Remnants of the First Earth by Ray A. Young Bear

Author:Ray A. Young Bear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1996-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

. . . Just when I looked up from home plate and realized who was pitching the softball, I had already unleashed a furious swing that sent the weather-hardened softball whistling toward a delicate young girl by the name of Selene Buffalo Husband. All the players gasped as the softball shot straight past her extended gloved hand and into her stomach with a loud skin slap.

Before, I hadn’t really taken notice of her, that she had tied a large bowlike knot with her front shirttails, exposing and highlighting her belly button. She was wearing a light red shirt and blue jeans that were cut above the knees. I had been so intent on playing that her presence had failed to register. Which was odd because years before I had had a number of erotic dreams about her. But, on that particular day, the bare skin of her beautiful stomach was the sole contact point. The petrified softball hit her quite hard. She maintained her composure for a good ten seconds before slowly doubling over. As she held her stomach with a gloved hand and propping herself up on one knee with the other hand, her head dropped and her knees buckled.

That’s when I remembered who she was.

She had long shiny brown hair whose tips had been lightened to a brownish red tinge by long hours in the summer sun. The color was identical to that time I first saw her on the warm sidewalk outside of the Why Cheer Theater after the afternoon matinee. Unlike most Settlement girls her age, she had strikingly photogenic qualities. She was even more visually pronounced in bright daylight. Yet, even in the darkness of the movie theater years before, as she struggled to gain her vision sitting beside me, I secretly espied the beauty in her future. There was nothing sinister or “Kensey” Muscatine impure about that, except in old dreams that only embarrass me. The biggest difference between the dreams “Kensey” and I had was that I never acted upon them. “Some children are simply born beautiful,” Grandmother had said once at Horned Serpent Lake, Canada, “and they will grow into beautiful young adults.” Selene Buffalo Husband, as it turned out for me, was one of them.

On that summer day, all of the softball players, myself included, ran up to her after the audible belly impact. What I almost did was turn around and flee. Even my companions, Ted Facepaint and Pat Red Hat, who had been watching from the hillside in a green Oldsmobile, began scolding me loudly for hitting her. I made absolutely sure I was the last one getting to the pitcher s mound. I remember thinking: What am I going to do if she’s seriously hurt? Had that been me, I continued, taking it in the gut—what a strong girl she must indeed be—I’d be writhing in pain like a decapitated snake over the bluish gray pebbles. I stood back and waited anxiously for the right moment. Once her

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