Summer Stories 2026: ‘If I Rise’

He lay on his back on the concrete floor and pushed his follow-through into the dark. He pictured the ball on a quick backspin, the net ready for the sound. The ball redolent of sweat and leather. A feeling of fire in the hand and fire in the night as if a lone tree of epic height had been lit in the darkness and the conflagration was a candle seen for hundreds of miles. If he had a pure heart to try to reach something, he remembered as a boy he’d been called with his brother to the solitude of remote places. The singlewide trailer was on an open plain in northeast Washington, an hour and a half from Spokane, and could have been anywhere inland, anywhere far from the city – the fallow ground north of Stockton, California, the red fields of Oklahoma, the high plains of Kansas or the blue peaks of Colorado, places basketball had already brought him on the travel teams for blue chip high school athletes, All-Americans, of which he was one. He’d traveled to NYC, LA, Seattle, Atlanta and Detroit too, hotbeds of hoops a real estate bigwig in Billings paid for in the name of potential or perhaps oddity, the fetishizing of bodies unlike one’s own.

There in his boyhood was where the nowhere of Washington existed, holding him fast, getting him through these months of waiting in his 8-by-5-foot cell at Martin Hall Juvenile Detention Center in Medical Lake. Same town that housed the state insane asylum. To find some of the loneliest country in the world you drove through expanse, and small towns met the distance and passed again at the corner of the eye: Deer Park, Clayton, Chewelah, a small outpost of asphalt and neon on the ancestral lands of the Spokane nation. Farther on, American Falls. He loved those towns.

Then north and east into Canada.

The jail was different. In juvenile hall for a first arrest on possession and gun charges. You’ll ruin your future, his mom said on her initial visit. He’d had his cheek on the metal table, his face awkward in his hands. She’d prayed again, her hands on his shoulders as she kissed the back of his head. After that on each ensuing visit she checked herself. Devoted herself to his encouragement. He was unworthy of her, he thought. She was gone now, and he lay on his back on the cell floor, lifting his arm into a clean release in the dark. She’d pick him up at the front tomorrow. His brother Dominique despised his incarceration and blamed Q entirely, but no matter, Q reasoned, for a long time now he’d felt Dom hated him.

Q’s father, Cleveland Kills Night, one of the Cheyenne basketball greats from Montana, had led a team that placed third at the state tournament, finished an associate of arts degree at Dull Knife Memorial College and worked for the BIA in Lame Deer for a time before his own stints in the Montana State Penitentiary in Deer Lodge. He hadn’t seen Q for years. His mother said his father drank too much. Drugged too much too. Also a gun lover. Pistols over rifles. Q thought of the old hoopers, both Spokane and white along with Kalispel and some Colville in American Falls. They spoke in hushed tones. Release the doves, they said of Q’s touch with a basketball, and he admitted his J felt dovelike to him as it left his hand. The deep J, the finger role, his mastery of midrange, the way the ball fell from above and how his follow through was a song. He heard it like the voice of the mountain bluebirds his mother had shown him near the Canadian border along a silver river where the purple tint of willows met the water’s edge. Serious handle, the men said in the afterglow of a good run. And assists too, he dishes aces, and jumps out of the gym.

Did him no good now though, in jail with no prospects.

America preferred to eat its young and eliminate people like him.

He couldn’t afford mistakes.

He and his homies lived animal-trap lives but it was not the ankle or the leg caught in the maw, the sawtooth jaws bit full through the heart. The mind. Even the spirit. Where was his future? Spring and lever. Swivel and chain. Pan bolt and nut. His future was nowhere, he thought. But it needed to be basketball. The vision appeared only as dusk now, not dawn. Dusk and the ashen skin of dusk. His own skin so unlike the white boys of the cities and plains, too dark for them, he thought, and yet so much lighter than the night boys of the inner city. He was both Cheyenne and white, and generally, he thought, people were happy to mistake him for a terrorist. He feared for himself too, not because they feared him, but because he knew he hadn’t proven anything yet, and with dusk in his veins mixed with the silt of cocaine and the purl of his blood, he’d felt it for years as if he was arrested multiple times before the actual arrest. Coke paired with gun possession. They said he’d be fine, the charges would be cleared from his record in less than a year, at 18. Get right, they said, and you’ll be fine.

He didn’t feel fine.

Already, he wanted his old habits, and not just basketball.

A firearm was protection, and rock was as holy as unholy gets. He wasn’t dumb to the fact that when he laced 10 3s in the state championship game, his arm had felt on fire, and the rock he handled with such fluidity was leather not a mind-altering substance. The fans, 10,000 strong at Key Arena in Seattle appeared to him now as druglike as cocaine, but not the same, and not edged with gold.

Who can tell the dead to rise? he wondered.

Perhaps his mother, he thought. Perhaps God.

Or maybe no one.

A world without his mother was no world at all.

A world without God seemed possible, but he told himself he still believed.

He wouldn’t forsake his mother. Ever.

He needed to bend the toothed jaws back and release the metal from his flesh. Let the dog go. Amputate, if need be, but at all costs release his flesh from the pan, escape and hear the trap snap shut with him already gone. He’d race from that clap like a bolt of lightning from the hidden places. He’d reappear like she wanted him to, like thunder from clifftop to valley floor, like the fire itself he’d form a world of uncommon power where lightning branched upward from earth to sky.

Tonight, he preferred the floor to the bed.

His brother Dom would believe none of this.

Dom wanted Q to quit basketball for good.

Apply himself at school. Get a real job.

But thinking of Dom, his heart hurt. The same Dom who buried a sharpened pencil in Q’s leg at school when they were children just to be sure Q wouldn’t follow him anymore.

Can fire be water?

Can the mountain bluebird, the bluest of bluebirds, be red?

No, he thought, not ever.

He’d get back to where he should be, for her, and never look back.

He’d forget his brother. Go forward.

“Midnight,” a guard called.

Grumblings from the boys in the other cells.

The bank of lights in the hall went out.

He folded his arms across his chest as if in a coffin.

As he fell asleep, he dreamed of the trailer outside Chewelah.

His mother welcomed him.

Come close, she said, and took him into her arms. He was weary to the marrow of his bones. She, however, lent him her radiance. Nearly twice her size, he felt nothing but strength when she was near.

Oh son, she said, so good to see you. So good to have you home.

She looked up into his face.

Do you feel deeply loved?

Yes, he said.

You are deeply loved.

Is my brother here?

No. He’ll be home soon.

Into the dream a flock of mountain bluebirds moved from the willows along the river and arced into the light of evening.

Agile flyers, he thought.

His eyes followed their ascent from water to sky and when he lost their number against the mountains, he fell further into night, further into the invisible place of rest.

In sleep, dark and deep, he dreamed dreams no one knew.