Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

sleepwalkers cared about that kind of stuff, I’d have at least had my gym shorts on, and, if I was in fact trying to see something outside, then my glasses, too.

either the half-buried wheel of a car long gone or the still-attached wheel of a car now buried upside down. I wanted the latter, of course, but, to allow that possibility, I had to resist digging around the edges of that wheel.

My heart pounded in my chest with what I wanted to call fear but what I know now was actually hope.

I think when you’re talking about your dad, you kind of go back in years—the more you become a kid, the more he gets to be the dad, right?

Another effect Dad being back was having was that I was less patient with Mom now. Quicker to dismiss her. I mean, sure, that could be part of being twelve. But I think it was my way of siding with my dad, too.

One single bead. It was as big as the whole rest of the world.

Dad was back because he loved us, yes. But it was also because I believed in him.

Except I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was the man of the house, at least until Dad got solid enough for Mom and Dino to see him too.

shots cracked the world in half, then quarters, then slivers of itself.

The world was so quiet, after all that sound. And because I was deaf.

The way it was turning out, it was that you could maybe come back, be what you’d always meant to be, but to do that, you had to latch on to your people and drink them dry, leave them husks. After that, you could walk off into your new life, your second chance. With no family to hold you back.

this is already the way Indians have been dying for forever. And it would be Dad killing us.

“Junior Junior Junior.” Every fourth person on our reservation, that’s their name, like the same stupid person is trying life after life until he gets it right at last.

For the truck, Junior was just going to deal out a beating, a shaming. To keep Dino safe, I was going to have to wade farther out. That’s why nobody ever got sent up for it. This is why Junior never told anybody about this—even whoever his girlfriend had been eight years ago. Because he didn’t know about it. He didn’t know the why of it. He was sleepwalking.

The first time I looked at myself in a full-length hotel mirror, I felt lake water was rising in my throat. You can dance that away, though. You can lower your head, raise your knees, close your eyes, and the world just goes away.