POSTS

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.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

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

We Are Not What Divides Us

In the van at night, I watch my husband play poker on his phone beneath the blanket. I watch like most women watch, silent and allowing, unwilling to enter another fight as if we weren’t in the desert in a discount van to leave his desire for luck and chance behind. We’d told our families that we sold our two-bedroom, with enough land for future children to grow, so we could travel before settling down. How delightful it was, my husband had said, to shed our earthly burdens. He’d bet everything, even my retirement, on the cards that never turned up in his favor. I close my eyes and wait for the desert to cleanse us both.

In a gas station, we learn of the Father. A leader of a community of devout men, devout to the earth and its harvest more than to a higher power. My husband would never pass on the opportunity to meet such a fruitful man, so we get directions scrawled on a napkin that I interpret even in the dark. I am happy to visit a commune, to stay at a place without cell service and to meet someone who can help my husband find our purpose.

When we arrive, the Father opens the front door to his home and gladly welcomes us in. A black hole of dread opens in my stomach when, in the front room, I see an ancient beige desktop monitor set up on a betting screen. No matter where we drive, it seems, we always end up closer to trouble than further away. 

After introductions, my husband sits down with Father eagerly to play. Father is a silent figure, dressed in a white smock dotted with dirt or some other earth-stain. I’ve never seen a man look like he’d be more at home on a stage, his gestures too wide and his voice too big, hesitating after speaking like he is waiting for applause or a laugh or a groan, which I, in my discomfort, oblige.

I chew my fingernails as my husband wagers what little we have left: pocket change, his wedding ring, a traveler’s check from my mother I’d hid underneath the passenger seat of the van. He comes close to winning each time, and I feel the odds almost turning in our favor, but Father always, humbly, comes out on top, clicking to flip over his better hand.

It is drawing close to midnight when my husband’s shoulders sink pitifully and he says, “Father, I’m all out of money. I have nothing more to lose.”

Father shifts in his seat, the wooden legs creaking on the floor. “A man with such a beautiful wife is still a very rich man,” he says.

My husband kisses me on both eyelids and then bets me on his hand. He clicks and clicks and I watch and listen to the fake sounds of a casino tinkling through the speakers. It’s dry and warm as an oven in the front room but when he loses me, I go cold and wet all over.

The Father leans back in his chair, crosses his ankle over his knee so I can see the bottom of his foot, calloused but surprisingly clean. He tells my husband he can stay for the night but will leave me behind in the morning.

 “I lost my love, my lovely,” my husband says, kneeling to hug me around the waist.

 “You can’t have loved her so much if you wagered her like pocket change,” Father says. Husband weeps into my stomach, I hold his head and stare at our three clear figures reflected in the large windows. I feel only a sorrow so expected and heavy I want to lie on the ground and be buried beneath its weight.

*

*

In the morning, I wake to my husband tying his shoes, propped up close to my face on the mattress. I watch his thin fingers fumble with the knot. When I ask him to promise that he will return for me, he kisses my forehead and leaves through the door.

I stand behind Father and watch as my husband climbs into my van, our van, the van I bought off Craigslist when I decided I wanted to travel, to get away from my home and my life before my husband pleaded that I take him too, that we could find our love again on the road. I believed him because I wanted to be loved, so I got out of the van and handed him the keys that he now starts the engine with while I look on over Father’s shoulder.

Father holds up his hand in one solemn wave, but I can’t see my husband’s face in the glass, and I don’t know if he’s looking at me, if he’s crying or stoic, if he knows he has made a mistake. The tires churn up rocks that skitter across the path as he pulls away. I remember the feeling of driving the van home for the first time, the way it shuddered on the highway and I was jittery with adventure and then desperately trapped by my own fear, the huge unknowing that stretched before me like rows of shark teeth. I was so aware of my fleshiness and all of the ways I could get hurt going it alone. I hope my husband feels that too now, the danger of freedom, of being just one body adrift in space. I hope this fear will bring him back to me.

I meet the Brothers later, after I am shown the kitchen in Father’s home and how to cook his favorite breakfast: oats, thick with goat milk on the stove. After I’ve cleaned up, I follow Father out to the fields behind the house. He calls them fields, but they’re not quite fields as I know them—I’ve driven through stretches of wheat, shifting like dancers in the wind, so careless I wanted to pull over, lie down, and wrap myself up in rustling. These fields are bare-cracked desert that flake up in fine clouds when I stamp over it in my sandals, and I wonder how they could prophesize anything will grow.

Men sprout slowly into view, dotted across the desert in denim pants and jackets, deep blue faded to a near-white. It’s so warm that the blood in my hands pool by my sides and I can feel my wedding band, department-store silver, tighten around my skin.

 Father removes his hands from their tuck in his sleeves and gestures towards the men who take off their hats in welcome. “This is our livelihood,” he says, so solemnly that a shiver tickles the underside of my biceps, the weight of this mission holy as a church. But I don’t see anything living, beyond the men, for miles.

I shade my eyes from the sun, my moist forehead sticking to the curve of my hand. “Father,” I say, “What livelihood? I don’t see.”

A man, who Father introduces as Brother Seven, approaches me with a long-handled rake. “Don’t worry, Mother. Father teaches us all how to see.”

I take the rake in my hand and little splinters prickle my palm. My chest tightens with the way he calls me mother. It feels heavy in a different way, like the prayers I’ve whispered into my knuckles on a walk home alone late at night. Father pats me on the shoulder. I emit radio waves, extend out across the plains, around the earth and up and out into the universe. I imagine how they’ll never stop traveling, they’ll only grow weaker with distance and time. “Go now, my child,” Father says, “Brother Seven will teach you the way.”

*

*

While we work the fields, Father sits on a lifeguard tower above the desert. It’s a classic tower, white and wooden, paint whipped and chipped from the beating sun and storms. He holds a rusting umbrella in his right hand and binoculars in his left, and he watches us as we rake back and forth. I wonder, with him being so far above, if he can see something we can’t, if we’re making our own little messages for someone much bigger and higher to read.

I rake quick lines like I’ve been told, but by the time I’ve reached the end, the wind has smoothed my effort, like I’d done nothing at all. When I grow frustrated, Brother Eleven smiles so knowingly I want to crush a small animal between my hands. He tells me that it happens to us all. I watch his metal rake grind, twinge, and bump off rocks and other small things hidden beneath the surface. I think this work will never be done.

It’s only been a few weeks, so I try not to worry, I need to have faith that my husband will return for me. He’s never lost me on a game but he has left me behind at a table as an IOU. He hasn’t left me this long, but it’s different now. I was the last valuable thing he had to lose, and I imagine him, sweating at a poker table, waiting for luck. This faith keeps me from collapsing in despair underneath Father’s gaze.

I run backwards with my rake to catch up with Brother Eleven. He’s the youngest Brother, with a soft, freckled face and a preference for overalls, the jean still dark blue and endearing. My rake snags a rock and jolts up, twisting the muscles in my wrist. In the tower, Father blows his whistle. I slow down.

I ask Brother Eleven why he joined the Brotherhood.

“Same as you,” he says. His breath comes fast and quick, whistling somewhere in his throat but he smiles calmly, like they all do, like I’m a younger, simpler sibling.

“On a bet? Is that why Father keeps a PC in the doorway?” I ask.

“No, Mother Three,” he says gently. “I mean it was destiny, same as you. It doesn’t matter how we got here. Only that we’re all here together now.” His face is round and warm with the work. 

“I understand, Brother, but where are you from? What is your family like?” I ask. I want to know what he dreamed of being when he grew up, his favorite color, his real name. I want to know all the little pieces that make him up.

We reach the end of the plot. Brother Eleven turns and starts back down the row, but I stop to catch my breath. Over the grinding of his rake, Brother Eleven shouts, “We are not what divides us.” His powerful knees pump out at the sides, propelling him backward, his taut arms pulling evenly. “We are what brings us together.”

I twist the rake in the hot sand, resist the urge to bite my hand. This is our solemn prayer, an everyday anthem like the pledge of allegiance I had to say hand-over-heart every morning in class. I also do not fully understand what it means or how it binds us together.  Father blows his whistle. I spit into the dirt. I turn and pull my rake through the field. Under my breath, I savor my divisions, juicy like an overripe peach: Florida, loud but loving, marine biologist, forest green, Rowan.

*

*

In the pit, I lie on my back and shield my eyes from the sun. I miss the trees more and more each day, real trees, not the bent and gnarled Joshuas that mark these fields like crucifixes. I miss the lime-green wide stretching canopies that knit together to shield whole ecosystems from the sun. In the pit, I can feel the earth on my bare arms and calves. Whenever I dig deep, I find a coolness I crave and can’t always understand that the earth has a core, that somewhere deeper inside it’s bright and hot like the sun. The earth too has a heart.

The Brothers stand above me in a ring and pray. I can barely tell them apart because of the brightness, their shifting jean-blue shapes, and only Father in his white smock and glinting glasses stands out. Father was the one who told me I would be baptized today, a celebration and acceptance into the Brotherhood, a formal relinquishing of my sinful divisions. I told him I had already been baptized, I was a good Catholic girl, but he shook his head and smiled the all-knowing smile that told me I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t ask any more questions to try to. They like me best when I don’t know.

The chanting slows and the humming reverberates against the shallow walls of the pit. A slick film emerges on my skin. The sound reminds me of 14^th century Gregorian chants I listened to on YouTube back in college, before I met my husband, when I still wanted to know what it felt like to be held.

Father leans over the pit, his head blocking out the sun. “I will now ask you three questions,” he says. I nod, my hair rustling in the sand. “Do you believe in the one true purpose?”

I nod.

“Will you live and serve the Brotherhood, with light and kindness in your heart?”

I nod.

“Will you turn away from sin, renounce your name, and obey the Father for the rest of your life?”

I nod and feel a drop of his sweat land against my top lip. Then, the chorus rings out, “Father, thank you for giving us Mother Three and her light for the rest of our days.”

They throw in handfuls of hot desert sand, bouncing sharp against my bare legs, arms, face, and I close my eyes and my lips tight together to keep it from working its way in. I do not believe what I agree to, but how could I say no? There is only desert for miles.

Sand works its way into my mouth, dry and a little salty, crunchy between my teeth. I wonder how long they will keep throwing it in, and how long I will be in this hole and if I will crawl out myself or if someone else will reach in. And I imagine my baptism from their perspective and can feel the sand in my fists, and for a moment I’m terrified that I’m being buried rather than coming into a new life.

*

*

I am not surprised when Father informs me of our marriage. At night I sit beside him while he gambles online. He sits in a wooden kitchen chair and I sit cross-legged on the floor, working my way through patching the Brothers’ clothes. In the first few weeks, I had to teach myself how to sew, and now I can patch all types of problems with only the tiniest little scar left behind as witness. I watch the screen as best I can for my husband’s username without poking my fingers. I imagine him, searching the infinite lobbies, playing and betting and folding until he finds the Father. Until he can play and prove how good and loyal he is, and then I can go back home. But I know this is a fantasy; I have no loyal husband or two-bedroom home.

The needle slips into my thumb and I hiss air out of my two front teeth. Father turns to look down at me, pressing his palm into my scalp. I suck the blood on my finger. “My child, we will be wed. And then you truly will be Mother, as the Brothers have taken to calling you.”

Mother Three is what they call me, and I’m not brave enough to ask what happened to the other mothers, and if they’re counting up or down. Sometimes I walk by my baptism pit out back in the fields behind the dormitories. They never filled in the singular pit, and it’s the size of a body. Out there alone, I swear I can feel the other mothers turning below my feet.

“But Father, I’m already married,” I say, stretching the fabric between my thumbs. “You won me from my husband, remember?”

Father shifts in his chair and looks above the clunky monitor. There is an embroidered fabric rendering of the American flag and over it, in uncertain red stitching, reads: ᗯE ᗩᖇE ᑎOT ᗯᕼᗩT ᗪIᐯIᗪEᔕ ᑌᔕ. It looks like a child’s hand, or like my own stitching when I first arrived here. I try to picture the Mother’s hands, I wonder if they’re dry like mine, dappled with scars like mine, if the same needle I now patch socks with too slipped from her control, jammed up into the tender flesh beneath her nail. Some nights I feel more like the other mothers than myself.

“What husband?” he says, “You were grown in the desert, by the brotherhood, like the rest of us. We harvested you from the field together. This is our livelihood.” He steeples his smooth fingers before his face, purses his lips so the corners of his eyes fall. I do not think he is praying. I think he is only pretending to be a man of deep thought.

I do feel grown in the brotherhood, out in those fields every day, dragging the rake back and forth over the sand. The desert is in me, I cough dust and my skin is cracked like salt flats, my bleach-blond hair growing out a reddish brown. Sometimes I wake in the night to a prickle in my hip, the underside of my foot, behind my shoulder blade, and when I touch there, I pull out cactus thorns like gray hairs.

Father returns to poker. His wanting eyes shimmer, the animated cards reflected upside-down in his glasses, distorted and hungry. I hate the desert and my Brothers, the Father and our livelihood, and the senseless repetition, playing the same games and the cards that never turn up in my favor. Father grumbles and goes all in, I poke my finger with the needle. Blood puddles up and I squeeze it out onto the fabric, glistening and cough-syrup red. One husband was enough, I think. I will never be married again.

*

Transcript of 911 call placed on Tuesday, September 21, 2017 at 14:09pm

Transcribed by James Marlboro, Dept. of Public Safety

Dispatcher: 911, what is the emergency?
Caller: Hello?
Dispatcher: This is 9-1-1. Are you in need of fire, police, or EMS?
Caller: Um, I don’t know, I didn’t know who to call.
Dispatcher: You have to speak up, ma’am. I can’t understand you. Why are you calling?
Caller: My husband lost me but he hasn’t come back. And I waited awhile but I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s coming back.
Dispatcher: (typing) Are you presently in danger?
Caller: (pause) No, not like that. But the wedding is soon and I’m in the middle of nowhere and I have no way to get out.
Dispatcher: What is your location? 
Caller: With father, on the farm…I’m in the desert, and (inaudible)
Dispatcher: Ma’am you need to speak up. Can you explain to me again how this is an emergency?
Unidentified person: (unintelligible)
Caller: Uh (pause). Never mind, I have to go. 

Ended by caller at 14:13pm

*

The night I leave the Brotherhood, I am afraid. I’ve watched enough true crime and lived long enough in the world as a woman to anticipate all the violent ways leaving can go. Father has been good to me, mostly, because I did what I was told—I obeyed my husband’s forfeiture, I paid his debt, and I cooked and cleaned and kissed and raked and gave up my clothes, my name, my sins. But even when I am lying beside Father in our bed, I fear that as soon as I slip off the creaking springs, he’ll sit up, knife in hand, ready to hold me down. Since my husband left, I had felt powerful in playing the good wife, stoically accepting my fate. I’m afraid of truly understanding what it will be like to be owned.

Father does not stir when I get out of bed and put my shoes on. My heart beats so quickly I tremble, bump into things, my hands unsteady enough that it takes five tries to unlatch the door. Then I’m outside, the cool night air tickling my skin like ghost hands, my neck prickling with expectation of being caught. I walk into the darkness toward where I think my husband and I entered so many weeks ago, in the opposite direction of our fields, of my Brothers. I don’t look back but I imagine the night like a black hole swallowing the ranch, the dormitories, then the fields with my baptism pit, gaping and empty, until I am alone.

In the darkness, I feel weightless like I did that time I drove the van home, when the true freeness of my life cracked open like a nut before me. I was so afraid of leaving and testing the Father I didn’t anticipate the fear of being out here in the desert alone at night, the flat vast expectation of the earth and the choices I will need to make. I feel the same terror of the endless responsibility for my body, keeping it clean and fed and alive and happy, when all I want is to stop growing in space, to crawl back somewhere quiet and safe.

The desert shifts below my feet, uncertain and slippery so my ankles ache from trying to keep stable. Only my husband ever made me shrink down, I fit nicely into his comforting palms. I want him again, I want to know with a yearning so deep if he tried to reach me like I tried to reach him. I want to know that he has never felt so empty, that he hasn’t found something better to fill his palms. I want him to stumble upon me in the dark and guide me home by the hand. 

My foot catches on a rock, sending a vibrant wave of pain through my knee but I don’t fall, I keep walking forward. It will be dark for many more hours but I hope when the sun rises I will have caught up with that shifting horizon, and I’ll peer down and see a whole city, wide and shining before me. But for now there is only darkness, the howl of night creatures, and the feeling of growing, the electric fear of my body stretching too far. 

*

A message caught between radio stations while driving through the desert at night —

    

Mialise Carney is a writer and MFA candidate at California State University, Fresno. She is the senior fiction editor at The Normal School and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Booth, and Barren Magazine. Read more of her work at mialisecarney.com.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO