This is a story that has already happened. It is also happening right now. It is never not happening. In a land that touches our own, there lived four sisters. Like all, they were both and not special for…
Memory begins in myth.
I speak of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: who we are, our connections to others, all the muscles and wounds bound together by words to make us us.
Indigenous literary studies scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes, “It’s our teachings—and our stories—that make us human.” And in fact, DHJ’s words reimagine those of Elder Thomas King: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” It is, perhaps, manifest how these sayings beget future sayings—narrative and theory being a tree from which all grows.
To be clear, I am not Indigenous—rather, the whitest of settler colonials. But these words felt—still feel—like truth I had been failing to articulate for so long. They explained why I looked to books to understand the world around me: in the outside age of alienation and anxious individualism, stories held connection. And so my dreams blurred reality and fiction, collapsing time and space: I was both child and adult. In melted topographies of memory, everything turned into and was changed by everything else. Perhaps humans are syncretistic beings. Perhaps this is why our stories are as well.
For what is myth if not syncretic? And if myth is syncretic, then is not memory as well: how the things we learn shape perceptions.
I write to learn. Thoughts feel too fast and disparate, and writing is how I sit with things, recognize connections. I wrote this story for my three sisters and in it, recognized us as the cardinal directions—geographies mirrored by personalities. This story helped me see my relationship to my sisters—and in that, my relation to myself—more clearly.
And so I write to know things because I believe knowledge—not the acquisition but the process that is searching—is humanity’s best part. And I think that when we become less curious—as many now have—what holds us together threatens to break. That is, something like fascism, for me, represents a fundamentally uncurious approach to the world, an approach that coheres around its own narrow, oft-false version of self. And in such constructions, everything other is a threat.
This is not to suggest that stories can unwrite something like fascism. It’s already been written; it can’t be put back in the box. But we can write something else, something that imagines other futures, other ways of being. Maybe then we can work to create a world worth inheriting.
KYM CUNNINGHAM (she/they) once graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a PhD in English. They do a few things in order to pay to live in Southern California, spending whatever constitutes free time traveling the coast with their partner and feral dog-child, Truffle Monster. If so inclined, you can read more of Kym’s work at kym-era.com. If the cost is prohibitive (especially if you identify as a member of a marginalized community, including currently and previously incarcerated writers), contact Kym via their website for complimentary copies. We work to make the future worth inheriting. Stay feral, and find Kym on Instagram @kym.era.
