Below Mendenhall Glacier 
published in Foliate Oak, University of Arkansas

 

            Sleeping Child had always lain there, curled up like a new born but long limbed like a girl of two hands old. Sleeping Child would breathe but not so anyone could know. She had a beating heart that no one ever heard, only Spider who felt sorry for her, alive with strong hard bones, cold flowing blood, fine hair like velvet on antlers, but no muscles, no way to move a finger. Spider heard her blood flowing slowly through her body of bone and knew she would sleep until she had grown the muscles to wake up. Only Spider could draw down the mist to make white webs of glistening threads, weave the threads over and over, around and across to cover Sleeping Child. Each year she made more misty white blankets for her, covering her bones, keeping her in comfortable dream sleep. The web blankets were all that grew, year by year, until the last Spider who remembered the tale of why they must weave the webs from the white mist stopped. And the web receded, dripping and drying out, breaking and shifting across Sleeping Child.

            Where her long limbs or strong spine were exposed, the moss settled in, then ferns, flowers, hemlock and spruce until a layer of muscle began to cover the bones beneath the translucent skin. Cold blood flowed and fed the warm growth. Slow breath of life took refuge beneath the bone cage and passed in and out across the upper lip of Sleeping Child.

            If Sleeping Child, now muscled, stronger, stirs in her sleep, her bones crack and pop like frozen tree trunks. When a shiver runs across her skin, everything trembles. When Sleeping Child has lost all the white wet web cover Spider made for her, and all her muscles have covered her bones and warmed her blood, and deepened her breath, then she’ll awake, see the sun, reach up and touch it.