Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

When you grow up in Indian country, the TV tells you how to be Indian. And it starts with bows and arrows and headbands. They’re the exciting part of your heritage. They’re also the thing you can always find at the gift shop.

Yup.

That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.

Damn. Yeah.

Twenty feet wide sounds like a trailer house, I know, which we’d also lived in, but the difference in a trailer house and modular one, it’s that a modular house, it gets delivered and it stays there, more or less, while a trailer house keeps its wheels and the tongue it gets pulled with, so it can still roam if need be. They’ve both got skirts that never last the winter, though, and the sidings are pretty much the same, and if you end up with one of each, you can kind of rub them together like puffy Cheetos and make a bigger, more complicated house.

2/3 of my childhood was and half my family are in homes like this.

But dogs are stupid.

Is this a thing with you, SGJ? You are 2/2 in books I have read.

You can’t rub a bruise off, no matter how hot the water is.

So this hits for some reason.

You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

Rule 0

I turned, regarded it up and down its whole fourteen inches of long triangular darkness, and finally, like a trade, picked all Mom’s old butts from the coffee can and pushed them through one at a time. It was an offering.

IDK any Indian kid who hasn't done some version of this.

Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal.

IDK I just feel this.