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Brandon McHone
The Void
Earth sent a message into the darkness to explain what it was to the void. The Void replied 20,000 years later. It explained what it was. The Earth was destroyed 100 years before the reply reached it.
This Thing On My Foot
It started with a cut on my right foot. The metal drain in the shower had this jagged edge that stabbed into the ball of my foot. It bled pretty good and I needed stitches, but overall it was just an exciting afternoon. A month later it started. It was this awful itch in my shoe. I'd go to the restroom and find gray, dead skin around the edges of the scar. It was red and throbbing at the center. A few days later and I'd wake up with a shooting pain in my entire leg. Almost like a lightning bolt shooting through the nerves in my foot. A few days after that my toenails began cracking and falling off of my toes. I didn't tell anyone about this. I'd just call in sick when the pain got really bad. I didn't tell my girlfriend or friends how bad it was. I'd just complain about it in passing. After a few weeks, I started feeling soreness and swelling around my whole foot from the ankle down. I stopped wearing shoes because they were too tight. It started to get really hard to walk. I'd develop a limp to compensate. One month went by and that's when I knew it was bad. My whole foot was stiff and gray. I couldn't feel it anymore. I just felt the flesh inside of the foot. It was like having wax around my foot. I started to itch it. First I used my fingers, then I used a file. Before long I was using a knife and a hammer. I peeled off the bottom of my foot where the scar became a layer of gray, dead skin. When I peeled it back I saw the unbelievable. It was orange, bright, and pulsing. And it was sensitive. If I hovered my hand over it I could feel the presence of it like a nail being poked against it. A day after this discovery it began to spread. Spots of skin all over my body began to rot, swell, harden, and turn gray. It was in the webbing of my fingers, behind my ears, on my cheeks, and popped up like a rash on my back and chest. The itching was unbearable. It happened so quickly too. Meanwhile my foot stopped being a foot. My toes started falling off. They were brittle and would just snap off. It didn't even hurt. It felt warm. The orange light began to grow and spread. The fingernails on both of my hands began to turn yellow and fall out. Late that night I began eating everything in the fridge. I had an overwhelming hunger that turned my stomach inside out if I stopped eating. Going to bed I turned off all my lights. In the dark, I could see the orange light shining through all of my skin. It was under my stomach, fingertips, knees, and my hands. I opened my mouth and it shined out like a jack-o-lantern. As I write this I wonder if I'll have my fingers tomorrow. I wonder if I'll be able to speak. I wonder if I'm dying. It's too hard to stay awake. My hair is starting to fall out and I feel a warmth under my scalp. My foot is gone. It's just growth. An orange growing mass. It has no shape. I wish I could tell someone about this. Tonight I wonder what I'll dream. Tomorrow I wonder what I'll wake up to.
River
The land I call Home is desolate and the wind is relentless. It is considered the Great Plains and the Big Sky but for me, it is just Home. In winter, lashes grow ice crystals and noses drip and there’s nothing you can do. If you live there you learn to love that way, like slowly forming ice second by second molecule by frozen molecule. The whistle of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train is constant, it cuts through the silence of the days and nights. A vibration in your mouth signals an impending train long before its’ arrival. If you live on the ‘hi-line’ too long it will become a deeply embedded part of you and one that you will long for years after you’ve escaped.
On the Hi-Line spring dawns slowly, meadowlarks return and with them their song. They too are a constant, their singing plays like an old record in the background of your life, while they are present that is when one knows life is good and that it is okay to slow but for a moment. I do not know where they go when they leave all I know is their song is the song of my childhood and I imagine that wherever they go they bring happiness to them as well. I am grateful that they do not forget my people and their central place among them.
Home is not so different from other places that indigenous populations reside and most of the problems that exist there exist everywhere. Much strife, both internal and external exist but for me the one that hurt the most and is the most enduring is childhood trauma. Let me tell you a story….
Long ago, but not so long ago many of my relatives would leave our homelands to go out to fight wild fires during the extreme summer heat. For many, fire-fighting was not only a job but a way of Life. It was one way for them to buy a one-season-cars that would, albeit coincidentally, last just until the next seasons’ fires began to burn. The distinct sound of the fire whistle would blow throughout our small town of 2,500. Men and women would begin to scramble, telephone lines humming along the ‘moccasin telegraph’ that the time had finally come! They’d catch rides down to the hall having ‘hoofed-it’ or hitch hiked all dressed in their distinctive yellow long-sleeved shirt and forest green pants and of course their black fire-fighting boots. School busses would be waiting to transport them to their location. They would be gone for twenty-one-day limits, then come home a day or two then embark again. The Forest Service made sure that they were taken care of, these Indian crews. Known for partying hard even if it wasn’t allowed.
In 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt made it federal policy that all wild land fires must be extinguished within 24 hours as the result of a late August fire that burned approximately 3million acres of land across Idaho, Washington, Montana and British Columbia. The issue with this enactment is that rejuvenation of these woodlands can only occur by way of burning which allows for new growth, clearing of the forest floor and natural ways of rebirth. Fire is an integral part of Life, some things are meant to burn.
There is a tree called the Lodge-Pole Pine, it is the one that people of the Great Plains use to make the structure of the tipi or lodge. This tree is integral to our way of life, it grows similarly to the people, tall, straight up and down. Oral traditional teaches us that that new growth may only occur if the seeds are first burnt or singed allowing for the seeds’ hard shell to germinate.
If this is so, it makes me wonder and question, that with all my people have endured what can emerge from those who have experienced traumatic events? Are we like Lodge Pole pine, able to be made anew following a raging fire but instead our fires are trauma, Colonization, boarding school, oppression?
In our language ti-pi means ‘they live’ and in English my name means ‘woman who holds her relatives close’. Dare I imagine that I could ever be the structure that holds up our people, the foundation, the one that will withstand coming storms? I have fallen many times Creator knows but I imagine that if I were to believe that I could be a foundation, that I may fall and I may not always be so steady, but turn my back to my people I will never.