The Missing Morningstar: And Other Stories

By Stacie Shannon Denetsosie

In The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories, Stacie Denetsosie confronts long-reaching effects of settler-colonialism on Native lives in a series of gritty, wildly imaginative stories. A young Navajo man catches a ride home alongside a casket he’s sure contains his dead grandfather. A gas station clerk witnesses the kidnapping of the newly crowned Miss Northwestern Arizona. A young couple’s search for a sperm donor raises questions of blood quantum. This debut collection grapples with a complex and painful history alongside an inheritance of beauty, ceremony, and storytelling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torrey House Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781948814867

Book preview

DORMANT

I was taught from a young age that the earth was sacred. Yet, every two weeks or so, I’d back my little truck up to the edge of the Divergent Dam and throw our garbage into the gorge below. My mother didn’t like that the Kayenta Township’s Transfer Station charged $12.50 for a bed of garbage. She’d say, I don’t want to pay those motherfuckers to take my trash. Who in the fuck pays to get rid of trash?

So, we started dumping our trash at the dam. I’d done it dozens of times without getting caught. At this point it was second nature. Load up the garbage, chase off the dogs trying to get into the garbage, drive it to the dam, and watch the black bags explode down the cracked ravine.

But this particular evening was different, the scent of decaying food was more pungent, and the dark juices leaking out of the garbage bags didn’t smell like Dr. Pepper anymore. I felt sweat bead on my chest and run in a small rivulet between my breasts. Maybe it was the sweat coupled with the garbage, but when I picked up the last bag by the black plastic, the bag ripped, spilling soured frybread dough down the front of my blouse.

I vomited.

I prided myself on my strong stomach. That’s why whenever we butchered a sheep, I cleaned out the stomach. That shit smell didn’t bother me. When my mother couldn’t make it to the toilet after a night of drinking, I’d clean up her puke. Cleaning up my mother’s mess—shit, piss, puke, whatever—that was my job. After puking, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Shaky and lightheaded, I pulled off my soiled shirt and sat on the tailgate of my truck. From the back, someone could have mistaken me for a boy with an Ace bandage wrapped around his chest.

The evening light bathed the sandstone domes lining the west Kayenta horizon in a golden haze. The maroon rock formations deep within the gorge turned the dense shade of a fresh bruise. In the shadows, several willow trees rustled in the wind. This dam was an oasis for those trees, the dandelions, dots of morning glory, and the fluorescent algae growing in what was left of the summer monsoon. Desert plants were resilient that way. They were short and looked nearly dead, but beneath the alkaline soil, where most plants couldn’t grow, their roots clenched into the earth like wiry brown fists.

When my grandmother was alive, we’d chase her sheep down to the ravine to drink water. That’s before my mother sold off all my grandmother’s livestock to pay for her accumulating debts. Sometimes, I think that the monsoons left us for good along with my grandmother. It only seemed logical that they did because everything had all but dried up.

Feeling woozy and restless, I hopped off the tailgate and headed to the cab of my truck. The door opened with a groan. As the engine turned over, a fiddle whined through Willie Nelson singing a warning to Mamas to not let their babies grow up to be cowboys.

My mother liked this song, probably because she dated a lot of Indian cowboys. Like the ravine, this song diverted the truth. White babies growing up had choices to be different things, doctors, and lawyers, and such. But Indians, even us girls, we’re born cowboys. We don’t get to choose anything.

My stomach grumbled against my sterling silver belt buckle, despite my Levi’s feeling tighter than ever. Somewhere in the cab of my truck under a pile of bills, my cell phone buzzed. Probably my latest snag. Based on the pink tinged horizon, I knew a dust storm was coming. The wind picked up, funneling through the cab of the truck, stirring the feather hanging off the rearview mirror. I rolled up my windows and drove home.

I worked as a bagger at Bashas’ the summer before my senior year of high school, the same summer I met Aaron. I saw a lot of folks come through my checkout line. Young moms, drunks, cheating husbands, and traditional Navajo grandmothers whose veins clung in clusters beneath the skin of their hands like turquoise squash blossoms. I scanned all their items: hydrocortisone cream for open sores, hemorrhoid cream for the unwashed, condoms for the fourteen-year-old boy, and Gatorade for his thirteen-year-old girlfriend. At some point, I stopped processing what the items were and just scanned them, took cards or cash, and said goodbye.

One day at the beginning of my shift, baby shampoo, seven cans of evaporated milk, ground beef, fishing line, and a sewing kit came through my line. The man buying the items looked like he just walked off the pages of an outdoor magazine. He had a well-trimmed reddish beard, sported a blue zip-up sweater paired with khaki cargo shorts, and cradled something against his ribcage. He wasn’t a local. I could tell that much. There were only a handful of white people in Kayenta.

Did you find everything you need? I asked. I gave him my best customer service smile.

Yeah, do you guys carry rubbing alcohol? I couldn’t find it anywhere, he said.

You’ll have to purchase that at customer service. I motioned with my lips to the glass display that contained cough syrup, rubbing alcohol, and any other type of drug or cleaning supply considered dangerous.

Oh, he nodded.

You’ll need a valid form of ID, I said.

Holding his side, he slipped his hands into a cargo pocket and pulled out a distressed wallet.

I don’t need your ID, they do, I said, as I bagged his items.

Can I ask you a question? he asked, his brow crinkling. I found this little guy behind my trailer. The man pulled an orange tabby kitten from his sweater. He’s in pretty rough shape. I’m not really sure what to do with him. He held the kitten the way someone would hold a gun, not quite sure what it was capable of. Dry blood matted the kitten’s striped back and face. Its body hung limp from the man’s hands. Its pale swollen underbelly protruding. Does this town have an animal shelter or anything?

No, we don’t sir, I said, but we do have a vet van that comes around every two weeks with medicine.

He looked down at the kitten in his hand.

I don’t know if he’ll make it until then. He tucked the kitten back into his jacket.

I think the vet van stops in Tuba today, I said.

Is Tuba close?

This guy was clueless. Tuba was only an hour or so away, and he didn’t even know that. He needed real help, help that only a local could offer him. The line to my register was growing and I didn’t want to hold the other customers up with this man’s questions.

Look, I get off my shift at noon. If you want to come back then… I looked at him hard for a second. He didn’t look like a killer and if he was, I could butcher a sheep in twenty minutes flat, so I could take him if that was the case. I’ll take you to Tuba.

Relief flooded his face.

Definitely—I mean thank you. Yeah, I’ll be back at noon. Thanks a lot, he said as he looked from my face to the name tag on my Bashas’ apron: Bernadine.

You’re welcome, I said with a grin. And your total is $27.98.

I bought those for the cat, so…I guess I won’t need those anymore.

I shook my head. I was going to have to put these random-ass items away.

Thanks a lot, dude, I said, laughing.

My name is Aaron, by the way. He offered me his hand over the register. I half-heartedly pinched his fingertips with my fingertips. An NDN handshake. White people weren’t crazy about them, which is the reason we gave them. In our culture offering any part of your body was an invitation given only to friends and families, and definitely not strangers you’d just met.

A few hours and a couple hundred scanned items later, Aaron came back to Bashas’ and we searched the grocery aisles for some munchies for the road. He’d changed since that morning. He wore a fitted tan shirt screen-printed with a bearded man wearing psychedelic sunglasses, a nicer pair of outdoor hiking shorts, and thick nylon-strapped sandals. He was at least a foot taller than me, which I noticed when I didn’t want the bottom shelf case of blue Gatorade, and he was able to grab the top shelf flavors. He wasn’t muscular in the bulky way my uncles were. Aaron’s muscles were long and lean, except for his calves. His calves were disproportionate to the rest of his body, cartoonish almost, and covered in a generous layer of blonde leg hair.

When my co-worker, Kamisha, checked us out, she eyed me. We’d known each other since kindergarten, back when our teeth were capped in silver because we’d sneak Dr. Peppers from my family’s cooler during volleyball games and drink them in the sand under my porch. She was more like a cousin than a friend. We shared a running joke that neither of us had any friends, only cousins. I acted as a lookout when she had sex for the first time, with her boyfriend underneath the shade of cottonwood trees, near my grandmother’s cornfield. She was there the night my mother had her stomach pumped for the first time. We were closer than friends, looked like real cousins, and perhaps way back somewhere we were.

We walked out of Bashas’ past four drunks stood outside the grocery store doors wearing piss-stained Wranglers. They all shared the same glossy expression, as if their faces were varnished in alcohol. I wished I didn’t know them.

Bernadine, one said to me. Come here baby. Uncle needs some money just to get to his next paycheck. Just twenty dollars. Underneath the shopping cart canopy, I recognized the man as Irvin, my mother’s last snag.

Aaron tensed beside me. I shook my head. White men and their nerves.

Just ignore them, I said.

That’s no way to treat family, Irvin spat, before proceeding to laugh with his friends. How’s your mom doing? Irvin asked. Your mother’s no fun when she’s sober. Irvin’s friends joined in a chorus of laughter.

I’ll tell you what, our house smells better now that your good-for-nothing ass isn’t there anymore, I yelled.

Fuck you bitch! Irvin yelled.

Aaron drove a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. It still smelled like leather. He had placed the kitten inside a cardboard box labeled fragile kitchen lined with old T-shirts on the floor of the passenger seat. Aaron started driving and didn’t say anything for a long while.

Thanks again for all your help, Bernadine.

No problem, I said, looking out the tinted windows as we drove past Tségi Canyon. Tségi Canyon is twelve miles from Kayenta and translates poorly to English as in between the rocks. It’s an apt name, given that natural springs travel the vertical fractures in the sandstone, creating alcoves or fissures, all conduits for water run-off. I wasn’t fluent in Diné Bizaad anymore, but when I was little, I used to speak it really good, according to everyone in my family. Even saying tségi’ was frenetic, like running my hands along the crackled lichen of a sun warmed salmon colored canyon wall. You don’t just forget the taste of your first language; it sticks to your tongue like sour weed and juniper resin. Deep down, I knew that my language was still there, in between the rocks, obscured by the shadow of sheer red-orange sandstone cliffs dotted with dark green juniper. Only in the desert can forgotten things still flourish.

On the drive to Tuba, I would find out that Aaron was twenty-four years old and student-teaching at my high school. He blamed his late start on a two-year religious mission served in Taos, New Mexico, for the Mormons. During his time in the education program at New Mexico State, he decided Mormonism was no longer meeting his spiritual needs. He stopped shaving his beard and got 1 Corinthians 3:16 tattooed on his rib cage. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

He thought his