skonen_blades

My stutter came back in full force when she paid for her gum.

She had the small ears and strong scooping jaw that all the northlanders had. Something about eating the tough skin of the fish they lived off of for so many hundreds of years and ears grown small and almost vestigial from centuries of arctic wind. There were old jokes about how they could never listen to reason because of their small ears. Also, it was said that they could bite a leg off or chew through doors if provoked.

Myths, of course, but I’d never met one who smiled or looked a person directly in the eye until now.

I worked in Nukatiukut’s first Seven Eleven. The glamour of the position had worn off within hours. I was doing the night shift but at this time of year, that meant nothing. The sun beat down outside even though it was four in the morning. The occasional late-night partier would come in and look for local traditional foods and find only candy bars and doritos. Usually, they’d leave with a pair of cheap sunglasses since that was about the only useful thing that this store sold.

It was comical seeing the one truck a month of Oh Henry bars, Twizzlers, and Gatorade come here to sit and gather dust on the shelves. One month later the truck would come back, load up on the unused stock and drop off a fresh batch. This was not a corner of the world that was ready for this kind of consumerism. It was like a brightly lit green and orange spaceship had landed on the edge of town and had broken down there.

It our business plan was a dog, it would have whimpered.

I grew up with a stutter. My name was Noi but everyone called me Nanoi. First it was a name that was used to make fun of the way I’d introduce myself as a child (n-n-Noi) but after a while, it grew to become the name I used and the one-syllable name on my birth certificate dimmed. Now only my parents called me Noi.

I had read about speech therapy and tried some out. If I was calm and pictured music, I did not stutter. If I was shocked, it would come back with force until I controlled myself.

The northlander had come up and snapped her packet of gum down on the counter along with some change.

She looked directly at me with eyes that could harpoon a walrus.

A hard green that was somehow colder and brighter than the snow on the ground with a dark ring of flint around them matching her pupils. They pinned me like an insect to the cigarettes and potato chips behind me.

“Th-th-th-that’ll b-b-be six-seventy f-f-f-five.” I stammered.

She left six and stared at me as if daring me to ask her for more money.

I swept the six off of the counter and turned to the cash register. Because I was flustered and because she was the first customer I’d served in days, I briefly forgot how to use it. I figured it out and with some electronic beeps and a sound like I’d won something small in Vegas, the cash drawer clanged out.

I put her change in and closed the cash.

When I looked up, she was gone.

The bell on the door rang when she left.

I went back to reading about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and dreamed small-town dreams in which my face and the face of the northlander were taped over Brad’s and Angela’s as we went to far off countries and adopted children who had never seen a snowfall and rolled in tall grass.



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