//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: The Meaning of a Name // Story: FiO: Even the Strongest Heart // by Shaslan //------------------------------// I was twelve years old when the world ended. Not old enough to remember much of anything; nothing useful, at any rate. Just cartoons and cuddles and my Nana’s oatmeal cookies. Just enough to give me a feeling of comfort. Just enough to make me miss it when everything went to hell. I guess my name would be a good place to start. I’ve had a lot of names over the course of my life, and each one has meant something a little different to those around me. A name is a good way to shape a person. What you call them…well, it defines them, doesn’t it? These days I mostly go by Lozen. It’s not the name I was first called, but it’s the one I’ve chosen for myself. [1] ---------- [1] The name I began with was Margaret Lozen Atkinson, but even that wasn’t my family’s original name. We were the Araho family, once, but my Dad wanted something more…normal, he used to say. English, is what he really meant. White. He and Mom went by Eric and Daisy — names as far from their real ones as can be imagined. That’s how you end up with a full-blooded member of the Kalth Tindé Apache tribe with a name like Maggie Atkinson and no real grasp of her own heritage. ---------- I never really…learned anything useful about my people. I mean, I have a few stories. A few snippets of the history. But nothing really concrete, about the way they used to live and survive out here. But the little knowledge I have is more, I think, than my parents ever had. They met on the rez, but they both hated it there — the way everyone was so up in their business, the tribe interfering in everything they did. Passing judgement on every little thing. They describe it as somewhere that suffocated them, but when I imagine all those people, one big community, extended family everywhere… my parents might have been overwhelmed by it, but it sounds like paradise to me. I wish I had been able to be one of them, really one of them. Summer vacations just aren’t the same. Anyway, we left. That’s all that matters. Instead of growing up in the bosom of the extended family my Nana adored, I grew up in the city. Cold, hard concrete towers rising into the sky, people everywhere but not one who knew your name. Children as hard and unwelcoming as the city itself was, who never wanted me to join in their games. Everyone in our block stuck to their own people — the kids jabbering away in Russian, in Polish, in Spanish. I only spoke English and the smattering of Kiowa-Apache my Nana taught me over the summers, and neither was enough to buy my way into any of those exclusive, insular little cliques. When I went home to the rez during summer — because even though I never lived there full-time, Nana’s cosy little wood-built house always felt more like home than our apartment — I was happier. Things were greener there, and Nana was always home, wanting to spend time with me. She never had to work the late shift, or cover for a coworker. Having so much attention all focused on me was like water in the desert. I basked in it, I loved it. And she loved me, her little Lozen. I was never Maggie to her; I can’t remember her using that name even once. Honestly, over the summer I think I stopped being Maggie even to myself. Maggie was quiet and shy and awkward, the weird loner in the corner of the classroom. But in summer I could shed that person like an old snakeskin and become Lozen — still shy, but not weird. Not unwanted. Lozen was my Nana’s one victory over my dad — she wanted me to have just one name that was something real, that mattered to our people. He gave her the least important name, the middle one, but she made it count. The original Lozen, the one Nana would tell me stories about, she was a hero; a brave fighter, a wise woman. In the stories Lozen had special powers; she could predict the future in little ways and foresee her enemies’ movements on the battlefield. I used to lie awake in my little attic bedroom, the walls hung with my Nana’s weavings and beadwork, and imagine that I was the Lozen with special powers, riding beside my brother, going to war side by side with my family and my tribe. Sometimes I could almost believe it. But it never quite lasted — I always woke up and was just plain old Maggie again. [2] ---------- [2] No brother, no horse or warpaint or homeland to protect. And even on the rez, even with Nana watching out for me and putting a good word in with the tribe, I was still an outsider. I didn’t know the games the other kids played. I didn’t know the lay of the land like they did. And even my names, designed to give me camouflage in the world outside, made me stick out like a sore thumb. ————— But Nana always made my summer trips worthwhile. From the second I got off the greyhound coach and into her rackety old beater, she was a whirlwind of laughter and fun. She’d have me up early in the mornings, helping her around the house, feeding her scruffy chickens seeds in their pen, collecting eggs while she whipped up pancakes and cornbread in the kitchen. Then we’d play in the garden — a game of catch, her sitting in her chair and me scampering all over the place to grab the ball. And when I’d gotten a bit of energy out we’d settle down on the porch, and Nana would pull out her beadwork or a half-woven basket, and she’d show me how. And while we worked, she would tell stories. Stories of our ancestors, the way we once lived in the mountains and hunted for our food. Stories about Ussen, who flew through the empty universe on a shooting star and made the world just for us. Stories of the wars with the other tribes. And then the last war, the one we lost. Where we were forced to move south, to leave the lands we had held since the dawn of time. All the way down to the reservation. And after that came Lozen and her brother Victorio. Rebels, refusing to take the abuse and the confinement to the rez. They waged war on those who trapped them, and stood up for the weak. My favourite story was the one where Lozen left her brother and his war band and went off alone to escort a mother and her tiny baby to their home hundreds of miles away. She protected them all the way, keeping them safe from soldiers, hunting with only a knife because a gunshot might give them away. I loved those mornings on Nana’s porch. And the long, lazy summer evenings, listening to the cicadas singing in the trees. Those few weeks in August made up for everything. My parents, the city kids, even the way the tribe children didn’t want to play with me either. Being with Nana was like a warm hug. Of course, summer doesn’t last forever. Good things tend not to stick around. I went home at the end of August one summer, and before the new year had rolled around my parents were sitting me down and telling me in hushed voices that I wouldn’t be going back to the rez again next year. Nana was dead, and she was gone forever. I was only eight, maybe eight and a half, and I remember struggling to grasp what that meant. What was ‘death’? In the stories Nana told me death was a distant threat, a fate that would befall only the villains. Or a vague and hazy place that the hero or the spirit in the story could maybe return from. But Nana wasn’t a villain, and she had died anyway. And my parents were very clear that she wasn’t coming back. If I had been older I suppose I might have asked if I could go to her funeral. But the idea never occurred to me, and my parents took it as a given that we would stay at home. The journey was too far, and they both had work to do. So my Nana passed from my life quiet and unmarked, without even a hint of warning. She just…stopped, and I never got another telephone call from her, asking ask me what mischief I had been up to. It kept me up, though, that night and the next and the next. The knowledge that Nana wasn’t in her own bed, looking up at the tie-dyed fabric she had nailed above her bed. That the little wooden house, with its cozy, overstuffed furniture and the half-finished beadwork on the kitchen table — that it was standing empty. There would be no one to feed the scrawny chickens. No one to sit on the porch and watch the sun go down. It just felt wrong. Nana had told me a little about death and the way our people used to mark it. There was a lot of wailing and tearing of clothes, and if you really loved the person that was gone, you could even shave your head to show how sad you were. I dutifully made a little rip in the bottom of my pyjama sleeve, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror holding my Dad’s disposable razor for a long time…but to my shame, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had loved Nana, more than anything, but if I turned up to school bald — I’d go from being invisible to being laughed at. I put the razor away, and closed the bathroom door behind me. There was nothing I could do.