by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
But she still has her strong chin, her biceps, her drive to be the best.
“Mommy, stop staring at the mirror and come play with me.”
Amber grins. She doesn’t have to win races or collect numbers to be worthy. She’s married (legally!) to the sexiest woman she’s ever met and mom to the sweetest, silliest kid. She doesn’t miss the lonely nights or the empty days she filled with beer and workouts, aching with a void she could never satisfy.
“You just try to get away from me, Good Queen!” Amber growls in her bad queen voice, which sounds remarkably similar to her pirate voice.
The good queen shrieks and darts away.
Amber grabs the broken hippopotamus toy off the bathroom counter. “You can’t stop me! I have the Hippo of Power!”
KATE PARTRIDGE
Kate Partridge received her MFA from George Mason University, and her poems and lyric essays have appeared in Colorado Review, Carolina Quarterly, RHINO, Better: Culture & Lit, and Verse Daily. She lives in Anchorage, where she teaches at the University of Alaska Anchorage, co-edits Gazing Grain Press, and serves as account coordinator for VIDA.
Model
As if the name isn’t enough,
she insists that I stand on the porch, too,
to look at the beaver moon,
which is indeed pale as the rings
around birches along the river, or bright
enough to light them, and barely obscured
by the early evening streetlights and sirens,
the icicles grafting onto each other
in regimented curtains. Here
and there, one takes an abrupt turn
where it’s been dripped on—
sudden left elbow tapering out.
My friend says nothing can be done
about the icy intersections except patience,
but he also recommends wrapping
a turkey in bacon, so take your best guess.
The term fishtailing makes me wonder
what it would be like to be propelled
by sudden shifts from behind or to wade
across a street completely submerged
in fins. The ice seems suddenly preferable.
In fact, we snap off ice spears
from the roof and compete, perhaps
not as safely as one might, at hurling them
into a snow bank, where they remain
wrapped in snow as though modeling
the rule for treating impalements:
leave the object in place.
Earthquake Park
Someone has taken care
that all the edges should be jagged:
fence posts cut in descending steps,
path split by a constantly-shifting
line up to the edge where houses
shrugged off into the ocean, remaining
ground rippling across trees locked
upward. From a rock along the inlet,
she observes the planes landing,
crossing before Susitna and selecting
the international landing to the west
or the local airfield to the north.
If she can identify all of the objects
in the sky, she believes in order.
Beneath her, the rocks boast
cartoon faces and phone numbers,
the recovery of ancient method
almost reverent to the location.
Another woman scampering further on
the ridge slides down the mud bank
into a stand of grass, a collapsed circle
outlasting the animal that formed it.
M 4.0, 21 km S of Knik-Fairview
Otherwise, a static day—
the snow huddled against the mountains,
the bike trail puddled over root-carved ravines,
we decided to go to war or not.
When we left, Ben gave me a field guide
in a bar we frequented. I didn’t read it
but went to a preserve to learn
to recognize my neighbors—
the bears fielding blueberries
from the paws of a young keeper
pitching them over the deck,
the caribou fencing, antlers clacking
like hockey sticks. In the gift shop,
a stack of pelts, fleshed and stretched;
a child stroking them and murmuring,
“Poor reindeer. Now he’s dead.”
DAWNELL SMITH
Dawnell Smith works in a cubicle by day, a shared desk pod/family room at night, where she crafts columns, reviews, and articles for daily and weekly newspapers, quarterly magazines, blogs, and other digital chalkboards. When not on quad skates, working on art projects, running errands, and getting outside, she makes essays, poems, short stories, and other mixed-genre pieces. She won a Rasmuson Fellowship in 2015, and is currently working on a collaborative memoir and video/audio project with her partner, Teeka Ballas. She lives in Anchorage with her partner, teenage boys, rescue dogs, crickets, renegade shrews, and lone gecko. (She feels bad about the gecko; it’s cold and the tank seems limiting.) Her derby name is WickedSpeedia.
What Would Derby Do?
Dear WWDD,
I hate my job. It’s not the work I do. It’s my boss. She’s passive aggressive, a micromanager, a social fail. Yep, a great combination. She treats me like a fucking child. We get paid shit, but we do something decent. She just doesn’t get the “decent” part when it comes to her staff. My boyfriend says I need to stick it out a year. We’re broke. But I dread the walk to the office from the parking lot. I’ve started showing up late to avoid her. And when I do run into her, I feel like throwing up. It’s just a stupid ordinary job, and she’s just a stupid ordinary bitch. Why does she make me feel like crap?
Jobba the Hunt
Clearly, you can ditch it, tough it out, or hit the bitch where it hurts. That’s the obvious advice. That’s how I would have responded a year ago, but I got the wind knocked out of me. I feel trapped in a noisy washing machine with my kneepads and wrist guards in the soak, agitate, spin, and repeat cycle.
My WWDD advice blog came to me like the big bang, a self-made extension of my derby career and a vehicle for moving from retail to publishing. I figured it could go viral, help pay some bills, keep me relevant in the badass community. That was two years ago, and the blog blew up by year one—the likes, shares, invites, comments, and nudges by social media hounds went off the chain. Even now, the blog’s reach keeps hitting all-time highs despite my bout of writer’s block. I feel less like a witty advice columnist and more like an imposter every day. You know, the old friend who gets called every six months by the ever-heart-broken slosh who thinks it’s cool to vent until 2:00 a.m. because they used to share a dorm room and get hammered twice a week.
I’ve come to a complete stop and derby can’t abide a standstill. Wheels must roll, any direction, any speed—fast, slow, imperceptible, backwards, lateral, powerful, graceful, on toe-stops, in the air, over a roller girl pile-up, through a blockade of hips and limbs. If you get stuck, get used to it; do anything to get out of it; try anything to keep the forward motion. Do not let it get in your head.
It’s playing offense and defense simultaneously. If a blocker opens a hole for a jammer, the other team’s star might slide on through. It’s all timing and intention, awareness and response, communication and contact. Let your girl through and then slam the door on the other chick.
Roca knew this as well as I did. She wasn’t loud, she didn’t curse, she never tagged people on Facebook and Tumblr after a game, because watching derby wasn’t a social event for her. She paced. She twitched. She anticipated how the blockers should pivot and brace, when the jammer should accelerate, how the lead jammer could fake and cut to the inside lane for a clean pass. She would identify the flaws in each team, the limitations of each skater, the untapped strengths of the under-recognized. She never tied a skate in her life or asked me not to, but Roca
understood the game. She absorbed it tactically, strategically, metaphorically.
Offense and defense: The day she left, she dropped a love letter into my skate bag. I wasn’t surprised, I just wasn’t paying attention; she didn’t have to drive through my wall because I left the lane open.
Strangely, I don’t recall the timbre of her voice anymore, though we talked day and night the first year, but when I close my eyes I can see the curve of her fingers around a pen, the slope of her hand poised on the keyboard, and her first hesitant, frustrated moments before a flurry of loops and lines, key strokes, and returns. She studied anthropology, dabbled in poetry, stayed connected with people around the world. She called them, wrote notes in her hand and scanned them into emails, drew her own happy faces on round bodies with many arms.
I unfold her last letter, Verdana with addendums and tangents in her own script, English and Spanish. I carry it in a hideaway pocket of my sling bag with the coffee-stained napkin carrying our first collaborative poem. The creases of both parchments fall back into place when I fold them. Enormous messages made tidy and small.
The afternoon we wrote our first poem, we headed out as partners rather than women on a date. I grabbed her writing hand in mine, “You know, we should chat, hang out, fall in love, even argue, because it works, because it’s fun, because it’s real, even seamless, but let’s avoid having a ‘conversation,’ okay? ‘The talk’ never sits well with me. The ‘sit-down’ always comes off as another request for me to give in to what I don’t want and give up what I do.”
Roca clutched my two stunted hands in her one long one, holding a coffee mug in the other, and leaned from her chair to kiss my neck. I loved her for that—the way she could hold her tongue even as her mind raced.
My father used to say, “Let’s have a talk,” so we would sit, and I would never speak and he would never confess.
“Maybe we need to sit down and talk this out,” my mother would beg, and we would sit, she and I, in our trusted silence.
“Can we just sit down and have a conversation?” my latest lover would suggest when lust gave way to my needing some space, and we would sit, hearts in transit, until I left.
People in control don’t ask or hear or reflect, they tell, presume, and justify; the one-way communication they call an agreement. I learned this before I could read. There are things communicated in flesh that can find no voice, things said, accused, and demanded without dialogue, without any acknowledgment but the civilized skirting of what needs erasure, restitution, or at least a, “can I get a witness?”
I survived by standing in the shadows and saying nothing. When the shit hit the fan and splayed across the haunted walls of our family dollhouse, my shame held my tongue hostage and saved me. Even then, as that child still formed by imagination, I convinced myself that I would grow up and declare in dramatic courtroom fashion the truth of the wrongdoer, the strength of my character, the proof of my worth. But the loss of innocence is less about what you lose, and more about you can’t repossess.
Even if you put the thief away for life, you’ll never get back what they stole.
Dear WWDD,
I think I did something bad. I was drunk. I can’t remember.
Anon
I keep my Roca memorabilia tucked away in a travel trunk. The poems, love letters, stories, even shopping lists and vacation plans, little reminders of films we want to see. I dust them off sometimes and try to extract from memory and evidence what really happened. It’s easy to remember only the bits of conversation we care to, but the letters, notes, tombs, diaries, Craigslist ads, cryptic lines in the “I saw you” personals outlive those interpretations. They force you to reposition and reconsider. They make you relive the past by reinterpreting it.
As a kid, I used to leave scraps of paper under my brother’s door as warnings, but he took them as threats. “Do not go downstairs,” I would write. I wanted to warn him about the hell breaking loose, but he later told me he assumed I wanted to keep him from something good, maybe ice cream or a good TV show. No matter how often he walked into the maelstrom, he still doubted my motives.
He never heeded those notes, but he tucked them away. We shake our heads and laugh sardonically at the misunderstanding, and the intended camaraderie we only now know. Perspective of a thing deepens when you experience more angles of it.
I guess those warnings were my first attempt at giving advice. Later in grade school, I kept a poker face as I passed notes and delighted at how I could incite a drama by knowing what observation to make, how to make it, who to keep in the loop, and how to redirect backlash before the brunt of my words come falling back on me. My middle school savvy led to a college prep advice column, “Ivy League,” with encoded messages for the “in” crowd about where to get the best weed and how to get free pop from the vending machine. I concocted a system for my target audience to find the information they needed by scanning the bullshit of the day with headlines like, “The Top Five Study Habits for Getting into College,” “What to Wear at an Interview,” “How to Start a Club,” and “The Pros and Cons of Study Groups.” When you offer the advice, you control the questions by controlling the answers, and my fallback inquiries were always, “Who are the influencers?” and “How can I protect myself by making them need me?”
In college applications a few years later, I described my column as “visionary.” It makes sense that I’m back at the keyboard twenty-five years later where I can pose (or impose) a view of my chosen sport, the derby life, the spectacle of the game.
On the track, you might get laid out and knocked on your ass, belittled and dismissed, made heroic and mighty. You might get blindsided. You might not be good enough, strong enough, experienced enough, young enough, fit enough. You might discover your calling. You might stink. You might look fat in your uniform. You might get your confidence back. You might end up in the “in” crowd and regret what it turns you into. You might find your soul mate.
Ah, the ways the derby love bubble can pop.
Dear WWDD,
My marriage is a pile-up right now. We went from occasional sex to no sex. We went from kissing each other hello every morning to barely saying goodbye and even that’s a chore. He says I spend more time with derby than I do with him. He thinks I care more about my derby schedule than our family. It’s not that I don’t see his point, but you know: Derby. Because it’s where I can fuck up or jam like a rock star, and either way I still have my skates and my wives and my thing.
I love him, I really do. His family’s fucked up and he got the ass end of the deal, but I thought we worked that out ages ago. I thought we were managing it. I thought that with the kids close to moving out and our debt finally paid down, I could finally do something for myself, that I can do something that makes me a little fucking special for a change. Now he’s basically saying, “Derby or our marriage, you pick.” If I back off the oval to save my marriage, can I still save myself?
Love Un-Handled
A year ago I would have answered with a rapid-fire “play or get off the track” meme with a hardcore Sigourney Weaver Alien shot bolstered with some faux metaphysics: “The oval is the metaphor for life, the wall a symbol of cohesion, and teamwork the gel that holds it together. Why keep your man in the line-up if he won’t even put on skates?”
Just like that, I’d get a few hundred “likes,” dozens of shares, retweets with snide one-liners, and comments bemoaning my lack of compassion, recounting another rash of pity parties, hating on my choice of words or themes. No shit, if you read them out loud, the feeds would sound like an epidemic of AM radio personalities bouncing off the hermetic studio walls. Roca used to roll her eyes when I dropped a blog post because she could see the mediocrity round the bend.
“You can think harder than this,” she would say, scrolling down my posts and viewer responses.
“It’s just a thing,” I’d shrug. “I’ve got too many letters to overthink it.”
“Well, you can write bette
r than this, too,” she’d say and get up to get on with her own business.
Every blog (over 100,000 fans and climbing!) made a new beginning for me, though. I learned how to twist a tweet into a one-sided manifesto sound byte every bit as shearing as an ass cheek across cement. To every “She’s got kids, debt, and a heap of ex baggage, but she slays me when she skates. Should I ask her out?” or “Sure, size doesn’t matter, until you’re upended at the knees and gasping for air at the bottom of the pile,” I would construct a WWDD blog easily broken down into 140 characters: Jam’s on, baby, if you can’t put on the #star when told to throw down for the team, then take your #FishnetDerbyEntitlement to the stands.
Once the blog blew, I spent more hours posting, updating, blogging, tracking analytics, responding to letters than I did dreaming, romancing, even skating. Roca encouraged me early on, helping lift it off the ground and give it traction. She got me doing something I cared about again. She convinced me that taking the basic tenets of roller derby—the attitudes, rules, tactics, strategies, legacy, sports scene, and sideshow—to build metaphors and meaning would matter. She said once, “What better way to help people deal with a sucky love life or lousy job than advise them to ‘dump the douche and put on your skates.’” (Crude words rarely fell from her lips, but she meant them when she said them.)
Pimping out the “get on with your life, we’ve got your back” message helped me subvert the wearisome song and dance of query, submission, rejection and replace it with instant gratification: Followers, likes, retweets, comments, favorites, shares, you name it. The blog made the 100 best blogs in Daily Tekk and I got invites to tournaments, boot camps, and conferences. I went from being a bookstore assistant manager with a dead-end job in Anchorage to a minor celebrity on tracks and in roller rinks all over the world, from Oklahoma, Florida, and Kodiak, Alaska, to Germany and Taiwan. I drank sake with trilingual military wives and smoked dope with rednecks in the back of 1970s American trucks.
