by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
real. She was smiling and so excited and I said to her,
“Do you want to touch my Sáami Hair?”
and she did. I let her touch my hair and when she did, I
reached up and held her hand there and she curled her
fingers through my hair. It felt good. Very good. I said let’s go
to your office and she led me down the hall and around the
corner. We went inside her office and she locked the door and
pulled down the shade and I said, no, leave the shade up, so
she pulled it back up again. And she took an Indian weaving
off the wall and laid it on the floor. I don’t know if it was an
authentic Indian weaving from India or the Americas or if it
was from China but that’s okay because I am all those fibers
anyway. And she didn’t let go of my hair the whole time.
Can I see your card?
I think they always mean they want to see my BIA card or
my tribal card or maybe my green card but I always pull out
my DNA card. Usually I have to take the card out whenever
I cross a border like whenever I go from Southeast Alaska
to Anchorage, or when I go to a meeting, or when I have to
stand up and say something publicly. Sometimes, I take the
card when I go into the grocery store. I had it laminated.
It’s a custom card created from a study of our Sáami DNA,
a diagram that looks like a sun. We are people of the sun. I
have the U5b1b proof laminated with my smiling face in the
center of its universe. It’s proof that I was born from those
people. Heck, I’m a born-again-Sáami or maybe I’m a Sáami-
born-again. I hate the church reference. They persecuted us,
tried to destroy our culture. The missionaries did the same
thing to my Tlingit relatives. You must be born again to enter
the KINdom. So maybe Christians need a card, too. Proof
that they’ve gone down on their knees and checked the box,
something about blood-of-Jesus-quantum. Check. Check.
Check.
What’s a Sáami?
My mom and I learned how to make an oval drum. I’m
learning about all the symbols on the drum now. We have
to research the information at museums in Scandinavia
because when the drums were confiscated, they put them into
museums and now we have to ask permission just to touch
them. We have to use gloves when we touch them. They’re
afraid of our oils, our fingerprints, our D . . . N . . . A . . . our
Sáami motif: mtDNA haplogroup U5b. Sounds like a punk
rock group, eh?
You look exotic. What kind of Indian are you?
I’m the kind that comes from a detailed phylogeographic
analysis of one of the predominant Sáami mtDNA
haplogroups, U5b1b, which also includes the lineages of the
“Sáami motif” that was undertaken in 31 populations. The
results indicate that the origin of U5b1b, as for the other
predominant Sáami haplogroup, V, is most likely in western,
rather than eastern, Europe.
Can I touch your Indian Hair?
The researcher promised that it was a noninvasive form
of gathering biological information. It’s just dead skin.
With 99.999 percent accuracy he yanked my hair, pulling
the strands, stuffing them into a plastic Ziploc bag. Right
then and there he analyzed the root bulb, told me a story
of Y-DNA, linking me to Asia and a story of haplogroup
I, linking me to Europe, and of U5b1b connecting me to
the Berbers. Even though it was a complicated story, full of
tricksters and fornicators, it was a good story so I let him
touch my hair again. This time he didn’t pull it out. Instead,
he leaned in and sniffed my hair. He said it smelled like a
New Year, or maybe gunpowder.
Do you want to touch my Chinese Hair?
Well, we don’t know if we’re Chinese but we might be. We
had a relative that worked in the canneries in Wrangell,
Alaska, who came from China. Maybe he intermarried with
our family. Maybe I have Chinese cousins.
Do you want to touch my creation story?
This story began with a young woman, me, who went off
to college to study ology to become an ologist. She learned
everything she could about Greeks so she could understand
the colonizers’ Western worldview like why she had to
memorize the birth of Zeus and not the story of how Raven
stole the sun, or how the Wind Man created the tundra
just for her Sáami people. She specialized in over 400 ology
stories: heliology, phycology, trichology, odonatology,
nephology, and more. But even today she resists stories with
beginnings, stories with a middle motivation, and an end
that makes sense, a story that’s so clear that you can see a
salmon egg on the bottom of the stream. Warning: These
stories are not fairy tales. These stories are not for children.
Before the World of Men and Boys, There Was the Land of Girls
Our fingertips drew glyphs
on one another’s backs:
Spiraling Venus’ hand mirror,
my girlfriends and me, in the dark
at church camp, tracing the shield
and spear of Mars.
One girl lay on the floor, the others
gathered round chanting—
Light as a feather, stiff as a board.
Light as a feather, stiff as a board.
And with two fingers each placed beneath
her body, we levitated her higher and higher,
offering our passages—
before we felt the weight of men, when our bodies
were made of air, when girl-flesh tickled
without shame,
when we lifted our girlfriend up—all breast buds
and knobby-kneed, raising her toward
the Divine.
JERAH CHADWICK
Jerah Chadwick is a former resident of the Aleutian Island of Unalaska, where he raised goats and wrote poetry while living in an abandoned World War II military compound for seventeen years. In 1988, he began teaching for and directed the University of Alaska extension program for the Aleutian/Pribilof Island region. He holds degrees from Lake Forest College, Illinois, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work was chosen for an Alaska State Council on the Arts Writing Fellowship, and his poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. He is the author of three chapbooks as well as a volume of poetry, Story Hunger.
Cold Comforts
Boiling water in a scorched can,
first bubbles breaking
where an ash floats
fracturing the surface. Soon I’ll steep
and pour black tea, savoring
this moment of attention, the cabin
creaking refusal to gusting winds
that have all night grasped
at everything. Some days
I’m as inarticulate and restless,
as needing to be held.
Days when I’m warmer
chopping wood than burning it,
sourdough collapsing in its crock,
wood stove ticking like a sprung clock,
overloaded. Like some Crusoe finding
only his own foot prints in snow
and following them, I know I am living
off my life the way the freezing
survive for a time. Cold
&n
bsp; driving me into the dazed
blur of other bodies, the fleeting
warmth of fever as I strip
my clothes, stumbling
through blizzard, the exposure
of letting go.
Legacy
Morris Cove, Unalaska
“A woman behind each tree,”
the soldier joked
of feeling horny
at the sight of spruce, saplings
they planted around their huts
to relieve the erosion,
loneliness, a longing
interminable as the tundra.
Forty years later
a single stunted tree stands
out from concealment,
from a ravine picked with care
up the hillside. The banks
between it and the collapsed buildings
windbreaks, the camouflaging grasses
flattened by drifted snow.
Beyond the boundaries
of this camp, the historical
fact of courts-martial, I imagine
a man set apart by desire,
some chastened Whitman,
his only poem furtive, this
forearm and fist of a tree.
Returnings
1.
Salmon rush the stream
into rapids. White wings
of gulls, eagles, and ravens
shadow their splashing,
the flash of fins’
riffling circle and streak.
Crowding the bank,
fireweed flare and fume
seed in spinnerets
that drift in swirls of light
on water the salmon
know after years at sea
as source, freshened
sense of even so few
parts per million.
And from millions spawned,
thousands thrashing the gamut
of mouth and gravel.
Like Li Po’s poems
set aflame and afloat,
this charged current,
the shallows like
shreds of burning script.
2.
Burning script. How many stories
and the tongues that told them, ash?
Our history, scattered sparks,
glimpses.
What had been done to us
we did to each other. Listen
like the blind who must
hear their dreams, these spaces
between our words a distance
we’ll cover with our hands.
Survivors to have made it
this far, I reach
for you, here
where we began, are
beginning again, this bed
where we kiss with our eyes open.
Lesson of Bread
Our wool socks steaming
by the tiny stove, we poise
over tea, encountering the animal
smell of ourselves
in each other. The tea itself
incidental but necessary,
cooling in our mugs. We sip
and stare at our hands,
our drying pant legs, the stove
steeping in the room’s
sourdough air. How people
used to meet, I think,
yes, keeping yeast starter
alive in their clothes,
breaking isolation
like bread, a trail
going only so far. This is
my body, the least
I would have you know.
A Sense of Direction
Crust gives way to powder,
to waist-high drift
as we trek homeward—
hills magnified
with headwind, the strain
of supplies in our packs. Climbing
out of our tracks to pull you
from the deeper snow,
I press ahead, falling
behind
again to follow
through the glazed depths,
the sinking grate and jar
as we lift our feet
and step on through the thinning
air of exhaustion.
For what must be miles
both of us staggering
forward and back,
overtaken by the numbing
expanse, the provisions
and heavier boots
of our own pasts,
we plunge and falter,
breaking trail, each
leading and led.
Stove
Some black grub
grown enormous
it exists to consume
becoming a potbellied husk
smoke swarming above us
as we hurry for fuel.
With thick gloves
we stoke the coals
the harnessed heat
our honey.
Nothing is sweeter
than to stand close
opening our coats
to sit, keeping
our distance as it hisses
and steams turning
our dough to bread
our skin to blisters
in the bargain.
Like a baby
it must be fed
and fed. We doze
and wake, filmed
with sweat, toss it
paper, planks, afraid
to find it cold.
It is our changeling
our burden, the little
bit of hell at the heart
of our household.
The Life to Come
Some days the dough
takes on the humid
sheen of your shoulders
and my hands ache, trapped
air sighing and catching
as I work the back
of your thighs, your buttocks,
again, feeling them
slacken and firm.
Then driving the dough
back into itself,
I fold and turn, press
against and away,
drawing out the raised
warmth of your hips,
the wedge of your pelvis
beneath my cupped palms,
remembering
pliancy, the guiding
slip of your hands
over mine.
Beating down what becomes
our bread, I think today
of that logger diving
with a mouthful of air
toward his pinned friend
who laughs and drowns
balking at the intended
kiss, how we keep
to ourselves, wrestling
the diffused weight
of a world, our own
held breath.
MEI MEI EVANS
Mei Mei Evans is the author of Oil and Water, a novel based on the events of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether prize as well as the first novel published in the University of Alaska Press Literary Series. She is Professor of English at Alaska Pacific University and co-editor of The Environmental Justice Reader.
Going Too Far
1.
It was late in the day when Tierney and Robert crossed the Alaska–Canada border at Beaver Creek. They were both so pleased with their accomplishment that they decided to continue hitchhiking together to Fairbanks the next day, where Robert would apply for a job on the new pipeline and Tierney would look for whatever work she could find, wherever she could find it. She figured she was doing Robert a favor by hitching with him since guys traveling alone or in pairs often had a hard time getting rides, and he definitely provided protection for her—everyone knew what could happen to girls who hitchhiked alone. Besides, Robert had a tent, which was vastly preferable to the sheet of plastic under which Tierney had tried to sleep her first few nights on the road, before she met him on the Yellowhead Highway.
Her body wa
s coated with dust from the unpaved Al-Can, her hair so dirty that it had begun to clump. As promised now, in a clearing beside the highway, Robert snipped off her long locks with the tiny scissors on his Swiss Army knife, and Tierney loved the unaccustomed weightlessness of short hair. New look for a new life, she thought, patting her head happily before realizing how horrified her father would be. He was always commenting on her hair, “long and beautiful, just like your mother’s.”
Robert’s hair was not a problem for him since his head was completely shaved, matching his clean-shaven face. After several days together, she still thought he looked a lot younger than twenty-three. He said his bald head kept him cool, but whenever he made the mistake of removing his now-filthy Red Sox ball cap, mosquitoes and flies swarmed his head. With his broad chest and wide smile, Tierney thought Robert bore an amazing resemblance to the guy on TV commercials, “Mr. Clean,” except that Mr. Clean was some kind of giant and Robert was pretty short for a man, only slightly taller than she was at five foot five. In any case, his baldness was just one of the things about him that Tierney had begun to find irritating. Another was that he’d believed her when she told him she was eighteen. In her opinion, if he was really as old as he said, he should know when a sixteen-year-old was lying about her age.
The border crossing, a single, small concrete building, made Tierney think of the kind of isolated military outpost featured in old movies. On the Alaska side, a thick layer of new asphalt welcomed travelers with the promise of a smoother journey than the unsurfaced, bone-jarring road from Canada. The women’s restroom in the still-new complex had both hot and cold running water and large mirrors on two walls. Tierney shampooed her hair with the liquid pink soap in the dispenser above the sink and proceeded to wash every inch of her body with wadded-up paper towels. Her new haircut dried in no time flat while she ducked under the electric hand dryer that was mounted to the wall, fluffing her new shag with her fingers. She loved the way she now resembled a unisex rock-and-roll celebrity. If I were just a little taller and didn’t have boobs, she observed proudly, people would think I was a guy. Her face and arms were tanned from being outdoors; her eyes were bright. Her dad would say she looked as healthy as a horse. Tierney was so elated by the chance to wash herself and so happy to have reached Alaska that she resolved to be nice to Robert for however much longer they traveled together.
In fact, she was in such a good mood as they walked away from the border and into this new land, that she even found herself laughing at Robert’s stupid jokes. Honestly, for a Harvard graduate, sometimes he didn’t seem too bright. Robert pointed to their next destination on his road map, a town called Tok. “Tick-tock,” he said. “The mouse ran up the clock.” Tierney noticed what looked like mossy pincushions of tiny pink and white flowers growing beside the road. It thrilled her that she’d never seen anything like them before and had no idea what they were called. It may be true that Alaska is technically part of the US she thought, but it’s “terra incognita” to me. The term was one she’d learned this year in her eleventh grade history class.
