by Tommy Cheis Six AM. Winter Solstice. The summit of Burro Peak. In the valley a pronghorn herd assembles to receive the day’s orders. So charged they march through mesquite and cholla, hunting water and fodder. Tazhi gobble love songs to their hens. I, the fireman with elk horns, fork the fourth and final glowing stone through the east gate into the pit. This done, I enter the lodge, close the deerskin flap, and sit cross-legged with my brothers in the sacred …

The cave started out as a joke. Driving along on a New Mexico back road, we saw a sign: Experience Darkness, 1 Mile. Then a mile later: True Silence Here “Shall we?” I asked Evelyn (she called herself Eva-Luna). “True silence seems appropriate.” We’d been driving all day—or I had. Eva-Luna still hadn’t spoken. I was tired of the silence more than the driving. The desert in its persistence can also wear on you. At night, the stars are like braille in your mind—the sinister wind whispers …

Content Warning: implied childhood sexual abuse. My father can’t find the tie he wants to wear. It doesn’t take much more than that. A missing shoe, an empty scotch tape holder, that’s all the reason he needs to go on a rampage. Ordinarily, I grab my little sister, Irene, and make an exit when he starts, but we have only ten minutes left to get ready for my cousin’s First Communion. I pull Irene into my room and close the door, try to distract her from the arguing outside in the hall. I …

Come on, pick up the phone. I kicked some pebbles and scattered them. The streetlight was jaundiced. I felt ill from its flickering. The night was cold. Not windy, but cold. I felt a buzz and heard the phone ring, a hangover from a time when the phones had chimes, but now it was obsolete. People just liked to know that they were still on the line. “Hello?” It wasn’t the voice I wanted to hear. It was deeper, jovial. Had to be her boyfriend. “Hey man, is Destiny there? She said she was …

In church, Lee conjured herself another mother. Not the small, faded woman who sat next to her in the wooden pew, but a woman with long, loose hair, one who smelled of jasmine and wore a blue silk dress. Lee could picture the woman so clearly that she could see the faint laugh lines at the edges of her eyes, the freckles on the underside of her jaw. A pain shot through Lee’s upper arm, and she gasped. “Stop that right now,” Lee’s real mother hissed, her fingernails digging into Lee’s …

He’d done as he was told. Did what he promised. It didn’t take long to adjust. After a week of training, Wayne started the overnight sorting shift at the garbage facility just off downtown. He found if he spiked his rum with Alka-Seltzer, he could make it through the entire night without his back cramping up, and if he chewed gum, he never stank of booze— just tropical fruit mixed with burned coffee from the never-ending pot in the lobby of his new home, the LAX Holiday Inn. Working …