Some days I am painfully aware of being a little kid in an adult body. Take today, for example. I was going about my grown-up life. I had my list and was heading to town to grab my weekly mocha and get a few staples from the general store.
I threw open my door and stopped dead. The blue sky that had graced my morning and was still visible from my kitchen window was being swallowed by an inky fog. I stared at the approaching gloom and took a step. What I did next surprised even me. I shut the door, took off my coat and hunkered into my overstuffed couch.
First, I thought it had been in response to the disturbing Stephen King novella, The Mist, which I had read a few days back. But that didn’t feel right. So I continued to sift through the emotions that made me react this way until a memory bubbled into my consciousness.
To my people, the fog heralds the coming of ‘the one who steals us.’ In times long past, the fog came and children went missing. So as a child I was warned to run ahead of the fog and get home. As a kid I thought, “yeah, sure, another way to scare me into doing what I’m told.”
Then a young boy went missing and hushed whispers about ‘those that take us’ followed. My adult mind says, “how silly. He was lost in the woods or fell into the icy waters and was swept away.” Then, that little kid in me whispers, “they will take me, too.”
When I shut the door I was asking myself, “how can I be sure that boy wasn’t taken by a mystical group of people who travel in the fog?” So, I did what any child in a grown-up body would do—I decided I could be an adult tomorrow.
Until next time,
(Thanks to James Kari and Alan Boraas and the book A Dena’ina Legacy, K’TL’EGH’I SUKDU, The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky)
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