Splitting South Dakota

It was on a Tuesday when the crack formed, small at first, a crevice really, across the entire state of South Dakota, like a long wrinkle, a long sole wrinkle. A Seminole woman said it was a bad sign and she needed to dance. We built her a fire, rolled her wheelchair in front of it. We watched the flames dance inside the blacks of her eyes as she whirled her arms in circles like windmill propellers. She chanted in her mother tongue, a mother herself with intimate knowledge of what a crack through the state really meant.

It frightened all of us who were white and couldn’t see the future in anything: fires, palms, crystal balls. Everything Indian-spoke sounded like a death chant to our white ears. It means she’s hurting, the Seminole woman said in English. The burden is finally too much for her and she’s breaking. The Seminole woman closed her eyes, lowered her arms. She looked ready for a long sleep. I’m ready for a long sleep, she said in English. We wheeled her back to her leaning pre-fab. She will heal only if we recognize we’re demanding too much of her, the Seminole woman said. Now leave me and mind your shoes don’t scuff the linoleum. The linoleum glowed like marble. The Seminole woman fell to sleep, and we walked on our toes across the linoleum, making sure all of the lights were turned off.

By Thursday, the crack was big enough that everyone in South Dakota started throwing things in it. Lawn clippings, at first, hedge prunings, dead branches, fallen leaves. The crack, then big enough to be a rift, seemed bottomless as those in South Dakota tried their damnedest to fill it. First with organics, and then with their garbage, things they’d saved for who-knows-when, for who-knows-how-long: plastic lawn furniture, broken bird baths, discarded license plates, bent baby cribs, indeterminate car parts, buckets of used motor oil and unused canary yellow paint, tax returns and paycheck stubs, long strands of forgotten yarn and thread and thin chain link, rusted bicycle chains, rusted wheels, wheels without tires, tires all by themselves. The Seminole woman watched the desperate business of those in South Dakota filling the space in the rift with their refuse, their recyclables, their regrets. The rift had expanded to cover rez and rural alike. Had yawned wide open like a crying baby. Without thinking, children threw in their mothers’ purses and fathers’ car keys: all while no one was watching.

The Seminole woman watched, and we waited with her. She asked us for cigarettes, and we obliged. It was that I could not change enough for this place to be my home, she said. I could never get used to how cold it was in the winter, how heavy the snow fell. All of us mothers form cracks in the middle of us when we can’t get used to a place as our home and the burden of it breaks us down the middle. The Seminole woman pulled down the front of her dress far enough for us to see where her chest had separated much like the gaping rift through the middle of South Dakota, the place where something pulled her apart. We saw where the cigarette smoke escaped through it before her lungs could absorb it. And what happens when we crack down the middle? the Seminole woman said. You people hurry to fill it with your unwanted shit. She dragged on the cigarette slow and sad, the streams of smoke rising up from the front of her dress. This place where everyone has the need to watch things break apart and then fill them with debris could never be a home to me, she said.

We watch the white people with gleeful faces and unfillable holes in themselves dance around like drunken bees, unloading everything they can get their hands on, everything they can lift and carry themselves.

Tell us about Florida, Mother, we said to the Seminole woman. Tell us about when the Earth was angry with us she sent a gale of wind, and an ocean of water fell from the sky.

he cracks were underground then, the Seminole woman said.

We stared and the rift grew to a ravine. Soon, the ravine would rip through enough, long enough, for those in South Dakota to fall in, if they weren’t paying attention. Or, to jump, if everything was too sad for them to endure.

Aaron Hellem lives with his wife in Leverett, Massachusetts and attends the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His short stories have recently appeared in Xavier Review, Quay Journal, Ellipsis, Phantasmagoria, Amoskeag, Menda City Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal; also, works of his are forthcoming in Lake Effect, Oklahoma Review, Parting Gifts, Fourth River, and Confluence.

Email: Aaron Hellem

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