The Savage Foundation and Other Slip-Ups

“Mothmoon?! Please tell me Julie’s here!” a birdsong voice asks, breaking through the crowd of writers. The woman wrestles through the masses, apologizing to the elbows she nudges past, and lands at the booth I stand behind. She offers a sheepish smile, her hazel eyes glancing at the brace of Mothmoon staff helming an armory of books. On one end, an editor defends a table of poetry—the word savage disappears into the palms of strangers. On my side, I field fiction—Sacajewea slips from my palms and into the bags of strangers. She will be carried across the Los Angeles Convention Center, onto planes, into the shadows of their own hidden lives. For now, she sits with me—and I am not alone.

Now, though, I slip Sacajewea into the stacks and smile, hold out bookmarks like a shield. The girl tucks a blonde strand behind her ear, double-checking the faces of Mothmoon again. When our faces remained disappointingly unchanged, she turns back to me, flashing her own forced smile. “Julie? Avenport? Financial, right?”

I know exactly who Julie is—she’d been my first supervisor who’d taken me under her wing, back before I’d realized that wing had been made of paper. When I held on—I’d entered nothing short of freefall. This girl, though, she was so happy. I swallow and nod, pressing freebies into her hands.

“I’m from a press that started last year! We had, like, no money.” her eyes sweep across our books, starstruck. “Julie’s the reason we’re here. She guided us through a proposal! I’m so sorry, I’m being rude—what do you do?” She squints, studying my name tag. Instinctively, I want to hide my name, the logo of their pale moon fixed over us like a spotlight.

I laugh, though it sounds cheap, full of teeth. “I’m just an intern. I wish Julie could’ve been here,” I muse, my eyes skating across the book covers, wanting to slide into them.  Everything wants to boil from me the moment I grasp her hand—yes, Julie was actually my original mentor—she joked the very first application I wrote was for “the Savage foundation.” At last week’s Indigenous education conference, she said I could spend my breaks getting drunk at the casino bar. She says this all while wearing a clutch of turquoise and beads at her throat like a vise. Not once in these six months, has she talked me through a single proposal—though I’ve tried. Like you, I have upended my entire life to be here.

Instead, I flash my teeth as the halo of blonde hair disappears back into the crowd. I try not to picture Julie’s micro-expressions—the choreographed hesitation in the slight crinkle of her eye, when the light glimmers like a knife-point catching sun. For now, I am left alone with Sacajewea. The hardcovers on landless Indians and Indigenous botany wrap me into a hug—it is all I can do to slip and hide into story.

Brianna G. Reed is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts.