Attack of the 50 Foot Indian by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Published: 2020-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote this standing up at a high shelf at a laundromat in Rancho Mirage, California, three or four days after nearly killing myself on my mountain bike in the 120-degree sun. I was still electrolyte-poor, I mean, my head kind of swimmy, my muscles slack. But maybe that helped? What didn’t help was that I only had so many quarters—I’d forgotten that some of them would have to be for detergent—and I’d just slopped my big pile of wet clothes from the washing machine to this unit on the wall that looked like it could dry this whole load in about five minutes. So I fed it the last of my quarters, then watched through the little porthole as… water and bubbles poured in? I ran to the attendant asking her what was going on, what wrong button had I pushed. Could a machine be a washer and a dryer both? Is that the world we live in now? She came, looked, told me in her most bored voice that I’d put my wet clothes into the big washer, and now that the door was locked, all I could do was wait it out. What this meant for me was that, first, I wasn’t making it to the place I was supposed to be in half an hour. Which is pretty much the usual story. The second thing it meant was that I was going to have to drive around real fast all over Palm Springs and Palm Desert and all of those crazy Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Gerald Ford Streets with the windows down to try and dry all these clothes I very much needed dry, but I was going to have to somehow not get a ticket doing that, too. So, to hide from having to think about all of that—fiction’s just a fort I build wherever I am—I set my laptop up on the high shelf, tried to stand tall enough to actually type. All I really had in mind was some giant Indian dude with tanks and planes trying to bring him down. But I knew they couldn’t. Thanks to the workshop I was teaching that week at UCR-PD, who let me sneak this into the rotation. Not sure I can say all their names here—schools have rules—but theirs were the first eyes to cross this. Next was Mackenzie Kiera, then my agent, B. J. Robbins, and, after that… I guess I read it at Readercon, and it took thirty-two minutes, and I was going so fast because I thought I had an only thirty-minute slot. Turns out I had an hour. But my new editor, Joe Monti, was there in the front row next to Darcie Little Badger. I didn’t know him yet, hadn’t met him in person, so Two Moons here kind of facilitated that meet, which was soon followed, as all good things are, by hamburgers. And thanks as always to my wife. When I talked to her on the phone from

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