KRISTINE ZEIGLER

Strangled by Sapphires

      No one ever stops to consider a ghost’s feelings. You haunt us as much as we haunt you. The sapphire miner, the father, and her, the American – you have got to end this, please. I beg you all; let me depart.
      A sapphire is an antidote to poison. At least, that’s what people used to believe.
      “Sapphire” comes from the Sanskrit Sanih Priya, “precious to Saturn,” the god of time, abundance, the seasons, and farming. The Persians claimed that sapphires, blue as the heavens, shielded against evil. Russians believed they gave the wearer courage, and the Greeks beheld them as third eyes to understand the oracles. The Pope told his bishops to set the stones in rings as a way to lock away profane secrets and to remind us of the less rational, more vulgar parts of ourselves.
      Saturn smiles upon the mortals who clench this rock, corundum dolores, before they release it to the gemstone traders.
      About the photo. I am the girl in a rose-colored cotton t-shirt, lips cold white, eyelids closed, my cheeks brown as the water from the mining pits on the island of Madagascar east of the African continent.
      The miner does not know what he did in the darkness of that night, no one saw him drag me to the trees, crash his fist into my head, tear open my shirt and pants. I fought back as he readied to shove a piece of himself inside of me. The more I screamed, the harder he flattened me into the earth, so I bit into his face, his nostril, the soft of his ear, and as the blood ran down his face he rose up and disappeared into the forest. A darkness came over me, my own blood rushed out of where his punch had landed on my ear and at last I stopped knowing anything.
      The miner is no longer a man; he is a monster, a slave, his feet bleed. He is hungry, but the traders say he’ll be paid, that his family will be rich, that these gems will bring prosperity to all whose fingers fondle the beloveds, their Sanih Priya.
      It never happens. The traders pay him in more and more drugs and in less and less cash.
      The miner wants to rest and remember something. Every day he walks to the trees and finds the place. He stops there but nothing comes to him. He cannot recall what he did, cannot think proper about anything; the drugs work just so.
      Papa, with a copy of the photo taken by the gendarme, attends a meeting in Ambatondrazaka. Officials sit in a room discussing the food that must be grown, the children that must have schools, the jobs that do not exist.
      Papa says, “Ask the farmers down below the mine what they want. Ask the elected officials. Ask the corrupted officials. Ask a mother. What do they need?”
      “What do they need?” an American asks. She is visiting, a charity worker who thinks she can solve the problems.
      “I will tell you,” Papa says. “Les forces. Armies, uniforms, and guns. The laws must be enforced.”
      Papa, he comes to me daily to tell me the news, that the Americans want to close the mines. There are women in groups far away raising money for the lemurs. But what about us? He talks of the pus-colored water in the holes, the blue tents where children try to sleep. He tells me about his walking eleven hours down to the city, to a mayor’s hands delivering the photograph of the girl in rose.
      Weary and sore, Papa takes a deep breath; he longs for a coffee. I always loved drinking it with Papa. Ghosts don’t get to drink coffee. Another affront.
      A man at the meeting – an important man from the capital, a man everyone is listening to, seated next to the mayor – shakes Papa’s photograph. As it passes down the table to the American, I glance at the girl in rose who is me but who is not me anymore.
      “You are the girl from the forest who takes the trees apart, slashes and burns them to make way for rice. You are the girl who grows rice to feed her people,” the American says.
      “I did not ask you to remember me!” I shout. Every night, just as I forget and prepare to pass into the next place, the American is back, looking at my village, inventing a life for me.
      “You know nothing about me, you have made it all up,” I say.
      “I’m doing research, I’m meeting with your community, I’ve made appointments with government leaders in the capital,” she says. “I told the environment minister that he must look into this!”
      “It is over, you need to stop.”
      “But your story is important, it needs to be told. The oppressive and extractive systems here are killing innocent people, polluting the water, and destroying the forests, the Indra, bamboo, ring-tailed and sifaka lemurs. All to make foreigners rich.”
      “A story will not save me. It won’t save anyone,” I say.

      I pray: Papa, be as hard as this gem, as enduring and blue as the Indian Ocean, as clear-eyed as a seer, as durable as love, as precious as life. Lord, expunge the miner’s memory. And the American – tell her a story is not a gun or a gendarme’s badge.
      “No, I agree with you there,” the American says.
      She does this, she speaks to me, even when I have told her how little I care for her company!
      “The story about your life and death is more powerful than a weapon,” she says. “The words are strung together to reveal how one thing happens, and then another, and another. They help us to understand. If we understand, then we love. If we can love, then the situation can change. A story gives us instructions on how we can survive this change, all change.”
      “Write it then. Then leave me alone. Will you permit me my final rest?” She lifts her eyes to mine. She can see ghosts.
      “I am sorry you have had to relive these memories. You deserve better. I’ll finish writing your story. Then, I promise I’ll stop seeking you.”
      “Thank you. I’m ready to go,” I say.
      “You’re precious, you know,” the American says. “Your life, it mattered.”
      A sapphire is worth so much more, but I know she means well.

Kristine Zeigler studied art history and French at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Zeigler’s previous books include Connor and the Love Left Behind: The Leaning Dog Who Changed Our Life and Cover This Country Like Snow and Other Stories. Her stories and poetry have appeared in Forge Journal, The Bark, The Peregrine, Charles River Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Barely South Review, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, and Menda City Review. Zeigler is CEO at Planet Women, an environmental nonprofit. She also supports and mentors nature writers as co-founder of New Nature Writers. She holds a private pilot license and flies a Cessna.