The Hunger and the Fire

Elders say fire is an unnatural death. It takes a body, turns it to ash, and returns it to silence. There is no resolve in the Diné way when fire is an ending, fire as release. But this fire was not the sacred kind. This was the kind born of wires and plastic, the kind that car­ried the smell of chemicals instead of cedar.

I can think about that sometimes—how some fires purify and others consume. How even care can burn, if left unattended.

At night, when Tenai is at work, I forget to eat. Hunger sits inside me, patient as smoke. In college, I thought starving made me strong—made me beautiful, like the women in Vogue: lean, fragile, hollowed into purpose. My grandmother was like that too. One bite and she was full. I thought that was an inheritance.

But Tenai changed that. He fed me slowly, gently. “You need to feed your body,” he’d say, handing me a plate of steak bites. “Your body’s still sacred.”

That word—sacred—caught something in me. I realized hunger could be another colonization, one that taught us to shrink from our own flesh. Commodity foods filled our cupboards but not our spirits. Our people’s bodies grew sick on rations, our stomachs aching for corn, mutton, berries, deer, blue corn mush—food that still remembers our names.

But this hunger didn’t begin with me, or with my grandmother. It began generations ago, when the U.S. tried to break us through our stomachs, long before the stories turned into warnings. It began in the days when Kit Carson—that bastard in the history books, or from my elders’ words—married a Ute woman just to use her people as scouts. Every time I read that part, the same bit­terness rises in me, thick and dark, like the stagnant pools of water that once gathered along the walls of Glen Canyon.

And the worst part? That same mindset never really died. I still see it today in movies that paint Native women as some kind of wild fantasy for white men. A fetish, not the fetishes that are sold along Route 66, but a sick fetish. A costume. A conquest. It makes my stomach twist. We are still being turned into scenes—some­thing for them to brag about to their golf buddies or snowbird friends who fly from Canada for a so-called bachelor’s party. To them, we’re trophies. Not people.

But the old stories remind me none of this is new.

Kit Carson wanted the Navajo people to surrender, but how do you force a nation rooted in land, prayer, and generations to kneel? When the first snow clung to the Earth and our corn hung drying in the rafters, Carson began the scorched earth campaign. He and the U.S. Cavalry rode across Diné Bikéyah, torching every hogan, every field, every orchard, every cha’oh. They burned our corn. Our sheep. Our winter food. Our shelters. Our memory.

Flames swallowed our livelihood until there was nothing left but ashes carried by the wind. Only then, after he starved us, did he ride back to the forts, leaving our families to surrender them­selves, to the forts, only to journey on the Long Walk with nothing but the smoke still clinging to their clothes.

Tenai wrapped his arms around me, and I let my head rest against his shoulder. I tried to steady my breath, thinking of Navajo ancestors who had no such comfort as they watched their homes burn. I pictured them standing in the smoke—my pregnant ancestor clutching her belly—while their livelihood and memory turned to ash. I couldn’t let myself, or us, collapse under our own struggle. We had to move forward. I refused to let our lives echo the hardships my ancestors endured. Their resilience carried me here, and now it was my turn to carry it on.

***

That night, the apartment spoke its own language—the hum of the air conditioner, the low buzz of city night pressing against desert heat. Then a choke, a break, a sound like Flint Boy’s stones that struck against each other before the first light entered the world. Sparks fell from behind the TV, orange rain dripping onto the carpet.

“Jalen, wake up! The outlet—look!”

Tenai’s voice ripped through the dark. I shoved him aside, feet slapping the tan carpet, heart pounding. Sparks hissed behind the bookcase like a bad prayer.

He was beside me then, shoulder to shoulder, lifting the heavy shelf. Fire breathed and spread—plastic, acrid, heavy.

Something older than thought rose up in me—ceremonial instinct. I seized the green wool blanket and struck the flames again and again. My arms ached, lungs seared, but I could not stop. I could not let fire take what we’d built here—our bed, our books, the small rhythm of our lives. When the flames shrank to embers, we stood over the outlet’s black mouth, breathing the same smoke-filled air.

***

In the silence, I felt it—the weight of two worlds. One where fire is sacred, another where that hides behind the drywall and copper, hidden and hungry.

The apartment smelled like burnt wire and fear. And yet, under the smoke, something else lingered—gratitude. We were still here.

Tenai squeezed my hand, his thumb tracing small circles against my soot-streaked skin. Outside, the city pulsed—siren passing, headlights flickering across the blinds. I thought again of my great-grandmother, counting cars on the dirt road, measuring the day by what passed. But now I saw them differently. Not just motion. Meaning. Each car carrying a story, a body moving through the world, choosing to keep going.