III

Like mother said, they saw me for what I was good at. It was my color first, how I changed in the flames from black to blue. They decorated themselves with my dust. They coated their walls, vessels, and canvasses with my body. They wore me in their clothes, fingertips, and faces. They loved my color, a deep yet bright blue, like a gradient between the sky and the sea that was backlit by the sun; warm, regal, and noble. It woke up something inside them, something familiar that they couldn’t quite place. 

Yet, the joy of seeing me was not enough and this is perhaps because my color was only one of the things I could be, that they couldn’t seem me for everything else that I did. They could not consume me, and for this many only saw me for the ways I could help them consume. They traded my body for money and traded that money for other things that I helped make. They did not see me for how I helped sustain them, how I labored every moment in the delicate spirals of their cells. They only saw me for what they could make with me, and I did not mind this. As mother had said, we are all builders, and it I was not surprised that they were builders, too. 

I let them carry me as I had with water.

Their limitations confused me. Thought their numbers grew swiftly, they seemed unable to work together like we did. It was as if their ability to collaborate was far more limited and, when they did collaborate, it was often without the joy or the delight that my family and I had shared. 

They were so quick and so many. They came suddenly. They carried away the bodies of my brothers, then carried them back. They looked different this time; my brothers had returned in new forms. The people called them machines, nimble and fast with their great rolling tires and teeth, and I marveled at how the people had transformed us to increase their capacity for building. Yet, despite my fascination with their creativity, there was something in the way they spoke about us that felt wrong. 

When they looked at mother and I, they called us a mine, they said they were mining, and when they held me in their hands, they said, mine, mine, mine. 

What is mine? I wondered.

There was something about this word that I did not understand. Was this the word that changed everything? 

They told my bothers to reach into the ground with their iron teeth, tear into it, and take us. I looked at mother, as I had when we looked up at the bottom of the ocean, and she only closed her eyes and nodded. 

They measured our value by percentage, by how much of us was in one place in the ground in a given space. It was in the places that we were most dense that they searched with their machines, scooped our bodies, and sent us on the backs of machines that belched black smoke as they carried us ever upward in a long and snaking circle. Then they placed mother and I on a long moving belt that took us toward a large building from which even more noise came. Was this the song? I wondered. 

On our journey, I inspected the faces of those walking beings who labored around us. Most were as dark as me and seemed to have come from this very ground, but there were others—fewer in number—who were the color of clouds floating above, like ghosts, like something that was only passing through, but instead of giving, as the clouds did, they were the ones who looked at us and said, mine. I looked inside all of them for this desire to build, for the creative force that had made them possible, and found that their relationship to this was cloudy and complicated. It seemed to me that they were indifferent to my journey except for in the ways I could be traded for a currency that allowed them to eat, to care for their own family the way mother cared for me. 

Even in this act of mining, there was a divide. On one side was the massive power of the machines and the deep holes they gauged in the sphere to search for mother and me. On the other side were the crowds of people who gathered together, the ones whose skin was deep black like my own except sun soaked and warmer in color, who searched the ground for me with rods and spades of iron. When they did not have these, they tore at the ground with their fingertips. I felt their warm sweat and blood as it dripped from them into the earth, and it was then that I began to understand the word mother had told me long ago, sorrow. They shouted when they found me, but there was no joy in the sound. 

And they sang. 

It was an encouraging sound, but it was filled with so many other things, too. Like the pools of water that they stood in with their bare legs and feet, sifting and cleaning my body before placing me in sacks that they loaded on their shoulders and the backs motor bikes to bring to the place where they could sell me for just enough money to buy food for that day. That water had too much in it to be of any use except the rinsing of my body, and because it was overworked and tired, it confused their bodies for a place to deposit the many travelers it carried. I watched as their skin changed. Opens wounds formed and began to weep, much like the pits they cut into to surface of the earth. Like the water and their wounds, yes, that is what the sound of their song was like. It helped them do their work but was not the one of which mother had spoken. 

However, being that it was the first time I’d heard such a sound, I was surprised at what it did to me. Something inside me began to grow, vibrate, and dance to the sound. The melody woke up a part of me I did not know was there. The power inside this sound they made was unquestionable, perhaps endless, and the way their voices and hands kept time with the rhythm seemed to say something true, but like the water there was too much pain inside the sound for it to ring clear. 

Did love hurt or was this something else entirely?  

This was especially true of those who searched for me in long snaking tunnels like the way that earth dwelling creatures build their homes. There were many of these tunnels, all dug in hopes they would find me. They were not building homes; they were only trying to live. It was a necessary thing, to care for their families the way my own had cared for me. I felt sorrow in their touch, observed how my body made them crazy, and how they sank ever deeper into the ground in search of me. These people reminded me of the way that iron had been changed to fit the purpose of those who only took and never gave back, a form that did not recognize the sacred nature of our elemental bodies but only saw what it could do for them. Like iron, like the busy toiling at the center of the everything that I had left with mother long ago, they craved work, and they loved to build. Like iron, like me, these people desired to labor, to give their life to something, but not in this form. 

As they snatched at me, when their tools rang against my body in time with the songs they sung, when they shouted in excitement upon discovering my black body nestled in the earth, I heard only desperation and a momentary relief at the way my body would keep them from dying. 

Mother and I rode belts into more machines. They crushed our bodies until we were like grains of sand at the edge of the sea. It was the same work that water had done, except much faster and more violent. 

They tossed us into water and mixed us with other elements that worked like wedges between mother and me. Because they loved mother’s ability to harness the power of the sun, they focused on her first. I already knew what they would do, but I was unprepared when the moment came. 

They sent electricity through us, and I watched as mother was pulled away from me. The force pulled her to a strip of metal which they drew out, cleaned, and repeated until there was nothing left of her in the water. I watched as they took her, my face full of questions. 

When will I see you again? I cried. 

It won’t be long, she said. Remember, you are a leader. You must tell the world what you’ve seen here. 

But how will I—

You will find a way. 

Her form shot to a metal strip like a cloud through the water, pulled toward it with great force, and then she disappeared. 

It was just me and the water. The water, like much of the water I had seen lately, was tired and depressed because it could not do its job of giving life while carrying so many other things. The people called this water poisonous, something horrible and fearful and bad, but I knew the water differently. It was simply too busy shuttling elements back where they belonged before it could be of any use to their lives again. 

They called me cobalt, as mother said they would, but they also called me a biproduct; something that was left behind in their unquenchable desire for mother’s body. Yet, they said that I could work for them, too. Some said that I would labor to save the earth from the damage that they had inflicted upon it. 

It was strange to me, this doubleness of their thinking, the way they spoke of me as a solution but only in the ways that could maintain their power—both over the people who tore my body from the ground and their ability to manipulate currents of sun. They used us on the premise of creating a better life, but I couldn’t be certain what that meant or if it was true. It seemed to me that no one who touched my body felt joy, only pain and relief from that pain. Many who searched for me in the ground never made it back to the surface again. When their blood dripped onto the ground, the water, air, sun, and earth cried together.  

IV

They isolated me, used words like purity to measure my worth, and changed me into the shape of powder or shiny gray slabs baked in ovens whose heat reminded me of home. They employed different ways to describe my form. Hydroxide and cathodes. They praised my abilities, the ones that mother had noticed long ago, and they sent me on the backs of iron beasts that floated and feared the depths of the ocean. 

The journey was an eternity and an instant. 

V

It was a strange greeting. As the lightest of metals, Lithium was pretty sure of themself despite spending eons in the solitude of the desert under salt flats where the sun was hottest and the rain rarely came, if ever. Perhaps it was because they had survived so long in this environment that made Lithium this way. I couldn’t tell. They pointed to their place on the periodic table, how it was higher than my own, as if it’s placement on the chart meant something important. I often stared at the table which these people, who called themselves scientists, had made in order to keep track of us, placed us into categories, and ordered us by of our atomic value. 

Lithium was indeed high and farthest to left of any of us. Whereas they placed me in the middle next to my brother, Iron, my cousin Manganese, and on my right was my uncle, Nickel, and next to them, my mother, Copper. 

See that? Lithium said to me as we laid together on the flat table. Lightest of them all. That’s me! You see that, Cobalt? What do you think of that?

I was annoyed by Lithium’s constant ribbing. All I wanted to do was get back to work, and it felt as if I’d been stuck in a constant state of flux ever since they had separated mother and I back in the tanks of water. What was Lithium trying to prove? 

You don’t talk much do you, Cobalt? What’s it with you anyways? 

I just want to do my job, I told them, exasperated. 

And what exactly is your job?

I explained what I did as simply as I could, the way mother had described to me way back at the beginning except I left out the bit about me being a leader. Stating that I assumed would only bring another round of antagonism from Lithium. Plus, lying here on this table, I wasn’t sure if it was true. 

Oh, that’s pretty cool actually. You do that deep work at the beginning, huh? All those spirals inside the cells. That’s technical shit, very meticulous. Do you ever get scared you’ll mess up the whole thing?

Scared? I asked. Genuinely confused. 

Yeah, you know. It’s like an emotion. Everything we make has got them. Oh—

Lithium trailed off when it saw the look on my face. 

hat? I asked, self-consciously, worried that Lithium knew things that I didn’t. 

Ahh, forget about it.

NO. Tell me! I demanded. 

Geez, okay. No need to get all twisted up there, Lithium said with a hitching laugh. See what I did there? Twisted? Cause you work with the spirals—

What is your deal, Lithium? 

Alright, alright. You really need to lighten up…

LITHIUM. 

Okay! Damn, Lithium coughed and smothered their laugh. Do you even know what I do?

You mean besides being the lightest metal asshole in the world? 

OOOH! This is what I like about you Cobalt, you learn fast, keep cool, and don’t hold grudges. 

Are you going to tell me or are we just going to do this forever? 

Okay, okay. So I may not be doing to all that technical work that you do in the spirals, and I mean that when I say that because I’ve seen those things and I don’t know how you do it, but I do most of my work up in their brains. I help neurons get from one place to another. It’s not hard work but you gotta be fast and being able to pass through organic matter quickly. So, that’s me. I’m light and fast and can get shit done. 

I felt myself calming at Lithium’s complement. They continued. 

Since I’m up in their head’s all the time, I get a good picture of things. These creatures, all of them, feel so many emotions that it’s hard to keep track. One of them is fear. It’s basically the emotional representation of their adversity to dying but they have it in all kinds of scenarios where dying is probably the last thing that will happen to them. Since you work in the spirals, I know you know a ton about the difference between living and dying. 

Too much sometimes, I replied with a nod. 

So that’s what ‘scared’ means. I know your smart and I guess that’s why it was surprising to me that you didn’t understand the word. I didn’t mean any offense. To be honest, I’m actually super nervous about working so close to you because I’ve heard so much about you and your mom. You guys are legends. 

I felt a sudden emptiness at the reference to mother. Where was she? Sometimes I swore she was so close. 

Well, it seems like you’re the most important one to them. Your name is everywhere, I said. Looking at the signs around the room that denoted this place as a LITHIUM-ION BATTERY MANUFACTURING PLANT. 

Ahh, well. That’s just because they think I’m important now. I’ve heard them talk about Sodium as the “next big thing.” You know, I wonder if enough will ever be enough with these guys. I keep thinking that one day they’ll sing the song, but I’m starting to wonder if they ever will, Lithium replied. 

You know about the song? 

Sure, everyone does. 

My thoughts drifted to the singing people who dug for me in the open pits and tunnels on the continent where mother and I had first made it to the surface of the earth. Their songs had opened windows into myself that I didn’t yet understand, but it was discordant, borne out of their condition which was forced upon them by others. That wasn’t the song. It wasn’t the song we were all waiting for and I knew that the song could not exist with that kind of pain.

So, what is this? Why did they bring us here? 

Haven’t you heard? We’re going to save the world! Lithium shouted this with obvious sarcasm. 

I stared at Lithium. 

I know, I know. I’ve spent WAY too much time shuttling neurons around. Basically, the people think that by using us they will be able to keep the world from getting hotter, the air from being too busy with Carbon to be of any use to their lungs, and the water from being so overworked with cleaning up their messes to keep them hydrated. 

But—

I know. It was the same in the desert. You should have seen what they did to the place. It was nuts. But I think that’s what makes these creatures both terrible and special; they cannot feel what is happening everywhere like we can. Because of that, and because of their short life spans, they don’t understand the concept of building things that won’t disrupt the rhythm—that won’t turn right around and kill them. 

I nodded somberly. 

Is there anything that we can do to help them see farther? 

Lithium thought on this for some time before answering. 

I was honestly hoping that you would have an idea, Lithium said finally. 

So what are they doing with us? I asked. 

They’re going to put us in a cell and try to keep us there, Lithium said with a shrug.