This excerpt is from our upcoming collection of Writing That Risks, featuring fiction, poetry, and memoir that breaks rules to deliver the goods. These stories and poems--by more than two dozen authors from around the globe--will take you on surprising journeys to destinations both insightful and delightful.
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The Law
Jacob hits a button on the Astrovan’s radio. Dusty Stump’s favorite song, “Life Is a Highway,” is playing as we approach the sign that reads: LEAVING THE RESERVATION: THE ERIE IS COMING.
On the Rez, where fireworks are legal, Jeff Sky Hawk, an Erie, mixed gunpowder—and nitrates and different compositions to give colors—with Dusty’s ashes into assorted fireworks. The flashy red box filled with rockets sits way in the back of the extended Astrovan that contains generations of Erie children. I am driving. I am the Matriarch of the Erie. I connect all Erie.
Everyone is Erie.
Erie mental structuring is not in linear form, but rather holographic: Each contains the whole. And the whole contains each Erie. The Erie is capable of immediate connection with the sacred: Consciousness unconfined by space. Or time. Or a physical being. Free. The essence of our being is unconditional love. As the Erie say, Love, without reservation.
Beside me in the passenger seat is Dusty’s son, Jacob Stump, age 13. His dark hair covers his face to avoid intimacy. Jacob resembles his father, but he has my blue eyes. My long black hair is streaked white from sorrow; it has never been cut.
Jacob warns me urgently, “You’re going too fast, Grandma.”
Lightning turns the world brilliant; thunder shakes the earth. The atmosphere is white, then black. We pass over the border of the sovereign nation, where fireworks are legal—then they are not!
On the Rez, where fireworks are legal, Jeff Sky Hawk, an Erie, mixed gunpowder—and nitrates and different compositions to give colors—with Dusty’s ashes into assorted fireworks. The flashy red box filled with rockets sits way in the back of the extended Astrovan that contains generations of Erie children. I am driving. I am the Matriarch of the Erie. I connect all Erie.
Everyone is Erie.
Erie mental structuring is not in linear form, but rather holographic: Each contains the whole. And the whole contains each Erie. The Erie is capable of immediate connection with the sacred: Consciousness unconfined by space. Or time. Or a physical being. Free. The essence of our being is unconditional love. As the Erie say, Love, without reservation.
Beside me in the passenger seat is Dusty’s son, Jacob Stump, age 13. His dark hair covers his face to avoid intimacy. Jacob resembles his father, but he has my blue eyes. My long black hair is streaked white from sorrow; it has never been cut.
Jacob warns me urgently, “You’re going too fast, Grandma.”
Lightning turns the world brilliant; thunder shakes the earth. The atmosphere is white, then black. We pass over the border of the sovereign nation, where fireworks are legal—then they are not!
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