by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
“I’m spending less and less time in town myself, nowadays,” James explained. “I go in for the laundry run, try to pick up the food drop, mostly for other folks out here in need. I do what I can. So many just barely making it these days.”
“Looks like you finally got that bulb wired to the solar panel,” Jo noted, refilling her own mug.
“Should give me light through October and again come February,” James acknowledged proudly. “Sun won’t be clearing the ridge mid-November.”
“Mid-November I’ll be deep in my big city routine, riding the F between Brooklyn and the East Village,” she laughed. “Hard to believe that’s real when I’m here.”
“I’m thinking of spending the winter outside again; plant another crop of garlic on the family land in Alabama. Last year’s crop paid for the trip, with a little left over. Organic garlic is fetching a good price these days. Got to get that greenhouse started. Still hoping to put in tulips this year. Lots of tulips. If only I could get ahead for a season, I know this land could pay for itself,” he sighed, lighting yet another bowl.
Over the years James had remodeled the place, starting by digging out the cabin floor several feet down, and adding a root cellar under the kitchen, accessed though a trap door. He pushed out a wall upstairs, creating an alcove with a dormer window, to let in light as well as free up some headroom. Downstairs, he set in a small octagonal picture window to catch the view up valley. An extension to the original arctic entryway served as storage space for just about anything that could handle freezing. A wooden deck off the west side, out the sliding glass doors, invited summer guests to look out over sunsets and the brackish water of Dragonfly Pond.
“Always so many chores waiting,” he continued. “Haul, build, split, lay in, mend, feed, stack. Envy those damn cats, always napping when there’s work to be done.”
As the pipe changed hands again, talk turned steamy, moving beyond the new root cellar and leaky roof to the running feuds, both domestic and neighborly. Who left who, why, when, and how. Deals and hearts broken. Convoluted disputes over property lines and rights of way. Custody suits and court proceedings, escalating beyond divorce.
Fueled by a full pot of caffeine, the rumor mill churned. James loved to test, needle, and bait, whether bantering and bitching in the kitchen or working the massage table. He could be catty, even vicious when jealous, detecting a sore spot, honing in on the vulnerability, and digging hard. Jo had watched James burn the bridge to his last long-term lover this way, when he showed up with a woman, suspected to be a girlfriend in the making. James knew how to out that screamer of a spot inside the big toe, or the knot hiding under the scapula, that possessive streak, that lurking hang up over body image, that trip about sexuality, that nagging doubt about being woman enough, or man. Most of the time he knew when to back off; after preying on the pain a while, he’d admonish, “Stop holding on, that’s baggage you don’t need, honey, get it out of your way, let it go.”
So why couldn’t she shake her ex’s edict: half and half, could swing either way women were a waste of time. Only real dykes from now on, she had said. If not being 100 percent lesbian 100 percent of the time made her suspect, she was better off on her own. She didn’t like seeing herself as a potential traitor to the lesbian nation. She felt unfairly disqualified, cast into a limbo land of in between and nothing at all. It hadn’t threatened her last boyfriend that she was also into women, so why couldn’t the women in her life be just as open?
James interrupted her brooding, unexpectedly veering onto raw emotional turf of his own.
“The grandmother, that bitch, went and called DFYS. All over a little weed. And my thing for men.”
Jo had never met the child, just seen photos. James and Benjamin outside the cabin. James and Benjamin going to town. James and Benjamin smiling for the camera.
“Don’t make me no pederast. Men aren’t boys. We’re talking about a two year old.”
There it was again. Prejudice. Making a whole class of people guilty by default, that deep-rooted assumption that gays are up to no good whenever children are involved.
“When are people going to wake up?” she scoffed in his defense. “Where are the stats on guys messing with underage chicks? Look at Annie, felt up by her mom’s new squeeze. Did some time, and he’s back on the scene, still lusting after those new teen tits.”
James shook his head. “Too much hot-blood in that Harley-riding man.”
Jo tried to piece James’s life together, getting nowhere figuring out her own. He was notorious for lying about his age, getting caught in inconsistencies from one rendition to the next. But by her best estimate he was more than twenty years her senior; pushing fifty to her still twenty-something. Upstairs, in the strictly shoes-off loft, carpeted thick and kept uncharacteristically clutter-free, a large painting capturing him as a much younger man, joyfully nude, hinted at a life left somewhere behind. On one of her early visits, James had shared the contents of a flimsy cardboard box tucked in the upstairs dresser: Kodak memories dating back to the days of black-and-white glossies.
“They’re calling it neglect, abuse, child endangerment,” James continued.
A strapping fresh-faced Marine posed on a public lawn somewhere in Kerouac’s America: perhaps a clue to the undesirable discharge that first redirected his career, long before Stonewall, long before AIDS, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and Silence = Death.
“The mom entrusted me with him; I relieved her of a burden she was not ready to bear. I could see she couldn’t cope.”
During his bohemian Atlanta days, in shorts and an unbuttoned polo shirt, he tossed thick, curly hair, flaunting the taut, tanned body of which he remained so vainly proud, warmly greeting bee-hived young women and mod young men at the door of a bustling coffeehouse. Again too alternative for the time and place, he had to move on; that time anti-war activity got him run out of business and town. “Surely he’d already suffered enough discrimination for one lifetime,” Jo thought. “Surely it could stop now. All of it. Surely all narrow-mindedness keeping people out, keeping people apart, stopping gay men from parenting, dumping bi people in one closet or another, could just stop.”
“She was too young; she had no support. No father in sight. And where was the grandmother then? I’m the only parent that child has really known.”
A brief relocate to the Haight took him west, but finding that mecca already on the wrong side of trendy, he left. He wanted to go to India, but that required too many vaccinations and visas, so he headed north instead, looking for land to go back to, seeking freedom and peace, self-reliance and community away from it all. Winding up in Anchorage, he fell in with the start-up health food crowd, established a massage business, and bought property in the Talkeetnas, complete with blueberry bog, forested acreage, and an eroding bluff overhanging a braided meander and flood of a glacial river.
“I took on that child when no one else wanted him. I gave him love no one else had to spare. It was the right thing to do. It was something I could do.”
With the right company he’d sashay to Leonard Cohen until the cassette player batteries died. With the right weather, he’d go about all his chopping and sawing, baking and planting buck naked, reveling in his best birthday suit, so out of place there was no question he belonged.
“So I have got to defend myself in court. Against projections and conjecture. Justify myself. That’s all the thanks I get. Because now she wants him. I don’t know if I’ll ever see that child again.”
Jo searched for something worth saying. “It’s so unfair. Court sounds kind of scary.”
“She doesn’t have a case, really. Nothing but hearsay. Another reminder that this is all temporary anyway. Attachment brings suffering. That’s the human condition. Best get on with those chores before we lose any more of the day. We can fire up that sauna later, put on a pot of soup.”
With conversation and coffee drained to the dregs, damper closed, and pain set back on its shelf, James po
cketed the pipe, absent-mindedly stashing what was left of the weed behind a jar of Granola. Leaving the cabin unlocked, tended by a host of Ganeshas, Shivas, Buddhas, and the stray Devata, collected from import shop, thrift store, and garage sale, he loaded up rototiller and chain saw, to lurch on up the dirt road, shifting beat-up green pickup into low for the steep climb: a fading Southern queen keeping the homestead dream alive, just barely in the bush, highway hum always drifting down valley with the clouds.
TEEKA A. BALLAS
Teeka A. Ballas has worked as a freelance writer and editor, and staffer and stringer for newspapers, international wire services, travel publications, and radio. The cofounder of F Magazine, Ballas has worked tirelessly for seven years as editor and publisher of Alaska’s only volunteer-run, independent arts and culture publication. As of 2015, she has placed the magazine on hiatus while she focuses her attention on working with her partner, Dawnell Smith, on a multimedia project that entails an art documentary, a dual memoir, and an audio slideshow collectively titled, “Exhuming My Father.”
Carrots, Peas: in D minor
She releases the bite on her lower lip to blow a renegade strand of hair from her eyes. With a swift wave of her right hand, she moves the pan of braised ptarmigan in reduced crushed juniper berry and red current juices to the back burner, and with her left hand guides her roux of most beloved imported ingredients to the closer flame: butter, rice flour, a dash of paprika, two grinds of sea salt, four pinches of Aleppo pepper. She gradually adds the homemade vegetable stock. With one hand she whisks without pause, a hint of music between each beat. With her other hand she drops finely chopped carrots and peas into a sunken pan of hot caribou fat to brew a hash; then diced onions, zucchini—all from the garden—into a dry stir fry pan, tossed over a low flame to sweat them together. A continual lift and twist of her wrist throws the contents into the air and catches them.
It’s a cacophony, a discordance of motion. I play a game with myself, trying to intuit her next move, but it’s dizzying for me to watch her hands. Instead I watch her feet. Bare and cracked, they hardly move. Only a slight shift of weight from one to the other indicates the mayhem delivered by her upper torso. Her ankles slim, her calves thick from combat, plaid cotton boxers come down just past her buttocks, rounded, firm. I want to lunge into the kitchen, press my breasts against her back and bite on her ear, tug on her ponytail, and laugh—but I know it would only disrupt the flow. Our flow. The rhythm in her head. Her manic cooking, her panic. Her fear of sleeping hungry.
In the cities where her story began, there are those who have it worse than us, those who live in the shadows cast by wealth. They fight for rotten scraps. They shed tears, wring hands, gnash teeth so gnarled they can only suck and gum what food they find. She tells me stories about those she lived among, what she had to do to survive. Sometimes I tell her to stop talking about it; I am laden with guilt for the contrast of our lives. I was born and raised in Anchorage—a city with different social ills than those Outside. I had the luxury of summers and the great outdoors sans concrete, suffocated earth. Very young I learned to fish and hunt, gut and tan. My palate is simple like my cooking, if I couldn’t catch my food I might starve, too.
She has an inherent ability, a gift, to look into a cupboard even an impoverished city dweller would see as bare, and as an outrageous throe of movement and attitude, adorn a plate with piquancy and lusty appeal in under an hour of aerobic culinary activity. She says poverty taught her to cook. Poverty and eating scraps off rich people’s plates when she worked busing tables for wages so low that a full day’s work didn’t afford her the price of an aperitif.
Sometimes when I watch her work, I can see the impressions left behind—a shadow in her eye, a twitch in her brow, a turn in her lip. When she is so buried in those moments, I resent not just her history, but how she squanders the moment by living it only as a means to defeat the past. In those instances, she cannot see me; she cannot see the ease in which I swing my axe; my perfect posture as I brace, draw, and release; the gracefulness in my cut and clean. It is as though I am posturing for a blind artist. It is as if I am only living between her seconds, between the notes she’s humming in her head while she wields and blows.
This incessant motion of hers is not relegated to the kitchen. It’s how she moves through life—it keeps her from noticing the hollow, the void—the place where anger and pain reside. She’s at war with her demons, the ones who determined for her before she was old enough to cross the street alone what the outcome of her life would be. The sexual reprobates whose acts buried within her a path that would know only struggle, doubt, and false footing.
I don’t always know how or where I fit in her life, but I take solace in knowing I am not the problem. I am not her past. I am now. I get to sit here with her. Eat the cuisine she creates out of food we harvest and I catch. Feel her tears fall onto my shoulder at night when she thinks I am sleeping. Listen to the monsters growl and churn inside her while she slumbers. I want to pick up my rifle and shoot her demons, but have learned the best way to help her fight the bastards is to hold them down when she needs to kick them.
Sometimes, when the volume is turned up in her head and she’s immersed in a burst of activity, her tongue lashes out at me. I am not a fighter, I’m a hunter. So I stand aside and bide my time. I have a hunter’s quietude, a fisherman’s patience. Eventually, in short time, she comes around, wraps me in her earnest embrace, lets me taste the wealth of my fortitude, reminds me why I wait.
A hush is unfolding in the kitchen. Each burner’s flame is extinguished. Discarded culinary effects are placed in the sink. Her feet move more than her hands. They dance between spaces as she removes two plates from the cupboard. Two glasses. A bottle of sour wine made by neighbors. She begins to hum, then sing . . . and I release the breaths I’ve been hoarding.
“My darling lives in the green,” her voice soft in sound but firm in texture.
“She wants to be . . . ah la la . . . with me.”
A pool of copper brown, spicy roux. A scoop of vegetable hash doled atop.
“But darling . . .”
Notes rise and embolden.
“I’ve no time to be deceived . . .”
A twirl and spoon of blues.
“By the sweetness of desire.”
Ptarmigan placed gently atop . . .
“Ahh . . . All I’ve got is time for sweet . . . sweet . . .”
A trill and fade.
“Sweet ed-di-bal . . .”
Delicate swirls of deep red, tart rhubarb syrup.
“She wants to taste my sweet ed-di-bal . . .”
Carrots and peas . . .
“Sweet ed-dah-bal love . . .”
She spins the plate down in front of me. Places on my mouth soft lips with sour wine lingering upon them.
For now, we feast.
Cupid’s Arrow
red makes the buffalo hit the fence
the tourist’s social camouflage
drives it to fury
its passion imitated
she paints
brushes and strokes
flush pastels across my body
moon indigo over my face
a pouting lip
a rounded tear
slipping through her memories
her laughter momentous
full of texture and strength
holding me up
high in the air
safe from the buffalo’s rage
SANDY GILLESPIE
Sandy Gillespie, writer and artist, lived in Alaska for twenty-two years. She worked as a professional artist and arts administrator and exhibited extensively in Alaska, including solo shows at the Anchorage Museum and the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. Her work is in the permanent collections of these institutions and the Museum of the North in Fairbanks. Gillespie currently works out of her Minneapolis studio. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UAF and continues to teach online for the Kachemak Bay Campus of U
AA.
The Trees Tell the Story
They walked among us—listening deeply to the ruffling of birch
leaves, the ting
of aspen leaves. They smiled at the spruce, tapped the trunk of
the largest—the one that would stand as sentinel at the top of
the driveway. Before they brought chain saws and bobcat, they
invited friends. To come. To listen. To dedicate this place in
love. They brought gifts—tokens of the earth from other loved
places. They brought stories and laughter. Dogs and cats. They
consecrated this
space in their own way, understanding that the sacred
already breathed here.
When they began to build, they did this with respect. They took
down only
enough trees to live amongst us. They saved our severed trunks.
Split them into logs and stacked them for winter.
We welcomed them. We danced in the wind, bending as if we were
60-foot palms
swaying along a sundrenched coast. We sang until our leaves
fell, then rustled hellos as they walked from cabin to outhouse
to campfire. We heated them in woodstove and fire pit—lis-
tening to their stories and the stories of friends who gathered
around the fire.
When they were ready to build a studio on the second ridge they
had to take more
trees. Clear a larger space—creating required more floor space
than living. This time a concrete base—and the need to hire
help to stand the larger walls. We didn’t mind—they still re-
spected us, would save our trunks for heat and be grateful. But
something had shifted in their hearts.
We wanted to lift them up—high into our boughs—to let them see
what they had
