Fire Exit

by Morgan Talty

She never said what happened to him, but I took it he left. You’d think men would come up with a better story, or a different one.

started to think that Fredrick had understood her in a way nobody else could. It explained how well they worked together. But what exactly made them so close I never found out. I guess the simple answer is: Just because.

during one try he made people out of stone. Gizos said that Gluskabe tried to teach them, these tall rock pillars, but they were unteachable. They could not hear, they could not talk, and they could not see. They were brash, and they moved about the earth with their heavy bodies and stripped trees of their bark and crushed the animals. When they collided, they would fight and smash each other until all that remained of one was a pile of pebbles and sharp, pointed fragments and rock dust.

True story

Their joints of quartzite sparked and created fire that caught the grass and spread to the oak ferns and then to the shagbark hickory and birch bark and oaks until half the world was burning. Having thought that the stone people could not reason, Gluskabe was shocked to see one stone man point into the sky—to the sun—and point back at the earth, as if predicting that the earth, too, would become a ball of flames.

stories—Gizos’s and my father’s—the reservation is covered with bodies.

The reservation is a burial ground all right, just as the rest of the world is.

he stopped drinking only long enough to remember that he did not want sobriety.

I guess I just don’t understand this, this one word for two different things. Like Gizos: his name meant sun and moon. Is it indecisiveness? Is it neatness we’re after, tidiness? Is it a desire to make sense of a thing on the basis of another? Maybe all we are is creation’s translators,

I wasn’t really done telling him the story, but he was done listening, wanting to go home and drink some more.

I felt relieved for only a moment that he didn’t believe the story. It wasn’t the accusations, wasn’t the story and its particulars that bothered me. I was more upset with the lie than what the lie said.

I think Fredrick was just plain tired, tired of fighting against something that so many wanted.

wasn’t forgetting how to live—she could clean and cook, never forgetting to turn off a burner and always remembering not to put soap on the cast-iron skillet.

The cast-iron skillet is the test!

It’s sharp, like cold air—that feeling of remembering your body knows something—that feeling of remembering that your body knows something about your past that you don’t.

I’m not skeejin—not Native—and I can’t say with any pride that I’m “Panawahpskewi” because I contain no blood connecting me to ancestors long gone. But I feel that I am, or that I have a stake in their experience.

This book handles this really well.

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

Yes, talk to urban Indians who grew up outside the rez

No place makes a Native a Native. It strengthens it, I’ll say that, but it’s not the deciding factor.

It was Fredrick’s love that made me feel Native. He loved me so much that I was, and still am, convinced that I was from him, part of him, part of what he was part of.

Shows throughout

erasure, no different from the ways I’ve seen Native people erase their own kind.

some tribe I’d never heard of. There are so many of them.

It was always heartening to see my mother in such a mood, where she laughed at anything and everything. And while it was nice, it was also a reminder that just around the corner was that darkness, that deep, deep low that would

He laughed too, and he shook his head. I think Fredrick knew how rare this moment was—Louise’s laughter—and he’d give up anything, even all the reverence he held, to be part of it. Because what’s more sacred than laughter at the dinner table?

Some people wouldn’t consider silence a sound, but it is, and at night there’s a certain silence emitted during the dark of night.

“But it wasn’t on fire before is what I’m saying,” someone said as both fires were shrinking. “You thought it was on fire, not the garden, but the garden was on fire, and now the garage is.” “You think you know everything,” somebody said.

They gaslight each other constantly

It was a flutter. That’s the only way I can explain her state of mind. One minute she was over there, and then the next she was over here.

Dementia

“Louise,” I said. “Do you know where you are?” She looked at me again. “Where I am?” she repeated. “Yes,” I said. “Do you know where you are?” Never before had I heard such certainty in a voice. “I’m in my bones,” she said,

And I realized I was not alone here. We shared a mutual distance.

I have this memory, and I don’t know if it’s true, where I felt he had something more to tell me, something more to say. It’s a look on his face, but instead of saying what he wants, he says something else,

Oh god doesn’t this ring true

the outline in the snow of a monstrous body tired and wounded but that had risen to live.

Now, I had to decide: Should I tell my mother the simple truth: that I did not go because I was waiting for my daughter to be brought home? Or should I reaffirm the other truth, the one she knew but wouldn’t believe: that it wasn’t my idea to lie? I didn’t think either one of those would do any good. In a perfect world,

So hard to get resolution or satisfaction in an imperfect world

only because the doctor had brought up being anxious or panicky, and since we’d gotten to the doctor that day, I’d had a strange feeling like there was something in me that was slowly vibrating and numbing me.

“What bothers me,” I said, “is that when she doesn’t remember anything, she is never depressed.

I get that it’s best to put Native children with Native families, I do, but we worried about his culture, what he, this Coeur d’Alene and Tukudeka boy, was losing by growing up with a Lakota and Penobscot. What would his culture be? Would he take Dave’s? Mine? Some mix of both?” Gizos laughed. “This is such an Indian thing to worry about.”

There are too many unnecessary things to think about when it comes to existing as a skeejin.

I asked her what she wanted help with, and she said I should know. “It’s not rocket science,” she said. “It’s a baby. And I need help.”

When she sat in that wheelchair after a treatment, her face was the most restful I had seen it, like the electricity had put up a wall blocking the terribleness that can be human feeling.

Seeing somebody so helpless and close to the Silence puts things in perspective.

He shrugged and said, “I just do.” We’re not so different, Gizos and I, when it comes to why we love who we love.

“Someone needs it,” he said. “Do we or don’t we?” I think she said “No.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rhett said. “We do too.”

Everyone negates everyone else

set the car seat on the ground between her feet, and she had the heat

Floor? Floorboards?

Fredrick used to call them Goog’ooks—spirits. It’s like you’re not alone, like something is just over your shoulder, peering.

And I wonder, looking back at Louise wanting her mother, how strange it is to want something you did not like, or something that seemed a bad part of your life.

Marissa—she’s always been nosy, she gets it from her mother, but then again so is everybody on the reservation—

He recommended the treatments, for her memory and for her mental health.”

Ect is known to fuck memory up? I don’t understand this rationale. It would be more convincing if he said something like, While ECT is associated with memory loss, in these cases….

I shrugged. “It’s not like her memory can be improved. I think this treatment was more for her depression.

Exactly

Listen,” he said, but I had no time, although I’m very curious now to know what he wanted to say. That’s my life, though—not knowing, but wishing.

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?

And we can never know them