Before we left, Fellis shoved eight beers in a plastic grocery bag, which he made me carry while he carried his hand-crank flashlight and a half-gone bottle of gin, and somewhere between his place and the silo, when we were on the wooded path, he told me to hold onto the bottle and flashlight so he could tie his shoe. When he was done he didn’t take the bottle or the flashlight back until we were at the ladder, and he only took them because I couldn’t carry all that and I told him so. We climbed up the ladder and down into the silo.

Fellis kept his pins in a medicine bottle with the label partially peeled off, which makes sense when you buy from the streets, but he got these prescribed from the doctor on the rez. The flashlight cut the dark of the silo, and I watched as Fellis kicked at the small mounds of wet leaves.

“Here it is,” he said, and he rattled the bottle with the little blue pills before tossing it to me.

I knew better than to take a whole one on a pretty empty stomach, but I couldn’t snap the tiny pill in half, so I took it.

“You’re gonna fall asleep on me,” Fellis said, and he swallowed a blue pill with a sip of beer. He leaned back on the silo wall and slid down it to a sitting position. It was all but dark out now. He cranked his flashlight once, twice—thirty times. He propped it up and in the lit space between us I saw our mess of crushed cans and cigarette butts and crumpled cellophanes and bum lighters and glass bottles.

How long had we been coming here?

Three beers in, I started telling Fellis the story about my grandmother, years back when I was little, when her memory first started to go and she thought I was someone else. I told the story and he said “uh huh” or “mmm” for a time, and when I got to the funny part his hard laughter gave me energy to dig up another about her, which he listened to quietly and with no noise. The hand-crank flashlight cut out in the middle of my story, and when Fellis made no movement to get the light going again I wondered at which part in this second story did he fall asleep? I lay down and used my arm as a pillow, and the sting from the cold metal of the silo against my skin reminded me that she wasn’t dead yet and in the morning I better be up and on time.

. . .

I was up in that early, early hour when it feels like anything can happen, that moment right before the sun crosses the horizon in a quick and unexpected burst.

My grandmother.