Fire Exit

by Morgan Talty

But one thing is for certain, I thought: you are who you are, even if you don’t know it.

anyone who wasn’t Native at all had no right to live on the reservation. And since Fredrick was my stepfather, I wasn’t Native, and so I couldn’t remain on the reservation when I came of age. My mother, a non-Native, could stay, of course, since she had married in.

Maybe all we are is creation’s translators, putting things like granite or oak or elephant or corn in a language they want to be put in, to give them bodies made of sound so they’re measurable. “Measurable” sounds like “miserable” when I pronounce it.

Now I know such a thing could do the world good, not the crying, not simply the body and spirit’s self-recognition of pain, but the publicness of it, the body and spirit’s communicating to another’s body and spirit in one and only one language—that of deep, deep emotion—between the flesh of two free bodies. I say “free” here because it’s true—what is freer than that, freer than one body welcoming and receiving another’s in a state or condition so unchanged since the very beginning of bodies, a state or condition that has continually been jailed time and time again since that very beginning?

All these years later I saw how each of us told the truth, yet we couldn’t believe each other. And that we didn’t believe each other made each of us reconsider our own truth, our resentment, until it turned us against each other and in our minds we settled upon what was not true.

We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them—the ones that make us—how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?