She starts with a name that I do not know how to say. It could be a triangle or one side of the rise from a dip between two mountains. It is more about where and when she appears and how I rely on her, even in her absence. She has not surfaced for a while but I trust she knows what she is doing, or at least, if she is not visible to me then she must be elsewhere, tending to some ground more urgent. Why does she disappear? And where does she go when she is absent to me? I have to accept this autonomy on her part, and I know her lack of appearance in this place does not mean her lack of existence in another. She has a right to be slippery. I found her in a field not far from Pendle, Lancashire, UK. August 2015. August 1612. The women who were accused were taken from the villages to the town. The route traversed along the river.
There is nothing, really, here for you to see. I will tell you that she is a stone, or that she has the possibility of becoming stone, from woman to woman-stone, to stone-woman to stone and back to woman and so on and forever, as a way of practicing edges, her particular route towards and away from kin. Or maybe I can say that she is an almost stone, or a kind of stone, or a type of stone, kind of a type of stone. She is a type of kind, stone, almost.
She stands in the field and closes her eyes although then begins to see. She sees a group of women and stones. No, she sees a group of women-stones. No she sees a group of stone-women. No, she cannot see anything. She feels a texture pulsing moving shifting being becoming back and forth rebounding. She is standing in the field and she is standing with the women, the stone-women, the women-stones. No, I am standing in the field with her and we are pulsing moving shifting being becoming back and forth rebounding. We are standing in the field, with our eyes closed, and then we begin to sink further and further into the ground, into the layers of soil and sand and clay and bedrock, until we reach the women becoming stones becoming women back and forth rebounding. It happens suddenly. It happens suddenly that we are no longer stones and stones are no longer women. It happens very suddenly. It happens in the place where they take the women along the river from the villages to the trial. It happens at night in the field under the layers of earth. It happens with our eyes closed beginning to see. It happens very suddenly and we immediately doubt we have seen anything, you and I, I and you, immediately doubting we have seen or felt anything.