Nisio and Shula

By Mia Kirsi Stageberg

A restless young man leaves his stark homeland to travel across entire continents. He seeks something he can't define, and after a stint in the circus he moves on, driving camels and wandering with deer hunters. When he meets a startling, isolated woman healer in the far North, he's taken aback—even frightened by her. They're mutually curious, but he disappoints the heartfelt woman by not understanding her work. When their relationship ignites, passion leads to happiness, loss, and danger. The story depicts fear of The Other as well as disorienting spiritual experience and longing for redemption. It's an adventure of two very different spirits, what they choose, and what chooses them.

"Mia Kirsi Stageberg’s fiction has an intense sensuality like Proust, only edgier, stranger." —Geoff Rips, author of award-winning novel The Truth

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mia Kirsi Stageberg
• Release date: Aug 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370112074

Mia Kirsi Stageberg

Mia Kirsi Stageberg’s earliest fiction was published in the New Directions annuals, 1960s and 1970s. She has been a researcher, art writer, cloth sculptor, radio documentarist, editor, creative writing teacher, oral historian, and singer in a few bands. Her work includes a published novel; stories, prose poems, and articles have appeared online and in journals and anthologies. She lives in Japantown, San Francisco and is working on another novel.

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Nisio and Shula

By Mia Kirsi Stageberg

Copyright 2016 Mia Kirsi Stageberg

Smashwords Edition

Originally published serially

By Caracol Journal 1975-1976

To Ronnie Burk

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Part One: Nisio Leaves Home

Part Two: Shula Leaves Home

Part Three: Beyond Home

Acknowledgments

About Mia Kirsi Stageberg

Other Books by Mia Kirsi Stageberg

Part One: Nisio Leaves Home

Nisio came from a land of immolating heat. The sun had mad, crossed eyes: a mouthful of dried blood, weasel's teeth, and a jaguar bone like an arrow through its nose. It had never loved anything, it had never spoken or cried, and the people who could stay alive beneath it were formed by it. This fact was well known to those who lived in the land. Nisio, too. He had never looked at himself in a mirror. He did not trust likenesses.

Although the land was flat, one had to be sure-footed. Stony red-marbled offal, infested with predatory worms, stood for rocks. You could trip. For many villagers, their singular wish was a kill. Their gravity: to kill each other, or anything. But it wasn't love for murder. They had just been born listening to a black roar in their throats. In wood-rimmed doorways like black slots sat some old women who picked their teeth, listening deeply with charred eyes to some awful inner music. At noon the older men sat down to eat with quick, lithe forks, fierce and whiskery in their absorption.

A body that could contain so much sun-grown blood was bound to be a bruise. Could a body hold it? After such a long time, these people had come to act like they had special bodies and souls, made not like petals or tender flowing water, but like thorns, hooves, hooklike hair. It was as though the sun pushed its people into a rarefied inner state. Young children, babies even, wore faces heavy with concentration. They had work to do, sensing how their parents seemed to scan the land for an object. And what object? An object was not-themselves. A vortex, a submissive hole, a stranger, a not-sun. Actual strangers were automatic voids to them, pieces of human not-black-air. All that was empty in their sun's sight was target. Target: in a neighbor's averted eyes, in a cousin's back shuffling away, and also in the sparse, dwarfed trees who screamed with fear when the people approached. A man whose life had been spent this way was propelled to attack. If he held an actual knife, someone's life was ended.

Nisio had a fierce inner sun from birth or before birth. This boy, Nisio, felt in himself the chance of killing his brothers over a girl, his brother-in-law over his sister, before he had brothers at all. The inflamed air lacerated his breath; in fact he felt the very earth under his feet as a ripped body. He was a quieter, more brooding, straighter-standing boy, an even more loyal son, a harder worker, than the rest. All his family were tough, wiry, they were all brooders; but he was the hardest brooder they had produced. Consequently he was a bit marked and set off. Yet there was another unusual thing in him, as though he wanted to be another kind of being. It was no surprise to his mother when he decided to leave the country altogether, though it broke her heart and she died.

Nisio never went back. Someone else killed his brother-in-law; with his mother gone there was no pull on his heart to return. He was nineteen when he joined the circus. He'd had no women, and there he had them all. He traveled around Europe acting bored. But inwardly something strained him to agony. He wanted something born in himself. He didn't know its shape, but he wanted to get away from suns and holes and hurt.