Albino Promenade

An Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

Grandfather introduced the albino woman, Nuva, by slow-step promenade through the village, the infant Tuwa clutched in the arms of his new surrogate mother. There being no ceremony for such a thing, Grandfather improvised.

He proceeded from his house nearest the dual sandstone spires that rose like steeples from the northeastern edge of the mesa, and wound his way along every pathway past every dwelling.

At the house of the top farmer lived the eldest woman, Wooti, grandmother to the farmer. She’d heard the twitter of the children as they ran and hid and peeped to watch Grandfather and the strange white woman.

Wooti studied Nuva’s red eyes and her hands and legs, and then turned her back. Grandfather stopped.

“Wooti,” Grandfather said.

“You bring us a witch?” she asked without facing Grandfather.

“I bring a mother for my grandson.”

“You bring us a witch.” A statement this time.

“I would not and have not brought anything to this village that will do us harm. Do you doubt my judgment?”

Wooti’s hands dropped to her side. “I have never until now.”

“Nuva is no witch!” Grandfather’s voice rose in anger.

Wooti turned to Grandfather. “Do not shout at me, old man. I have as much sense as you do, and your white woman is infected with … something not good.” She glanced at Nuva, then turned her back again, arms across her chest.

Grandfather stood, the village quiet but for the gargling calls of turkeys and the barking of a dog in the woods below. The infant fussed and Nuva comforted him. Grandfather stood until Wooti uncrossed her arms and her shoulders sagged.

“The something that is not good isn’t here among us,” Grandfather said so low he might have been speaking only to himself. Wooti turned her head to point her right ear toward him. “It is down there,” he said with a single nod to the south, “and it is growing.”

Grandfather began again his slow walk and all the women in the circle of Wooti, her family clan and her friends, turned their backs on Nuva, but Grandfather did not stop and said not another word.

# # #

Did any words pull you out of the setting or time of the story?

Note: The name Wooti is derived from the Hopi word wuyòoti, which means “get old.”  The dual sandstone spires are those of Chimney Rock, Colorado, the northeasternmost outlier of the Anasazi culture centered in Chaco Canyon.

Anasazi Runner

An Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

Note: This is a sketch made in preparation for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). My working title is “Anasazi Runner.” Synopsis: Native American boy abandoned at birth and raised by white parents is inspired when he visits Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and becomes, in his mind, an Anasazi runner who completes the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon.

# # #

“Kira thinks I’m Navajo like her.”

“Do you think you’re Navajo like her?”

Sean leaned across the table so others wouldn’t hear and mumbled, “No, I don’t.”

I looked around the restaurant. All white people but for one toothless guy of uncertain ancestry in the corner. I knew the Elkhorn cook was Navajo. The waitress, Jicarilla Apache. And the owner had a Ute grandfather. Always made me laugh to think of the cultural tangle inside that place.

Sean obviously didn’t want to be overheard, so I piped down to his level. “You tell her you think that?”

His eye went out the window and he half-shrugged. He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I think she wants me to be Navajo. I think maybe she thinks she can make me into a Navajo.”

“You could be Navajo, I guess. Nobody knows.”

He tensed and pulled his cheeks back as if in pain. “I just don’t feel like it.”

I scratched my neck and blinked. I didn’t really know how to empathize with that kind of deep identity feeling. Generations of white-trash ancestors had bred all that out of me. “You show her your mamma’s disk?”

When his birth mother had died in the car wreck, she’d been wearing some kind of ceramic disk on her stomach, held in place by a leather thong. His adoptive parents gave it to him when he turned eighteen. It was the only thing he had that connected him to his mother.

Spirit-Puller

He nodded. Good, I thought. Hiding things from your girlfriend isn’t a good sign. “She said I should put it back,” he said.

That shocked me, but the Jicarilla waitress brought us cups and coffee just then. I watched how she eyed Sean, but she didn’t do anything unusual. I always tried to notice how other Native Americans treated him. We ordered the usual, a half-dozen scrambled eggs with dry wheat toast for Sean, and a bowl of oatmeal and raisins for me.

I leaned closer to him when she left. “What does that mean, ‘put it back’?”

“She thinks it’s some kind of spirit-puller from the ancestral enemies.”

“Ancestral enemies? That’s what Anasazi means in Navajo. She thinks it’s Anasazi?”

He nodded. We drank coffee, not looking at each other. I didn’t expect that. I thought that disk had a modern usage and meaning. It looked old, but not ancient.

“Do you ever feel like it’s pulling something to you?”

Sean looked out the window at tourists taking pictures of the glistening mineral mound of one of the hot springs. “Kind of,” he said. “When I run. I feel this lightness in my chest. Like something is pulling me faster than I’m going.”

He drifted into silence, but I needed more than that. “Only when you’re running? Like a vision?”

Softly, almost to himself, he said, “Like I’m a runner for the king or top priest or whatever they had.”

“An Anasazi Runner.”

He nodded for a long time.

# # #

This is my last National Novel Writing Month piece. Thanks for hanging in here with me as I shifted from historical fiction to present-day fiction. It’s been a fun ride.

A note about the image of the spirit-puller: It’s actually an Inuit carving in a piece of mammoth ivory that became exposed from the melting permafrost. It’s not ancient at all.

New Guest Blog: The “War” in WarriorWriter

Check out my guest blog, “The ‘War’ in WarriorWriter,” with my three favorite warrior metaphors for writing. And a picture of Mel Gibson with a big, red universal “no” over his warrior face. Symbolism, you know.

Money for Running

An Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Note: This is a sketch made in preparation for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). My working title is “Anasazi Runner.” Synopsis: Modern-day Native American boy abandoned at birth and raised by white parents is inspired when he visits Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and becomes, in his mind, an Anasazi runner who completes the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon.

# # #

Things changed after Sean won the Denver marathon, breaking the course record by more than a minute. Suddenly, people knew him, he became an elite runner, and the press started hounding him and me too.

“How can we get away from them?” he asked.

I had an idea. “Remember the cookie jar I kept in my history classroom?”

He nodded, clearly with no idea where I was going.

“If I left the lid on, you kids would go nuts trying to get a cookie or to convince me to pass some out.”

“I remember that.”

“But when I opened it up and let you guys have all you wanted, somehow cookies just didn’t interest you so much anymore.”

“I remember that, too.”

“So let’s give these reporters all they want and maybe they’ll grow tired of you.”

That turned into a mistake. At least it didn’t work like the cookies. The more we talked to reporters, the more reporters wanted to talk to us. The story of an orphan Native American boy, raised by white parents, and calling himself the “Anasazi Runner,” got so big it dominated sports news and broke into general news at times.

But it really blew up when Sean got too comfortable with a New York Times reporter. This quote electrified the world: “Yeah, we’ve got it pretty well timed out — break the world record at New York by a minute or so, then another minute in Boston, then sub-two-hour in Berlin next year. Then I’m done. You guys won’t be able to find me anymore.”

That made it to primetime mainstream news and it brought out all the talking heads with opinions, all but a few calling Sean and me idiots for even uttering the Holy Grail phrase “sub-two-hour” out loud. You’d think Sean had said we intended to highjack a couple airliners and crash them into the twin towers of the World Marathon Center, if there were such a thing.

But here’s the interesting thing — money. We’d been eking by on my retirement income. But after the media frenzy, sponsors and agents from all over the world tried to get us to sign contracts, some of them for millions of dollars, and all involving becoming a puppet to the sponsor.

“What do you want to do?” I asked Sean.

“You’re my coach. You decide.”

“Nope. If you got no opinion in the matter, I’m going home to Pagosa Springs, and you should give up the whole idea.” No way I’d let the boy abdicate and not even have a preference. Not my job to babysit him.

“I’d like to have some money,” he finally said. “But I don’t want to do all this crap they want me to do. I’ll sell my soul to running, but not to a company.”

I nodded. I’d like to have some money, too. “Okay, let me think about it. We’ll come up with something. You just keep your mind on running away from that moon guy who wants to eat you in your dream. If you don’t run, we got nothing.”

So I set up a  deal with a contest that made all the sponsors and agents squeal like we’d live-trapped them. We offered what I thought of as lottery tickets for $50,000 a pop. After he broke the world record, we’d randomly pick three winners and he’d do limited spokesmanlike things for a million bucks each. I’d find an attorney somewhere to work up the details. Then after he broke the world record again at Boston, we’d randomly pick one of the three for five million bucks, and then if he broke the sub-two-hour mark in Berlin, they’d kick in another fifteen million. I gave a deadline of a week for sponsors to buy into the lottery.

The press went wild. The TV show “60 Minutes” said it sounded like a deal that Jed Clampitt of The Beverly Hillbillies might come up with. But it worked. At the end of the week, we’d banked nearly three million dollars.

And it also sort of didn’t work, because then we had film crews following us everywhere.

“You sorry you’re doing this yet?” I asked him one day.

He shook his head. “I can do this. I have to do this. Then I’ll be, well, I’ll be somebody.”

“You’re already somebody.”

“You know what I mean.” He grew surly. He didn’t like it when I probed too much into this identity thing of his. I wondered if he’d ever truly be done with that. Only one way to know for sure, I guess. That’s to do it. It certainly had become an interesting show to watch.

# # #

Is this even plausible? Or is it too farfetched to believe?

Too Skinny

An Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

Note: This is a sketch made in preparation for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). My working title is “Anasazi Runner.” Synopsis: Modern-day Native American boy abandoned at birth and raised by white parents is inspired when he visits Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and becomes, in his mind, an Anasazi runner who completes the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon.

# # #

“You’re too skinny,” I told him.

“All the Africans that have been winning marathons are skinny. Look at Haile Gebreslassie.”

“I do look at him and I think he could be a little faster if he carried more leg muscle.”

“Where’d you get that theory?”

“From my head.”

I handed him a ten-pound belt I had devised from a couple ankle weights and had him strap it around his waist. “Don’t take it off until just before the race. And I mean you wear it everywhere except in the shower. And to bed.”

That extra ten pounds really slowed his times. I rode behind him on my three-wheel bike like usual and watched the little computer screen. When we got to the top of the run, he stopped.

“This thing’s killing me,” he said, cocking his thumb at the weight belt.

“Good. Fear of death might make you run faster.”

We kept working every day and after the first week of wearing the weight belt his times began to nudge back up again.

“How far am I off my top times?” he asked.

“Before the belt?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know. Twenty percent, maybe.”

He shook his head.

Still three months before the race, I decided we had time for a test. And it’d be good for his head. He seemed to be getting down.

“How you feel today?” I asked before our usual run up Fourmile Road.

He shrugged. “Left ankle’s still sore, but it works out. I didn’t sleep so good last night. Had a nightmare about the man in the moon swallowing me, and then I fell down a mountain.”

“How’d your Indian buddies interpret that?”

“Didn’t tell ’em yet.”

“When you do, let me know what they say, and it’d better be that you’re the fastest running in the world. Now take off that belt.”

He looked at me like he would argue, but I cocked my head and gave him the stern coach look. He took it off and I dropped it into the basket on my bike.

“Now see what you can do. No splits. All the way to the trailhead.

His lips pulled into a crooked smile. “You’re using psychology on me.”

“I’m proving to you that this ten-pound belt is good for you. Now run.” Truth be told, I wanted proof myself. I just made this running coach stuff up. I didn’t have a clue how the professionals did it. Didn’t want to know. Preferred my own common sense.

He ran. He stepped up onto the balls of his feet and leaped from foot to foot. I had to work extra hard to keep up with him on the bike, and that extra ten pounds of the belt didn’t help. At the top, we were both pooped. After we blew a bit, I looked at the computer on the bike. I turned the screen for him to see. He broke into a huge grin.

“Wow!” he said. “I didn’t think I was anywhere near that pace.”

“Nearly three minutes,” I said, grinning back.

“Give me that belt,” he said. “I’m never taking this thing off.”

“Until right before the race.”

He nodded. “Then I’ll run it like the Moon Man is chasing me.”

“Is he?”

He nodded again, with more seriousness than I’d expected. This dream stuff had gotten to him. “They told me it means the moon spirit is chasing me.”

“Why?”

He shrugged.

“Is that supposed to motivate you?”

“I guess so.”

“Does it?”

“Not really. But getting rid of this weight belt sure does.”

# # #

I ended up not using anything similar to this in the novel. This flash exercise helped me get a feel for when the dialogue density is too high. What do you think?

Jeff Posey, This Week’s Guest Warrior Writer

Hey, I’m the guest blogger this week on Kristen Lamb’s WarriorWriter site. Take a look: The Eyes of Bob: Revising/Rewriting, by Jeff Posey.

Race for a Spirit

An Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

Note: This is a sketch made in preparation for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). My working title is “Anasazi Runner.” Synopsis: Modern-day Native American boy abandoned at birth and raised by white parents is inspired when he visits Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and becomes, in his mind, an Anasazi runner who completes the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon.

# # #

I stood in a raw wind outside Arboles, Colorado, waiting for Sean O’Brien to come out of the trailer house parked close to a Navajo Hogan. I hadn’t seen him since high school and I didn’t know if I’d recognize him. Those particular six years change people a good deal.

But I knew him the moment he stepped out, followed by a girl. His black hair had grown long and tasseled in the wind, but the way he carried his body played a chord of recognition inside me. Id’ watched this boy run countless miles, talked to him for hours in places where he’d go to hide from people, become something like an uncle and a best friend to him. But then he and his parents disappeared. Angus O’Brien took a job in St. Louis, people said. I figured I’d never hear from him again, like I did with most of my students.

His call surprised me and we talked for an hour before we realized we were less than an hour’s drive from each other. So I went to him, following directions he relayed to me from the girl.

“Is she pregnant?” I’d asked.

He hesitated on the phone and I imagined him reluctant to say anything she would hear. “I’ll talk to you when you get here,” he said and hung up.

The whole drive there, following streams out of the high mountains that joined the San Juan River to run west into the Colorado, I thought about what kind of trouble he’d gotten into making a Navajo girl pregnant. Made sense, somehow, I thought. The boy had no more “O’Brien” in his blood than I had African in mine. He could pass for Navajo. Maybe that’s where his birth parents came from. Maybe that strange ceramic disk his birth mother they found taped to her swollen belly after she died somehow led him here.

I went to shake Sean’s hand as he approached, watching his eyes to see what I could make of his thoughts, but he blew past my outstretched hand and bear-hugged me, rocking me back against my truck door. I wrapped my arms around him. Though still wiry and shorter than most, he’d filled out and his shoulders felt solid and strong.

Sean backed up and seemed to realize he’d greeted me a little too enthusiastically. His eyes squinted and reminded me again of an Eskimo in a blinding snowfield.

“Coach,” he said. “This is Kira. Kira Bai.”

I’d no idea how to spell that last name, but I didn’t need to. She had classic Navajo cheeks and nose, black hair the same length as Sean’s, and straight legs, unlike the bowed legs I’d seen, especially among the Utes and the Hopi. I detected no thickening of her waist. If she’s pregnant, it’d just happened. I shook her hand and she smiled.

“I’ve got lots to tell you,” said Sean, inviting me into the trailer. Kira made instant coffee with sugar, which I drank reluctantly. At home, nothing but real coffee passed my lips.

The talk turned quickly to running. “You look good,” said Sean. “Have you been running?”

I had indeed. A lot, for an old man. Five or six miles up Fourmile Road five or six days a week, though my knees had begun to complain, especially on the downhills. “Not bad for a sixty-seven-year-old geezer, is it?” Then I asked about him, what he runs.

“Oh, I’m not training right at all. I just run because I have to here.” He lightly thumped his lower chest with his fist, a gesture I’d never seen from him before. I wondered where he’d learned it.

“And yet you came in eleventh in the Denver marathon? Is that what you said on the phone?”

Sean nodded.

“And he could have won it,” Kira said. “But he backed off.”

“Why?” He’d told me over the phone, but I wanted to see the answer in his face.

His Eskimo eyes and cheeks scrunched into misery. He opened his hands wide and spoke to the floor. “I got … I didn’t want people looking at … I didn’t want all that attention. It’s hard to explain.”

“And yet you asked me to help you win one. Why?”

He opened his mouth, but Kira answered for him. “Because he won’t have a spirit until he does.”

I looked from her to him. “You’ll have to explain that to me. I’m too much white guy or something.”

Kira looked at Sean, almost with pity I thought, then she looked back to me. “He has no identity. He’s not Sean O’Brien, you can tell that by looking at him. He needs an identity, a spirit force that will tell him who he is. If he doesn’t get that, he’ll just be a ghost.”

He looked at me with sad almond-shaped eyes. I knew he’d always suffered with his identity, a lost brown-skinned boy in a white world. But I wondered if he could truly get one from running a race. Depended on a lot of things, I knew. But I’d worked with him before. I didn’t feel it in me to deny him.

I drained my instant coffee and nodded. “Worth a try, I guess.” Sean smiled and looked at Kira, who seemed pleased with herself.

# # #

I wrote this before National Novel Writing Month began, so I should be about half-finished with the fast novel by now (I’m actually at about 60,000 words; I’ve been on fire). I welcome any thoughts you may have.

Lessons from a NaNoWriMo Virgin

Not an Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

A quick hat’s off to veterans (of whom my father is one: WWII, B-17, missions over the English Channel into Germany; many unpleasant memories for him, along with a few good ones).

# # #

I just passed the 50,000-word mark after only ten days. Woot!

I tepidly entered the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge of writing a minimum 50,000-word novel in one month. I begged my best writer buddy, Jason Myers, to talk me out of it. “Do it!” he said. I should’ve known. His cure for everything is, “just write.” At least he’s consistent.

An interesting thing happened. I honored the “don’t start before November 1” rule, which meant I had a couple weeks to noodle it in my head. So I did. Now that I’m almost finished with what might be called a “flash” novel (as in written in a flash), here’s what I’ve learned so far from my first NaNoWriMo experience.

1. Simple is good. For me, three characters, one driving goal.
2. An experimental POV or voice is energizing. Think: playful; and see #8.
3. Spend at least as much time imaging the next scene as you do writing it.
4. Take long walks to let your story talk to you. (Feeds #3.)
5. Read out loud daily to a good listener (my wife is perfect, but you’ll have to find your own).
6. Write the first quarter or third of the story even if you don’t know where it’s going. You’ll discover what’s next on your long walks (#4).
7. Be freewheeling. This is an exercise in experimental writing. (See #2.)
8. Write in the voice that narrates your daydreams. It’ll flow like water because you know it so well. You may feel a bit psychotic, but you can recover in December. (Yes, cross-reference #2.)
9. When things begin to bog down, throw in a monkey wrench. Watch your characters squirm. Enjoy their pain. Remember, you can recover in December.
10. Never negate anything that happened in a prior scene. I learned this lesson from my days in an improv comedy troupe. Nothing slows down story motion more than denying what has already happened.

I have to confess something: Being unemployed (laid off in September) really helps give you the time to take long walks and smash through a lot of words.

Do you have any NaNo-virgin tips? Add them to the comments below. I’ll collect them and we’ll vote in a week or so to see what comes up tops.

Meanwhile, watch for my upcoming guest appearance on the Warriorwriters’ Blog next week. It’ll be about Bob Mayer’s techniques and advice for manuscript revision. After you finish your NaNo novel, you’ll need it.

Eskimo Face

An Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

Note: This is a sketch made in preparation for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). My working title is “Anasazi Runner.” Synopsis: Modern-day Native American boy abandoned at birth and raised by white parents is inspired when he visits Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and becomes, in his mind, an Anasazi runner who completes the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon.

# # #

The first time I noticed Sean O’Brien as anything other than a curiosity was when he outran his sixth-grade classmates in a one-mile run by nearly a quarter mile.

“That boy’s fast,” I told Wilson, the football coach. “Might want to keep your eye on him.”

“You’re not the first to tell me that. I’ve seen him. He runs as strange as he looks.” Wilson leaned back in his chair and thumped his big feet onto his desk.

He had a point. The boy didn’t run or look like anybody I’d ever seen except in pictures. His face had an Eskimo look, or Mongolian, or something. Maybe even Guatamalan, old Mayan or Aztec blood. Not the kind of kid you’d expect from the O’Briens, both of them so white they seemed to suck the color out of everything around them. It was common knowledge they’d adopted the boy right out of the womb of a woman killed in a fiery car crash outside of Dallas.

“Does it matter how he runs or what he looks like if he can help you win football games?” I asked.

“Hell no,” said Wilson. “Not to me, anyway. But you know how white-bread this place is.”

“He could pass for Mexican. We got Mexicans.” Not quite true, I knew. Other towns had Mexicans. We didn’t. Or blacks either. Ever since that ridiculousness of the Fifties when we had two mayors in a row associated with Ku Klux Klan activity, one of them convicted for chaining an old black gentleman to a pickup truck and dragging him until his dead body literally fell apart. That tarnished this little town and the progressive whites drifted away with the minority groups.

“Other towns got Mexicans,” said Wilson. “You know good and well we don’t.” He seemed annoyed with me, like I was pushing him to do something he didn’t want to do.

“You’d better decide pretty quick. You know Angus will be in here to sign him up for JV before school’s out.”

Wilson had a sour look on his face. “I know. But it’ll cause problems. You know the families around here. They won’t say or do anything in public, but I’ll never hear the end of it in private.”

Turns out Sean O’Brien didn’t become Wilson’s problem after all. He became mine. The last day of school, Angus O’Brien dragged Sean to my history classroom that served as the running coach’s office (I still don’t know why I let Wilson draft me into that job) and said the boy wanted to sign up for cross-country, not football. Angus had been drinking, I could smell it on him, and his nose had gone as red as it does in winter.

“The boy’s not man enough for football,” he said.

I looked at Sean, a slender, small boy. He seemed to try and hide in the pencil-thin shadow that ran along the edge of the chalk board.

“I’d be proud to have you on my running team,” I said, my eyes on the boy’s. If I looked at Angus, I’d want to smack him. The boy blinked as if his eyes stung, but he held my gaze.

Wilson was ecstatic. “You said yourself he’s fast, so cross-country makes a lot more sense than football. That’s why I made you head track coach, so you could sniff out and take advantage of situations just like this.” Then he cackled and slapped me too hard on the back.

I didn’t think about it much over the summer break. I enjoyed being away in my Colorado mountains, but I could’ve predicted something would go screwy. Wilson started a new football training class at the same time as cross-country, and all the football players dropped out. After that first week, it was just me and Sean.

“So,” I said, looking at the boy. “What do you want to do? We can’t do any meets with just one runner. You want to just forget about it? Or you want to train for something?”

He looked down and rubbed his shoes together. “I want to run a marathon,” he said in such a small voice I could barely hear him.

“Look up at me and speak so’s I can hear you. You sayin’ you want to do a marathon?”

That Eskimo face looked up at me and nodded.

I stretched and stood up. I’d never trained anyone for a marathon before. This kid had some speed, but that’s not what gets you through a marathon. You’ve got to have that fear or anger or something that pushes you beyond what any right-minded human would do. Did he have that? Something about the boy made me figure I wanted to find out. Might’ve been because I didn’t think his parents treated him right, and I thought I could do something for him. That’s always a red flag for teachers, but I blew right past it and said, “Okay, my boy. We’ll train you up for a marathon. Get here an hour early tomorrow.”

He was waiting for me when I pulled into the school parking lot the next morning, and I figured I’d done it now, ruined every morning for the rest of the school year. But that boy sure liked to run. Yes he did. And he seemed to blossom with me pushing him, so I didn’t mind. In fact, getting him to a marathon became sort of an obsession with me. I even had the gall to think he’d do well. Turns out I had no idea, no idea at all.

# # #

Give me an opinion of the voice I’m using in this piece. I’ve never written first-person fiction before. Is it smooth and believable? Is anything tripping you up?

It’s Still Not Red

An Anasazi Story by Jeff Posey.

She stepped in front of him and stopped him in his path, her eyes fixed on his head.

Never before had she seen a cloth the color of this man’s hat. She’d heard stories of the traveling trader, The Pochteca, who wore a cloth hat of an unbelievable red. She squinted to see it more clearly, and the man, without speaking, unwound his head cloth and handed it to her. Be shocked at his behavior later, she told herself, and concentrated on the cloth. She worked it in her fingers and held it close to her eyes.

“What kind of dye?” she asked without looking at him.

“Far to the south, many months of walking from here, men gather a small beetle and then women crush and boil them.”

“What kind of beetle?”

He shrugged. “I’ve never seen them.”

“What time of year?”

“The first cool breath after summer.”

“Do they dry the beetles first?”

“I don’t know.”

She pinched her mouth in displeasure. How could he fail to find out such crucial information?

“Is this red common there?”

“No, very rare.”

“The beetles are rare?”

“The color is rare.”

“How old is this?”

“More than six summers.”

“How does it keep its color so well?”

He shrugged again.

For the first time she looked into his eyes and she restrained herself from accusing him of not knowing much. But the crinkles around his eyes made him seem kind and people had knotted around to watch. She sighed, handed him his red cloth hat, and turned away as abruptly as she’d stepped before him.

Two years later when the winds carried the first cool air after summer, the old woman sat beside a loom and a pot of boiling water over a fire, surrounded by tiny palm-sized bowls filled with dyes of many colors, mostly browns, some with a bluish metallic tint.

From the corner of her eye, she saw someone approach and looked up. She didn’t know how, because he did not wear the hat of glorious red, but she recognized him immediately. His eyes gave him away, she supposed. She did not rise as he approached because her feet ached too much to carry her. She spent her days cajoling village children to find and bring beetles to her, and lately she’d become frantic with the cooling of the summer.

She wanted to duplicate The Pochteca’s red before the last breath spirit passed her lips. She wanted to show her people that they were as good as those murderous invaders from the south. She had no power to fight them, but if she could only make a blood-red dye, perhaps it would inspire her people to resist the Southerners.

The Pochteca man nodded his head in greeting and squatted beside her. A boy ran up and dropped a pouch close to her, gave a glance at the man, then ran away with a giggle. The old dye woman picked it up and clawed a sample that she held close to her eyes, then out for The Pochteca man.

“Beetles,” she said, spilling some into a bowl. She ground them to a moist mash with a smooth stone, then dipped boiling water with a small mug and dribbled it into the mash and stirred. She dipped her finger into the mixture and held it close to her eyes, angling it into the sun for better light, then held it out for him to see.

“It’s not red,” said The Pochteca man.

She shook her head, letting the sinking feeling affect her for only a moment, then she wiped her finger on a scrap of cloth in her lap and called to the boys for more beetles.

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Does this story work better from the old dye-maker woman’s point of view? (See last week’s #FridayFlash story, “It’s Not Red,” for this same story from The Pochteca’s point of view.) Do any word choices pull you out of the time and place of the story?