The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories
By Stacie Shannon Denetsosie
Torrey House Press | 2023 | 127 pages
In Stacie Shannon Denetsosie’s debut story collection, The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories, land has a familial gravity. The town of Kayenta and its surrounding geography on the Navajo Nation hold the weight of Denetsosie’s stories. It’s where the author is from, and her characters regard their home with the complex closeness of kin.
In the story “Dormant,” for instance, the narrator, at the behest of her mother, dumps garbage into a gorge while remarking on how she was raised to honor the sacredness of the earth. Later, she considers a canyon with a name that cannot be translated fully into English. The young woman is no longer fluent in Diné Bizaad as she had been as a small child, but she knows that the language is latent in the land around her. “Deep down,” she says, “I knew that my language was still there, in between the rocks, obscured by the shadow of sheer red-orange sandstone cliffs dotted with dark green juniper.”
“Dormant” appears at first to be a story about a Diné teenager’s affair with a white man in cargo shorts. The young narrator tells the story of meeting Aaron while she works as a grocery bagger. Tough and quick-witted, she pursues him; he turns out to be a student teacher at her school. What matters most in this story is not the affair but the life around it. Denetsosie deftly, concisely renders a world of scarcity and scrappiness. The narrator cares for her mother, cleaning her up after nights of drinking. There is never enough money and no inclination to properly dispose of their trash. Her mother’s lovers always leave, “slipping out from beneath her fingertips.” The narrator’s thoughts return to the life that survives, hiding in the desert. She is surrounded by a kind of resilience, like the desert plants that grow near the gorge where she dumps her garbage. “They were short and looked nearly dead but beneath the alkaline soil, where most plants couldn’t grow, their roots clenched into the earth like wiry brown fists.”
When the narrator thinks she might be pregnant with Aaron’s baby, she considers what it could mean, how he could privilege the child in ways she could not. As she discovers whether she is pregnant, the real ending of the story emerges. She realizes that she will always be returning to her mother and to a life of “burnt Spaghetti-O’s and drives to the gas station for chewing tobacco.” As she rides in an ambulance past El Capitan Peak, a dormant volcano, the narrator recognizes the pull of her mother, how it is tied to the pull of the landscape that holds her forgotten language. “In some ways, my mother was dormant like that volcano. I’d wait for her to resurface and demand recognition for her monumental existence. I think we were both like that, ancient geologic wonders.”
Denetsosie’s characters must contend with what home means in a country and culture scarred by the colonization that broke apart families and took their land. Denetsosie imbues her stories with the ache of this history. Her characters often try to take refuge from this pain in their mothers, in their grandmothers, in the women they love.
Like the narrator in “Dormant,” who continues to return to her mother, a girl in “Reservation State of Mind” crawls into bed with her grieving grandmother after realizing that her beloved brother is capable of violent abuse. In “Wool Dolls,” a stern mother soothes her daughter’s broken heart, explaining that she is tough because she wants to protect her girl. In the inventive and humorous “Snow Bath Season,” a dead mother reaches out to her living daughter through the medium of Amazon’s Alexa so they can journey together, one last time, to the mountains. And in Denetsosie’s most striking and unconventional story, “Under The Porchway,” instructions for slaughtering and butchering a sheep are woven together with the painful assault history of a young man’s mother.
There is an inevitability to the mothers in this collection. Characters return to them, seek connection and comfort in them—it is universal. Yet Denetsosie’s mothers are as specific and vivid and complex as the place from which they come. Characters find their way home in these stories, and also often find their way back to their mothers. With humor, grace, and a language of understated compassion, Denetsosie lays bare the burdens carried by generations of strong, resilient Diné women.
The title story, “The Missing Morningstar,” finishes Denetsosie’s collection with an enthralling vision of the land as a mother. Just as we are beginning to suspect a dismal end, an all-too-expected death, Denetsosie turns the story with what almost feels like an elated laugh. She leaves us with a birth and a feeling of having been wryly upended. This seems to be one of her great gifts as a writer. Through Denetsosie’s keen eye she beautifully complicates what a reader thinks they know about a place and its stories. She doesn’t offer easy endings or tidy metaphors. Instead, Denetsosie’s work pulses with irreconcilable tensions.
The first time I visited the Navajo Nation, years ago, I stayed with a family on Black Mesa. I remember standing in a square building, open to the late fall air, where corn was strung from ceiling to swept floor. As I read The Missing Morningstar, I found myself remembering this corn. My hosts had grown it in a place where springs had dried. Not far away, a coal mine drew vast quantities of water from the aquifer. As more and more water was drawn, the family watched their ancestral lands change. When I visited, they trucked water to their home. It was a common, necessary, and laborious practice. Still, here was corn strung up to dry, so much of it that I don’t recall seeing the walls through it. I had never seen such diversity in a crop. Not a single ear was uniform in color. Instead, each kernel was its own gem—glassy blue, moss green, pomegranate. Some were striped, some freckled. With the evening light cast across them, I was reminded of stained glass. It seemed that the little room full of corn held every known color, and a few I’d never seen.
Denetsosie’s work is eclectic, surprising, and inventive. It is also beautiful— stories carefully tended and written from relationship with an ancient home, a complicated place. Take care when reading it. The Missing Morningstar undoubtedly has a few colors you’ve never seen.
Grace Butler is a fiction writer from Waterbury Center, Vermont. She is pursuing an MFA at the University of Montana. She holds a BFA in Environmental Humanities from Whitman College (2018), where she was a Sherwood Scholar and Semester in the West student. She is currently at work on her first novel, which is set in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Header photo of El Capitan Peak by Harry Beugelink, courtesy Shutterstock.
