Wandering Stars

Maybe we’ll be running our whole lives. Just keep moving. That would be okay. We’ll have strong legs, keen awareness, and big hearts, keeping ourselves and each other going like we belong to that one-day distant future, when we can look back and say this is how we made it, despite everything.

I found that on the days after I drank even more than the usual amount, which often happened Saturday nights, I felt more intensely, and felt drawn to hear people talk about God. That feeling of the lingering drunkenness made everything feel loose, loose and without weight, like a cloud with no rain being moved by the wind. I’d let the sermon, the

Before he started talking about running away, your father had already done it more than a few times. None of us blamed him. We all imagined getting away from the school, going back home, but some of us had a harder time remembering how to get back home, and even if we did, if our people sent us away the first time, why wouldn’t they just do it agai

with sordid or noble pasts, depending on the story they were telling, what they were trying to get out of it, to pass the time or ask a favor.

You will always want to ask her what it means, to live on the land that was taken from you, to have to still live on the land that was taken and keeps being taken. Did it feel like it kept happening in present time, not in the past but perpetually, as in a car someone steals from you with you still inside it, driving through your neighborhood, fore

There was a very short book before the last book in the Bible with a verse that felt already in me before I got to it there in Florida, before I even knew what a sea was. Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame, wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.

I wanted to see what it did to me. I’d heard of drunkenness, of course, had seen drunken men, white men and Indians alike. I wanted to see what it would do to me, how it would feel to be that way. And it wasn’t what I thought. Not at all. I coughed and gagged and then when I thought I might throw up, heard my voice come. It began with the cough and

Charles Star’s memories come and go as they please. They are a broken mirror, through which he only ever sees himself in pieces. He doesn’t know that it is true of everyone, of memory itself, that it is a centerless map and, for those who risk too much looking back at their lives, a trap.

When it came to my own name, I went looking through a Bible. I couldn’t decide until I got to the book before the last book, after coming across the verse, They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. Getting these new names felt like dying again. And I felt like a cloud without rain. A