Building Fires in the Snow

by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction

  Once, on the trail, her boot had unclipped from her ski and, frozen, wouldn’t snap back in again. I stopped and walked through the pines the rest of the way with her, our poles and skis propped across our shoulders. We were still half a mile out when two huge, snow-covered dogs came sprinting down the path toward us. Their harnesses jingled, and their tongues lolled, giddy.

  “Hey!” she said. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

  The dogs stopped immediately, looked at one another for a moment, then turned around and ran back the way they’d come.

  “Everything is urgent when you’re in love,” she’d said.

  She took it all back the next morning, of course. I had run all the way home and barely slept. At six I got out of bed, put on my best shirt, and cooked a big breakfast of waffles and eggs. Made a smoothie and drank it too fast, imagining and imagining what could possibly happen next. I had never been happier.

  I was washing the dishes when she called. My heart hummed like an engine.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s me. Listen, we need to talk about what I said last night.”

  “Okay?”

  “I wasn’t feeling well, and I had taken a lot of cough syrup and Tylenol PM. I don’t remember what I told you, exactly, but whatever it was, I didn’t mean it.”

  The way she said it—the complete honesty in her lie—felt like a new silver fish just pulled from a foreign river—glittering, cold, and alive. Like these were the first words ever spoken in time. They were so pure and beautiful in their devastation that I didn’t even try to fight it. “Are you sure?” was all I asked.

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  If the Titbook is real, then it is full now of breasts that might be dead, might be biowaste, might be full of milk. This is why I am afraid of it. The permanence of a photo is not what’s troubling, but the impermanence of flesh. All those women and their lives—their possible, delicate lives.

  I stopped changing facts after the bear, but years later, I woke in the night thinking, Of course I’m not the only one. Perhaps the homeowner changed the facts. Perhaps the State Trooper who salvaged the skull and pelt did. Perhaps enough facts have been changed, or could be changed, to alter the bear’s fate entirely. Perhaps he is on this very day eating a king salmon on the bank of a cool fast stream.

  After I hung up the phone, this is what I did. I sat completely still and listened to the stillness. I listened to her words in my head and to the clock’s second hand and to the trucks rattling down the highway and to a dog standing on top of his doghouse barking. The answer, it finally dawned on me, was to take action and go someplace else.

  But there was nothing to do, nowhere to go to survive that stillborn love. So I finished the dishes and left in my good shirt and walked under the brilliant, manic sun to the office. I let myself in with my keycard and took the elevator up to the paper and crawled under the copy table to shake like the addict I was. If this was an earthquake then I would hold on, surrounded by whatever I called facts.

  Anchorage Epithalamium

  Love punched my brains out like

  Artie in the post office parking lot—

  “A big Samoan hit me and now it feels

  like there’s computers in my eye.”

  Everything big and distorted with

  the 19-hour days and the 19-hour nights,

  mountains balding into summer now

  as tourist traffic materializes onto streets

  we first learned empty and white. All

  I want: to explore the wilderness of Costco

  with you in the Dimond District,

  buy a new set of Tupperware with red

  lids and smooth sides. To be tamed

  with you and tell you every night

  which are satellites, planes, and stars.

  Moose are over-running the park and this makes me think of love

  In autumn, everyone weds—the moose find one another

  to mate and calve, tolerating gasps and photos until

  an “incident” occurs. Too many dogs off leash.

  Too many runners distracted by iPods. Too many reasons

  not to trust, not to say about the beautiful thing: That is beautiful.

  Like the frosty October morning when the man, whose face

  bones were crushed last year by a charging bull, reaches for

  his handgun at the sight of a cow with twins. Haven’t we all been

  crushed? Haven’t we all closed our eyes once? To love—

  just to speak of it—requires a courage that only love itself provides.

  In this line, the cow and her twins slip back into the trees.

  In this one, I hold your hand and we marry in the trees.

  The trees marry the moose. The moose marry the runners.

  But weren’t we the runners all along? Running toward each other—

  toward the call we heard before we even recognized it.

  an epithalamium for Larissa and Brian

  The Object Towards Which the Action of the Sea Is Directed

  is the Aleut word for Alaska, a passive voice

  construction that would mean docked points,

  were this a sentence in one of my freshmen essays

  about a belief they hold or a problem they see

  in the world around them. One problem is passive

  voice, I say. Cultivate your own unique voice, I say.

  One girl writes of her reign as a native beauty

  pageant queen. Another, of the smell of whale

  blubber frying in a city so far north, haloes of ice

  arc above the sky. Slowly, Ovid’s Io turns to Isis

  turns to Raven and takes off. Their textbooks lie

  open on the desks. The days are growing colder.

  The Sleeping Lady

  Susitna slumbers high above Anchorage,

  dreaming of her beloved, who took a javelin

  to the gut the day before their wedding.

  And you, biking home from work tonight,

  are 20 minutes late. If you die, who will

  cover me in snow and trees? Who will keep

  me sleeping, with you not there to weight

  the room?

  At the Crow Creek Gold Mine,

  I found three flakes of gold, you, four, all seven

  included in our plastic baggie practice packets.

  We walked a trail of rusted shovels to a cold

  river, singing “sluicebox, sluicebox” because

  we liked the sound. We returned to a wedding

  reception with a DJ and cake.

  If I could marry

  you, I would marry you in a river full of gold.

  Inside one ghost cabin, a tiny balance scale

  weighed a nugget and two pennies. On the wall,

  a black and white photo of someone’s mother.

  Your face mirrored the glass and the music

  kept playing. Trail maps, table of lanterns,

  bear pelt bed and foggy moonshine bottles.

  And we wed and wed and wed.

  Conservation & Rehabilitation

  Because we want to take pictures of bears and moose

  without actually coming near them—though

  already I have called to you, unloading groceries

  from the car, when a cow and her calf clopped down

  our street, taller than I thought, and faster, too—because

  we want to look like real Alaskans to those East Coast

  city slickers, those smog-breathers, those subway-riders,

  our friends back home, we drive down the only highway

  to the Center where, every five minutes for the duration

  of our visit, we hear the eerie shrieks of the elk, calling

  for one another in urgent lust, which at first I decide is

  the angry scream of a small girl throwing a tantrum

  in five-minute intervals but which Wikipedia

  informs me is
“one of the most distinctive sounds

  in nature, akin to the howl of the gray wolf.” And later,

  when we learn from a colorful sign that females are attracted

  to the elk that bugle the loudest and most often, I sympathize

  more with the elk and with the caribou, too, locking

  their antlers into one another because everyone in this Center

  is in love, including me, because when I stare at you staring

  at a muddy bison sleeping pressed flush against the wire

  of her fence, and when I see your mouth move, and then

  later, before I put my mouth on you, when I ask what you talked

  with the bison about, you say We understood each other, which

  I take to mean:

  Bison: There is nowhere for me to be safe

  Woman I love: I have been your kind

  [an elk shrieks]

  Love, let’s be the black bears that refuse our sirloin

  steaks, turning our noses up to the Lead Naturalist,

  or the intern—whoever is feeding us that day—waiting

  patiently for a handful of frozen berries flung into

  our yard. Let’s be those bears who come when called,

  eat our fill of this land, then pad back together into

  the thick brush, trying to be as wild as we still can.

  TERESA SUNDMARK

  Teresa Sundmark lives in Homer, Alaska. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UAA. Her poetry and fiction have been featured in Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, and her essays have been syndicated through High Country News. In 2011, she was the winner of the Nicole Blizzard Short Story Contest. Teresa works in a public library and teaches for the Kachemak Bay Branch of the Kenai Peninsula College. She blogs about writing, small-town life, and various other subjects at loftyminded.com.

  Worse Disasters

  The first time we saw Lola in her pink housedress and rubber boots, shuffling across the road to show us the small rental house she owned, we had lost our faith in landlords.

  It was 1972. A year earlier, when Leah and I were nineteen years old, we’d left Colorado and hitchhiked up the Al-Can together. It wasn’t unusual for adventurous, single girls to head for Alaska, but everyone assumed we’d each embarked on the journey in order to find a man. What we really wanted was just to get on with living our lives far away from our families.

  My family and Leah’s family attended the same church. There’s no way we could stay in the same small Colorado town and not get found out, so we hatched the plan to head to Alaska. Everyone thought it was unsavory for two church-going girls to embark on such a journey, but since everyone knew about the high ratio of men to women in Alaska, they didn’t put up too much of a fight about our going.

  Our year away from home had been eye opening. Anyone new to seven-month-long winters and never-ending summer days could say the same thing, but I doubt that most people experienced the same renting trouble that Leah and I experienced once we landed in Anchorage.

  Our first landlord was Bob and he was great ninety-eight percent of the time. But the things about us that didn’t seem to bother him when he was sober, he felt free to comment on during the two percent of the time when he was drunk.

  One summer night, he had some friends over for poker, and when we walked toward the mother-in-law cottage we rented in his backyard, he yelled out his screened window, “Hey girls, come on in. An hour or two with us and you might decide you like dick after all.”

  He acted genuinely surprised and disappointed when we moved out at the end of the month.

  Our next landlord was Regina, and besides being crazy, she raised our rent after we wouldn’t do LSD with her and her boyfriend on Christmas Eve. Our time living in her little conglomeration of log cabins was short-lived.

  We were hopeful that our most recent landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Pitman, would mind their own business and leave us alone. And we were careful around them. We even lied to them, telling them that we were just two single girls waiting for our boyfriends to get home from Vietnam. We’d had a decent six-month run of renting from them until one Saturday in mid-August when Mr. Pitman revealed his true nature.

  “Mrs. Pitman would be heartbroken if she knew about the two of you,” he said after a Bloody Mary fueled morning of mowing the grass around the duplex. “She doesn’t think your way of life is natural.” He wiped his brow with his arm. “Hell, I don’t think it’s natural either, especially for a couple of nice-looking women like yourselves.”

  Then he looked us over. When his gaze stopped on Leah’s chest, I knew it was time to start poring over the classified ads again.

  We bought the Anchorage Times every day, but none of the advertised rentals seemed like a good fit. The landlords either lived too close by—a problem with people in our situation—or the price was too high. We’d almost resigned ourselves to staying in creepy Mr. Pitman’s duplex when we came across an index card pinned to a bulletin board in the Laundromat.

  The card was hung vertically, and an intricate, pencil-drawn tree took up three-quarters of the space. Above the tree it said, Small house for rent. Wooded neighborhood. Fenced yard. No price was listed, so we called the number from a payphone. We made arrangements to go see the place.

  We had trouble finding it because the streets weren’t clearly marked and the directions I’d taken from Lola Miller weren’t exactly easy to follow: First turn left off of Northern Lights onto Haddock Street, then follow that road until you see the house with the jeep. Then turn left and go around a bend. Then when you get to a place where the spruce trees have been cut and a trailer is on the side of the road, go about another half mile. When you see the house with the ducks in the yard, you’ll know you’re on the right track. Take your next right and then you’re there. Finally, after driving around in the rain and looking for a house with ducks in the yard, we found what we thought was the right place to turn.

  “I want it,” Leah said, before we’d even gotten out of the car.

  “This might not even be it,” I said. But I looked at the door and knew it was the right place. A tree, in the same design as the one on the index card, was carved into the front door.

  I wanted it, too.

  The house was green and small—tiny, actually—but it looked well put together. The unassuming front of the house faced the street, and a newish-looking wooden fence enclosed the backyard. A chimney jutting out of the roof suggested a woodstove—something we both wanted—and the raspberry patch in the vacant lot next door was dripping with overripe berries. Lola Miller said she would meet us there at five o’clock, but we were ten minutes late since we’d had trouble finding the place.

  “What if we lost our chance?” I asked, but right after I’d spoken the words, we saw a small, dark-haired woman step out of the house across the street and begin to head toward us. She looked up just long enough to give us a cursory wave, and then she walked the rest of the way with her eyes on the ground. Even with the rain coming down hard, her steps were small, and her movements slow.

  When she finally arrived next to our truck, keys to the house in hand, she was nearly out of breath.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” Leah said. “We got a little turned around.”

  “It’s fine,” Lola Miller said, looking up at us again finally. Her skin was so pale it was nearly translucent, and her brown eyes were set back far into her face. Her lips were bright red with lipstick, applied recently, as though lipstick alone was all that was required as far as appearance was concerned.

  “Mrs. Miller,” I said, since I was the one who had spoken to her on the phone, “I’m Annie, and this is my friend Leah.”

  “Please call me Lola,” she said.

  “Lola, is this the house? Because it looks like it would cost more to rent than what you quoted us on the phone,” I said.

  “Yes, this is it,” she said. “I suppose I could get more for it. I don’t know though, I’m new to all
of this. Do you want to have a look around?”

  Lola struggled to get the key in the lock with her shaky hands. Watching her was not confidence inspiring.

  Inside the house, there were men’s boots and jackets in the arctic entry. In the living room there were Life magazines on the coffee table and a sweater folded over the back of the sofa.

  “When will the house be vacant?” I asked Lola Miller.

  “It’s been vacant for almost a year,” she said, without offering any explanation for the personal items strewn about the house.

  Behind Lola’s back, Leah gave me a look. It was a look she reserved for the times when words couldn’t be exchanged. She’d given me that look on our way up to Alaska, when a man in a station wagon picked us up and instead of talking like a normal person, he sang all of his conversation with us. “Where are you going, young women of grace?” he’d asked us, in operatic form. It went on like that for two hours through Canada.

  And now, at this house that seemed perfect in so many ways, we could tell that something was wrong. Really wrong. Maybe Ms. Lola was crazy.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you the first month for free if you can clear the stuff out of here. There’s not too much because my son only lived here for a month. He still wasn’t entirely moved out of our house across the street when he died.”

  Leah and I exchanged looks again.

  “Oh Lola, I’m so sorry,” Leah said. She was so good in these kinds of situations. She always knew what to say, unlike me who wanted to slink out the door unnoticed when things got uncomfortable. “What was your son’s name?”

  “Darren,” Lola said. “He couldn’t cope well with things.”

  She didn’t offer more information. Instead she continued showing us through the house. It didn’t take long since there were only five rooms including the arctic entry—a kitchen, living room, bathroom and bedroom. The stovepipe we’d seen was attached to a woodstove that had clearly never been used.

  “We put in the woodstove for backup, in case the electricity ever went out, but we never had a reason to use it,” she said by way of explanation.