The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie

an impossible green.
    “Don’t hurt my baby,” begged my mother.
    “What was your brother’s name?”
    “His name was Joseph,” I said. “Same as my dad.”
    The white soldier nodded his head as if he’d known it all along.
    “Leave him alone!” shouted my father as he tried to rise from the ground. A white soldier smashed him back down with the butt of his rifle. My father bled into the dirt.
    “Damn it,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “I told you. No blood.”
    Contamination.
    The red glow poured from my father’s nose and mouth. My mother clawed at the dirt as if she thought she could escape by digging a tunnel.
    “Jonah,” said the white soldier. “We don’t mean to hurt you. Or your parents.”
    “Yes, you do,” I said. “You’re going to eat us. You’re going to drink our blood.”
    The white soldier’s face grew harder. Marble, granite, quartz.
    “Jonah,” he said. “We’ve come to take you away from here. We need you.”
    “I knew you were coming,” I said.
    My father tried to breathe through his shattered nose and mouth. My mother pressed her face into the ground and wore it like a mask.
    I bit deeply into my palm.
    “I surrender,” I said to the white soldier as I offered my bloodied hand to him.
    War is a church.
    In my church, my mother and father were frozen in the stained-glass window above the altar. The red glass of my father’s bloody face was cradled by the blue glass of my mother’s dress.
    Memory is a church on fire.
    In my church, a soldier dropped a lighted match at the wooden feet of a crucified Jesus and watched the fire wrap around the savior like a shroud. Flames lifted away from Jesus’ body like angels and blessed the parched pews, threadbare curtains, and brittle hymnal books. Two rows of flames sang in the choir box. Flames climbed up the altar and walls to embrace my stained-glass parents.
    The glass darkened with smoke.
    The glass melted in the fire.
    The glass exploded in the heat.
    My parents’ faces fell to pieces in my mind only moments after those soldiers landed in our front yard. I began to forget pieces of my parents’ faces only moments after I was taken from them. By the time I was loaded into a school bus with twenty other kids from the reservation, I could remember only the dark of my mother’s eyes and the curve of my father’s jaw. By the time our bus crossed the border of the reservation, taking us away from what we had known and into what we could never have predicted, I had forgotten almost every piece of my parents’ faces. I touched my face, remembering that its features owed their shapes to the shapes of my parents’ faces, but I felt nothing familiar. I was strange and foreign.
    Outside the bus, the landscape was familiar. With my parents, in our horse-drawn wagon, I had often traveled along that highway from the Spokane Indian Reservation into the city of Spokane. The blacktop road split the wheat fields into halves. On one side, irrigation equipment stepped like giant insects across the field. On the other side, a white farmer sat in a still tractor. He watched our bus slowly pass from left to right across his horizon. Farther along, a tribe of starlings perched in one pine tree. I raised my hand to wave a greeting to them and one thousand birds lifted simultaneously into flight. The grain silos were painted with the names of ghost towns. Those silos could have been the tombstones of giants. Red lights blinked at the tops of radio antenna towers. An orphaned stretch of barbed-wire fence was partially submerged in a roadside pond.
    Suddenly, everything looked dangerous. Sharp stars ripped through the fabric of the morning sky. Morning dew boiled and cooked green leaves. Sun dogs snarled and snapped at one another. The vanishing point was the tip of a needle.
    Inside the bus, a dozen soldiers stood in the aisle between the seats. Another soldier drove the bus. I counted them again and again. There were ten white soldiers, two