Fire Exit

by Morgan Talty

It’s strange: all blood looks the same, yet it’s different, we’re told, in so many various ways and for so many various reasons.

To think that the reservation is what makes an Indian an Indian is to massacre all over again the Natives who do not populate it.

For one of the only times in my life, I felt like an outsider around Gizos. This was something I had no claim to talk about—as in I had no Native blood—yet I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong, what it was like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being. We’re all alike, even when we’re not.

I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, ever ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.