by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
“Me,” I say, “I prefer videos about ginkgoes. Wilco here is interested in unusual stories about bugs.”
“Cool. I dig the Nature Channel.” Judging by his earnest reply, the boy hasn’t picked up the concept of irony from his Harry Potter books. “Samantha’s an artist. She prefers ambiguity.”
“Knowing things gets in the way,” she says.
Ambiguity: I may have misjudged the girl. “Sounds like something you’d put on your tombstone,” I say while gasping for breath. “Which art form?”
“I’m studying painting at Antioch. That’s where we met.”
Roots washboard the path and slow our pace. Wheezing, bent over, I stand to one side, too overcome to express my interest. “You all go on ahead,” I say. “I’ll catch up in a bit.”
“It’s hot,” the young man says. “I think I’m pretty much going to leave my shit here, pick it up on the way back.” Sean strips off his long-sleeved shirt and ties it around his waist. He pulls a small bag from his pack and slings it over his shoulder, then tosses the pack out of sight in a clump of fiddleheads.
My eyes trace the tight arcs of the young man’s chest, then down the vein that protrudes from his bicep. There are photos that tell me I was once this delectable, but I’d been too wrapped up with school and my puny art career to take much advantage of it. At the sight of this boy, absolutely at the height of his beauty, fidgeting with the bag’s straps, practically chomping at the bit to get started up the trail, desire mingles with regret.
“There’s another overlook a couple of minutes ahead,” Wilco says. My man has done his homework about the trail; I’ll give him that. “We can rest there.”
“Right on.” The young man retrieves his pack from the clump of ferns and dangles it from a shoulder.
I sigh and we move on.
“This is what you wanted,” Wilco says.
“I’ve told you before, feel free to correct me when I’m so clearly mistaken.”
“Come on,” Wilco says, ignoring the pointedness of my remark. “Just a couple more feet, honey-bunch.”
Honey-bunch gets me every time. I straighten, wedge my hands into my pockets, and plod up the path with a renewed vigor that proves all too momentary. The hill quickly bests me. I feel weary in body, but in spirit also. This jaunty little outing of ours can’t belie the fact that I feel old, as well as adrift in retirement. Worse, isolated in that house, I’m beginning to look for advice on what to do about this from my soap opera friends. In my situation, how would Suzi or Kendall plot their next move? Whatever it was, it’d be bold. It’d be beautiful.
The pièce de résistance to this little pity party: my boot slides into the deep socket of a tree root. I hear a pop and find myself face forward on the ground, blood streaking from my nose and a stabbing pain at my ankle.
“Whoa, dude! You okay?” The young man hurries over and lifts me by the armpits to a standing position. Gently, as if I were a decorative porcelain egg.
“Ai yai!” I put weight on my damaged foot.
Sean hands his pack to his girlfriend and crouches. “Jump on.”
As he waits for me to mount, the muscles of his back glisten with sweat. I wrap my arms around his shoulders, and with my good foot hop on. He smells of skunk and cooked cabbage. As we pass Wilco, I lean my face against the ropy muscle at the young man’s neck and flutter my eyelids seductively.
Samantha coils a spongy Ace bandage around my foot with a gravitas that makes me think of mummies, she the Egyptian priestess wrapping me, having first placed my organs in a jar. My foot is blue and swollen. When she finishes, I elevate it on my pack and lean back on my elbows to take in the view.
Sitting on the rock a little distance from the young woman, solid as a fireplug, Wilco pulls on his shades to shield him from the sunlight reflected off the inlet.
Samantha returns the First Aid kit to her pack, then slides out a sketchpad and a clear plastic box of pencils. She traces on a page the line of mountains opposite us, patches of snow clinging to their sides like wayward jigsaw puzzle pieces. Below, the watercourse at low tide veins the mud flats.
The young man plops down beside me and motions to the mountains with his chin. “Friggin’ gorgeous, man. Bet you don’t get tired of that.” He takes out of his bag an Altoids tin held closed by a rubber band. “You all get high?”
As an art student, I smoked up regularly with my fellows on the roof outside our third floor studio. Our laughter echoed off the building where the Philistines studied business administration.
Sean pulls a small pipe from the tin. “Dude, this is some major shit, so go easy. Scored it from a guy playing frisbee golf in a park in downtown Anchorage. I walked right up to him and asked.”
Stubble stipples the young man’s square jaw. His eyes are sunk into deep sockets under overhanging brows. His straight nose, the axis of a perfect bilateral symmetry, is bounded by high cheekbones. It’s the stereotypical beauties I crave. That’s why I like the soaps. There are no plain people.
“Sean changed his major from art history to business,” Samantha says, looking first at the mountains and then at her pad. “Now he thinks he’s a man of action.”
Sean flicks the lighter and holds it over the pipe bowl. “Doing stuff is where it’s happening. Nobody gives a shit about art history, Samantha.”
I hadn’t pegged him for a Philistine, but people are often less than they seem. I could take his remark as a rebuke, except that it was so obviously aimed at the young woman. Besides, I’ve long ago become resigned to my own insignificance. The world belongs to people like this young man and Wilco, entrepreneurs and engineers, makers of the tangible, the useful.
Samantha draws a large X across the sketch of the mountains, tears the sheet from the pad, balls it up, and throws it in a clump of alders.
“Hey, Sam. That’s not cool.”
“Biodegradability,” she says. “Nobody had to invent that. It just is.”
“Dude,” Sean says as he stands. “I think this is where I’m supposed to go pee.” He whistles some song unknown to me as he disappears into the bushes.
I take a long toke and then pass the pipe to Samantha. After a puff, she taps Wilco on the shoulder and hands him the pipe. Another round of smoke and I feel like a head without a body.
“You two are together, right?” Samantha asks, suddenly stoner serious.
I readjust my foot on the pack and laugh.
“I didn’t want to assume,” she says.
“On account of the difference in our age?”
“I thought it might be impolite.”
I’m impressed. One doesn’t often find a sense of propriety among the young.
“Fifteen years, now,” I say, “since we first met. It used to feel like only yesterday.”
Wilco turns and gives me one of his eat-shit looks that are not to be taken seriously. Still, I know to tread lightly.
“And you,” I say, “how long have you guys been together?”
Samantha strikes a straight line across the middle of the page: the water’s edge under the mountains. “I don’t think we are together, not really. I’m not sure I want that anymore.”
“And him?”
“It’s like the Magic 8 Ball app on my iPhone: reply hazy, try again.”
“So much of life is that way.”
Samantha nods. In her altered state, she seems to think this profound, whereas I was only repeating what Pamela “Pam” Douglas said last week on One Life to Live.
She rips the sheet from the pad and tucks it in the back. She looks at me with a singular concentration and draws with a pencil across a fresh sheet a curve that twins the outline of my head. I still myself and assume a three-quarter profile pose, that of a wise Socrates in the presence of his adoring Alcibiades. Wrong gender, I know, but a pleasant image nonetheless.
She sketches quickly, glancing back and forth from my face to the pad cradled in her lap.
“You have the touch,” I say, glancing at her
progress. “The facility of line, I used to tell my students.”
“Your students?”
“Forty years an art teacher.”
She works hard to draw the shape of my shoulders. She holds the pencil like she might break it.
“You might loosen the line a bit. It’s all about breath, really. Precision in art does not result in merit.” I look back to the inlet and resume my pose.
“I bet you were a good teacher.”
“That wasn’t the plan, you know. I studied painting at university as well. After I got out, I rented this sweet house in the country and painted every day. I wasn’t without recognition: some awards, grants. I never could get paid though. It was my father’s idea to double-major in education. Something to fall back on.”
She shades the shadowed side of my face. I hear the pencil scrape across the rough paper. “I’m down with that,” she says.
I risk over-sharing, like you sometimes can when you’re stoned and with people you’re never going to see again. “Thing is, I gave up painting, but I never stopped thinking about myself as a painter. The teacher stuff was supposed to be temporary.”
“I wonder,” Wilco says, “if we shouldn’t get you back home and ice up that foot.” He uses his business voice, plainly displeased by my Kumbaya moment with this stranger.
Just then there’s a rustling in the bushes, and the young man strides back onto the overlook.
“Dude, just saw this hella big moose. So close. Way cool.”
Wilco peers over his shades. “Careful, moppet, those things’ll stomp you to death.”
Sean sits between Samantha and Wilco, reaches across the girl’s lap for the pipe and takes another puff. He hands the pipe to Wilco. “You know that’s the name of a band, don’t you? Wilco. Never heard anybody else use it.”
“My family’s from Minnesota,” Wilco says. “Totally white bread. Men had names like Algernon and Horatio back in the day. Dad’s name is Theodore. I guess they’d gotten around to the W’s by the time I was born.”
I roll onto one elbow to look at the sketch. An old man stares up from the pad: bald, jowly, wrinkled about the eyes. I don’t like it, but a picture can’t lie. This one captures none of the sexy joie de vivre I use to mask the truth. Old is old, it says.
“You know,” Sean says, drawing a line with his finger down the length of the inlet. “All this beauty, plus practically getting stomped on, makes me think.”
“Uh oh,” the young woman says. “He’s been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
“Hilarious, Samantha. Dude seems cool.” Sean turns to me. “If you don’t mind. I mean, I don’t know a lot of old people. Just my Gramps and I couldn’t ask him this. So, uh, are you, like, stoked for death, or what?”
I rise onto both hands and give him my best incredulous look.
“Sean, don’t be clueless,” Samantha says. “That’s a little too personal, don’t you think.”
We’re quiet for some time, magpies flitting in the cottonwoods, testing their raucous calls. Believe me, there’s been enough death in my life to make it more than just a concept. “It still feels like,” I say, trying to offer something reassuring, “what happens to other people.”
“Dude, seriously. A bear could come through here right now and turn us all into lunch meat,” Sean says.
“Not likely.” Wilco crosses his legs and pulls down his cap. The sun is getting lower. More time has passed than I thought.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe death’s a good thing. There’s only so much a person can take.”
“What is this?” Wilco says. “Truth or Dare? I’m officially tabling this discussion.”
“I’m seventeen years older than him. He doesn’t like to think about me dying.”
“Come on, David,” Wilco says. “Where’s my funny guy?”
“You know, my father was strict with me too,” I tell the young man. When I’m stoned, I become trapped by my thoughts. I can’t turn the ship around so easily, not even for Wilco. “I didn’t have a TV until after I went to college. He was a religious man, vice-chancellor at Texas Tech. With him, it was all about personal betterment and service.
“Wilco’s dad’s a champ, though. We go back there each Christmas, and his father takes me ice fishing. Nobody else will go with him, and I don’t mind. We drink whisky from a flask and look out the porthole window at nothing. Only catch a few puny fish. I never did anything remotely intimate like that with my father. Wilco doesn’t know how lucky he is. He’s got the complacency of the well-adjusted.”
“I’m right here, you know,” Wilco says.
“He’s never had to give anything up.”
Wilco hauls himself onto the balls of his feet, fingertips tented on the rock like a sprinter at the starting line. I know I’m in for it. “I told you, you could say no. We could stay in Houston.”
I turn to Sean. “He’d have blamed me for ruining our finances and our future happiness.”
“Dude, I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You hated that job,” Wilco says.
“I had something to do every day.”
Sean fidgets with the pipe. “Maybe you guys should take another hit.”
Wilco stands. It’s time to go. I want to linger, this patch of rock apart from the world and we, like gods immune to complications of our own, hovering over it.
Below, between the mountain and the road, a shadow bisects the remnant of a pond, a bog of electric green grass. Increasing in height outward from its center, a troop of stick figures marches ten or so yards, the dense encircling forest halting its progress.
Black Spruce. I read about them in the back of that hiking book. The spruce, they seem so fragile—scraggly, gray, seemingly half dead—but they carve a place for themselves where little else can, with sedges at the damp edge of a bog.
It’s probably the marijuana or a case of too much sunlight, but something about how sad and brave they look makes me feel giddy. “Come to the house, Samantha,” I say. “For dinner. Are you vegan?” She seems as though she might be vegan.
“We’re thinking of walking to Rabbit Lake,” Sean says.
“Long way back in there,” Wilco says.
“Land of the midnight sun,” Samantha says. “We can walk all night.”
“Tomorrow, then,” I say. “This has been so much fun. I feel already like we’re friends. We’re all about making new friends. Right, Wilco? Real friends, I mean, not soap opera ones. And you should see our place. It looks right over the water to the mountains. Wildlife outside our window practically every day. It’s almost as good as camping out, plus you have all your stuff. You should see what Wilco has done with it. Everything right out of the box. The furniture has that new leather smell. You know, the smell of beginnings, of no impediments.”
I can tell our moment is over and that I’m sort of freaking Samantha out, but I’m a stoner on a roll. “Come to the house,” I say, “before you leave Alaska. Just for a beer, even, out on the deck. I can’t tell you how good that place makes me feel. It’s perfect.”
AMBER FLORA THOMAS
Amber Flora Thomas is the recipient of several major poetry awards, including the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize, Richard Peterson Prize, and Ann Stanford Prize. Her published work includes: Eye of Water: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems (University of Alaska Press, 2012). Most recently, her poetry has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saranac Review, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and numerous other journals and anthologies. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the East Carolina University. She was born and raised in northern California.
Marlboros at Dusk
Light clouded, a nighthawk cuts
ac
ross the last threads, as though what can be seen clearly—
your foot cupped in my hands, the growing veins
of tree limbs darkening above us—contains its own crude
light. Silence changes us without our turning
to know it happens in the other’s eyes: love,
a rich sadness we can afford the longing for.
Your look retreats in a haze of smoke.
I lift the arch of your pale foot to my lips.
Desire does sustain its hold. We are invented
by what we let pass through us.
Aubade
I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess.
Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust
crumbled. You push me back into bed.
More “honey” and “baby.”
Breath you tell my ear circles inside me,
curls its damp wind and runs the circuit
of my limbs. I interrogate the air,
smell Murphy’s oil soap, dog kibble.
No rose. No patchouli swelter. And your mouth—
sesame, olive. The nudge of your tongue
behind my top teeth.
To entirely finish is water entering water.
Which is the cup I take away?
More turning me. Less your arms reaching
around my back. You ask my ear
where I have been and my body answers,
all over kingdom come.
A Woman’s Jewelry
The woman in line at the coffee shop
wears a shark-tooth earring. Its jagged leaf
hooks back and forth on an inch of chain,
sharpness aimed away from her chopped
hair and acne-scarred face. It’s the right
place to touch her. I reach for its pendulum
dangling there, ask after its petrified origins.
It’s a tangible beginning: her leaning her ear
toward me. In this jeweled splurge, I sense