A Calendar Is A Snakeskin: 12 Ghostmonths

By Kristine Langley Mahler

Kristine Langley Mahler is tracking the signs. The year she turns thirty-eight, she keeps finding snakes, bears, ghosts, and ancestors at her doorstep, pointing toward the person she needs to become. As an eclipse approaches, she begins to follow their demands and&nb

• Language: English
• Publisher: Autofocus Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781957392233

Book preview

A CALENDAR IS A SNAKESKIN

12 Ghostmonths

Kristine Langley Mahler

autofocus books

Orlando, Florida

©Kristine Langley Mahler, 2023

All rights reserved.

Published by Autofocus Books

autofocuslit.com

Essay/Literature

ISBN:

print: 978-1-957392-22-6

ebook: 978-1-957392-23-3

Cover Illustration ©Amy Wheaton

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937718

for my siblings

and of course, for the ghosts

A CALENDAR IS A SNAKESKIN

12 Ghostmonths

Ghostwatch

Bear

A bear near the waterfall’s plummet pool, loping along the edges of the canyon floor.

I had seen the scene in my dream-mind a hundred times: the bear far enough that it wasn’t a threat, but still close enough that if it wanted me, it could have scampered up my side of the canyon. My husband and daughters thought the animal at the bottom of this canyon in Bandelier National Park might be a mountain goat, but the instant I saw its shape I knew exactly what it was.

It was the bear that had lingered on the scrub-brush edge of the gravel road behind my employee housing in Montana the summer I was nineteen. The bear with its back to me, rummaging through the juniper berries, a rumbling fur-ripple that stopped me dead in my tracks as I then grabbed the arm of my fellow employee and did the one thing we had been instructed never to do: turned my back on the bear and ran. The bear did not pursue me. The bear waited. I was certain, later, that it had telegraphed my fear to its friends; I was so scared that I had turned in my two-week resignation notice the next day and, a few days later, took a final hike with another fellow employee. Six hours and only halfway around the famous lake, we rounded a corner to find bear scat, green and steaming, in the center of the trail. We did not speak about it, but we sped up the frequency of our hey, bear chant and I slipped out of my body, floated above the trail and saw a bear like a spectator, perched on the mountain, waiting. The bear rested on its haunches before launching itself forward into every chase-dream I would have forever after.

So when I saw the bear in New Mexico, nineteen years later, I was not startled. Of course the next movement in my growth-clock must be facing the bear while awake in the dreamfear: miles away from the trailhead, no one but us down a canyon in Bandelier with only a backpack of granola bars and a snake venom extractor. I was calm. It was finally happening. I didn’t have to wonder any more what I would do when the nightmare transmogrified from subconscious into conscious.

The previous night, when I’d read my tarot cards under the lunar eclipse in Capricorn—closing out the 2018-2020 Cancer/Capricorn eclipse season—the Hanged Man had appeared in the position of where to grow. The Hanged Man means trusting the universe and waiting through suspense. Of course I saw a bear the next morning. It was the release I had been waiting for, the fear I had been waiting to encounter.

My husband panicked when we saw the bear. He didn’t want us to get any closer, thinking the bear would lumber up the steep canyon walls once it recognized our meat-bodies. But even though I’d been the one recounting my bear dreams for almost twenty years after sweaty wake-ups, naming the dreamcanyons I knew intimately, the scenarios with a seashell-like closing of doors as the bear pawed his way through the house toward the core I could not leave, I was transfixed by this bear in the canyon, not repelled.

Over my husband’s protests, I asked my daughters to come closer to the canyon edge so I could take their picture, hoping I could see the speck of bear in the background, a form of proof. But later, after I uploaded the photo to my laptop and zoomed in, I had failed to catch it and I could not find the bear, every dark shadow a trick of the eye.

We retraced our path out of the canyon and I left my husband and daughters at the footbridge so I could walk another trail alone. I looked up at the rock face of another canyon, trying to find pictographs. High above the ghostbeams of a cliff dwelling’s vanished second story, someone had painted a sun on one side of a natural fissure, a full moon on the other. The path to reach the lofted rock face, even centuries ago when the dwelling’s roof would have been intact, was precarious. Someone left those pictographs as a message that we must be both light and darklight, both sun and moon; any divide is temporary. Fear needs to be met with trust because the universe will bring us into the places we need to face.

Stick

I am sitting on a covered patio in New Mexico, a house I will call home for a month, watching a bird with a frighteningly long beak make tentative hops from piñon to apricot tree before settling into a basket on the paved stones. The bird tweezes out a clump of dried growth before it repairs to a nearby nest, the bird clutching its prize in its mouth.

I am thinking about homes and what is needed to construct one, wondering what materials I have woven into mine. My husband and daughters are gone, hiking in a nearby canyon while I sit on this patio in a state that is only temporarily mine and read about being betwixt-and-between, what came before and what will come after. I’d been watching the bird warily, considering its ancient dinosaur mouth a threat and noting the

Reviews for A Calendar Is A Snakeskin

[Morgan · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I'll be frank: I don't understand why this book exists or why anyone would read it/recommend it to others. It's a meandering, performative ramble about crystals/tarot/destiny masquerading as meditative introspection, with gems like, "I had no idea eclipse energy isn't something you want to f*ck with." The author seems to be striving for profound personal insight (and something that might be worth our time/money as readers), but it sounds more like she's trying to justify the inordinate amount of time she spends scratching rocks and reading constellation fanfiction.

I admit, I started to wonder if I had this book all wrong (COMEDY? PARODY? AM I SUPPOSED TO BE LAUGHING?) when a rogue astrologer straight-up sends her into an identity crisis by using a system that rearranges her "houses"; the passage reads like an interview with some vapid YA author discussing the half-baked magic system in her latest novel, "A [Noun] of [Noun] and [Noun]", not like anything I'm supposed to take seriously. And then IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS, she's like: "I saw a snake; it was long and brown; I wondered what it meant, but the last dream I had was about Oreos not snakes!" Tweet that with a few thinking emojis and I would 100% interpret it as satire. But I read the review-blurbs ("THIS BOOK IS A TALISMAN OF STONE, OF MILK") and no, they're way too hyperbolic; it's still hilarious, but I think she's playing it straight.

Anyway, I don't get it. But that lady who pushed her kids out of a moving car because she thought the eclipse was going to eat them or something, she'd probably get it. Do with that what you will.