“The car is hemorrhaging fuel,” I told Dad over the phone as we approached Grandma and Grandpa’s place.

For three years, I boarded a bus in West Pullman, then transferred to the Red Line train to attend Chicago’s Roosevelt University.

There are things you can’t ask at the clinic. Among your prescribed list of acceptable questions: Where is the bathroom?

Many of the “Indians” — that’s what they call themselves and what we call them too — in our small Alaskan town live in a separate community called Saxman.

Beyond dead. Torsos glazed with epoxy, exuding an icy sheen. A spinal column exposed, its flimsy cord dangling from a robust sacrum.

Mama was born in the year of the Dog. In the Chinese Zodiac, dogs are known to be loyal and stubborn, of which she was both, but mostly I thought of her as brave.

When a group of Alaskan women flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with Senator Lisa Murkowski during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, I wanted to be on the plane with them.

When we were girls, we weren’t supposed to look adults in the eyes, and when we did, we could barely stand the intensity, felt like we were too close to a human kind of flame.