didn't just scatter; the inferno drove a wedge of heat between us, forcing us apart like frightened deer breaking from the herd.
Then came the fracture. A massive oak, eaten through by the blaze, groaned and surrendered to gravity, crashing down between us in a shower of sparks that blinded the night.
One flash, one thunderclap of timber hitting earth, and the world narrowed down to a singularity of heat. When the sparks cleared, the hands I was reaching for were gone. I was running alone. The smoke didn't just curl; it coiled around my head like a noose, thick and gray. Every breath was a battle, filling my lungs with ash and knives, forcing me deeper into the burning dark.
Everywhere I turned, fire herded me closer to the lake. The ground behind me was already glowing red, pine needles bursting into sparks underfoot. The air was thick and strange, hot with fire, yet sharp and cold at its edges, the way Grandmother once described the breath of spirits.
My throat scorched, my eyes streamed, and my heart slammed in my chest like a trapped bird. Somewhere through the crackling, I heard her voice: The land remembers. The water listens.
But what good were her words when the land wanted me dead?
The fire chased me, and I was running out of land. I stumbled through the underbrush, my boots scraping rock and root, my heart hammering against my ribs, bruising itself against the bone.
Behind me, the wildfire raged. A living beast with flames that licked the night sky, it devoured everything in its path. Orange tongues flickered through the trees; it swallowed the darkness whole and lobbed sparks like stars cast down from hell.
I knew I was trapped. I was out of ground.
The lake was my only way out, but I couldn’t swim well.
Not because I didn’t try. Not because I didn’t want to. But because the water held terrors of its own. Silent, slimy things that slither and snap beneath the surface. My grandmother’s warnings echoed in my head: Watch for the water moccasins. They hide in the weeds. They strike without warning.
I could feel the cold bite of the lake before I saw it. The shoreline stretched ahead, a jagged edge between fire and water.
I stumbled to the bank, breath ragged and shallow. Smoke clawed at my throat, and my vision blurred. The world tilted. I wanted to fall, but my feet dug in, desperate to stand a second longer.
I stepped off the burning earth and surrendered my spirit to the water’s judgment.
The water hit me like a sledgehammer, a shock so frigid it felt less like cold and more like a physical blow. My muscles seized instantly, locking tight in protest. The terror didn't rise slowly; it grabbed me by the throat. I had traded the fire for the suffocating dark, and my body knew it before my mind did—a sharp, sudden certainty that the things hiding in the weeds were already aware of me.
I froze.
My mind screamed for me to move and swim to safety, but my body betrayed me. All I could do was hold my breath.
I floated on my back, limbs limp. The sky above was a smear of smoke and ash—no stars, no moon, no silver-lined clouds... only the hellfire’s orange glow flickering at the edges.
Paralyzed. Fire above. Water filled my ears and the roar of the wildfire sounded softer now; muffled by the lake, as though I were lying beside a gentle campfire instead of a burning forest. For a moment, I almost believed it. My mind drifted, carrying me back to the warmth of summer nights when Grandmother sat by the fire and told us stories to keep our heritage alive, weaving truth and myth into the air. Stories of Thunderbirds and Mishipeshu, of sky and water spirits, of battles older than the trees themselves.
Her voice returned to me. She pulled me into memory while smoke and water choked me in the present. I felt something inside me stir. Heat rose in my chest, even though the water was frigid. It burned like a large ember pressed against my skin. Too real. Too painful.
It was real.
My lungs convulsed and I cried out, releasing the air I’d been hoarding to float. The sound of my shriek bubbled upward, lost.
My dead weight dragged me beneath the surface. Cold folded around me, and through the glassy skin of the lake, I stared upward. The moon was there now, blurred by water and smoke. It pulsed. Once. Twice. Thrice. Each flash like a spotlight that swept over me, circling, spiraling closer with every orbit.
A sudden friction scraped my leg. Coarse skin. A serpent’s grasp. Panic jolted me alive. I kicked, twisting to be free, but the thing only tightened its grip. It jerked me downward first, deeper into the lake, my chest squeezed for breath. Abruptly, the trajectory shifted. Not down, but away. Away from shore. Away from the consuming glow. Slowly, steadily, upward.
I thrashed, but my limbs were weak, my vision blurry. The world turned black.
I woke with a choked cough full of lake water, chest heaving. I was moving; the lake air dragged across my body and through a hole in my shirt, stinging the fresh burn on my sternum. This creature held my leg with something long, but in front of it, the body loomed larger, thicker, too vast for me to make out in the night. It was the tail that squeezed my leg. My mind scrambled for answers: alligator, a mega catfish... No, not here. How was this bigger, more complicated?
The moon’s glow brushed over the water, enough for me to see ridges that rose like jagged scales. Not sharp, but plated, armored. Horns sprouted from the nape, I thought, or maybe it was just the shadows tricking me.
The beast coiled and curled its immense body to the side. My leg was freed now, and I was brought alongside it, parallel. There wasn't hostility, nor hesitation. So, I grabbed at the ridges and clutched them like handholds. They were solid beneath my fingers, rooted in the flesh of something alive.
Something ancient.
Was it the smoke? A trick of the eyes?
The lake rocked us gently, the cold unyielding. My breath came in shallow gasps, a rhythm slipping away as the water lapped against my hands clutched around the beast's back. My arms brushed along rippling skin, slick like wet leather.
Beneath me, the creature started to move like a mountain in the lake, vast and patient, carrying me away from the fire.
My eyes darted over the animal, searching for the predator I expected, the beast with gleaming teeth and hunger in its eyes. A serpent, with venom dripping.
There was nothing—only the water, the smoke, and the cold.
Water fell from the long tail that now arched out of the lake between my legs and into the smoky night, droplets splashing on my face. I saw now it was no snake.
Under me, it shuddered, a rasping, chittering sound rising with each breath.
I recognized it.
My grandmother had the same wheezing cough before the sickness took her. Fluid in the lungs, pneumonia inside aged and weathered ribs.
I understood the creature's age with my fingertips fastened into its skin, fighting for a grip. I anticipated being bucked off and swallowed whole, but found my instinct wasn’t needed. Supported by her sacrum, my hips hung over hers as though in a saddle.
My fear trembled into awe.
My limbs grew heavy with exhaustion and relaxed, and I felt the creature’s warmth, steady and strong beneath me.
She moved slowly, slicing through the dark water like a shadow with a heartbeat. I watched her swim with my head slung over her shoulder. Her paws glided through the water like fern leaves... No, they were bigger, like palm or monstera leaves paddling.
I turned my head to look back. The fire’s roar, bite, and heat had faded, swallowed by distance.
Still, tears stung my eyes. Warm, helpless tears that slipped down my cheeks and into the lake.
I was too tired to cry out. Too tired to fight. Too tired to fear. Too tired to...
The sharp sting of dawn stabbed through the smoke, as I found myself lying alone on the lake’s southern bank. The fire smoldered far to the west, smoke drifting low and to the north. My feet were soaked. I stood, my shoes squelching with every step, mud from the bank clinging to me like the last trace of the lake’s grip.
I was alive.
My family had buried Grandmother years ago, smoothing the dirt over a pine box with a priest’s dry eulogy and a Bible verse she never cared for. They rushed the service, eager to leave her cough in the ground, treating her stories like dust to be swept away and be unceremoniously forgotten. But as I walked away from the lake, looking for a trail, I realized they had failed. Her spirit never needed their consecrated soil or their permission to exist; it only needed belief. The rattling cadence I heard last night—from the throat of that ancient thing in the dark water—proved she hadn't been silenced. She had been waiting. And now, the inheritance she left behind wasn't in the grave. It was in me.
The stories she told had always been lessons, warnings, promises. Now I carried one inside me. I pressed a hand to my chest, feeling the faint echo of that ember that the night left behind. Whether spirit or beast, dream or ancestor, something had dragged me from the edge to here.
I let the morning air heal my lungs with a sting, and for once I was grateful for nothing more than the weight of soggy shoes and the raw ache in my body. Life, sodden and raw, clung to me.