Building Fires in the Snow

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

  Elsa runs her fingertips along the edges of the metal gears until she gets to something sharp and out of place. Using her nails to loosen whatever it is, she fishes it from the sink. Pinched between her fingers is a rough hunk of gravel. How’d that get there?

  Elsa runs the water and tries the disposal again. The empty gears rattle and whir. “I’m driving in to Costco tomorrow,” Elsa says. “You need anything?”

  “You’re out of body wash,” Mel tells her, punching the button on the TV remote, turning up the volume of a British announcer narrating a true crime drama. “And don’t get that fruity kind. It stinks. Makes my nose itch, and I smell like salad.”

  For a while after Mel moved in, out of habit, Elsa kept replacing the empty household bottles: shampoo, laundry detergent, dish soap, salad dressing. It hadn’t seemed strange until Mel started making requests. When Elsa was young, and she would whine about having to fold someone else’s laundry, or pick up a mess she didn’t make, her mother always reminded her: “We take care of the people we live with. It’s not up to us whether or not they deserve it.”

  Elsa kept on buying the body wash. Something about the act made her feel useful. Mel’s needs were simple. There were a lot of them, but every single one was manageable. Not like her ex.

  Elsa types the words, body wash, not fruity, into a running list on her phone. “Butch up the body wash,” she says. “Got it. Anything else?”

  “Why’s it always gotta be a gay thing with you?”

  Elsa’s pretty sure that if Mel liked people, Mel would be a lesbian. In fact, when she first moved in, Elsa had her figured for a closet case. She assumed Mel would come out once she realized Elsa was also gay, not that it wasn’t obvious. With close-cropped silver hair, a penchant for Carhartts, cowboy boots, power tools, and a sharp eye for damsels in distress, Elsa would be an easy tell most places. But Alaska has a tendency to blow the fuses on general gaydar, especially out in the valley, where Instagrams of teenage girls sporting semi-autos, riding four-wheelers, or holding hundred-pound fish are about as common as bathroom selfies. In Palmer, women like Elsa are everywhere, and most of them are straight. In San Francisco, at least according to her friend, Tracy, a woman like Elsa would be in high demand.

  “You should move here,” Tracy told her. “You’d be a real heartthrob. A lesbian Clint Eastwood.”

  “And about as miserable as a wet cat,” Elsa replied. “Why does anyone even live in California?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s the winters full of sunshine? Or a never-ending supply of citrus?”

  “Well, at least we have water. When’s the last time you flushed a toilet?”

  “Touché. I’ll come visit next summer.”

  “Bring produce,” said Elsa.

  During Mel’s first few months in the house, Elsa tried coaxing her out of the closet. She invited Mel to go dipnetting and hosted barbecues, all with her solid group of female friends, each of them sporting similar haircuts, sensible shoes, pockets full of Leathermans, and a collective appreciation for Susan Sarandon’s glorious, age-defying rack.

  It wasn’t until Mel came home from work one day, complaining loudly about “some fucking dyke” who kept getting orders wrong at the warehouse that Elsa finally spelled it out for her.

  “You do know that I’m gay, don’t you?” Elsa said.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Homophobe.”

  “Dyke. Hey, did you get any toilet paper?”

  “Shit,” said Elsa. “Nope. Sorry. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

  In time, Elsa quit trying to drag Mel out of the closet, and Mel stopped spending most of her time hiding in the bedroom.

  Mel punches again at the remote, this time drowning out the sound of a Pizza Hut commercial. “Hate these stupid commercials,” Mel grumbles. “Shitty deals are never true.” Sure enough, at the bottom of the screen, in the all-too-familiar fine print, appear the words: *Alaska and Hawaii not included.

  Elsa pulls a warm bath towel from the laundry basket. Elsa’s mother has a washer and dryer, but they’re brand new, high efficiency, hold about three socks each, and take forever. Elsa prefers to wash a lot of clothes quickly, so she does her laundry here. That usually means dealing with Mel’s clothes first, always conveniently left just inside the washing machine. Elsa gives the towel a sharp snap for a clean fold. A pair of hot pink bikini briefs go sailing into the air and flutter to the floor, landing in a heap at Mel’s feet.

  Mel stiffens.

  A tiny satin bow, held on by a single stitch, shines from the top of the brightly colored bundle. Elsa stares at the panties, tightening her lips, and tries not to crack a smile. Hot pink, Mel? Seriously?

  “That yellow jacket nest,” Elsa fumbles. “Where’d you say it was again?” She turns, grabs the flashlight from the kitchen counter, and, stifling a laugh, takes several steps out of the room before Mel has time to answer.

  “Crawl space.” Even from the hallway, Elsa can hear the frown in Mel’s voice. Elsa doubles over in silent laughter, clamping a hand over her mouth.

  When she recovers, she grabs the rope hanging down from the ceiling. Tugging, Elsa feels a thin layer of crumbs and dust sprinkle onto her face. She is several steps up the aluminum ladder before she hears the buzz of a few stray fliers, stirred into action by the opening door. Elsa sweeps the eaves with her flashlight beam. It doesn’t take long to locate the nest. It’s a big one all right, larger than a football, tucked at the crook of a soffit. Elsa climbs slowly down the ladder and heads back into the living room. The panties are gone. Mel’s eyes are fixed firmly on the television screen.

  “I found the nest. It’s a live one.”

  Mel nods, says nothing.

  “I don’t want to spray it,” Elsa says. “Not in the house. I’m going to town for some dinner. I’ll come back and take it out tonight. I’ll probably need your help.”

  Elsa can see the whites of Mel’s fingertips gripping the remote. “Sure,” she manages, pushing the word through clenched teeth.

  After dinner, Elsa hunts around the laundry room for appropriate wasp-killing attire. If it were up to her, she’d leave the nest alone, but if Mel ever got stung, she’d never hear the end of it. Elsa slides open a drawer and pulls out a roll of duct tape. She lays a few more articles of clothing on top of the washer, then digs through a Rubbermaid bin for the rest.

  Later that evening, Elsa and Mel stand across from one another in the narrow hallway. Mel is holding both of her arms stiffly away from her sides while Elsa winds the shrinking roll of duct tape around one of Mel’s wrists like a boxer. Elsa makes sure to close any gaps between Mel’s leather gloves and her insulated Carhartt sleeves. It’s getting harder for her to see the tape through the dark amber lenses of her snowboarding goggles. The steam from Elsa’s breath keeps fogging up the plastic, now duct taped firmly to her newly crinkly, silver balaclava.

  “Hurry up,” Mel grumbles. “I’m sweating to death in here.” Her voice, muffled under all of the layers of heavy clothing and duct tape, reminds Elsa of an astronaut.

  “Oh, keep your panties on,” says Elsa.

  Mel jerks her hand away. “Gimme that,” she says, tearing at the roll of tape still dangling from her sleeve.

  Elsa picks up a broom and hands Mel a roll of heavy-duty lawn and leaf bags. “Tear off a few of these and triple bag them,” Elsa says.

  Mel gropes clumsily for the bags with her stiffly gloved hand. “I can’t see jack shit. This is ridiculous. Why don’t you just call someone?”

  Elsa doesn’t answer, but climbs up the rickety ladder, realizing that she can no longer hear the buzzing of the yellow jackets over the huff of her own breath in her ears, the steam of it rising and falling in front of her eyes.

  In the attic, the two women creep closer to the nest. It’s quiet, most of the fliers that were out earlier are tucked inside for the night. Elsa wonders how quickly they’ll wake up. She hands the broom off to Mel, then carefully opens the mouth of th
e bags and reaches toward the nest.

  AMY GROSHEK

  Amy Groshek holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is a graduate student in the PhD program in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Amy’s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Contrary, Bloom, and Fence. Her chapbook, Shin Deep, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008.

  What Goes Around Comes Over

  When my girlfriend’s other girlfriend

  comes over for dinner with my housemate,

  and my housemate, en route from the grill

  to the kitchen, invites me to the picnic table,

  I am not confused or upset. I sit

  behind my sunglasses, tonguing

  the cucumbers sliced to transparency

  in the salad. I swallow the peppers

  and lettuce, the peppered halibut,

  and watch my girlfriend’s other girlfriend

  discuss with my housemate the making

  of a replacement guard for a miter saw,

  how her mannish hands approximate

  the thought. I snap at my housemate

  when she asks me to pass the bread, but I

  do not weigh stabbing them both with a dirty fork

  against bleeding myself in the flower bed.

  So seldom these hot, backyard days.

  Fresh is the halibut, soft as butter, soft

  and salty, white as the clouds that are not

  in the blue, blue sky from which the sun

  burns us all without distinction.

  The capacity for true love expires at age 25

  At some point I quit trying to do good

  and tried only not to do damage.

  For every candle I’d lit,

  every flower I’d opened,

  there lay something dead behind me.

  There is killing in all things,

  I’d heard them say, especially love,

  so I was terrified.

  Out some window then

  slipped my hope: dirty captive bird

  taking back the perfect sky.

  And all these years

  this cage kept just for her.

  With her the candles and blossoms

  that covered the smell of the dead.

  I was lighter then, or heavier.

  How she flies.

  Rubia Writes a Poem About Light for a Contest

  Light, that old word, worn bare by biblical

  metaphor—it turns a poem to stone.

  Knobbed cliché, light, and its cousin, white,

  sewn in fringes to black-and-white Westerns

  my father watched as a child. Silly fool,

  to believe that good guys dressed in white,

  to believe in men entirely good or bad.

  But the world has taught him. But light. But white,

  adjective with which my Mexican girlfriend

  labels the selfishness common to uninformed

  Northerners. Nevertheless, light! My hand

  on her thigh, my pale neck draped

  with her black curls. Being gay makes me less

  white, she says. Less. In Anchorage they speak of light

  like a famous acquaintance. In November the light

  goes away, they say, or, Today I saw the sun. Miracle

  and cruelty, the daylight so far north.

  Generous, careless, ubiquitous—true celebrity.

  Light. White. Blessing unto the blessed

  in their houses with big windows. Waking

  the not-so-blessed to labor or exposing

  their progress home at the end of third shift. Yet,

  light! Don’t you want it? Don’t you sit

  in the sun and read on a February day?

  Dinner at Her Place

  When she takes my hand

  and tries to kiss me

  I’ll say I’m busy,

  my lips are resting,

  do I hear someone

  breaking into the living room?

  I haven’t yet finished

  my wine, I’m only

  halfway through Fossils of Texas,

  I have a prearranged call

  to my house

  in five minutes

  from China.

  There is the moon, dim

  in the long June dusk,

  the way she drops her eyes

  to her empty hands.

  But I’ve hurt enough women

  to start a commune:

  just crossing the room

  I stub my toes on regrets.

  We could be long and deep and glorious.

  We could be life’s one brilliance

  purchased with a thousand failures.

  My cat has developed

  hepatitis.

  Are those Navy SEALs

  on the rooftop?

  If I don’t go out

  and start the engine

  my truck will explode.

  Pearly Everlasting

  When the dean says she understands completely

  she means there isn’t enough money, and anyway,

  she disagrees. Go back to your computer, sort the emails

  of your students, arrange for their tour of the rooms of books

  they will never have time to read. No one

  can see anymore, through the winter steam of the city,

  overpowering moon and stars, the desperate aurora.

  And in “Interrupted Meditation” when Hass is told

  that “there is no key, not even the sum total

  of our acts,” he thinks of love, sees the end

  of his marriage, his wife in tears. “I don’t love you,

  she said. The terrible thing is / that I don’t think I ever

  loved you.” What I thought, reading the poem,

  was how I watched a room of faculty, for half an hour,

  expostulate the filing of a form. Tonight I’ll stand

  before my students, buttoned into my pantsuit,

  fulfilling a contract in exchange

  for health insurance. He was right, Hass, your Pole,

  and then you found not even love

  could answer him.

  So you sang out the name of a weed,

  the common name of a weed against

  the whole world because you couldn’t say

  there isn’t any key. Plastic

  tray of the registrar’s unprocessed forms,

  black and finely dusted. Manicured nail

  my reading student draws across the line,

  wrapping word after word in glossy beige.

  Spruce. Aurora. Pearly everlasting.

  Anything not to say we make it so.

  GABRIELLE BARNETT

  Gabrielle Barnett has been a frequent contributor to Cirque Journal. She has also placed poetry and nonfiction with Alaska Women Speak, Wild Voices, POL, and Contact Quarterly; her poetry was recognized in F Magazine’s 2014 statewide writing contest, and her nonfiction won a 1993 Alaska Press Club award. With a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU, she taught as contingent faculty at UAA from 1993 to 2013. She calls the coastal forest and mountains of Turnagain Arm home, seeking balance between the pulls of modern city life and the wish for a quiet backwoods retreat.

  Mountain Man

  James set two mugs, a jar of jam, and platter of toast, all ends cast off from otherwise eaten loaves, on the sturdy drop-leaf table. Idle gossip had been brewing along with the coffee, woodstove warming the A-frame against a steady drizzle damp, low clouds still funneling through the pass.

  Passing the toast to Jo, he apologized, “I eat so simply now; it’s such a bother to haul a lot of food out here. Got my dried bulk items, and learned to like cabbage. I do miss the rhubarb. Died off this year. The chickens give me plenty of eggs. Mostly I drink water.”

  Pausing to stoke the stove and light a bowl in a pale, stone pipe, he returned to his rambling monologue on the exhale, grateful for an audience after a stretch of solitude.


  “Just look at my skin. It’s the diet, the pure water. Still so clear, and at my age. And the sauna, to help flush the toxins, sweat them out. You’ve got to flush those toxins, honey. Eat simply, drink lots of water, and cleanse; cleanse the colon, cleanse the liver, cleanse the blood, cleanse from the inside out. Honey, just let it go.”

  “Here I am, late summer again,” Jo mused, “still just a weekend visitor, taking refuge from the city, fleeing another disaster with a woman who doesn’t get me.” She looked around, relaxing into the familiar surroundings. Underfoot, signature fragments of blue circle and red stripe speckled the hardwood floor, courtesy of the school gym rebuild. A seated Buddha surveyed the scene, complacent and inscrutable as usual, from a perch atop the spiral stair. Behind the old cast-iron stove, stacks of cups, plates, and jars, waiting for the eternal backlog in the enamel sink to clear out, buried a wooden counter.

  “I could give you a hand with those dishes,” she offered, accepting pipe and lighter from her host.

  “They can pile up a bit more; it’s not yet worth heating water,” he replied.

  As soon as the summer swelter set in back east, she had started longing for this place. She missed seeing timberline on a regular basis: somber conifer spires breaking up the bright mass of birch and aspen leaf. She missed the cabin under the contours of that beloved rock face, daubed all muted orange, rose quartz, and dusty yellow, crevices filled with clumps of mossy tundra jagging down from ridgeline. But an unexpected loneliness confronted her when she arrived.

  “Seems like half the state cleared out with the crash,” Jo reflected, passing back the pipe. “Anchorage feels so empty.”

  James agreed. “Hardly anyone there worth visiting.”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “Yeah, I guess the half that stayed is sticking close to home, putting down roots, digging in, just trying to get on with things,” said Jo, spreading jam on a slice of toast.