He was virile. He was known to have felled nine aurochs by his lonesome, to have made peace with the wild dogs. Draped behind his loincloth lurked his immense patrilineage, some rumoring him to be the son of the Sun. If survivability was measured in inches, he was by far the fittest of any hunter.
She was wide-hipped. During droughts, she wet-nursed the dry mothers' children with her effluent milk. Where she walked, she precipitated: birds and mice wound her hair into nests, her sweat pooled into fishing holes, her droppings provided banquets for flies and beetles, and her menses gave root to sapling shoots.
Fire was still untamed and forbidden then, a punishment loosed by brooding gods, so heat was scarce. It was raining. He and she took cover under nominal tent of ribs, hide, and brush. Their colluding pheromones coaxed them to conjoin for warmth. It stopped raining after many days.
The herds migrated eastwards, from the then barren flats to the alfalfaed steppes. So he and the hunters followed, but she did not. The east was frigid and perilous, and she was moored by her eighth month of pregnancy. The same curious impulses that made the mothers mothers brought them to found a village. They erected huts and halls. Each mother kindly repaid her birth-debt with a fertile daughter of her own. And the daughters had daughters who had daughters, proliferating necessary warmth throughout their village. Over thousands of years they grew to have aqueducts and monasteries and auto dealerships.
The herds dwindled, and the hunters atrophied down to skin-and-sinew ghosts who survived meekly on grubs. They trudged through the undead tundra where sometimes no meat nor sun would be seen for so long they reasoned they must also be dead. They slew and consumed the few creatures they saw, sometimes elk, sometimes other hunters. Dense blizzards utterly negated sight and sound leading each hunter to believe himself to be the last man alive. Thousands of years of white. Further east, colors returned to the earth -- greens and blonds. The hunters found queer beasts unlike those they originally sought, but savory nonetheless.
He and she drifted apart and so did their continents. She stayed herself, he himself.
Tectonics had split them once with a real distance. Categories that had been contrived over the centuries were revealed as quaint abstractions when compared to the warmth between two bodies' flesh. The castes, the races, the religions, the genders, the creeds signified nothing. All diaspora have a cradle to return to.
His journey, which was once 19,000 years of arduous and unforgiving schlepping, took 19 hours by 747.
They met again in the Mesopotamian bazaar. Before there were dead kings to memorialize, coins to print them on, or economies to spend them in, they had known each other. Lovers know each other in and out of costume. Curly hair, elegant chins, stubby fingers, lilting voices, sepia skin, limpid irises, and all the other masks in the world's wardrobe disguised nothing.
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