Diamonds at Dusk by Catalina Claussen

Author:Catalina Claussen [Claussen, Catalina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Progressive Rising Phoenix Press, LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

“Hey, what are you doing here?” Ahzi asks opening her screen door. “Thought you had important business to take care of.”

“I do.”

“Oh,” she grins. I give her one of my big bear hugs.

“Sorry.”

She takes my apology, without question. We’ve known each other so long I don’t have to explain.

Sicheii looks up from his newspaper. He looks over at us briefly and then goes back to his reading, settling into his easy chair, footrest, and his favorite cup of Good Earth tea. He used to drink. I mean really drink. Whiskey, rum, tequila, whatever he could get his hands on. The more fiery the water, the more he wanted it. Then, when he almost lost Ahzi to the courts, he quit. Grandma used to make him this tea, heavy and sweet with cinnamon, cloves, and cream. And he’s been hooked on it ever since.

“Come on. I want to show you my new dress,” Ahzi says.

Ahzi’s room is a montage of everything that’s her. The yellow cream walls are covered with her art. A black and white picture of her mother hangs over her bed draped with strands of blue, red, black, and yellow corn. On the tiny shelf below her picture, Ahzi keeps an altar of sweetgrass incense, a candle, and a single, beaded, eagle feather for prayer. Then she has pictures of stars from old movies, all Native American women who somehow rose to the top, trimmed with bits of horse hair, sage, dried flowers, found objects from our adventures. Her dresser is filled with a huge collection of silver and turquoise jewelry, some of it she inherited from her mother, other pieces given to her by her million aunties back on the rez.

See Ahzi’s like me. Her mom’s dead. She got sick from the uranium mines on the Dine Reservation and never recovered. And her daddy? Well no one really knows who he is. Her mom never told. The secret went with her to the grave. So her family is her Sicheii and us. We are family.

Last summer we made a collage of pictures she took with her digital camera. Chad, Ahzi, and me are pictured riding, dripping wet in water fights, and building forts. The collage is bordered with sand from the creek bottom, old bottle caps, flower petals still bright with sunshine, and beads from her mom’s gigantic collection. All of it mounted on a piece of cardboard we took from the back of the valley store. In silver permanent marker she titled the piece “All for One and One for All.”

“Cassie, look,” Ahzi emerges from her closet with her latest creation. She’s fashioned a jingle dress from deep purple silk with a neckline that slashes across her chest, just barely exposing her cleavage and the fullness of her right breast. The jingles of her skirt follow the slanted neckline, spiraling down to an asymmetrical hemline. She turns to show off her Japanese-style silk shawl in lavender purple with a huge orange, turquoise, and yellow dragon, breathing fire from her back.

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