Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

I was twelve the first time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room.

First line

To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it’s under any real compulsion to, finally. If anything, being inhabited by yourself like that, what it tells you is that there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. But it can only get that done when your defenses are down. When you’re sleeping.

Once or twice a year, he’d sign on to fight whatever fire was happening, but it wasn’t to protect any ancestral land. It was because when you signed on, they issued you these green wool pants. He’d sell those to the hunters, come fall. Once a year, Mom told me, he’d usually walk home in his boxers, with a twenty folded small in his hand so none of the reservation dogs would nose it away.

I’d imagined it would smell like an animal den in here, that it would be moist and sticky. It was just dry and dead.

I like that he’s bringing in the smell of the place. We don’t do that enough in writing.

I smiled, understood: this was what I’d been telling Mom. Exactly. Dad was here to fix Dino. To help him. I was holding the proof right here in my hands.

This is the human element, the connection. Why we stick through the story. Because the MC is inherently good and fighting for his brother who has seizures. And HE believes the dad has coke back to fix Dino.