This Wide Terraqueous World by Laird Hunt

Author:Laird Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press

For one reason or another, the earlier-mentioned high-school girlfriend and I played a good deal of “guess which hand.” By that I mean one or the other of us would hold out both hands, closed tight over something tempting, and ask the other to guess where it was. Inside the winning hand would be some Red Hots or a piece of Starburst or a Tootsie Roll or a love note. Speaking of which, once, when I was walking past her in school and she was at her locker and I was preparing to scare her she spun around at the last minute and had me guess a hand. The first one looked empty and so did the second.

“I’m holding the note you didn’t write me but should have,” she said.

“Here’s my note,” I said without missing a beat, and right there in the middle of the hallway I kissed the center of one of her pretty, empty palms and then the other. And then I walked on, almost certainly wearing my 501s, and my girlfriend watched me walk, and as I went she gave out a low, slow whistle. And though I didn’t know it then I know it now that what had just unfolded between us was a story entire. One whose details may wobble but will never finish being told.

“Once recorded, a story has the potential to live longer and spread farther than any other creature. All it requires is a consciousness to inhabit—and that consciousness need not be human or even organic,” writes Ferris Jabr in an essay called “The Story of Storytelling,” which describes the almost inconceivably deep and interconnected origins of the tales found in the Grimms, in Andersen, and in Perrault, and their counterparts on other continents. Stories, like fire—that special, manageable fire that was stolen from the gods—have really never stopped spreading, and if it is true that some portion of them that we now tell has passed through the bloody holes in the hands of a Jewish carpenter pulled down off a Roman cross two thousand years ago, they are much, much older than that.

Some are so old they can barely move.

A bit of black bark with an eye at its center. A warm dollop of weeping dough.

Some are just in the opening act of becoming ancient.

Say an upturned empty hand held out in a Norwegian church. Or in the hallway of an Indiana high school.

What do you see at the center of your empty hands? When you hold them out in front of you. Forests? Snowstorms? Bonfires? Deep pools? The fade—think raw denim—from a kiss you had forgotten you had been given in your own personal long ago? The fade from a wound that for better or worse means a great deal to you?

These are among the sorts of things that can be hard to determine. That gnaw at us as we gnaw at them.

What I am able to determine at this moment is that since I read on Wikipedia that

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