Seen

The watcher, the sentinel, the interceptor, protection from the powers and principalities who won’t like what you write, who have keen interest in keeping those with no say silenced

She didn’t notice me, didn’t even lift her head as the soft brass ding announced my entrance, never broke focus on whatever she was doing for nearly a minute as I stood just inside the door.

I noticed her hair—locks the color of red oak heart. And from her coiffure, I surmised her a practical woman, unconcerned with what is “in style,” unbothered by opinions of those who are. I doubt she ever wore it any other way.

It was pulled tight from her face, but a few wispy tendrils had escaped meager efforts to tame them. They tickled her jawline in frayed curls, sparking bronze in the slanted light streaming through a west-facing window. In contradiction to the flyaways, there was the braid. Tight, stoic, the criss-crossed pattern reminded me of copperhead hide as it draped across a thin, bare shoulder. Its rubberbanded tassel-end lay coiled in her lap.

Trinkets aren’t my thing. I’d wandered into her shop for the air conditioning, hadn’t planned to offer more than “howdy, just lookin’ around,” but this was even better. A lifetime of wishing for invisibility had finally manifested.

The fragile silence was short-lived, though, cracked with a “how do” as I perused shelves of glassware.

“I am well,” I answered, hoping body language could convey what the politeness I was raised with would not let me voice.

But more queries followed. And since my boundaries have always been permeable, I obliged her questions of where I come from and what brought me to her shop, though with brevity. She asked where I lived. I told her not too far away. She asked about my visit. I said my wife and daughter were in the shop next door. She asked what I did. I told her I was in the beginnings of a new career.

She asked what it was.

That last question produced a little smoke.

Fresh out of college at middle age but smoldering with the world-changing enthusiasm of a graduate half my years, I told her the short version of my journey back to school. I told her about the outrageous optimism riding shotgun with this opportunity to rethink and reengineer who I was. I told her about my conversion, about the prophets who led me to this path: Petersen, Abbey, Leopold, Snyder, and Berry. I told her about my very first essay, published only weeks prior. I told her I was a writer.

Gray eyes at last tilted up to meet mine, and the conversation shifted to particulars. The sincerity in her gaze was like concentrated photons, like sunbeams harnessed and brought to bear through the thick convexity of a magnifying glass on a tiny random point—me.

That was ignition.

A white heat surged in my core, burning my belly, singeing my throat, the words flaming as they leapt from my lips. I told her that I wanted to write about the rivers, about old oak forests and older cedar glades, about little fish swimming in hidden waters and how understanding that we are all connected to everything else, the way of humility, is the panacea to the destruction we’re inflicting with our notions of human dominion.

I told her that I aimed to speak for those entities—liquid, mineral, rooted, scaled, feathered, furred—who had no say.

Her eyes flickered, flashing silver in the golden afternoon light.

“You’ll need help,” she said.

She beckoned to me and ducked below the counter for just a moment, rummaging with deliberation, standing upright just as I reached the cash register, with a strange glass amulet dangling from coarse waxed string. It looked like an eye the color of creek water, its lids a shade of deep ocean blue, bordered in new leaf green, accented with swirls of limestone white.

She nodded toward my hand, then grasped it in hers, tucking the amulet into my palm.

“This is the watcher, the sentinel, the interceptor, protection from the powers and principalities who won’t like what you write, who have keen interest in keeping those with no say silenced.”

Studying the amulet in my palm registered some recognition. I knew a little about the Eye of Horus. I’d read about the nazar boncuğu. But this was neither, or maybe it was both. It was familiar yet fantastic in my hand; smooth contours and heft reminiscent of river stones tumbled in the currents over eons. I raised the amulet, gazing into the cast-iron black of its pupil. Foreign, or at least forgotten, feelings of confidence, alignment, peace beamed from the amulet. And though I don’t cotton much to the mystical, I know that the eye was gazing back at me.

Having never been gifted an apotropaic before, I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t even sure the words existed. I was pretty sure that anything I said would defile the moment.

So all I did was nod and turn as she sat back down and got back to work, leaving the soft brass ding to announce my exit.