Mudbow
by Susan Hazen-Hammond

Once there was a woman who loved rainbows so much that if they had been harps, she would have thrummed her way straight into heaven. If they had been oil paints or acrylics, she would have painted her way into MOMA or the Louvre.

She liked stubby rainbows, double rainbows, and rainbows that climbed to the zenith and stopped. She liked rainbows that lingered all through dinner and rainbows that vanished before she could set down the parmesan she was grating and run outside. She loved legless rainbows suspended high in the sky like mistletoe over a doorway and rainbows that looked as if they had planted themselves between trees.

If she had known how, she would have floated up like a helium balloon and ridden rainbows in and out of the sky. Of course, she would have missed her daffodils, her apricot tree, the smell of green chile roasting in autumn, the sound of the noon whistle, and the rest of the life she had left behind, including her husband.

Late one afternoon after a heavy rain, when the wild alliums filled the air with an onion-like perfume, and apricots lay all around, ready to be turned into jam, her husband came out to the back yard and leaned against the eye-like knots of the aspen tree to watch the arc in the sky with her.

“I guess I like rainbows most because of the colors,” she said.

“You’re all the color I need,” he said, and wrapped himself around her.

Another time, when he was inside, reading a physics book, she called into the dim house, “Actually, what I like best is the way the rainbow combines logic and chance.”

She wanted him to say that she was all the logic and chance he needed, but he didn’t, so she went inside and stood in front of him, watching his eyeballs roll back and forth below his eyelids as he read.

Finally he put a bookmark between the pages and looked up. “What exactly do you mean?” he said.

She explained that rainbows are as random as pockets of pitch popping in a fire, a matter of luck and timing and where you are standing in relation to the sun when the rain lets up. But like heartbeats and drumbeats and tambourines, they also follow natural laws. The sunlight has to enter the raindrops at a certain angle so that light can pass through them in a certain way and refract out into the air beyond the rain.

Her husband smiled his amused scientist’s smile, the one that meant he thought she was talking about something she didn’t understand. “Next thing you know, you’re going to be explaining to me how to get bark beetles to plant new trees all across the West,” he said. His lips and his eyebrows twitched, as if he were trying not to laugh.

“Just remember, the sun and the rain are like us,” she said.

“Am I the sun or the rain?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh,” he said. He opened his book, removed the supernova bookmark she’d given him for his birthday, and read.

The next time she saw a rainbow, she looked in and saw that her husband was dozing through the news, so she didn’t tell him that now she knew for sure what she liked best: You can always count on blue to be blue, and you know blue will always stay between green and violet, and never try to worm in between orange and red.

In short, as predictable as you, she might have said, if he’d been listening.

One day towards the end of July, the woman watched an after-dinner rainbow fade above the branches of the junipers in the greenbelt behind the house. Then she began her evening chores. She scrubbed the toilet, polished the chrome faucets, washed the dishes, cleaned the dust bunnies from behind the dryer, and folded a load of clothes, carefully separating her rainbow-colored underwear from her husband’s white jockey shorts in neat, well-balanced stacks.

When she finished, he looked up from his game of solitaire and said in an odd voice, “Now you’ve really spoiled things. I was planning to do all that.”

The comment was so unlike him that she wondered if he was coming down with summer flu. “You should have said something,” she said.

“You should have known what I was thinking.”

“Known what you were thinking? Is something wrong?”

“Not with me,” he answered, and stomped outside.

When he didn’t return, she looked out and saw that he had taken the woodpile apart and was restacking the pieces just so, from longest to shortest, as neatly and carefully as if he were preparing an exhibit for the county fair.

The next evening after dinner she brought the mop in from the back porch and asked if he wanted to wash the kitchen floor.

“You are so demanding,” he said.

“I’m happy to mop it myself,” she said. “I just don’t want you to be angry at me later.”

“What makes you imagine you can predict my feelings?” he asked.

“But last night you said....”

“You are so tiresome,” he said.

She mopped the tiles, rinsed out the mop, twisted it dry with her hands, and went to bed, hoping her husband would come out on the other side of his strange mood soon.

The following evening, without comment, she vacuumed the living room. When she shut the machine off, her husband said, “I wish you’d stop making all the decisions around here. You’re turning me into an old man.”

“You mean because I vacuumed the rug without asking you?”

“No.”

“Then can you give me an example?”

“Figure it out yourself, Smarty Pants.”

After that the woman didn’t clean house for several days, until her husband shouted, “What kind of wife are you?”

She looked out the window and saw a rainbow splashed across the sky. I wish I were a rainbow, so I wouldn’t care if people yelled at me, she thought. She closed her eyes and imagined she could feel the rainbow’s colors drape themselves across her shoulders, like one of her grandmother’s crocheted shawls. Then she sat down beside her husband and said, “I can see that something has been bothering you. If you tell me what it is, I’m sure we can work it out.”

“Just because you say something, doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, you look totally weird tonight.”

She ran to the mirror and saw a woman who might have been herself except that her forehead was as red as a stop sign, her chin as purple as eggplant, her cheeks as green as spinach. Her nose was yellow, her lips blue, her eyes orange, as if she had washed her face in the rainbow, and the colors had stuck on.

By morning, the rainbow in her face had disappeared, leaving her wan and gray. After that the woman tried to stay cheerful as she waited for her husband to turn back into the person she had lived with so long. But the more she tried, the angrier he became. She talked less and less often and spent more and more time searching the sky for rainbows.

However, the rainy season was ending. After one more rainbow, faint and so tentative that it rose barely as tall as a stunted Arctic forest, autumn came, and with it drought. At night, lying in the dark, listening to the wind and smelling dust mixed with the smoke of forest fires, the woman visualized a rainbow arching over the bed, protecting her from the intruder who snored beside her: her husband, the stranger. Then she fell asleep with the rainbow’s colors in her heart. But as the weeks passed, the air grew drier, dustier, smokier and cold; her husband continued to rage, and she found it harder and harder to imagine a rainbow, or even rain. 

If she’d been a different person, she might have left her husband or staged an intervention and forced him to see a doctor or a therapist, or she would have gone to one herself. Or she might have invited him to hike in the mountains with her, then lured him off the trail and let him wander alone in confusion among the fir trees, pines, and fallen logs for an hour or two before she rescued him. Or maybe she would have invited him to go walking on the mesa, so she could trip him into the prickly pears and smash his face onto the spines.

But she didn’t do any of that, because she was who she was.

Still, the more he became who he wasn’t, the less she knew who she was. By the time frost had bitten off all the blossoms on her apricot tree, she could no longer think clearly, or sleep more than an hour or two without waking. One morning she forgot to fix oatmeal with scrambled eggs for breakfast and made buffalo burgers instead. Another time she set out to buy groceries, but halfway to the store, she couldn’t remember where she meant to go, so she stopped for gas, only to find that she had left her purse at home with everything she needed inside it. She had to call her husband to rescue her.

All this made him that much angrier. “I don’t even know who you are anymore,” he said. “If I’d wanted a stupid wife, I would have married one. But I didn’t and I don’t.” 

***

The rainy season returned. One evening in late June, after a downpour, the clouds pulled far enough back from the mountains for the sun to shine through the narrow band of blue sky above the peaks before it set. High in the air, rising far above the tops of the junipers and piñons, there appeared the fullest, most intensely colored rainbow the woman had ever seen. She ran out to the end of the mesa and saw that the rainbow’s left foot disappeared into the pavement in a parking lot down in the valley. Its right foot colored the wisps of damp smoke rising from a dump.

The rainbow was so intense that the air smelled of some of its colors and tasted of others: pomegranates and orange peel, lemons and fresh-cut grass, blueberries and lilacs.

Just then the woman’s husband ran up, panting. He leaned forward and propped his hands against his legs. When he’d caught his breath, he said, “Why are you out here staring at a stupid rainbow when you ought to be home making my dinner?”

“But you used to like rainbows,” she wailed.

“You think you know everything, don’t you?” he said.

Maybe he was right, she thought, as she walked home ahead of him. Maybe this was all her fault. She was the problem, not him. What kind of wife watched rainbows when she should have been cooking dinner? But just as she reached their back yard, she remembered that she had already made dinner and served it, and he had eaten, and so had she. All at once she hated the rainbow, curving above the apricot tree and the aspen, above the cactus and the stubby piñons, above the roofs and the chimneys and the woodpiles and the schoolhouses, as if trying to prove that life was beautiful.

What a lie, she thought.

She bent over in pain and saw mud all around her in the garden. Without stopping to wonder what she was doing, or how, she scooped up as much as she could carry and flew into the sky. Quickly, as if applying a thick layer of adobe to the outside of a new house, she smeared the mud across the rainbow, until nothing was left but a dirt-colored arch.

For the first time in months, the woman felt something like happiness, or even peace. “I showed that damn rainbow,” she shouted, as she floated back down to the ground.

She found her husband on the couch, finishing a sandwich. Bread crumbs and bits of peanut butter and jelly flecked his clothes and the upholstery. He brushed his hands together, wiped his mouth on his arm, and said, “What on earth did you do now? You’ve got mud all over your clothes.”

She flicked some in his face, and was so surprised at what she’d done, and at the pleasure it gave her, that she grabbed the radio and took it into the bathroom, where she locked the door, turned the volume as loud as it would go, and took a long, soaking bath.

***

At first the only person who noticed that the rainbow had turned to mud was an old man who had been out walking and had seen it all, from the moment the woman flew into the sky until she sank back down and disappeared among the roofs and backyard trees. He telephoned his children. “I wish you could see it,” he said. “She took all the colors away. Every last one. She didn’t even spare the green.” But they had seldom listened to him before, and they didn’t listen now. 

Normally, a rainbow made of mud would wash away in the next rain, sliding down the sky glop by glop. But the woman had put so much despair, resentment, and rage into the mud that it hardened until it was firmer than concrete, even though it weighed no more than air.

Since the mudbow didn’t depend on rain, sun, refraction, or chance, it hung in the sky day and night, wherever it chose, often huge and high overhead. Sometimes it stretched from horizon to horizon. And every time the sun tried to make a rainbow, anywhere on earth, the mudbow shoved itself in front of the rainbow and hid it from the light, so that nothing was left except mud.

Soon meteorologists and preachers, shamans and teachers, plumbers and writers, farmers and everyone else, even meth dealers and Honda thieves, were talking of nothing but the mudbow.

Politicians called the mudbow a terrorist attack, and several dozen previously unknown insurgency groups posted internet messages claiming responsibility.

Psychologists called the mudbow a mass hallucination, brought on by anxieties about war and global warming. Pharmaceutical companies promoted pills guaranteed to stop delusions, and doctors wrote so many prescriptions, their hands curled up with cramps.

Bleary-eyed scientists, who were working day and night to become the first to define the mudbow’s features and win the Nobel Prize, told talk show hosts that some previously unrecognized force of nature had manifested itself. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs showered the scientists with grants and bribes, hoping to acquire the exclusive rights to tap the mudbow and sell its energy.

Among ordinary people, the sane blamed the crazy and the crazy blamed the sane. Some people blamed the devil. Others said the mudbow was God’s punishment to humankind for tolerating abortions, gay marriage, safe sex, or cloning. Christians, Jews, and Hindus blamed Muslims, who blamed them back. People who lived in forests and caves in the most remote parts of earth saw the mudbow as proof that the Rain Goddess or the Sun God, the Day God or the Night Goddess, the Goddess of the East or the God of the West would soon cover the earth with oceans of mud and destroy trees and caves and humankind, the way He, or She, had covered the rainbow with mud and killed its colors.

People everywhere prayed, even atheists, but all the prayers on earth couldn’t wash the mud away.

Seeing the dirty half circle overhead, day after day, people grew more and more agitated and depressed, so that in houses and trailers and caves and brush shelters, women yelled at men and men yelled at women. Everyone yelled at children, and hit them until they bled.

***

The woman who had covered the rainbow with mud was so busy congratulating herself on her creation that she barely noticed the commotion. One evening she even thanked her husband for causing her to discover her true mission in life, but the virus or fungus or varmints or prions or plaque or whatever change in blood chemistry had made him turn difficult the previous summer had grown worse. He couldn’t comprehend what she was talking about, and accused her of wanting to chain him in the back yard like a dog, beneath the ominous eyes of the aspen.

Not long after that, he stopped talking. When she asked what was wrong, he crawled under the bed and wouldn’t come out, except to go to the bathroom and eat. For fear of squashing him in the night, she slept on the couch.

Meanwhile, people around the world stopped going to work, because what good did it do to work when the world was coming to an end?

As economies collapsed and people starved, countries blamed each other. Venezuela invaded Colombia. Finland attacked Iceland. The United States declared war on everyone, and dropped bombs like crazy.

One August afternoon, when the woman was sitting on her patio admiring the mudbow as it arched, magnificent and grand, all the way up into the stratosphere, an atomic bomb exploded at its apex. The mudbow didn’t even sway, but as the woman watched the mushroom cloud drift up towards the moon, she understood at last what a terrible mistake she had made.

That night, while her husband slept in his new favorite spot on the linoleum floor beside the dryer, she tried to fly back up into the sky so she could wash the mud off the rainbow, but nothing worked. She jumped up as high as she could. She visualized herself growing lighter and lighter. She took off her clothes. She stood on her head. She dragged the ladder out and climbed as high on the aspen as she dared.

Nothing.

Remembering the way she had scooped up the mud and flown with no effort the first time, she drove to an all-night store and bought seven buckets. She filled them with water, balanced one on her head, one on each shoulder, and bent slowly and carefully at the knees until she could pick the other buckets up, two on each side. Her head ached. Her shoulders burned. Her hands felt as if the weight of the water would rip them off her wrists. Still, she stood motionless, waiting to be lifted up.

Again, nothing, except that after a few minutes, the buckets on her head and shoulders tumbled, dousing her.

By dawn she felt as angry, frustrated, desperate, and tired as she had before she flew into the sky the first time, but now even that didn’t help.

The next night she tried again, and the next, and the next, and the next. But no matter what she did, she could not fly. She gave up and took to spending her days in the yard, talking to the mudbow. “Aren’t you tired of being brown?” she coaxed, with her face turned skyward. “Think how pretty you will be if you just get rid of all that mud.”

The mudbow ignored her.

“What's wrong with you?” she screamed at the mudbow one afternoon. “Don’t you know I’m the one who gave you life, so I can take it away?”

When her husband heard her shouting, he came running out and spoke for the first time in weeks. “You shouldn’t bother the mudbow,” he said as calmly as he would have, three summers back. “He has as much right to exist as you do.”

When she heard his old, matter-of-fact voice, she hugged him, wept, and told him she loved him.

“I know,” he said. “I love you, too.”

After that he never spoke again, but he did go back to sleeping in their bed. Some nights he clutched her so tightly that she woke up gasping for breath.

Meanwhile, the mudbow gave no sign that it heard her, or cared.

Finally one night towards the end of the rainy season, after she’d watched the ten o’clock news, with its famines and wars and scientific debate about how to smash mudbows, she whispered up at the moonlit mud arch, “Don’t you believe in some force larger than you are?” For a moment it seemed as if the mudbow trembled, but afterwards she wasn’t sure. 

“Think of it,” she said, looking into the sky the next night. “You could save the world just by washing yourself off.” That very instant, a heavy fog rolled in, which was so unusual where she lived, even in the rainy season, that the woman wondered if the universe was giving her a sign.

“Please take the mudbow away,” she said to the fog, before she went to bed. But the next morning the fog was gone, and the mudbow remained.

After that the woman gave up, but maybe something she had said to the mudbow had helped, because on the very last rain of the season, with lightning and cloudbursts all around, mud started falling in brown dollops and blobs onto the ground. In the sky, a bit of yellow appeared, then a patch of violet, then a trace of orange until, by late afternoon, when the sun came out, the rainbow was fully itself.

That night, the woman’s husband died in his sleep, with a peaceful look on his face. The woman kissed his cheeks, his belly, and the palms of his hands. She cried and wondered if, in some strange and inexplicable way, he had been the mudbow all along.

***

All over the world, people sang, danced, and made love. Soldiers, guerrilleros, rebels, and counterinsurgents smashed their guns to pieces and hugged the very people they’d been trying to kill. Governments held vast celebrations in which leaders promised that as long as there were rainbows, they would never fight wars again.

It wasn’t true, of course, but at least life returned to normal.

As time passed, the woman thought about writing a memoir, but she was too bewildered and ashamed by all the chaos and deaths blamed on the mudbow.

One night, the mudbow came to her in a dream and said that her mistake had not been that she was angry at the rainbow, but only that she had painted it with mud. For months she brooded about the dream, and her life. She longed for the mudbow to talk to her again. But he didn’t, even in her deepest sleep. After a while she was no longer sure if she had truly dreamed his voice, or only imagined the dream.

Then one year on her birthday, just after a rain, the sun came out, a rainbow appeared, and the woman felt something inside her loosen and lighten. For the second time in her life, she flew into the sky. This time, when she reached the rainbow, she disappeared into it and stayed.

***

Nobody knows what happened after that.

Some people insist the mudbow was a hoax. Others swear that the only way to stop the mudbow from coming back is to hang a mudbow on your bedroom wall or wear a mudbow on a chain around your neck. Many people refuse to discuss the mudbow at all, but they do talk about a woman who lives hidden in the rainbow. They say that if you feel so miserable or angry you can no longer think, or if all you can bear to do is scream or throw dishes or tire irons, the woman in the rainbow might bend down and lift you up to be with her, so you can rant until your complaints float away with the clouds. Then she will carry you gently back to earth.

Other people say, No, no, the woman in the rainbow is not interested in your troubles, and if you mention them when you’re visiting her, she will throw you out of the sky. If you’re lucky, you’ll just crash land hard back into your life. If you’re not, you may die impaled on the top of a dead pine tree, the way their second cousin’s Aunt Martha or their third stepdaughter’s Great Uncle Joe or their best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s mom died a few years ago.

Either way, those who claim they’ve visited the woman who lives in the rainbow agree that up close the rainbow smells faintly of green onions and tastes like apricot jam. They say that after they returned, they understood something new about logic and chance. They say it doesn’t matter if blue is always blue. They say we all are sunlight refracting through raindrops. We all are the rainbow. We all are the mud.

They say, Listen to the wind and the rain, the day and the night, the trees and the rivers, and you will know what to do with what is left of your one unrepeatable life.

“Spider Woman’s Web: Native American Legends about Women’s Power” and other books by Susan Hazen-Hammond are available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

“Lantern with Words” by Annie Dawid

See Annie Dawid’s art, writing and more at http://www.anniedawid.com/
Learn about Dawid’s writer’s retreat at http://www.bloomsburywest.com/