And She Was Excerpt

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
Sweeping across 250 years and into the Aleutian Islands, the story explores Aleut culture, taboos, mummies, famine, conquest and survival. It leaps forward to a lost woman who more than anything needs to understand the gray shades between heroism and evil, between freedom and bondage, between this place and the rest of her life.

EXCERPT
That night, after driving back through the tail of the storm, I could still taste the decayed seal flipper on my tongue -- old, salty. Maybe it was those little belches of resurrected lusta that kept Bellie's story nagging at me, eating at me, as I lay in bed.

The Outside Man ate his own son's blood. The Aleut girl ate from the bodies of once-glorious whale hunters. I couldn't help thinking about the taste. I mean, how does a mummified hunter taste? Blood, I knew. We all know blood -- old metal, salt. I climbed down from the loft to brush my teeth again. But another lusta belch hit me before I'd retucked the covers around me.
What is it about the eating? Even our very own Eve eats the apple, the ovaries of a tree. The Aleut girl eats for power. Eve eats for knowledge. Knowledge and power -- the two loop back on each other as parts of the same whole. I lit a cigarette, hoping the warm raw smoke would cover the lusta belches.

What does power taste like? What is the taste of knowledge? Of good or evil? Like lusta, dry and rank? Or is it sweet? The nub of my smoked-out cigarette burned my index finger when it hit me -- I already knew. That was the point of the story. The taste of power and of knowledge is the only taste we know. We are born and we die with it. It's the taste of a suffering world the Buddhist tries to escape when he meditates. It's the taste of Sartre's existential angst. It's the taste of a dilemma, of responsibility, of culpability. A curse and a gift. It's the taste Eve knew when she opened her eyes and fell.

-- from "And She Was" by Cindy Dyson