I'm not really very good at titles, or introducing myself, so I guess I'll just vomit something up in this space - I don't think I have access to the google documents. As a warning, I have been surrounded by 10 year olds for the past year and a half and have not written in that time, so I'm feelin' a little shaky about it. (the beginning)


"The Navajo Nation"

Helena, with a cathedral-work of veins coloring her calves, kneels in the enclosed dirt space in front of her home. Nothing is sprouting from the soil she’d spread six weeks ago. She stares at the barren enclosure and wipes the back of her hand across her nostrils. When she stands, her knees creak, and her elastic-waistband shorts new from the Wal-Mart in Gallup ride up her inner thighs as she walks back into the house.

There are three window-unit air conditioners stationed in the kitchen and living area, blasting her with frozen waves when she comes in the front door. Her landlord had snapped at her the previous week when he came to fix the leak below the sink. “You’re gonna blow out the whole neighborhood if you keep running with that many BTUs,” he told her. Whenever he calls her refers to himself as “Mr. Berkway, your landlord,” as if Helena would not have recognized his heavy southern drawl. He is hardly older than Dave and already owns three houses on the lot. Another of his tenants, Meredith, from the down the road, told Helena that he’d gotten a law degree at Clemson University before coming to do “God’s work” with the Navajo nation. Meredith had smiled when she said that, while Helena tripped over her stomach, her loud, smoke-infused guffaw rippling through the desert air.

“BTUs?” Helena had asked. Mr. Berkway looked up at her from where he knelt on the kitchen tile.

“It’s sort of like the amount of power you use. You’re using too much. I’m surprised you don’t blow a fuse every time you turn these ACs on.”

“Must be okay ’cause I don’t turn them off and on,” Helena suggested.

“You mean you leave those running all day and night?” Mr. Berkway then stood up in the kitchen, his wrench in his right hand, his left hand exploding into the air, punctuating his question.

“You mean to stand in my kitchen and tell me that you turn off your air conditioner at night, Mr. Berkway?”

His face had begun to flush with color, but he knelt back down on the tiled floor and began wrestling with the plumbing again.

Anyway, Helena feels just satisfied with her stubbornness on the units now as she did then, when she smirked as Mr. Berkway fixed her leak. In just the few moments in her garden, beads of sweat had formed on her temples, and she can feel heavy moisture gathered in her armpits. She walks into the kitchen to pour herself some iced tea. Dave had given her a Mrs. Tea maker for Mother’s Day last year, delivered to her door gift-wrapped from Amazon.com.