WINNER, 2021
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY MONA SUSAN POWER
You have no one to blame but yourself. But you’ve been surviving on graduate student wages, convinced you’ll toil in obscurity forever. You’re not a star in the Anthropology Department. Frankly, there isn’t room for another star. Certainly not for the first Native American woman ever admitted to this famous university’s prestigious program.
You like to think you honor your ancestors—one wall of your studio apartment is covered with photographs of them, radiating from the central portrait of your great-grandfather and his eternal stare. You’re convinced he’s watching you, perhaps proud of you as you bend over your reading. One night when you treat yourself to a tumbler of quality bourbon—a gift from Dr. Mason, the Department Chair who often says that he “believes in you”—a blur of movement from the wall of photos catches your eye. You stand up to investigate, peering into faces of men and women long dead, the ones responsible for your being here. Your great-grandfather sits tall, his posture grand but at ease. Unlike you, he is comfortable in his skin. A blanket drapes over one arm and hand, and he holds a war club in the other. You know he would kill to protect you. He kept your band together in hard times. He maintained spiritual practices that existed before the time of Jesus. His stare makes you uneasy, so you glance away for a second. There it is again, the blur of movement. Your ancestors are restless.
You’ve had too much to drink at the Departmental Christmas party. You begin telling stories. How your parents and younger brother, Martin, were killed on a foggy night in Wisconsin while headed to Oneida for the annual powwow. Truck driver fell asleep and drifted across the median, slamming head on into your family’s car. State troopers forbade you from viewing their bodies, saying the carnage would be too much. And you understood what they meant after Martin visited you in a dream the next night, pushing his tortoise-shell glasses up the bridge of his nose in that gesture you found endearing—such a solemn nine-year-old—and his face slid away, revealing glistening bone. You were about to crumple in horror when his face came back, and he mouthed the word, “Sorry,” like it was his fault he was dead.
Your audience is rapt, making appropriately sad faces but captivated by blood. So you offer up your brother’s ghost. Tell them how on the last night of the four-night wake for your family to encourage them to leave this world for the next, the wake held in Wisconsin woods far from your Chicago apartment, you saw your brother step out of dense fog spun like cotton candy across birch trunks. Still wearing his glasses, hand gently settled on the back of a young deer. Maybe both of them were ghosts, choosing to make the journey together? Your brother came no closer, watching the assembled mourners until he found your face. He smiled at you, and now you were the one to shove spectacles higher on your nose—the sunglasses you wore to hide that you couldn’t stop crying. Elders advised being careful; you didn’t want your loved ones to see you sad, or you might trap them here in their concern. So you smiled at your brother until his face broke into a sweet grin. That’s what he needed. He and the deer walked back into the woods where you’re sure your parents were waiting.
Your audience are anthropologists, three of them specializing in the ways of your tribal nation. No need to explain a traditional wake. They appear transfixed, as if the customs that fascinated them weren’t real until they met someone who actually lived them. Flattery and coaxing ensue, offers of grant money. They want to visit a medicine lodge ceremony held deep in the woods of Wisconsin at changing locations to avoid the gawking of outsiders, to keep private what is most sacred. When eventually you say yes, and doubt creeps in, you shove it behind your doctoral dissertation, which takes up the most prominent part of your mind. Your committee wants to witness firsthand what they’ve only read about. You will be the tour guide who makes it happen. When you get home you avoid looking at your ancestors’ photos, even when you hear a thump from their direction, as if your great-grandfather has dropped his war club onto the black and white ground of the photo that traps him.
Your Aunt Rose calls you back to Wisconsin. Her son will be inducted into the lodge and she wants you to be there. This is your chance. You write down the directions and e-mail your colleagues about the impending road trip, a three-hour drive from Chicago. Upon your arrival you greet your relatives while colleagues wait in the car. They think you will smooth the way for them, that you will make it possible for them to participate.
You don’t know what you were thinking. This will never be allowed. They will never be welcome. You can blame your colleagues for tempting you, but this is your mess. You know better.
You hear Stella’s massive hounds before you see them, their drum-deep baying. They’ve run past you to surround the car. They rear on hind legs and steam the windows with angry breath. Stella is no longer here to call them off; they’ve taken on a life of their own. They howl at the members of your dissertation committee, who must be frightened though you can’t see them past the swarm of dogs. Stella’s hounds sing threats, and because they are made of powerful medicine—medicine meant to protect lodge members and their privacy—their song can shatter windshield glass.
In a minute the dogs will return to lifeless straw scattered on the ground. But the ones in the car will be lifeless as well, throats opened by vicious teeth.
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Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation, currently residing in Minnesota. She’s the author of three books of fiction: The Grass Dancer, Roofwalker, and Sacred Wilderness. The Grass Dancer was awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize in 1995. She is currently working to complete three novels: Harvard Indian Séance at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast, Bitter Dolls, and Ghosts of Sitka. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies including: The Best American Short Stories of 1993, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and Granta.