Category: AP36

Chunksi

I.

Four friends bake in the sun, four reservation princesses wearing sagging basketball shorts and white tank tops, waiting for something to happen, anything, anything at all to break the monotony. It is midday and too early for the spectacle of someone kicked out of the casino for drunkenness. Too early for ejection due to violence, for freak out over a social security check gone too soon. Too early, but if they sit long enough, these Shakespearian tragedies are inevitable. So they wait.

Four res princesses, in a kingdom that begins atop a picnic table outside the casino/gas station/quick-mart, a kingdom that extends beyond the overflowing trash bins and cracked asphalt, beyond the idling trucks and the cars filling up at the pumps, and ends where the parking lot becomes the on-ramp to the highway, and the highway becomes escape.

Her name is Rachel. She is 11, and already she’s acutely aware of the insufficiency of this place.

 “Dang, it’s hot,” says April Rose, and Rachel and Demora and Howa (short for Howasapa) and the wind all agree. But the wind says nothing, only blows dry and spiteful over the casino, a casino built cheap like government housing. Over the picnic table indelibly marred by the bloody vomit of Indians who traded their livers for fleeting moments of forget. Over the South Dakota town on the other side of the highway, a town already old and forgotten when it sprouted up over a century ago, on a reservation where despair reigns and the ceiling for success is the purchase of a flatscreen TV for a squalid living room, or a not-yet-repossessed pickup truck parked in a front yard, majestic in the grass like a lion on the savannah and complicit in countless DWIs. The wind blows dry and spiteful over it all.

Rachel holds Demora’s long, silky black hair in her hands and braids it meticulously, an act of kindness, an act of love. “Man… geez,” says Demora when strands get caught in her bracelet. “Don’t pull my hair out.” April Rose and Howa share a giggle. Rachel apologizes. An eighteen-wheeler groans its way out of the parking lot, kicking up dust as it makes a break for it.

“Heya,” says Demora. “My sister called that the wakpa.” She extends a finger at the highway. Rachel doesn’t know what that word means, but she knows the highway is Interstate 29, knows that civilization in the form of Fargo, North Dakota, is a couple hours north, and Watertown and Sioux Falls is an equally tedious ride south.

Rachel doesn’t know what that words means, but her friends do, because they are all darker, full-bloods to her half-blood, each born on the res and far more Indian. She envies them for the language they share. She envies them for their fathers locked away in federal pen, or dead or nonexistent. She envies them for their mothers lost to drink or pills, or simply gone. It is almost an embarrassment that her own red father and white mother reside under the same roof.

Her friends, they all know what wakpa means. But she doesn’t ask them. She doesn’t want to remind them of her differences. How much unlike them she is not.

“Wakpa means river,” Howa whispers into her ear. An act of kindness, an act of love.

A woman approaches from across the parking lot, older but not yet old, with bright red lipstick, worn jeans and scuffed boots. Like Rachel and her friends, she has walked from town, a distance of a few miles but a not uncommon practice for those with nothing and nothing to do. The woman is closer now, close enough for Rachel to see the dark blue ring around her eye, close enough for Rachel to discern the remnants of violence and the shame on her face. She keeps her gaze from meeting Rachel’s and holds her head high—typical proud Native woman. The woman walks past the picnic table and reaches for the door to the gas station.

Demora calls out to her. “Auntie, buy us something to drink, hey?” Rachel knows they’re not related, that Demora has probably never met this woman before. But on the res, any older woman is Auntie, just as any older man is Uncle.

The woman finally looks at all of them. Shakes her head and says “shit” with a hiss, as if such an act would be beneath her. She pulls open the door and goes inside.

The sound of an eighteen-wheeler. The sound of someone slamming their hood down and getting back into their car. The stink of exhaust. Down the side of Rachel’s face, a trickle of sweat. The door opens and the woman is there again. In one hand is a pack of cigarettes. In the other, a paper bag and the unmistakable shape of a 40oz. She stands beside the four of them and the cigarettes go into a tattered purse. Off comes the cap. She puts the bottle to her lips, tilts her head back, and takes a long drink. Rachel watches the sagging skin below her chin move in its own rhythm. When she hands the bag to Demora, there’s a collective sound of appreciation.

Around goes the bottle. Gulps and winces at the taste of the cheap beer.

“What are you girls doing here anyway?” says the woman. “Jus’ getting into trouble?”

“Heya,” says April Rose. “Doing nothing. What are you doing, Auntie?”

“I’m about to ride the wakpa,” she says.

“Damn,” says Demora. “We were just talking about that. Why is called the wakpa?”

Another long drink from the bottle that makes the skin below her chin move, and the woman says, “Because it’s like a river. You can ride it away from here, maybe far away.” Her voice trails off, and her eyes go to the parking lot. “But you have to know how to swim, otherwise you drown.” She continues to stare, and Rachel follows her gaze. There’s a car there, a battered old Cadillac with tinted windows, parked away from the gas pumps. Idling. Rachel thinks of the coyotes that prowl the woods near home, and how children can’t play outside after dark lest one of them slink out of the tree line and drag a hapless kid away.

“Why are you going, Auntie?” says April Rose.

“Auntie Wana-yi said it’s time,” says the woman. Her voice is solemn.

“Shit,” says Demora. “Auntie Wana-yi spoke to you?”

“You seen her?” says the woman, her eyes narrowing.

“Yeah, I seen her. She didn’t say nothing, though. She was just brushing her hair.”

The woman makes a clucking sound, the sound of skepticism, but she watches Demora, and her expression grows into one of sadness. A last swig from the bottle, and she reaches into her purse, producing a cigarette and lighting it. A long drag, then another, and another. Her eyes are back to the battered old Cadillac. To the coyote, waiting to drag her away. “You girls mind yourself,” she says, her words a kind of goodbye.

Rachel watches her go in silence, watches her worn jeans and scuffed boots as she crosses to the edge of the parking lot, a tattered woman all used up, and Rachel swears to never become her. When she gets to the Cadillac, she reaches for the door behind the driver seat. Pulls it open and disappears inside. The four res princesses watch in silence as the Cadillac lumbers out of the parking lot, finds the on-ramp to the highway, and accelerates into oblivion.

*

They walk back to town, and Rachel catches a ride with an uncle headed out towards a distant cluster of tribal-owned houses, one of which is her home.

Outside, on the hood of a long dead car beside the house, is a wolf—Waji, her family’s pet, and their answer to the coyote problem. Waji raises her head.

Rachel greets her with a hello and a gentle rub, and walks into the house just as the sun begins to fall behind the hills to the west.

Her mother is setting the table for dinner. When she sees her, she pulls Rachel in for a hug and plants a kiss on her forehead. Tells her to wash up, let her father and brothers know it’s time to eat. Soon, everyone is seated, and as spaghetti is divvied up onto plates, her father’s voice booms.

“How was my chunksi today?” he says, using a word Rachel does know; chunksi means daughter. “Stay out of trouble?”

She tells him she did stay out of trouble. As the baby of the family, that’s the entirety of her share of the conversation. But she doesn’t mind, because she is happy.

The rest of dinner is spent with her older brothers talking and joking, and her parents laughing and chiming in. Eventually, her father asks them to sing. “Remember that tribal veteran honor song?” he says. “Do that one.” Four sets of male hands begin beating out a tempo on the table. The house fills with the sounds of tradition.

Her parents don’t work, but between the prize money her brothers sometimes win at singing and drumming competitions at powwows, the money she sometimes wins dancing in her jingle dress—plus food stamps, occasional visits to the res pantry, and whatever other assistance the tribe offers—her family survives.

After she has helped wash the dishes, her mother burns sweetgrass to cleanse the house while her father sits in the living room with her brothers, all of them focused on the Playstation. While they play, Rachel thinks of the woman and the Cadillac. Surely, if this had been her home, the woman would never have left.

When her parents go to bed, she asks her brothers what wana-yi means. Unlike Rachel, they are being taught the language of the Dakota Sioux—by the teachers at school and by her father, knowledge everyone thinks she would squander.

River, the youngest brother, older than her by just a year, doesn’t look away from the TV screen. None of them look away. “Wana-yi means ghost,” he says.

 

II.

A white woman disappears and it’s a crime. A noteworthy thing. A cause for concern. But change her skin tone just a bit, transform her paleness into an earthy red, and the disappearance is a non-event. The person gone, she doesn’t matter. It is debatable she ever did. This is why Rachel never learns what happens to the woman who left in the Cadillac, why Rachel never learns where they find her body.

This is why, after months of sitting on that picnic table, watching lone res women climb into strange vehicles and vanish down the river, Rachel never knows what becomes of them. She likes to think that the bruises around their eyes have eventually healed. That they have found safety.

Rachel is 12 now, and her home has grown quiet and lonely. Her brothers are away at the Flandreau Indian School, a boarding school a few hours south on the wakpa. It was a tough decision for her parents to send them away—she heard them fight about it. But the education is supposedly better than the one offered at the Tiospa Zina Tribal School, so off they went.

The Tiospa Zina is where Rachel goes, where she takes remedial classes, because her teachers would rather treat her as stupid than acknowledge her dyslexia.

“Heya,” says Demora. “That thing freaks me out.” She is staring at Waji, who lies on the roof of the long dead car. It is fall, and the air alternates between stifling hot and shiver-inducing chill depending upon if clouds drift in front of the sun. Waji watches the tree line, panting, her tongue lolling out, while Rachel, Demora, April Rose and Howa sit on a patchwork of rusted and tattered lawn chairs.  

“It’s just a wolf,” says April Rose.

Demora makes a face. “What kind of Indian keeps a wolf as a pet?”

Howa is the same as she ever was, but Demora and April Rose have taken to wearing skirts and, on occasion, make up—habits so alien to Rachel they border on betrayal. Rachel knows Demora has been seeing a boy from the white high school in town (whose football team is inexplicably called “The Redmen”). Rachel doesn’t know who April Rose is seeing, but she suspects there is someone, too.

“Rachel!” her mother calls out. Her parents are leaving the house and heading to the van parked on the street. As usual, her father’s mirrored sunglasses make his expression impossible to read, but her mother’s tone says it all. She is angry. “We gotta go get the boys. Mind the house. Don’t cause no trouble.”

As they drive away, Rachel thinks of how anger is the only tone her mother speaks to her in nowadays. Thinks of how her father doesn’t call her chunksi anymore.

When it is clear Rachel’s parents aren’t doubling back, Demora reaches into her knapsack and pulls out a joint. “Cocha!” she says with a grin. Everyone laughs.

In no time they are high, and the four of them point out the different animals they see in the shapes of the passing clouds.

Rachel is high when Howa talks about how her grandmother used to take care of her, but more and more she takes care of her grandmother.

Rachel is high when Demora talks about riding the wakpa with her boyfriend, how Auntie Wana-yi spoke to her and said she was ready.

Rachel is high when April Rose says nothing at all, only weeps in silence. Rachel reaches out and holds her hand. An act of kindness, an act of love.

Rachel is high when Waji jumps down from her spot on the roof of the dead car and nuzzles her hand for a rub, the wolf’s sudden presence startling everyone, eliciting screams that turn into laughter. Deep, endless, hysterical laughter.

Hours later, after her friends have long since gone home and she is sober, her parents return with her brothers. No one will include her in the conversation, or what’s left of it. She suspects all the words were used up on the ride back. But her father’s silence speaks of disappointment and her mother only calls out her name with anger in her voice and tells her to clean her room, and how can anyone live like this? “You give filthy Indians a bad name.”

Later on, when her parents have gone to bed, her brothers dust off the old Playstation. She asks River what happened at Flandreau. “We were expelled,” he says. “For fighting.”

 

III.

They say it was an SUV, maybe dark blue, maybe black. They say that Demora Gray Eagle waited outside the casino on Interstate 29 for less than an hour before seeing it at the edge of the parking lot. According to a witness, she walked up, opened the door to the backseat and climbed in. No conversation. No description of the driver. That was the last time anyone saw her.

Her boyfriend tells the police they had broken up the week prior. He’s a junior at the white high school in town, and no, he has no other information to add. His parents chime in, saying if the police have additional questions, they can talk to their attorney. But the police have no more questions. No one has any more questions.

Rachel is 14 now, and old enough to understand that some things cannot be asked or asked for, like why or help.

She is also old enough to understand how after only a few disappointments everything can come apart. She knows this because her oldest brother, Enoch, is arrested for a sexual assault on a school bus, and after his conviction, he is carted off to a juvenile detention facility in a distant part of the state, where he will stay for the next few years.

Rachel knows this because her other brothers, River and Leonard, drop out of school altogether, and there are no more family dinners at the table and no more songs.

She knows this because her mother screams at her father more and more. Screams at her brothers. Screams at her.

She knows this because one spring night there is a great ruckus outside, and her father and River and Leonard run out the door with knives, shouting. When they return, River has blood on his t-shirt. “Waji’s dead. The coyotes ganged up and got her.”

No one cries for Waji but Rachel, quiet tears shed when she is alone in her room. No one cries for Enoch or Demora but Rachel.

Now the house is truly mirthless and sullen, and no amount of smoldering sweetgrass can cleanse the bad spirits.

“I hate this place,” says April Rose. She isn’t talking about where they are sleeping tonight. Tonight, while Rachel’s parents think she is at Howa’s house, the three remaining res princesses are camped out in Sica Hollow, a haunted state park near town. According to local lore, the ghosts are of white folk and the Indians who murdered them roughly two hundred years ago, so to anyone white, Sica Hollow is a place of terror; to anyone is red, it is something else entirely.

Their camp is in the middle of a field thick with tall grass, atop a plateau. Above, a canopy of endless stars; below, the woods, trails, streams and gurgling springs that make up most of the park. They don’t dare make a fire, but it isn’t cold, and anyway, it is doubtful they would mind if it was, for Howa has brought some of her grandmother’s pills. They each swallow two, and soon they are warm and fuzzy.

From somewhere nearby, the hoof beats of horses that roamed these hills generations ago.

April Rose talks about her cousins, who live in a trailer near Enemy Swim and have a child together, a child whose conception and birth sent the father to prison for a few years. When he got out, they made that trailer into a happy home—happy by res standards at least. “I hate this place,” she says, and Rachel knows she means this town. This res. This life.

From somewhere nearby, faint songs of victory, sung by Indians who thought victory over the white man was all they would ever know.

Howa stares at her hand as if she has never seen it before. Says, “I don’t want to leave my grandmother, but she claims it’s important that I go. That if I go to college and never come back,  it’s a good thing, because I’ll have chosen my own path.”

The three of them fall asleep huddled together.

Later on, Rachel wakes to the sound of someone humming a gentle tune, in the darkness on the path they took to get up here. April Rose and Howa remain deep in slumber, curled up under the blankets. Howa is snoring.

Rachel disentangles from their limbs and still neither stir, not when she slips on her sneakers, not when she rises, not when she follows the path to the sound.

She does not walk far. At the edge of the plateau, where the grass of the field meets the trees that line the sloping woods, rests a fallen log. There, a woman sits, beautiful in a multicolored dress and a shawl. She brushes her long, flowing black hair in easy, thoughtful strokes. The woman looks up at Rachel.

Rachel knows who she is.

“Hello, Rachel,” says Auntie Wana-yi.

 

IV.

She is in rehab when she gets the news that April Rose Crow Dog drank a bottle of Jack and a bottle of vodka, went to sleep and never woke up again. Another Indian who drank herself to death, another friend gone, and she is sure she has no more tears left to shed.

Rachel is 16 now, and bitter. Enoch remains incarcerated and Leonard has moved to Sioux Falls to start a family of his own, but River still lives at home, and he doesn’t bother to conceal the track marks on his arms. Her mother and father say nothing about that, yet when Rachel is caught with pills, she is sent away to an inpatient clinic south of Watertown, and now must deal with the hassle of outpatient treatment in Agency Village three times a week. How is that fair?

“This is what it means to be winyan,” says Auntie Wana-yi. Rachel stands outside the outpatient treatment center, waiting for her ride. The Tiospa Zina High School is across the street, and though Rachel would hate for her sometimes-classmates to see her at the place where Indians go to halfheartedly stop being the architects of their own doom, she takes comfort in the knowledge that they can’t see Auntie Wana-yi. No one can. “This is what it means to be a Native woman,” says Auntie Wana-yi.

Rachel waits for her to go into one of her stories, something about how when the menfolk would leave for hunting parties, it was up to the womenfolk to do everything to keep the camp alive, including fight off enemy warriors. The typical story of the strength Native women must have. But the Wana-yi in the multicolored dress and shawl says nothing, only watches. Which to Rachel is worse. It feels like judging.  

A Ford Escort with no front bumper and a door the wrong color putters up the street. It’s Howa, her ride. Rachel slides into the passenger seat. The car reeks of the habits of its previous owners—Howa bought it from someone who bought it from someone who bought it from someone else—but there are personal flourishes, like the leather dreamcatcher dangling from the rearview mirror, and the Dakota phrase Matuwe Sdodwakiye written in marker on the dashboard. Rachel traces her finger over the words.

“‘I know who I am,’” Howa interprets, and Rachel repeats it. Howa hits the accelerator, taking the car back onto the street.

Rachel notices a sticker on the door to the glove compartment, a fish with whiskers splashing in water. She asks if Howa likes to go fishing, if it’s a new hobby or something.

Howa looks at her like she has asked something silly. “That’s my name.”

Rachel doesn’t know what she means.

“Howa? Howasapa? Howasapa is ‘catfish,’” she says. “All this time and you didn’t know that was my name?”

In the backseat, Auntie Wana-yi shakes her head.

On the seat between them lies a thick SAT prep book, the key text for a course Howa takes three times a week at the white high school. “Am I driving you home?” she says. “If so, we have to hurry. I’m going to be late to class.”

When Rachel had asked for this ride, she didn’t realize it was going to cut into her friend’s study time. She didn’t realize how she could be harming Howa’s future, harming her own escape.

“Am I taking you home?” Howa repeats. Rachel tells her she needs a moment to think.

And so Rachel thinks about her home, and her mother and father, how their fights have cooled into a shared existence of silent hostility. Rachel is certain that if not for her, her parents would go their separate ways, and maybe that would be for the best.

She thinks about her brothers and what has become of them.

She thinks about what became of Waji. About the happiness and safety she once felt, so long ago, when she was a different person—an innocent, young res princess worried about coyotes in the woods.

Then it dawns on her.

“Heya, here it comes,” says Auntie Wana-yi.

The coyotes were in Rachel’s house all along.

She tells Howa to drive her to the casino. Her father has taken a job at the tribe’s sister casino further north on the highway, a bigger, grander place with a hotel and restaurants. Her father washes dishes at one of them. Rachel tells Howa that if she drops her off, she will take the free shuttlebus and visit him.

“You sure?” Howa asks. Rachel tells her yes, she is sure.

When the car eases to a stop in the parking lot of the casino, Rachel opens the door and puts a foot out, but then leans back in and gives Howa a hug. Tells her she’s always been a good friend.

“Cocha, you’re being dramatic,” Howa says. Still, she hugs Rachel back, and when Howa drives off, Rachel watches her go.

Auntie Wana-yi stands beside her. Tucked in the cord belt around her waist is a brush carved of bone, and she pulls it out and begins running it through her long hair.

The wind blows dry and spiteful, and Rachel surveys her kingdom—the picnic table, stained and empty. The overflowing trash bins and cracked asphalt. The eighteen-wheelers, building up their courage to leave. The strangers at the gas pumps, just passing through.

At the edge of the parking lot, a battered Lincoln Continental idles.

“Why am I doing this?” she asks.

“Because it’s time, Rachel,” says Auntie Wana-yi. “There’s no strength in staying, and to go is an act of kindness, an act of love.”

Rachel stares at the Lincoln Continental. At the tinted driver’s side window, the driver she cannot see. She takes a step towards it but hesitates.

“Go on,” says Auntie Wana-yi. “You know how to swim.”

Rachel stands there for a moment, considering the words. Yes, she is sure she knows how to swim, so she walks toward the idling car, and then her hand is on the door handle.

And she is pulling it open.

And she is sliding into the backseat.

And then she is in the river.

 

Jim Genia—a proud Sioux—mostly writes nonfiction about cagefighting, but occasionally takes a break from the hurt and pain to write fiction about hurt and pain. His book, Raw Combat: The Underground World of Mixed Martial Arts, was published in 2011 by Citadel Press. His short fiction appears in the Zodiac Review and Electric Spec. Follow him on Twitter @jim_genia.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

Here Are the Ones That Went

It’s Sunday and we are standing, as we do every Sunday, in the small kitchen of your apartment. There are the white-and-blue cups we gulp tea (and sometimes wine) out of. There is the Soviet kitsch rug, slightly off-centre, nailed to the wall behind the couch. An electric kettle hisses assertively on the Formica counter as an easy silence unspools in the soft space between us. Yet I have no idea where any of these things came from. You didn’t own them when you were alive. 

Today marks three months—thirteen Sundays—since I received the brochure outlining my new government benefit: how many Visits are covered, what to expect, what I should do to promote ‘accelerated healing’. In the centre of the tri-fold is a stock photo of two women laughing. I return to it again and again, searching for a sign that one of the women is less real than the other. That one of the smiles doesn’t quite reach the eyes. I want to know which one represents me and which one represents you and I want to know about laughing—alone, together, or at all. 

The first time I saw you after your death was also a Sunday, warmer than this one, slashes of blue in an overcast sky. I was feeling nostalgic in a way that was probably clinical, drifting numbly past flowers and baked goods at the co-op down the street. The situation called for ice cream, I thought. But what do you like? I couldn’t remember for the life of me. For the life of me, I whispered to myself. Ha-ha. At the self-checkout I scanned a carton of Neapolitan, literally nobody’s favourite. Outside the air was thick with possibility, like something you could climb. A trio of street performers gyrated to a hideous tune.

*

You live now, insofar as you can be called alive, in an unremarkable building not far from mine. It looks more or less like the other unremarkable buildings on the street, identifiable solely by the number printed above its perfectly ordinary door. Past the entryway is a small lobby: armchairs with just enough wear so as to be welcoming, curated selection of magazines on a reclaimed wood coffee table, sleek Nespresso machine. Nothing strange in here, the building is saying. Just a regular apartment complex. Alternative milks are available. Like me, the building holds its secrets to its chest. 

That first Sunday, we sat on your couch (do you think of it as your couch?) and passed the Neapolitan back and forth. You didn’t mention the flavour, though I noticed you eating more strawberry than vanilla or chocolate. I wonder if you can have a favourite ice cream now, if you can make a new one. I hope, an acidic swirl of hatred in my guts for anyone else you ever knew, that it’s the one you share with me. When I go home my heart breaks and breaks and breaks. 

*

There is a polar bear in my neighbourhood. I guess it’s kind of like how parts of central London have foxes. Over time, the bear has acquired the mystique afforded a specific type of outsider: volatile enough to respect, enduring enough to tolerate, unique enough to become a sort of offbeat mascot. Local coffee shops sell t-shirts and mugs printed with bear cartoons. I bought a shirt—my neighbourhood! my bear!—and never wear it, not even as pyjamas. 

One day I saw the bear on my street. She was both bigger and smaller than I imagined a polar bear should be. She stank of ripe meat and mud was clumped in the thick white fur of her paws, turning it brown. I wanted to bring her home, rinse her off in the tub, wrap her in a warm towel. Perhaps she would lap beef tartare off my outstretched hands, steal salo from the fridge when I wasn’t looking. Can bears be kept as pets? I made a mental note to check later. As the bear gazed up at me, her dark eyes blinked slowly, like a cat’s. Maybe I am kidding myself, but they reminded me of yours. 

*

Visits are a new government program being trialled in several postcodes. I stay informed by doomscrolling on multiple social media platforms, as God intended. The wellness community proclaims them a healthy alternative to antidepressants. Charities discuss exporting the program to third-world countries. Entrepreneurs share their strategies for leveraging this and enabling that while corporations make quiet plans to phase out bereavement leave, no longer necessary in a post-bereavement society. I do not yet feel post-bereaved. I do not feel post-anything at all. Brooding and dramatic are among the kinder adjectives friends and colleagues have reported. 

Instead, I think about flooding your apartment building until it is under an ocean so cold my heart stops beating. I think about going to the airport and flying to my childhood home and climbing in bed with my mother. I think about a line from a book that always pushes itself through the stupid crowd of my stupid thoughts: it cannot be made good, not ever. Setting my teacup down, I count my breaths like the brochure suggests. One, two, three. Somewhere around two hundred my fists finally unclench, four half-moons imprinted on each sweaty palm. 

*

My life is a graceless yawn punctuated by Sundays and Tuesdays. On Tuesdays I am online promptly at 8 a.m. so I can renew my benefit for another week. The government portal creates a sensation of simultaneous perseverance and delirium. I upload the Visit receipts I am handed on my way home from your apartment. I upload photos of an identity document, required weekly even though my identity—horribly, cruelly—remains the same. I mark each day on the calendar with a fat X, willing the future to slam into me. 

And then it is a Sunday, glorious Sunday, and we are together. You are pouring me tea; I am telling you about the bear. You are so, so patient with me, with my meandering anecdotes. Dashenka, you say. I describe the entire reality I have constructed where the polar bear is my roommate. It is an idyllic sitcom life: she has developed a taste for tinned oysters and cloudberry jam, I wake her in the night with my screams. In the mornings she licks my forehead gently. A wild comfort. 

I monologue until I am split open. I think, Soon the benefit will run out. Soon they will take you from me. Soon they will take you from me again and then what will I do, where will I go, whose neck will I howl my grief into? I will look for the bear on my way home, carried by the kind of inertia they teach in physics classes. I am ready to keep moving forever until stopped by an external force. 

*

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was announced in the newest postcode to join the program. Trucks delivered canapés and crates of Champagne. The mayor, it was promised, would make an appearance; the post-bereaved anointed their wrists with well-reviewed perfumes in anticipation. Overnight the jubilant headlines turned crass, opportunistic: Act of cruelty, or act of God? Champagne was emptied fruitlessly on the blaze and chefs wrung their hands over the thinly sliced eel with new potatoes, painstakingly shaped into a two-up two-down and filled with elderflower jelly. I did not realise flames could go so high. The smoke writhed dark and acrid against the swollen clouds. 

I walk through the ruins on occasion, when a particular mood strikes. It’s necessary to step carefully, avoiding the wilting lilies, one-armed teddy bears, and half-burned votives. What’s left of the building’s foundation is covered in consequence. Most days, a woman guards the destroyed entryway. She is still as a statue, gripping a handmade sign with steady hands. Do not resuscitate. 

Safe in your apartment, I observe your throat, watching closely for a sign of movement under the familiar skin. There’s a constellation of freckles on your collarbone, a slightly over-pronounced vein that travels up your neck to your right marionette line. What happens when I leave, I wonder. Do you wait for other friends, fall asleep? Do your feet trace a pattern predetermined by fate or science or the government? Do you have a rich inner life, or are you a hot piece of glass I pour my dreams into—that expands with my breath? 

*

 

Before you died you told me you were thinking of dying. Or thinking about the fact that a person dies, that you were a person and would thus die. ‘I went back to where we were born once’, I confess. To the unnameable city in the unnameable country. It was a lifetime ago. My mother took me to some sad building. The smell was familiar. She pointed at a whorl in the faded hallway carpet. Your uncle died there, she said matter-of-factly. Ours is a legacy of death. We drink tea; we don’t talk about the war. 

When I picture all the days ahead of me I get sick, which I mean figuratively. It is a constant repetition of the same tasks to the point that they feel, must be, useless. Wash hair. Eat toast. Trim fingernails. But the hair collects dirt and oil. The stomach growls. The fingernails grow. They say fingernails keep growing after you die. Do yours? I picture my mother in a funhouse, the mirrors reflecting a hundred mothers. Dashenka, they say together. Grow the fuck up. 

I met the bear again one evening as the heat of too much alcohol worked its way through my bones. The moon was overfed and dangerous, barely lighting the streets; gangs of mosquitoes loitered in corners and doorways like troubled youths. I took a shortcut through the co-op parking lot and there she was, pawing at an unlocked dumpster. The bear sensed me and pulled her head out, lowered herself onto all fours and stared at me cooly. I could swear there was something glinting around her neck and for a moment I was convinced it’s a friendship necklace I gave you when we were kids. Then she turned around and sprinted into the night, off to do bear things and definitely not human things, not weird reincarnation things. I couldn’t move, too drunk to be here or there or anywhere at all. 

*

The government is anxious that Visits win public approval. Officials hope to eradicate mourning entirely by 2030. Scientific reports about improved patient outcomes and reduced work time lost to frequent distractions are paraphrased and misinterpreted by the media. The findings are promising, politicians assert, but it’s still early days. I was asked to do an exit interview about my experience. 

The interview took place remotely and I agreed to being recorded and to the recording being shared with other government departments. My voice and face, I was assured, would be anonymised; each question bore a silence so long it threatened to swallow the entire world. 

Yes, I used all my permitted Visits. No, my loved one was not able to remember what we talked about the week before. Yes, that was emotionally distressing. Yes, I noticed that my loved one didn’t breathe. 

I stared at the screen after the call disconnected, stared at my reflection in the dark. So that’s it then. One more Sunday. I felt fully emptied of everything, a void so immense it was an astronomical condition. Somewhere, I knew, a scientist was naming me after a terrifying Greek mythological beast. 

*

The last Sunday I see you, I buy more Neapolitan out of hope that a ritualistic element will neatly bookend this whole nightmare. Teacups cradled in our hands, we sit on your couch, knees touching. The ice cream is uneaten in its carton, liquefying in the summer heat. A whole life-death cycle of organic dairy happening right on your counter. I briefly consider eating you, leaning over to bite off a finger and run home with it in my mouth like a dog. 

I spot the bear as I leave, sitting on her hind paws next to an overgrown hydrangea bush. My hand raises reflexively and waves hello, and although I think she nods her muzzle slightly, it’s hard to tell in the dark. The rest of the week passes uneventfully. Tuesdays and Sundays are days like any other. 

In the autumn, someone will call animal control and the neighbourhood bear will disappear. People will argue online about who made the report, this is why we can’t have nice things, and others will share increasingly improbable sightings: the zoo a few towns over, Blackpool pier, a nightclub in Ibiza. There are still nights when I will wake up screaming, but mostly I will sleep the eight hours the brochure suggests. And I will forget this year, little by little, and that will be not just OK but in fact quite great. The future will roll out in front of me, a mouth hungry with feeling. 

 

Sonya Vatomsky is the author of SALT IS FOR CURING (Two Dollar Radio/Sator Press, 2015) and the chapbooks MY HEART IN ASPIC (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and AND THE WHALE (Paper Nautilus, 2020), which won the 2019 Vella Chapbook Contest. Sonya’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. They were born in the former USSR, live in Manchester, England, and tweet at @coolniceghost.

 

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Death’s Gambit

I.      The Pawn

They called us the Golden Hour 7. They said we were the forgotten youth with wasted potential. So, we lined up like ducks in a row ready to prove we were worthy of glory. They gave us grey wool with seven gold-plated buttons, a uniform sewn just as hastily as the war began. Seven buttons for seven men. A sense of pride would uplift our posture adorned in the scratchy uniform. The gold-plated buttons stitched down the middle used to glint when the sun hit them just right. Now, we barely had any left. The empty spaces where they once sat only elicited a reminder of all the ways we lost them. 

The sky was weeping the day Alden showed up to camp, like the Earth knew it would soon fold him into its arms. Alden was fourteen. The youngest of us. We all still remembered his mother’s grief-stricken face as she dropped him off at camp because he was too young to drive. Her face, sunken with hunger and years, had haunted us all. But her face has been replaced in our nightmares. Now all we saw was Alden’s face, frozen in agony. What used to be a round, youthful face filled with wonder was now but a husk of a human being with eyes dead to this world. His face so covered in dirt we could trace the path of his tears all the way down his neck. There was no time for us to mourn the boy who met death too soon, who shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. We continued on. Alden added to a long list of people that would join our nightmares. 

They told us we would be respected—tunnelers always were—but we were the lowborns. They put us where we couldn’t be seen, ashamed that the likes of us could win them a war. We crawled beneath the Earth, where they thought we belonged. The wails and thudding of shovels could still be heard, waking and dreaming. The walls of our manhole-sized tunnel glistened with promises of blue skies and fresh air, but they never seemed to come. We entered as the Golden Hour 7, but left as four—and soon after, even fewer. The voices in our head and obsidian Tether in our soul were rooted deep. At first, the tether was small, breakable even, but the more we disobeyed the more it grew. The obsidian splintered off, taking control of everything. Not just our arms and legs, but our lungs and stomachs too. We fought the tug and the sharp pull of the instructions from Command, but the Tether would just dig deeper causing our vision to black out from the pain. It wasn’t the only thing we fought. The grey wool started killing us all on its own, suffocating us with heat and mud. We started counting the hours, the days, the weeks until they would allow us to claw our way out into the sunlight. Scratching tally marks into our skin like prison walls. At golden hour on the eve of New Year’s, the voices urged us forward, the timers were set, and the explosives went off. The Tether pulled our puppet bodies through the motions of our final attack. 

We had heard the stories of units pushed to the brink of exhaustion with the sole purpose of making it harder for them to fight Command when they sent them into the enemy’s hands. The enemies that remain faceless and nameless, so when we look them in the eyes, we don’t see their families when they’re finally embraced by the Earth once more. We were sacrificial pawns, unable to even move without their okay. So, as we rushed forward against our will, we were bathed in mud, blood, and the last rays of a violent sunset. We never allowed ourselves the comforts of being grateful we were alive. We knew we were all already dead. 

*

Sara used to say, “It’s a necessary evil.” At least that’s what they told everyone. The streets of our town were littered with posters telling us our country needed us. The posters were always colorful with catchy slogans that pulled us in, like the promise of a good warm meal. They lied. And it wasn’t just a simple white lie that rolled off the tongue. This wasn’t a lie told between friends to keep the balance neutral, or one told from mother to daughter to preserve her dreams about how the world could be. No, this lie was heavy. It burned the tongue and throat of the speaker and swirled around in their gut, churning unpleasantly. It clung to the speaker like an oily second skin. They swallowed it down and spun their straw into golden words that were whispered into the ears of the vulnerable, into the ears of the powerful, into the ears of the masses. And soon enough, the lie became the truth. It started to burn less coming out, and just like snakes, they eventually shed their oily second skin. We were told what we were doing was honorable. We came from the home of the brave, didn’t we? The brave and free. That’s what we were, but they lied. They took us away, broke us down, and whispered, “It’s all for the greater good.” We preemptively strike, thinking we’re in charge of this chess game, except we weren’t even playing. We were just the pawns and they were making war for fun. 

They spoke through a personification, trying to disguise themselves as one of us. “We want you!” They wanted bodies in the field to wield destruction. No responsibility, no consequences in this life. Men sat lavishly, equating lives to green dollar signs, leaving the role of dying to the poor. Our blood was made of diamonds to be sold. Everything slow and heavy, made ready for extraction. Shuttled like cattle onto the kill floor. Whether it was jungles, deserts, beaches, the field always ended up shining red. Once our bodies were no longer of use to the lavish men, we were thrown out. Our blood no longer precious. We went from invaluable to expendable. Our lives were valued by how well we could die. How well we could kill. There was no after, only before. Whether dead or not, we were ghosts either way. They lied to us and we paid the price.

 

II.    The King

We lied. It was a simple lie, really. One to keep the cogs oiled and moving. It used to keep him up at night until he realized how simple it really was.

Knowledge isn’t power.

Money is power.

Supply and demand is power.

Power is in resources.

We advertise, and it’s distributed to the brainwashed masses in the form of motivational slogans. It’s a fair exchange, preferable. He used to want the credit, the glory that was brought to kings and emperors when they won a war, but times were different. So, we hid our work in plain sight. We targeted the weak within our own country, telling them exactly what they needed to hear. They were the most loyal when their will was finally broken. It was simple really.

The grandfather clock struck midnight. Four dings boomed through the room, bouncing off each mahogany-covered wall and landing in his lap. His tailor-made suit and crystal glass full of Pappy Van Winkle were illuminated by the yellow lamplight that dimly shone on a table in the middle of the room. It cast shadows on the walls that curled inwards, threatening to swallow him whole. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought. The only thing properly lit in the room was the ivory carved chess board in the middle of the table, the Smith-Morra Gambit set up in full view. He always played white. It brought him a sense of comfort; after all, he was playing for the greater good. Black could set a Siberian Trap, he thought, but he knew they wouldn’t. They were weak and unskilled. The opening had begun and it would succeed. All he needed was his blood diamonds, his soldiers, his pawns. Invaluable pieces of a war machine. White must make sacrifices to open up the playing field. His tunnelers would set the stage, and their offering would ensure a successful attack. He picked up his white pawn, slowly moving it forward, feeling a Tether deep within his soul go taut. Once the ivory hit the board, he felt the Command go down the line to his tunnelers. And now, all he had to do was wait. He had all the time in the world to play. 

The shadows seemed poised to strike him as he stared and stared at the endless possibilities carved into pieces of ivory. Not a single thought except the construction of destruction. The man in the tailor-made suit sat and pondered. He may have seen the ever-lumbering shadows surrounding him, but he didn’t feel their hunger. Didn’t feel the cloaked figure patiently waiting for him. As he moved his pawns around, no consequences befell him, making war just for fun. But the figure waited their turn to see him eternally burn.

 

III.     The Queen

Good and evil aren’t black and white. What people don’t understand is that evil gathers in masses. Like bloodhounds on a scent, it gravitates towards people that sing its praises. But no one is born evil, I should know. The occasions I saw pure evil, it came in through the mind. It spread like rot, contaminating the mind first, then the heart. And when it finally stopped spreading, there was nothing left. The eyes of its vessels are always vacant and cold. Apathy written in permanent red marker across their faces. They morph their features into those of empathy, mimicking the behaviors of others to hide in plain sight. Through these experiences, I have come to understand that man is the cruelest of animals. Evil swirls around them without any interference. It infects, spreads, and triumphs while men sit and watch.

I drift through the world, noticed and unnoticed. Many wail and scream in my presence. Some are relieved, and some feel nothing at all. My job is an unpleasant one, but necessary. There isn’t one soul in this world that I don’t meet in the end. Some days I hesitate allowing them as much time as possible. On a few rare occasions, I rejoice because they deserve it—the agony that will follow. I clean up mess after mess of theirs, waiting in the shadows to finally claim them. Savoring the day when terror floods their veins.

I grant as many wishes as I can to their victims, knowing it will never make up for the pain they felt in life. Many strangled hopes whispered in my ear following the tune of, “Take them instead of me.”

“Spare me.”

“Help me.”

This is often accompanied by a chorus of loud gunshots or explosions in the background. Sometimes there’s screaming and sometimes there’s just silence, the darkness already doing their job and clocking out before I get there. I sit on the sidelines, listening, trying my best, but it isn’t my job to help them. All I can do is grant them a little more time, but even that is never enough. War is a craven, fickle thing brought upon by craven, fickle men. If given a decision between war and compromise, they will always pick war. Never ones to pass up the easier option. So, I sit in the shadows that curl inward, ready to devour, watching the man in the tailor-made suit move his ivory pawns across his playing field. He always plays white to make himself feel better, but he knows full well that those pawns are people. People that I have had to collect. I see him pretend, playing at being me. And never have I felt hunger so consuming. 

I remember the boy buried deep beneath the Earth. Tick marks carved into his arm. His blue eyes, once bright with love for the world, are now dull and decades older than they should be. His mud-splattered face interrupted by his trail of tears. He feels me coming and he turns to me with a smile that shouldn’t be as bright as it is.

“Will it stop hurting?”

I nod. His shoulders sag with relief.

“I thought I was already dead. In hell, or maybe purgatory,” he swallows, his breathing becoming shallow. “You’re less scary than I thought you’d be.” Time is up, and I do something I’ve never done. Like the cooling breeze of a fall afternoon, I whisper, “You already lived through the punishment of this life; now, it’s time for after.” His eyes close with the ghost of a smile still on his lips. The pain eases out of his body as I snap the obsidian Tether, allowing the boy to be collected in peace. Many millennia have passed and I collect without word or complaint, but even I can be haunted. And when he is finally laid to rest, I take the steps two at a time, spiraling down into my rage.

*

I have all the time in the world to wait. And I don’t have to wait long. The man in the tailor-made suit brings his last sip of bourbon to his lips. Not even a second later, his left arm starts to shake as he clutches at his chest, trying to suck in a shaky breath. Beads of sweat start to form on his temple as he gasps like a fish out of water. The man struggles, unable to call for help. I soak in his pain, savoring it like the last crumb of food. The terror in his black eyes like rays of sunshine poking through the clouds on a rainy day. I glance towards the grandfather clock: four past twelve. I begin to step forward, morphing myself into a depraved nightmare, wanting to taste his fear. My rage charging forward with teeth yearning to cause him the same pain he caused that boy. The shadows follow me, humming in my wake.

And when the clock strikes five past midnight, I smile. Only on rare occasions are the deserving’s time cut short, served to me on a golden platter. So, yes, I smile. Because this is one of those few rare occasions.

 

Meara Carlin is a second-generation Muslim American. She grew up in a small town in Virginia and recently received her B.S. degree in Geology from The College of William and Mary. Although a science major, writing was always a passion that accompanied her throughout her life, including everything from journaling, to scientific writing, to screenplays. She hopes to continue her journey into the world of creative writing.

 

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