Sh/ft

Excerpt

The first time I saw David Cummings, he was doing laps in the shortie pool at the Flagstaff Days Inn. Armed guards were pressed against the breakfast room glass, watching as he shifted from one end of the pool to the other, appearing just for a second in two places at once as he swam an infinite lap. They were all pointing and jabbering and trying to sneak video on their phones. But me, standing alone at the side of the pool? I was just mad impressed. He never broke stroke, there was no splash of water where the waves didn’t line-up perfectly. He didn’t even bump his feet against the side from shifting too close. 

Eventually, he swam over toward me.

“So, you’re the Indian girl,” he said. Because of course he did.

“And you’re an old white guy,” I told him, my voice shaking. I mean, WTF else was I supposed to say? “Hold on while I get my feather!”

He chuckled the littlest bit and drifted backward, crouching in the shallow hotel pool so only his head was above the water. 

“Show me.”

Not for the first time, I thought about just shifting out of there. I didn’t need this guy. I was only sixteen but I’d been shifting for five years without anyone’s help. And, hell, he didn’t even bother to put on a shirt to meet me. But the good old White Father had found me once—they’d find me again. White guys had a way of doing that.

So, Instead, I looked around the indoor pool, all nerves. It would’ve been just like me to screw it all up and shift myself right into the deep end. Or the wall. Well, like me back then. Nowadays I’m kind of a badass.

I closed my eyes and whispered to myself: “Nahongvita.” That’s Hopi for “Get your shit together.”

I stepped onto the “5ft” tile and, without much thinking, shifted myself over to the matching tile on the far side. And since the tiles faced each other, I turned around too and had that weird moment of seeing myself both here and there at the same time. And, OMG, I looked small.

David turned to see where I’d shifted and just nodded, acting not at all impressed at seeing the only other person in the whole damn world who could do what we could do. 

He just said, “Let me finish and we’ll get started,” before swimming right toward me and, just before hitting the wall, shifting back into his endless lap.

He made it look so easy. It wasn’t like that for me.

The first time I shifted was a total accident. Charlie Chaca had fired a fastball right at me, all pissed off because I’d easily banged his last pitch off the edge of the mesa. But confident as I was with a bat in hand, I was still eleven, back then, and staring down an angry pitcher twice my size. So when I saw that ball leave his hand, aimed right at me, I straight freaked. I dropped my bat and curled up to protect my head. But I also felt this electricity in the air around me—and in the red dust at my feet. And I felt it, too, in the midfield. Like I was there, right inside the tire we were using for second base. Like I was in both places at once.

Next I knew, instead of hitting me, that fastball brained Charlie from behind. The asshole dropped like a rag doll. And my cousin, Jennifer, on first, started telling anyone who’d listen about how I’d been in two places at once. How I’d made a sipapu—a portal from the old stories—and was probably a powakum. A witch, Jennifer!?

And maybe no one would’ve believed her if home plate hadn’t been half-buried under second.

Let me dispel some myths about us shifters right away. The tribe and Indian Affairs and NASA and the Department of Defense like to talk about how we can do all these epic things like walk into a mockup of the space station in Alabama and, seconds later, float from module to module on the real thing. They love to tell the story about how David used to shift whole submarines from one part of the ocean to another or how he would shift special ops teams across the globe in a heartbeat. And that picture of David taking his first step on Mars—down off a plastic Walmart stool half-embedded in rock—is one of the most reproduced images in history.

But here’s how we really do shit: My boyfriend lived in K-town and I lived in Sichomovi—atop two different mesas, is the point—so I used to shift from my bedroom to his after Mom passed out. One time, I even shifted from bed to bed—though I was careful to shift about a foot over his bed so I didn’t end up with his sheets fused into me. And he wasn’t at all unhappy when I fell on him. :-) And once, at a party, I kept grabbing empties and shifting that bitch Elyse Tanakeyowma’s beer from her can to mine. I’d pass them out to my crew while she kept fishing in the cooler, feeling cans for weight and opening them only to find them drained. Hell, I used to bogart whole plates of Mexican from tourists at restaurants in Page. They’d just be chatting and—whoosh—their steaming enchiladas were gone while I left full, having never ordered a thing.

And that’s probably as fancy as my shifting would’ve been except for the night Mom got pulled over by some Navajo cop on the wrong reservation outside Tuba City. She was all lit and we couldn’t afford for her to go to jail, again, so I waited for the cop to step out of his Bronco and then shifted us all the way back to my high school, just below First Mesa. That was the farthest and biggest shift I’d ever done, back then, and I accidentally sank our tires a few inches into the pavement. But that tribal cop didn’t come after us. How could he?

No. Was the feds who showed up the next day.

No one knew about David or shifting back then. No one except for the DoD and whoever else the government shopped him out to. But once they found me—another shifter!—they were beside themselves. And by the end of the year, they’d found six more. All Hopi, like me, except for that one Zuni kid with the lisp. And David. Because, of course, the first one was a fucking white guy. And military, at that.

But when I stood by the pool watching David swim, I didn’t know there’d be anyone else like us. For all I knew, it was just the two of us in the whole world who could do what we did.

And that day? Goodnight! I mean, when I’d shifted Mom and me back to the school, I was so drained I almost couldn’t huff it home afterwards. But the way David did it made it look so crazy easy. It’s like exercising a muscle, he said. The stronger you get, the more you can lift and the farther you can go.

So he showed me. After his swim—and OMG some clothes—we went out into the parking lot, to the flattest spot he could find, and he asked if he could take my hand. Creepy. But his hand felt so strange. Most boys clutched at me like I might get away. And damn straight, I could if I wanted to. But here was this old white guy, all silver on top but cut like a damn soldier, holding my hand as tender as you might hold a child’s. It was weird hating and liking him at the same time.

He stood by my side, holding my hand, and I felt an electricity in the air like I’d never felt before. Wasn’t all static like when I shifted. Was more like a hum you felt under your skin—made me warm. And then, without a sound or a flash or anything, we were standing on this plaza overlooking the Eiffel Tower, all lit up red by the fading sun. The shift was just crazy smooth—the alignment of that pavement in Flagstaff and pavers in Paris so perfect we didn’t drop even a fraction of an inch from ground to ground. And before I could say a word, we shifted again. Suddenly we were standing under the lights and in the hot breezes of Tiananmen Square. And after barely a break to take it all in, one more shift—something so unexpected I about died. For reals.

Tiananmen vanished and this red desert stretched out ahead of me. Behind glass, of course. And a blue sunset cast long shadows over everything. 

A blue sunset. WTF!

That son of a bitch shifted us to Mars.

And it was there, in this little Mars outpost no one on Earth knew about, that David laid it all out for me. And where I bought in quick as shit. I mean, lots of us talk about getting off the rez but this was off the rez! I mean, Paris would’ve been enough for most girls.

“I want to train you,” he said.

“I am not cutting my hair or changing my name,” I told him. And he didn’t get it but I told him I was down to train, anyway.

So here are a few other myths about shifters I can knock out: I know those alt-right news nutters like to talk about how we’re assassins and government stooges and whatnot. When they’re not saying we’re fake or whatever. And the truth is, yes, we’re government dogs. Which totally sucks, BTW. But I can’t say we have much choice in that matter. I suppose we could go AWOL or work for some criminal organization or for the highest bidder but I don’t really think they’d let that happen. Besides, the government pays us bank and the benefits are kind of ridiculous. And if I can pat myself on the back a little, we’re big goddamn heroes and stuff. And not just because we do all this national security biz and go to outer space all the time. I mean, me and the other Hopi shifters are heroes. Native heroes. Because now the government that pushed us into some tiny corner of the desert, that left us there all poor AF to fight with the Navajo, that took us off to schools and cut our hair and killed our gods and our language—they need us. They need us so hard the DoD is now the biggest employer on the rez but they’re answerable to the Tribal Council. NASA built their new interplanetary transit station just north of First Mesa and the average income among the Hopi now exceeds those of white folks in Flagstaff. And I know not everyone on the rez loves having the government as their neighbor, but even the traditionalists can’t argue that shifting hasn’t elevated us from a little-known tribe to the goddamn X-Men, mansions and all. #DropsMic