by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
When he returned to the podium, she followed, taking the seat before him. “And this?” she asked, indicating the empty core.
Her professor smiled. “Trapped air, perhaps? Or maybe the remains of a small animal burrow?” He looked at her and blinked, his shaggy, gray eyebrows matching both the great mane on his head and the hair sprouting from his nostrils. “Imagine with me, miss. Millions of years ago, some minute amount of life found its way into this rock, perhaps a bacteria or just a mere trickle of water? And time pressed on and on and on, species of dinosaurs emerging and dying out, the shifting of continents, the birth of countless animal species, including our own. And through it all, there is this rock.” He paused, regarded her over the tops of his bifocals, and for the first time in her life, she felt seen by somebody.
“In Iceland,” he said, “they say the rocks are alive, that in fact, they have souls.”
Years later, when she had completed her graduate thesis, he gifted her the geode, wrapped in red ribbon with a card reading, A souvenir from the Miocene.
The musicians take a break. The bearded men stagger from the garage to the bonfires outside, but we remain huddled close, our voices dropping low. A charm is strung around her neck. I reach out for it, a small purple crystal, and my fingers rest against her warm skin. Up close, I see that the crystal is not a solid color, but many different shades, ranging from clear to lavender to nearly black.
“Beautiful,” I say.
“Amethyst.”
We smile at one another. She takes a drink of beer and licks the foam from her lips. I wonder what it would be like to kiss her? What harm is there, I think, in a kiss?
We startle to the noise of the garage door. It opens, revealing the dark night outside. Wood smoke overpowers the scent of motor oil, and with the rush of cold she shifts her body against mine. I make out black figures around a blazing fire, but their voices carry away into the night. My eyes adjust, and in the moonlight there are the jagged white tips of the Chugach Range. How small we are at the base of such mountains.
Then comes the sound of the garage door closing. Everything disappears. There is just the two of us, and we are private people. I understand that when she holds her arm to me, a broken wing, it is an offering of compromised privacy. I smooth my hand over the calcified ridge. Some wounds heal. Her skin a pale scar under my fingertips, I want to tell her that if she had been my child, I would have protected her.
But what I say is, “My husband and I have two kids, a boy and a girl.”
She nods once, then twice more. “I figured.”
In the silence that follows, she opens the side door and peers out to the black night. “You got married young, didn’t you?”
“I guess.”
“That’s good,” she says, turning back to me. “Love is a good thing.”
“It is.” I’m thinking about my children. I try to focus solely on my feelings for him, my husband alone, but what comes to mind is how the kids look when they laugh, Jay still missing his two front teeth, Stella’s bright eyes through her tangle of curls, and I know I can’t separate him from them. “Love is a good thing.” After a moment, I add, “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I just am.”
She searches for her coat in the pile of down and wool and fleece, mine falls to the floor. I don’t allow myself to think. One arm and then the next through the coat sleeves. When she walks out the door, so do I.
Stark autumn cold hits us, goes right to the marrow.
“It’s always like this before the snow comes,” I tell her as we walk to her car. “Freeze-up in Alaska is cruel.”
Under our feet, the brown chaff of birch leaves. This year a big Chinook stripped trees to bones in a matter of hours, and then the cold stomped down on the yellow leaves, quickly grinding them to mash on the frozen ground.
“Not the beautiful season you’re used to Outside, huh?” I say.
“Outside?”
“What we Alaskans call everywhere else.”
She smiles, shakes her head.
“This is the Far North,” I say. “Winter drops down hard on us. Like a hoof.”
“When do you think it’ll snow?”
“Soon, I hope. It’s better when it does. Warmer. Brighter.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it here.”
“It takes three winters.” I remember I said those same words to my husband when I met him all those years ago. My father had just died of cancer, and it was my first year at UAF. I remember the lost feeling I’d carried within me, like a small skiff in big waves. So long ago, it’s as though it happened to someone else, like I’m remembering someone else’s life. Was that college freshman really me? Now a pulse of guilt beats through me. “If you make it three winters, you stay,” I say. “You’re Alaskan.”
“Like you?”
“I was born here. I had no choice.”
She stands back on her heels and regards me. “What’s your deal?”
“What do you mean?”
She smiles, patient, and I see the scientist in her. White lab coat hunching over a microscope.
“I don’t know that I have a deal.”
The scientist waits.
I blow on my fingers.
“I can always tell,” she says.
“Tell what?”
“About women. It’s like identifying a mineral. You don’t go by the color, you go by the fracture.”
“What fracture? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you.”
I stare back at her. “What do you mean?”
“Suffering. That’s what I mean.”
I pull my coat tight around my neck. “But everybody suffers.”
She nods, smiles at her data. “And?”
“And so what?”
In graduate school, she was mentored by her professor, favored above all the other students. When they talked about rocks, it was as though the two of them were in love with the same woman. But where there might have been jealousy, there was only passion. He sent her daily emails, and when they stopped to chat in the university’s long echoing hallways, minutes ticked into hours. They were lost in events that occurred two billion years ago.
Once, late at night, she stopped by the lab to collect a forgotten scarf. Her professor was standing at the rows of rock specimens, his hands on the counter, and she could tell by his caved-in expression that he was not looking outward, but inward to a different time.
She meant to leave quickly, to not disturb him, but he turned and said, “My wife had a strange habit. Whenever faculty would come for dinner, she would polish the baseboards and banisters, all the wood in the whole house. Always, that was that day she chose. I hated the smell of Murphy’s Oil, and it would last throughout the dinner, overpowering whatever good smells were coming from the kitchen.” He laid a hand on the counter, tapped a finger. “I see now that she did it simply for something to do. She was nervous having the university crowd over. She never felt worthy of the conversation.” He laughed. “Rocks. Always about rocks.”
Kris knew that his wife had been dead many years. “I’m sorry.”
“And yet the parties were always her idea. I never would have thought of feeding people. She took care of me in that way, you know.”
“You must have loved her a lot.”
He smiled, turned back to the dusty rows. “I still do. Be careful with your tenses, my dear.”
“I should go,” she says, a glance to her car.
I take her hand in mine. It’s cold as concrete. Another memory sparks, though this one is close to the moment, no question it is my life. “You know, you remind me of a woman I loved. A long time ago.”
“Did she love you back?”
“No.”
She smiles, tries to suppress it.
“Okay, so I was fourteen. She was my math teacher. She never knew.”
Now she’s laughing, and soon I am, too.
“I’
m sure she did,” Kris says. After a moment, she sobers and asks in a quiet voice, “Are you sorry the way things turned out?”
I look down at the frost on my thick rubber boots. I’m thinking about my children, how I sometimes wake in the night just to watch them sleep. “No.”
The features of her face are complex to me, a terrain of great depth and meaning. I want to remember her exactly as she is: eyes not blue but green in the moonlight, cheekbones sprinkled with last summer’s freckles, a wide mouth with full, chapped lips. I tell myself that what I feel is an impulse, that’s all.
But when she takes a step toward her car, a wild ticking starts up in me. Not an impulse but an instinct, like the instinct to keep warm.
Her hands are back in her pockets. “I should go.” She draws in a breath, and when she releases it into the cold still night, the steam remains a cloud just above her head. “There is no institution that I respect more than marriage. Marriage and family,” she says. “I’ve never experienced it, family I mean, but I’ve seen how it can be . . . in other people’s lives. There’s nothing more fundamental.”
“That’s true.”
“And I’m not an asshole.”
“Neither am I.”
The cold presses in on us, heaving up from the leafy chaff under our feet and also dropping down from the stark bones of trees overhead. I reach for her, a hug goodbye, but there is the ticking within me now, too strong a pull, and I won’t let go.
Her kiss is surprising. She is searching me with a particular purpose in mind, anticipating my reaction to her every movement. She is well trained. She kisses me deeply, pressing the small of my back, her hands so precise, a scientist’s hands. I am discovered.
Her professor decided to take a trip to the Canadian Shield. He invited three students, but cared only that she went. On the plane, they drank vodka tonics and discussed different qualities of granite and gneiss, giddy with anticipation of setting foot on Precambrian rock. He told her that there was amethyst between the Proterozoic and Archean layers, and she told him that she would like nothing more than to touch her fingers to it, even just for a moment. His eyes flashed under their shaggy brows, and he laid his age-freckled hand lightly over hers.
“Amethyst. My dear wife’s birthstone.”
She fell quiet.
He patted her knuckles and produced a baby blue handkerchief from between several pencils in his shirtfront pocket, wiped each wet eye and then his cracked lips. “And what can you tell me about amethyst?”
She was used to these drills. “Silicon dioxide,” she said. “Six-sided prism ending in six-sided pyramid. Conchoidal fracture. Insoluble.”
“Very good. But did you know that medieval soldiers wore it round their necks during battle?” He carefully folded the blue handkerchief and stowed it back between his pencils. “They believed the crystal would keep them safe in the cold world of war. Such was their faith in silicon dioxide.”
And she understood that he was telling her something about love.
In her bed, our bodies shine white with moonlight. All I think about is right now. This moment. Her skin is unbearably soft over the workings of hard muscle and bone, and her small breasts press against mine. Deep in her hair, the scent of chlorine. She wears nothing but the charm strung around her neck on a loop of leather. Amethyst. And I wonder which is more beautiful? The crystal or its home at the hollow of the base of her throat?
She is more naked with her necklace than I am with nothing at all.
At the Canadian Shield, her professor, donned in a white Panama hat, kid leather gloves, and brand new walking shoes, pulled his blue kerchief up over his mouth and nose. She told him he looked like a dapper terrorist, a description he rather liked. Soon the dust of the quartz pit stirred, and she had to hold her sleeve over her mouth.
They descended through the millennia, the layers bold and easy to read.
“Caldera,” her professor sang out, pulling his kerchief from his face. “The Earth’s most private and ancient recesses heaved up by volcanic explosion.” He gave a grand stamp of his shellacked walking stick. After a moment, he added, “We’re tourists, but I’m sorry to say that we are not, in fact, time travelers. We can read the drama that took place here, but that is all. We missed the action by billions of years.”
The other students grew restless, dust-choked and hungry. They shouldered their packs and climbed back to the present day. She and her professor stayed in the mine, no longer talking or taking samples or photographs, but simply remaining.
I displace the crystal and press my thumb in the hollow of her throat. A perfect fit. I look at the bedside clock and laugh. “I’ve known you for exactly eleven hours and thirty-six minutes.”
“It doesn’t matter how long.”
Her words travel through my right hand. “True,” I say. “It’s just the beginning. The start.”
Silence.
“What’s wrong?”
She lifts my wrist and taps the gold band around my ring finger.
I fall back into her arms until morning. It’s still dark, and now I am crying. She refuses to negotiate. Frozen stiff, she’s become a fountain statue, a piece of garden art. I continue to lie against her only because I don’t know what else to do. I think, I’ll never say another word to you. Not even goodbye. That will be her punishment.
I cast my gaze around her bedroom. The quarters of a bachelor: rented white walls, furnishings straight out of a box store display, a navy blue bath towel slung across the bathroom door. There is nothing in the room that shows a private side of her, or any side at all. But then my eyes take in the crusted lump on her dresser. In the moonlight, the crystalline shades of color and intricacy are undecipherable, and her souvenir from the Miocene looks like nothing more than a chunk of concrete. My urge to hurt her falls away.
“In Iceland,” I say, “they believe rocks have souls.”
She stirs. She presses her face against mine, and I can feel that she’s smiling.
I want to say something more to her, a compliment maybe, words of how beautiful she looks in the icy flood of moonlight. Or perhaps I want to tell her that I love my family and that she’s torn my life apart. But I know that what she wants me to say is the one thing I can’t: You’ve had no effect on me at all.
My thoughts turn to leaving as the sky goes light. I peer out the window and study the empty yard. The grass is green with just a trace of frost. I crack the window by an inch, and the air feels wet and cool against my skin. Then I see the dark, low clouds moving in.
“I know a little something about time, too. I can predict the future.”
She looks at me with the solemnity of a child.
“Snow is coming.”
“How do you know?”
I point to the gray mass plowing toward us.
“And it’ll be warmer when it snows?”
I kiss her, and she kisses me back in that way of hers, and though I know that she won’t last three years in Alaska or even three months, I release her and smile. Then I take her hand and hold it to the stream of air coming through the window.
SUSANNA J. MISHLER
Susanna J. Mishler was awarded first place in the Poetry Open of the University of Alaska/Anchorage Daily News Statewide Writing Contest in 2001, and the winning poem was published on LitSite Alaska. Since then, her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hotel Amerika, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, RATTLE, and elsewhere. In 2004 she received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she also served as an editor for Sonora Review. She teaches workshops at the 49 Alaska Writing Center. Her collection of poems, titled Termination Dust, is available from Boreal Books/Red Hen Press.
Anniversary at the Evening Cafe
Cups of coffee steamed in our hands. The courtyard
purpled under vines. On her index finger,
suddenly, an emerald mayfly—wings veined,
abdomen swooped up.
Mayflies live one day and expire. They flicked through
my dreams last night. Under an olive tree, once,
Archimedes dreamed of the space an object
fills as divorced from
thing itself. Or, said in a different way: new
means of quantifying what isn’t there. We know
the exact dimensions of absence. Tesla
witnessed his dying
mother rise, heard singing and saw angelic
figures cloudborne, marvelous beauty . . . floated . . .
vanished. He detested the enigmatic
nature of visions—
everything’s explainable, he believed, if
we can ask the right kinds of questions. Like, what
occupies the space in my cup when coffee’s
gone? How can creatures
like the mayfly live without mouths? Once, I thought
the size and shadow of her loneliness matched
mine: a space in each of us domed, bottomless,
open like a bell.
Two bells without tongues, waiting. Evening thickens.
We expect the mayfly to spring and vanish,
but it stays. My hand upon hers—a boat on
water—we’re strangers.
Poem That Begins in Address to Nikola Tesla and Ends Up Offshore
You might like it if I said here
“He was married to Elektra,”—which
lends nobility to the lack
of wife or lover—“it was selfless
celibacy; work trumped women.”
But the fussy woodstove takes my
eyes from the page, its fan blades
spin as if underwater, the motor
slowly choked of charge.
Snow sits deep on the cooling
cabin. Ice on open channels
skims up the Arm, then gathers
back toward the Inlet. The floes
are daily evidence of how
the Arm unweaves itself:
Turnagain. Cakes of ice
bump shoulders, murmur like a crowd
at fairgrounds, their eyes ready
for the world to be different
