Brown Bodies by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
Associate editor Heath Joseph Wooten on today’s bonus story: With straightforward prose and powerful dialogue, Blaeser-Wardzala’s “Brown Bodies” deftly weaves themes of race, sexuality, loneliness, and the burdens of life under capitalism into an arrestingly original plot filled with tap shoes, crushed scorpions, and tenuous human connection. Like an ephemeral interaction with a stranger on the bus, “Brown Bodies” will turn and turn in your mind long beyond its ending.
Brown Bodies
“Only do it when no guests are looking,” the manager told me. He tugged open a desk drawer and pulled out a pair of tap shoes two sizes too big for me. “More effective than normal shoes.” He pushed them into my hands. “Only takes one good stomp to kill them.”
“I thought Service Assistants bussed tables,” I said.
“Some do. Not you.”
“What do I tell the customers if they ask about the shoes?”
“Then you give them a little dance. Simple.”
“I don’t dance,” I said.
“I’d recommend watching YouTube videos in your spare time.”
I made no move to put the shoes on.
“Do you want the job or not?” he asked. “Because I got at least another dozen applicants just like you. City’s brimming with unemployed Indians. I’ll call one of them right now.”
He picked up the landline on his desk, put the phone to his ear. There was no dial tone. The cords hung off the desk’s edge, unplugged. He went with the bit and started pressing numbers. One-seven-eight-three—
“Do I get tips?” I asked.
He paused in his number pushing and considered. “Yeah, sure.”
I sat in the chair across from him and swapped my sneakers for the tap shoes. I stood, and my feet slid forward. I was going to need thicker socks. “So I just . . . walk around and kill scorpions?”
“Without being obvious about it. Chat with the guests, ask how their food is, and then do the murdering when no one’s looking.”
“What do I do about the bodies?”
“Leave them until closing. Then you’ll go around with a broom and sweep them up.”
“Wouldn’t it just be cheaper and easier for you to get an exterminator?”
“That would look bad for business. No one wants to eat in a restaurant infested with scorpions.”
The manager walked me back to the restaurant floor. The restaurant didn’t open for another two hours. We practiced scorpion recognition and scorpion stomping. The first one I saw was small, no bigger than my pinkie. It lurked on the ground next to a booth. I gave it one swift stomp, but it wasn’t forceful enough. The scorpion lived and dragged the now unworking left side of its body under the booth. The manager and I stayed next to that booth. Several minutes passed. We didn’t talk. It peered its pincers out.
“Get it!” the manager yelled.
I slammed my heel down onto the scorpion, felt the crunch of it. I lifted my foot and parts of its body clung to the metal of the too big tap shoe. There was a blue stain on the tile flooring.
The manager patted my shoulder. “Good job, you’re getting the hang of this. Maybe not so hard next time.”
It took me three more kills to find the perfect amount of force. Then the restaurant opened. The manager didn’t bother introducing me to any of my coworkers. I felt their eyes taking me in: brown braids, big beaded hoop earrings, and tap shoes that weren’t proportional to the rest of my body. I didn’t make eye contact with any of them, my eyes always looking for scorpions.
At the end of my shift, I took the bus home wearing the tap shoes. I forgot my sneakers in the manager’s office. In my apartment, I stripped naked and lay down on my secondhand twin bed. My unfinished star quilt stuck to my wet, brown flesh. My Nookomis had made it for me when I was small. She died three-fourths of the way through the star. I stared up at the spinning ceiling fan and listened to a voicemail from my now ex-boyfriend on repeat, because I didn’t like the silence of my studio apartment. In it, he asked me to buy chocolate and creamer. I fell asleep to his cadence.
In the morning, I took the bus to work wearing those same tap shoes. I sat next to an Apache elder with kind brown eyes. He pointed at my shoes and asked if I was going to be the next Maria Tallchief. He nudged me with his elbow and grinned like only Indians could. I told him no, I wore the shoes to help me kill scorpions. He didn’t speak to me again. I should have just lied. Maybe then we could have talked some more. He could have showed me photos of his grandkids, told me which one was the troublemaker, which one was going to Dartmouth, which one was his favorite and hadn’t called in several months but who he was sure was just busy and would call soon, would come visit soon.
Maria Tallchief wasn’t even a tap dancer.
I killed thirteen scorpions in the first three hours of my shift. The manager was the one who counted. He walked around the restaurant and searched for their little brown bodies shattered on the tile flooring. He slapped me on the back, congratulated me, told me I might be the best scorpion killer they had ever employed. He said that I could go pro, if I wanted to. He thought that was really funny, laughed loud and hard at his own joke. I didn’t laugh along. Four coworkers standing near us laughed though. I looked at them for the first time. Their mouths smiled, and their eyes looked sad and tired. The manager didn’t notice. He went back to his office.
One of my coworkers saw me looking at him. He approached me. He was a mixed-blood like me with short black hair and blue eyes. He introduced himself, said his name was Aleci, that he was Diné. He asked me what I was. I knew his real question was if we were cousins in the Indian sense or not.
“Anishinaabe,” I said.
“Oh, cool,” he said. “So you’re like from the north, north?”
“Yeah.”
I looked back to the ground. A scorpion ran in front of Aleci’s shoe. I lunged, smashing it under the toe of my tap shoe. Aleci went back to work. He avoided me for the rest of the night.
I forgot my normal shoes in the manager’s office again. I took the bus home and crawled straight under the unfinished star quilt and listened to my ex-boyfriend’s voicemail. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend he lay next to me.
I wore the tap shoes as I took the bus to work again. The Apache man got on two stops after me. I sat in the front of the bus. He walked by me, sat in the back next to a woman who was talking to herself. He didn’t even look at me as he passed.
I killed only twenty scorpions that night. The manager was disappointed in me, didn’t talk to me the entire shift. Aleci didn’t speak to me either. I took the bus home and crawled under the star quilt still wearing the tap shoes. They left blue smudges on the unfinished quilt.
The Apache elder wasn’t on the bus. I waited for his return for two weeks. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I saw him again. I never had to find out, because he never showed.
The manager regretted hiring me. My kill ratio dwindled down. “I don’t know how much of a future you have here,” he said and told me I wouldn’t get tips until my numbers went back up. I only killed five scorpions in my seven-hour shift.
I stood at the bus stop that evening. Aleci stood a couple people away. This was the first instance he and I had gotten off work at the same time. I walked over to him, poked his shoulder.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he replied.
We stood there staring out at the road and the car headlights. As the bus pulled up to our stop, Aleci asked, “Do you ever take those off?” and motioned at the tap shoes on my feet.
“Can I come home with you?” I asked.
Aleci stared at me. Everyone else got on the bus. The bus driver called out and asked if we were getting on or not. Aleci nodded. We boarded the bus.
He undressed me in his bedroom. He shared his apartment with five roommates. He apologized for how loud they were. I thought the noise was nice.
We lay on the bed. He kissed his way along my body. He asked me what I liked. I asked if he would say the word creamer. He refused. He tried to take off my shoes. I said I wanted to leave them on. We had sex in missionary. I stared into his eyes as he moved inside me. They reminded me of the blue smears under the broken bodies of scorpions.
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala is an Anishinaabe writer, beader, fencer, and Jingle Dress Dancer from White Earth Nation in Minnesota. A current MFA candidate in fiction at Arizona State University, her writing is forthcoming from Tahoma Literary Review, CRAFT, and a Penguin Random House anthology. Her work has appeared in Ruminate Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, and others. Blaeser-Wardzala is a 2022 Tin House fellow and a 2021 fellow for the inaugural Women’s National Book Association's Authentic Voices Program. In 2022, her novel in-progress was shortlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize. She is the current nonfiction editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.
