Starlight

“When you are in doubt, be still, and wait; when doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage. So long as mists envelop you, be still; be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists—as it surely will. Then act with courage.” — Chief White Eagle, Ponca

***

I climb out of the back seat, and they are momentarily awkward, as if searching for the right words for a farewell. In the end they find them.

“Get the fuck out of here, Geronimo. We see you again and it’s over for you.”

“It’s already over, and you don’t know my name, wašíču.”

They stare, both of them, eyes near icy as the lung-scouring air, then get back in and punctuate the conversation with the acrid screech of rubber. 

I’m alone and relieved and instantly frozen. 

I see a white buffalo hidden in the spill of stars on night’s great canvas, but I might be delirious. The red and blue of the only other lights blink off as they recede the way we came, freight delivered and already forgot, back toward a mirage of warmth amid vast dormant sheets of wheat. 

There is no loneliness greater than this. Discarded on a border no one can see, either with eyes or the spotlight of the past, under cold that makes the hairs crackle inside your nose and can fuse your eyelids shut with your frozen tears.

My home to the east is forbidden to me now, so I turn and gaze west, at cognate stretches of dim grassland under a black felt dome sprayed by diamonds. The pewter grey of the highway an arrow shaft pointing to an unknown country.

In my dreams, vivid as you could wish, I stumble on a remote home and the people take me in. They are Cree, Ojibwe, my own people, and they cleanse me with sage and sweetgrass and as we talk softly around a hearth fire a great warrior appears in the flames like a bird or some mythic half beast and tells me of low-built homes and carved trees and how I might find peace if I can continue west and make it there beyond the scoliotic spine of Turtle Island. Like I said, a dream. 

Whichever way I go, whether I live or die, I am but a single doomed spirit among many, like those stars I crane my neck to revere, and it matters little; a great sorrow has swept this land and continues to arrive in unheard waves and will return with boundless reinforcements someday hence, like a ghost herd of tatanka (to borrow from my Lakota brethren), agitated and restless, vengeance deferred.

At least they left me my shoes, threadbare as they are. I must get off the highway and walk to the next on-ramp, or more faceless uniforms will bring further animosity. 

It’s quiet and late and my odds are slight, but before the cold can fully wrap me in its caul I look east at approaching headlights, hoping for a gentler soul free in their heart of the rot of bigotry. Though cold assaults my bones, I am still. I hope beyond hope. My only weapon now.

What matters in the end and also matters not are the details. The pattern on a woman’s shirt that reminds you of a candy store. A girl from São Paolo whose eyes can’t hide a thing. The call of a loon at daybreak stirring tiny spirals in the mist that hovers like the breath of our ancestors over the waters. The proximate eyewatering stink of bear. A signal from deep space. Walking home alone. Walking. Alone.

When the thing comes it comes and it won’t be rescinded.

*** 

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” — Black Elk, Oglala

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Image © Alyssa Best

Rattles and Thorns

“I’m not ready for this.”

“No one ever is.”

You want to meet in the high desert? Inhale the heady fragrance of sage? Wrangle rattlers with me? Pick cactus spikes from our boots? Hike up the draw then run the scree slopes serenaded by the coyote chorus. Surf those loose stones. Watched by wary stands of ponderosa pine, bark still blackened from the last time. 

Do you think it a kind of charm that porcupines are named thus? That their name means thorn pig?

There are some who wear those thorns on the inside. There are some who warn you first. And some who don’t.

I want to go out like Ignacio. Fierce and doomed and loved and soulful, filled with the citrus-honey surge of vengeance and the final cleanse of loneliness.

“I don’t think I know this Ignacio.” 

“Don’t matter. Keep driving.” 

“Wait. What kind of trouble am I in?”

***

Something big can grow from the saddest seed. A man approaching his autumn reckoning sitting in a coffee shop watching the strange choreography of cars in the parking lot. His eyes are bruises, flinching even at the light. He could sit all day, drink mediocre coffee all day, bottomless yet somehow depthless, watch without a single feeling the interplay of vehicles outside. He could then go home, sit in a small once-neat apartment as the winter sun departs the cold day, as televisions are turned on in other apartments, as voices fall and rise, and he will eat something that tastes to him like parchment. He is a wasp who lost its nest. A firefly whose flame has been doused. Something that flew too far and forgot to bring a map. Or forgot he didn’t need a map. 

And doesn’t even notice he’s unshackled.

***

This world is a heavy burden we have little choice but to shoulder. 

But what if it’s not?

***

“How far still? Will we make Culiacán by nightfall?”

Something went wrong, a bad deal involving bad drugs and worse people. A woman was hurt and fastened to a chair, but someone called it in. An officer arrived and traced the perimeter of the darkling house out by the encroachment of hemlock and cedar, but he never entered and only hand-peeked the pane and somehow missed the woman bleeding out in the kitchen, duct-taped to the chair. When they eventually returned, they found her cold and silent and fused to the plastic and metal with her own congealed fluids, like some lost and lonesome colloidal thing from some other, darker world. 

***

You’re at the park in August. A late-afternoon rainshower scatters families. The trees drip ravenspeak. All is agility and breath. 

You sacrifice yourself to those stones. You open. 

“Ignore this. Make room. Take a seat or take a photograph. Do both. And don’t mind me. Think I’ll have me another breakdown.”

Life Begot

Diminished, this.

Something dark and skeletal clinging to a whitewash wall ripples your skin with sudden cold.

We live somewhere between no place and so long, but we’ll go for answers anyway.

“Are you coming home?”

“What do you think?”

“You’ll be here.”

“In spirit, at least.”

We heard each other and we hurt each other and we can barely hear the difference. 

What is us? Most don’t have to enact this, but I’m moving across the plains this dusk and whispering to the team-huddled buffalo while bats like commas punctuate the clauses of tonight. A whole life sentence. An abundance of talent with no sure way to sell it.

You walk up onto the foreland, the ocean fronds astir below, like salt and lace, boom and hiss, and nothing happens or will ever happen even through the grim unwitnessed ruin of your ancestry.

Let me grip you and hold your switchskin body with my arms, oh precious one.

It takes so many increments to walk this road, the hedgerows and the cornbrakes slowly passing, sparse passersby, time a-waiting, hanging from a noonborn cry. A car comes by oh once in awhile, and the sun unfurls its blister arc above our heads and westbound, or northwestish, halfway hung upon a song, some hot and black diagonal thing. Hear it, hear the coyotes flinch then find each other days or weeks long since they split, and how their feral joy is tracings of contagion, chiming like fractured bells of wonder tolling their antic crimes in the piss-holy steam of this inferno canyon. The coming night. Things much dimmed. Yeah. Christ. The entirety of this.

You told me once you dreamed two worlds, two streams, two incomprehensibilities.

Riddle this: Why is all the world so red? This ultraviolence? 

“It’s not. It was with get that life begot. With dust that listen lost,” was all you said.

You want those words to mean a thing. Something dreamed and something proud. Make our motherloving life profound. 

The hardest thing to write about is silence.

_________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Who Art Worthy

*Content warning for racism and misogyny and implied sexual violence*

________________________

“[call] Well who's that writin'? 

[response] John the Revelator” — Blind Willie Johnson

Latrant, a man from the north, knew that fear makes men cruel. And that beauty and cruelty, valves both arterial and veinic, vie at the ventricular core of the world.

And though he was lean as a wolverine starved and shaped by austerity and weathered like a twisted tamarack lone upon a tundra, and though he had brought down many animals for food and skins, cruelty was not an indulgence to ever tempt him.

On the road behind, he’d ditched his ride, an eighties Mercury passed down from his long-dead father and driven into oblivion. Transmission now gutted like a rattler shedding its spine. Last song fading on his halfbusted radio Blind Willie Johnson’s gravel and ice “John the Revelator.” He’d walked a good fifteen highway miles since, that old blues song conferring inside him like a memory of dread, until this inconvenience store hove into view above the prairie buffalograss and patched asphalt.

He nodded at the clerk behind the counter, a brown-skinned young woman who had barely cleared her teens. The bell like a harbinger still echoed in the otherwise empty store. Her return nod was almost imperceptible, but he perceived it all the same. Along with some inkling of distant kinship.

Three men came in like envoys of chaos while Latrant stood contemplating snacks. He knew immediately their number by their disparate voices—the touchpaper toll of one used to deference, the flinty cringe of his sidekick, and the wavering, sexless pitch of a witless powder keg—and that they would need to be defused. 

Cold electricity ran in quick pulses along his skin, and he slowed his heart and breathing, let his knees sag, and enshadowed himself in the narrow aisle, eyes fixed on the convex mirror up front in the corner.

One of the men, the leader, said, “Check the aisles.” 

The sidekicks wouldn’t see Latrant; practice and blood ties had bestowed upon him uncanny stealth.

In the terrain map of his head, he assigned names to their voices, to their essences. Groan: the short bald leader whose cockiness belied his meager talents. Muskrat: needy watery-eyed enabler. Deejay: soft of mind and body but endlessly cruel.

“Well, fellas, seems we lucked out,” the one named Muskrat said upon spotting the clerk. “So which are you, honey, a dirty illegal or a filthy squaw?”

The woman didn’t make eye contact or reply and stared only at the counter. Latrant watched the mirror in silence.

Deejay’s interest was piqued. “Answer my friend, cunt.”

“Hey, hey, come now, my brothers,” said Groan, all false bonhomie. “We come in good faith and only wanna rob the place and not cause unnecessary pain. But first, would you be so kind as to indulge my rude but curious friends and divulge your ancestry, princess?”

She whispered a word—“Nuwuvi”—that Latrant knew meant Southern Paiute.

“Speak up. And speak American,” said Deejay, the pale rindlike orifice on his dusty ocher face tightening in a strange moue. 

Muskrat laughed but Groan didn’t.

“Paiute,” she said more clearly.

“Don’t sound too American to me,” said Muskrat.

“Shut up,” said Groan. “Pocahontas ain’t American either, but at least we know she ain’t no beaner. Might even earn her a stay. Up to a point, anyways.”

Deejay perked up at this. “So once we git the cash, we git to have some fun?”

“Sure. Violate but don’t mutilate. Not this one. I almost like her.” He stared at her, not blinking. She didn’t look away. “Hand over the contents of that cash drawer, missy. Then come around this side of the counter. Hands where I can see ’em.”

Latrant knew the men had to be armed, yet they hadn’t so much as given her a glimpse of barrel or blade, such was their hubris, for which they’d pay.

“It’s your lucky day, girl.” Groan’s genial demeanor dropped away. “Gonna taste you some white meat at last. And since we’re probably gonna let you live, you can tell your fellow savages how you done fucked some real men on this blessed day of our good lord.”

Listening and watching, Latrant thought how each of these men had a void in his head that clashed and clamored like a ceaseless howl. Each an echoing vacancy, self-loathing disguised as righteous entitlement. Mediocrity cosplaying masculinity. He wondered how such creatures were made. What dark unruly compensations vied inside their quaking substrata.

The woman did as she was told, passing a wad of bills and moving slowly, hands raised. Latrant was not often impressed by people, but he was impressed by her; she knew beyond a shadow he was here in the store, but not once had she flicked her glance in his direction or otherwise risked his detection. 

Any exchange of words would give them the advantage, so he decided on action only. And once he’d decided on action, it would happen with swift brutality.

Groan had his back to him, and Latrant would have taken him first regardless. Stepping from the shadows, he grabbed the man’s slippery forehead and pulled back while simultaneously using great force to draw his nine-inch Bowie knife across and deep into his neck, feeling the tendons and vessels part, the trachea and esophagus rupture, the volcanic heat of the blood spout. All this before the other two had barely registered it. The woman noticed, though, and reached behind the counter and produced a classic wooden Louisville Slugger and cracked Deejay across the temple while Latrant let his victim fall and first circled then stutter-stabbed the wide-eyed, slackjawed Muskrat in a quick frenzy of kidney punctures, pirouetting him for the coup de grâce, a merciful upthrust below his sternum and into his tiny shriveled heart. Latrant stood back and let the woman finish her work on Deejay, the bat scoring home run after home run on his uncomprehending boxlike head until it lay in globs of quivering viscera, bone, and the negligible cupful of brains it had once contained.

Latrant grabbed a set of keys from one of the men’s belt loops and turned to the woman, his hand outstretched.

“The bat. Call the authorities in fifteen minutes. Come up with a plausible story that won’t implicate you. I know it was self-defense, but they were white and… well, you know the rest. Invent a description for me and the truck I’m taking. Put it all on them. And me. I was never here, but a ghost was.” He paused and they kept eye contact. “You did good.”

“You did too. Uh, snacks are on the house.” 

He blinked then let out a short bark of laughter and collected what was his. 

Nonetheless, he was sorry for the necessity of his actions and he left the store bloodsoaked and ashenfaced with the food and the set of keys and recognized that the old Ford pickup resting forlorn in the dust of the parking lot like an old man awaiting gentle death would be his home now indefinitely and he drove onto the highway unremarked and diminutive, centered within the immense and shifting wheel of the encompassing horizon.

The many unnumbered, those who seem to matter not, might prove to be our ransom, the price paid to balance the ledger.

“[call] Tell me what's John writin'? 

[response] Ask the Revelator.”

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 Image © Krystle Wright

Hourglass

He came stumbling into the cabin with an armload of dry cordwood and dropped it clattering by the stove. Once he’d gone back to the porch and stomped the snow off his boots and shook out his coat, he came back to the stove and stacked the quartered birchwood neatly beside it and opened the stove and fed it a log.

She sat silent in a rocker, not rocking, and watched him warm his hands. She tried but she could no longer read him, and he no longer looked at her. Silent fury and indifference and even shamed assent can seem like kin on some men’s faces.

They stayed that way until the snow ceased falling and the clouds cleared like a true sign of some brighter yet short-lived day. Like a tide withdrawing before the towering wave. Like a dying man briefly lucid before the warrant of a promised end.

If an inanimate thing can be literal, the hourglass she cradled and prepared to upend was that.

“Give me an hour?” she said.

“Till?”

“Until you come after me.”

He finally squinted at her in the cold gloom of the cabin. She saw something behind his eyes, but it was fleeting. His quick glance at the corner where a double shotgun was propped betrayed one route of his thinking, but only one. 

She knew she could try to blame the rotgut whiskey for her transgression the other night, but she also knew that was a falsehood. She’d wanted to lie with John Joe Grady, her good man’s only good friend. Her predation had been both hot and calculated, an urgent necessity. She knew if the circumstances could ever be rerun, she would not hesitate to do the same. It was something must have been waiting in their stars, their bones. Their blood.

Outside, an ice-blue day was dying, the far white mountains golden-tipped and draped like pale giants by a work shirt sky. A robin’s egg dome.

“I don’t rightly know what you are,” he said to her.

“Who or what?”

“What. Deer or wolf. I caint tell.”

“You surely can. One don’t exist without the other.”

With that she tipped the heavy hourglass and placed it on the table and unlatched the cabin door. She wouldn’t append the insult of sentiment.

All was silent as she stood for only a moment, breathing the clarity of the heartbreak air into shifting lungs, learning a new truth: this was no longer home and she was no longer beholden. The static blue of evening was slowly fragmenting and softening with sundown, a solo wolf in the hills shaming for downright solitude the locomotive yowl of freight trains in the dimming valley.

He might be foolish enough to follow, but she didn’t think so, and it didn’t matter. 

She stepped fluently into the emerging dark and at long last resumed her unfeigned form.

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Image © Sam Williams