More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Hells yes, for sure. I know so because we’re going to make a home there. If you make something happen you can count on it being for sure.”
I knew to be positive in that way that a little kid comes home from school and can tell there’s been an argument that day by the way the air smells in the front hall and decides this is the day he’ll start his math homework without being asked. Survival, I guess.
Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes.
Her eyes that night: hollow like an old stump. Like the hole in my molar, a true ache.
“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.”
He kept a small pouch hung on a shoelace around his neck and tucked into those sweaters. Once, when I’d asked him, he’d told me that was where he kept his heart, because it was too dangerous to keep it in his chest, what with the sharp edges of bones so easily broken. I never asked again.
“Then the wars for the water came. America reached up and started sipping on our lakes with a great metal straw. And where were the freshest lakes and the cleanest rivers? On our lands, of course. Anishnaabe were always the canary in the mine for the rest of them. Too bad the country was busy worrying about how we didn’t pay an extra tax on Levi’s jeans and Kit Kat bars to listen to what we were shouting.
“At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for ways we could help guide them. They asked to come to ceremony. They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical?
“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”
For the first time in several years I missed my parents as physical pain at the bottom of my stomach and under each kneecap. That’s where the loss lived, in those strangely normal spots on my body. I didn’t think I deserved to rub them, so I fell into dreamless sleep with a throb and a pull in my body.
“Pearl Jam. Real tradish, these boys.” It started with an echo turned inside out, and a small yell like a man captured. Then the bottom fell out and he escaped and I tumbled along on his release. Snapping drums, a flexing of sound, and a high threading of guitar over a smoother cadence and then the man sang.
‘Jean, running only works if you’re moving towards something, not away. Otherwise, you’ll never get anywhere.’”
