by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
I stopped hiking, reading books, or planning escapes. I stopped joining the give-and-take dialogues we used to spend all night unraveling. Everything came out in short, biting sentences, truncated and rambling, one after another.
“Stop talking to me in blog rants,” Roca said weeks before she vanished in the virtual fog.
“JFC,” I said.
“What, you’ll be sending me emoticons tonight and calling it making love tomorrow?”
Roca began walking the lower slopes of the Chugach Range alone; we began to snip at each other about who should have picked up the box at the post office or changed the oil in the car. Where Roca once called me on my horseshit and played poet to my documentarian, she turned inward to an interior hum. We stopped talking, yes, but I stopped listening first. We both forgot to care.
She soon tired of my workaholic, derby-holic all-nighters and my way of taking whatever we talked about and circling back to my latest blog post, engagement analytics, and what we needed to do to push its visibility. I knew things were messed up, but I kept putting it off, dropping it to the bottom of my chore list, conspiring instead to write a blog post about how derby can take over your life.
By then, though, Roca had stayed long enough. She didn’t look broken up or weepy. She didn’t leave in sobs. She just looked done. She packed her bags in front of me, quietly gave me instructions for keeping the garden and fish alive. She may as well have been talking to a smart phone, though, because I only gave her directions to the easiest route out.
I always unravel the letter and expect more: “I’ll miss you. I’m excited for you. I’ll always love you. Roca.”
Maybe that’s why after the first read I managed only an impulsive Tumblr video montage of epic derby fails with a flippant side note: Uh oh, my mother o’ rants means the single life for me, bitches. More track time, more me time, more WWDD.”
Hey WWDD?!
Totally miss you. Can’t believe the stuff you say, LMFAO! Shit girl. I think you’re my all-time MVP derby crush!!!!
So. How do I tell my derby wife that she stinks? I mean, a LOT. I mean, how do I tell her, “You stink and it’s not in the everyone-smells-in-derby kind of way?” Because, damn, she needs to take care of that shit.
Derby love. Xoxo
P.S. Text!
Hanna Satana
With derby, you can couch surf. You can find a sounding board for dangerous plans. You can ask for a loan and stay for dinner. Where there’s a derby, there’s an array of women and men who skate, run line-ups, referee, keep track of the score, do the color commentary, raise the funds, and pepper the sport with verve, grit, and community. You can reach out to a league in any state and most countries, small towns and large: Spokane, Baton Rouge, Austin (of course), and Fairbanks, Melbourne, Germany, and Taiwan. You can build vacations around derby. You can plot a worldwide tour as long as you can afford the time and expense, and as long as you show up ready to play. You’ll get hit, flail, and lay it out on the track, but that’s part of the payoff, the bruises and chafes and dislocations.
Pain isn’t the issue. It’s whether and for how long you have the patience for it.
We all toy with our own tolerances eventually. I started early by jabbing myself with an upholstery needle to watch the thick, red pearls rise and slide down my arm. I can still find the scars if I stretch my skin. But I graduated to another kind of hurt quickly when I met my first crush, a boy. I was sixteen, but I told him nineteen.
We went out for a few months, I don’t remember how long, but I recall the way his roughness coaxed out of me a monstrous, hungry, brutally free thing and how I loved how it lashed out and seethed. In that place, as that being, I could own my hurt and hate and longing; and it seemed right and fair that it could spit and unleash what I could never do on my own but that had been done to me.
We didn’t last, of course. He came over one night with friends to party.
“Fuck you,” I said casually.
He had fucked me plenty of times without my wanting it by then, and I felt my ribs tightening even as I held my whatever stare. They hung out for a while and talked about what I could handle and still keep the same cold stare. Awkward minutes passed until they shrugged and left. The next day I gave the kid his walking papers, his empty wallet, and the lighter he left on the step.
I kept the cigarettes.
Roca used to orchestrate romantic gestures out of the ordinary. She’d send a text, “Tonight, cheese and bread in bed while streaming the nationals,” and I’d get home and find the latest game on the laptop and a platter of bread, cheese, and spices in oil.
She grew up a strict Catholic girl with a come-and-go father who whipped her at every unsavory thought—his, not hers. She made it north in her twenties via Mexico City and Brownsville, Texas, because she wanted to touch the past by walking through it and study the collision of nature and culture.
I’m an Alaska-grown child who never left except here and there, but I spent most of my days outside in the wilderness, the neighborhood, the parks, and trails. Inside felt like a trap to me, so I stayed out for as long and as often as I could, summer and winter.
Roca and I figured our differences would help us align, but parallel paths never entwine.
The last night I spent with her, I came home after practice and found her watching Koyaanisqatsi again on the laptop. Uninterested in the film and too tired to sleep, I curled up against her and ran my hand over the curve of her ribcage, the dip at the base of her back, and then I put her hand on me and touched myself. We had slept together for nearly two years, but this time she pushed my hand sharply and snapped.
“What the hell? I’m watching a movie. Can’t you just watch a movie?”
I could care less about the film. I felt exhausted, but ramped up; worn out, but turned on. I wanted to fuck or go to sleep, because sometimes that’s how it goes with a body driven by untended and unknown sorrows. The sting of her rejection did not sit well with me.
“Don’t think I’m going to conform to your idea of how and when and where to make myself feel good,” I said. “This is my bed, too. You think things are fine, but I’m not getting what I want or need. You say we just have to work some shit out, so work them out. You’re the one who drank the Kool-Aid and can’t see your way out of self-loathing—not even now that you’re Out and estranged—and it doesn’t mean I have to go along for the ride.”
I stood and pulled on my robe, pulling clothes off the floor and folding them, putting them in drawers. “It’s the plotline of all time, right? First they tell you how precious you are, how precious love is, and then they feed you their shame about who you are, about your body, about what you look like, about what you do with it, about who you touch and share it with. All those words on a page, words from the pulpit, words from your so-called family carefully crafted to make you feel like shit.
“If they can make you stop giving yourself pleasure, let alone have sex with your partner, on your own time, for your own pleasure, without fucking hating yourself for it, well they can make you do anything. They own your ass. And that’s what this is about, right here. The big mind fuck that owns your ass and makes you feel crappy about yourself and shitty about me and shitty about sex, so you put out desire like a bowl of dry cereal, and you know what? It tastes like a big fat fuck you to me and every other queer who didn’t get brain washed . . .”
I spoke bitingly, as if driven by the subterrain of my heart and the need to claim the yes and no, the wrong and right, the will and won’t for myself in the safety of her heartbreak. I spoke as if sharing it with my followers, as if performing for my “friends,” as if trying to keep up appearances to the people who kept me silent because they could.
Roca sat in bed as the light from the computer screen swept across her pupils. She did not look angry. She did not look afraid. She did not look hurt. She looked ready to go. Our final jam, and we didn’t even get on the track.
Dear WWDD,
I’m just not
feeling it these days. My game is off. I can’t stand the drama. I think I’ve just burnt out or done what I need to, but I worry. It’s easy to become irrelevant. What does the post-derby life have in store?
Ender’s Pain
It’s not that I decry faith and love; it’s just that I put a lot of currency in bliss. I figure there’s sorrow and pain enough in the world that you may as well engage what feels good while you can. I know what my body betrays. I see the scars every day.
WWDD used to get me high as a kite with a welcome ego-boost. Now it’s a way to offset my long, boring workday with furtive posts on my smart phone. I sure as hell won’t make the World Cup derby team. I joined the sport late. I’m in my late thirties and already worn out—inflamed hips, headaches, TMJ, lackluster sleep—the stuff born decades ago and churned into heavy cream. It’s the miles and the way I traveled them.
I hear about people all the time, people who have dreams, plans, plots unfolding like storybooks, their long-awaited retirements with retirement pay, their long road trips with long-lived lovers letting go of all they built to quest the last of their designs: the Hawaii bungalow, a cabin in the woods, cruises and grandchildren and temp jobs to boost the vacation fund. The thirty-odd years of saving and scraping and scrambling for opportunity and reserves, and it didn’t come easy, and they’re stiff in the joints now, but they still get around nicely, they’re still loved and in love.
Roca used to say, “Do people know the chances, the odds, their blessings? Do they know how much we watch them in awe?”
Those people who grab onto life’s arc and ride it out of the tangled forest floor to a place where they can see through and beyond the roots and weeds and trees—yes, the people who muddle through and around me and all that I’ve hoisted up on my shoulders or crunched underfoot, who have a clear sight line of all I want and long to see—the view from the clearing, the 360-degree sigh of belief.
Dear Olena,
Just want to touch base. I miss home, but I am well. I miss our laughing, our hikes.
I wasn’t sure if I could make this move without you, but I made it and I feel connected to myself again. I’m in Turkey now, a village called Ayder near the border, but I guess everywhere is near a border here. I work at a teashop and teach English. This is a place of history, and you know how I adore history.
Here, the mountains look lush like home and it smells like the spring when we took the ferry from Skagway to Sitka. It’s not the same, but there are waterfalls, meadows, peaks, and travelers. I am one of them.
I can speak a little Turkish now, enough to order pastries and make small talk. I met someone, too. She is Turkish. It is more dangerous here for us, but to everyone we know, we are close, close friends, and that is where it sits for now. She has decided to call me Raki because it “is close enough,” and our conversations are “intoxicating.” She is always playing with language. We are always messing it up and laughing, all the ridiculous translations.
It’s funny, we don’t speak each other’s languages well, and she doesn’t speak Spanish at all, but we fumble through and somehow learn through the fumbling and misunderstanding to communicate, even when the words scramble into something other than what we mean.
You and I fumbled a lot, too. Words can be such untethered things. Communication is like history that way—we hate memorizing the details, but if we don’t hold onto it, we repeat the same mistakes.
I do not know many people here, so I feel lucky to have found someone eager to repeat, repeat, and repeat again the same words and phrases until one of us gets it right or until it doesn’t matter, usually the latter. By then, we are drunk on our giddy misinterpretations and on to the next lesson.
I want you to know how much I miss our walks, how much I miss you. Write back if you can.
Ser la roca está, mi amiga íntima.
Roca
It’s been a week since I sat at the keyboard, and days since I dared hold a pen.
I go to the track, put on my skates, breathe. I feel that old dread mounting again, the buzz of anxiety, the wash of sensory anguish, old traumas mired in new. I cannot discern the difference. I join the wall of blockers and shift as it moves. Or I take the jammer cap and wait at the line. The whistle blows, my visible field narrows, my muscles angle toward the gaps between blockers, my speed gains at turn one, my thighs drive toward the inside lane, body hitting, evading oncoming hips and shoulders, anticipating the force of what’s sure to come, the past compressed with the future here in this moment on a track where the damage is witnessed, tallied, and shared, and the hardship heralded in hematomas and sheared skin.
This is what derby would do. This is all it can do.
VIVIAN FAITH PRESCOTT
Vivian Faith Prescott is a fifth generation Alaskan, born and raised in Wrangell, Alaska. Vivian is of Sáami, Irish, Suomalainen, and Norwegian descent (among others). She lives in Sitka and part-time in Wrangell at her family’s fish camp. Vivian has an MFA from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies. She’s the author of a full-length poetry collection The Hide of My Tongue and two chapbooks: Slick and Sludge. Her linked story collection is forthcoming from Boreal Books. Vivian’s poetry has appeared in the North American Review, Drunken Boat, Yellow Medicine Review, and Cirque as well as other journals. She was recently awarded a Rasmuson Fellow in poetry for 2015–2016. Vivian is a co–founding member of the Blue Canoe Writers, a multicultural writers’ group in Sitka, Alaska, and she co-facilitates a teen writers’ group at Mt. Edgecumbe High School.
The Minister’s Wife
I went to bed with a woman—
the minister’s wife, on a Salvation Army
retreat. In the cabin, there were only two beds—
two women to each bed and we settled in,
sharing the frayed gold bedspread.
And in the morning I revealed
how she wrapped her legs
around mine, and snuggled closer
to my warmth . . . I smiled
and her brow furrowed. She jerked
away, apologized for offending
me—my body—as her body searched
for heat.
And I wondered if that night, she too
crossed the reverie, legs entwined,
lips and tongues spending the night
in all our soft dreaming.
Tales in Fairyland
Can I touch your Chinese Hair?
Long ago, back in Distant Time, before time was time, before there
was a me, before there was a plot and arc, before I discovered that
I had a spine and a text and illustrations and maps, there was the
creation story. When I was in college, I would go walking around
at Pikes Place in Seattle and tourists would ask to touch my hair.
Just like when I was doing tours in Alaska.
Can I touch your hair?
At first, I let them touch my hair for a dollar but it didn’t make
me rich, it made me poorer, so I decided to trade stories. You can
touch my hair if you tell me a story. In the beginning, I got some
lame stories, some really bad ones, but not all. Camille was the first
person that I let touch my hair in exchange for a story. Camille
was from Utah and she was Mormon. She’d always wanted to be an
Indian, to touch an Indian, to kiss an Indian, and low-and-behold,
here one was. But I was a girl, though I think that intrigued
her. So she told me a story of how her father was an asshole. I
know all about asshole fathers. She told me how she had to wear
granny-style dresses and how her father had always told her to be
submissive to men. She was supposed to have lots of children. One
night, when she was sixteen, she snuck out to go to a party with a
friend. Her father caught her and locked her in the hall closet. She
hate
s the smell of boots, she said. For that story I let her touch my
hair and when I did, leather scent dusted my pages.
What kind of person are you?
I took a poetry class at UW and the professor asked what
ethnicity I was? Actually, she just said, “What are you?” When
I said, “Sáami,” she gave me a blank stare and I know she was
trying to think of something to say . . . there was a long pause,
even longer than I’m used to. So I said, “You know, indigenous
peoples from Scandinavia?” “White Indians?” I didn’t want
to say the “L” word and I don’t mean lesbian. I tried talking
around the word. I went over the tundra and down to the lake
and back up and around again. I stood up and circled that
professor a couple of times. I pounded a drum and nearly
fell over in a trance and finally I said, “LAPP. Have you ever
heard of a Lapp? Laplander? People recognize that name. Yes,
I’m a dumb-short-ragged-person. That’d be me.” But, you
know what? She didn’t know what a Lapp was, either. And I
was struck silent. How else was I going to explain who I am,
or was, or will be? The conversation pretty much fell off dock
and I made some kind of an excuse to leave the room. The
next day I saw the professor in the hall and she said to me, in
fact she blurted it out: “You’re all over the Internet.” She was
thrilled. I was real. I was true. I wasn’t lying. Google made me
