Victoria Rice

February 9, 2016
Project 1, Part 1, First Draft 1
EVENT: Siege of Fort Pitt July, 1763
Flight Chapter 22
I wake to the cheering of people. I rush outside to join a crowd of indians. It is a welcome home
party. A large Delaware chief hurriedly walks to me and embraces me. He is my father. The
other man who accompanied him on his trip gives me a small smile and nod. A woman runs to
my father and falls to him, crying. My mother did not think that he would make it back from his
journey to speak with the whites. The meeting must have gone well. We are all smiling as he
pulls out the gifts our tribe has received from the British: two large blankets and a small
handkerchief.
I hate to fall into that god awful cliche and say I have a bad feeling about this but in all
seriousness, I have a bad feeling about this. My father is happy. My mother is happy. All of the
village is happy. We are all hopeful that there might be peaceful relations between the white
people and our people. I pick up one of the blankets and wrap it around myself. It was
comforting to have it, even if it is in the middle of a blazing summer. This blanket is a symbol of
friendship. My father places me on his shoulders and I hold up the blanket to the village. They
cheer loudly. Men in full ritual dress start to do Grass Dances. I happily went to sleep, drifting off
to the chanting of my kinfolk and soft smoke from a crackling fire.

Happiness never lasts long, not even in a dream.

My eyes open and I immediately feel searing pain. First the pain was inside of my mouth and
throat but as I moved, I could feel it all over my body. A cold sweat seeped from my pores. My
body seizes and body convulses as all of the food I had eaten is expelled from my body until
nothing is left and I am just a shell of a person. I fall in and out of consciousness.
I was staring at the thatched roofing of a wigwam. I was still in my body but not in my time. My
body is coarse and bumpy. My vision blurs and head argues as I stand. I smell the smoke. I
walk out from the wigwam and see myself in the sun. My skin.

My skin is bubbled. These are not zits. I look closer at the small, hard mounds covering my
body. It feels as if there are a thousand bb gun pellets beneath my skin. I want to rip it all off. I
mean, really, what good is flesh, anyways?
What happened? I asked allowed in the dark to anyone who could answer. I hear a groan
closely to my right. What happened? I repeated.
The spirits are punishing us, a disembodied voice mumbled. I find my father on the other side
of the wigwam. He sits on the ground, knife in hand. He attempting to slice off his smallpox
bumps. The other tribes have caused this. We need to fight. He wipes the knife on a cloth and
hands it to me.
I shake my head and my brain rattles in its malnourished casing. I am usually one to blame god
or fate or whoever makes bad shit happen but I know that it is not god or whatever that actually
hurts people. I think back to the scratchy yellow blanket I held over my skin yesterday. I know
who caused this. I think back to the people I killed, the people I almost killed, the people I was
going to kill. It was not fate that was going to pull the trigger, it was me. I had felt betrayed and
was seeking revenge. I would like to know what Great British was seeking revenge for, I would
like to know how we had betrayed them.
I think about Dave. This is what Dave does. He finds out why people do the nasty shit they do.
Maybe he and I have more in common than I thought.

I have never been uglier than I am at this moment. I did not think it was possible to reach a new
level of hideousness. Jesus, what did I do to deserve this? I did not ask for smallpox. The
Nation of Delaware did not ask for smallpox. What did we do to deserve this?
There is moaning and yelling as others wake to find the bumps covering their bodies. I stumble
around the village. I am truly repulsive. How long was I out? As I walk to the edge of the village,
I am met with a pile of decaying bodies. An elder of the town sways near them, burning a stalk
of sage and slowly singing a prayer. She did not understand what we did to deserve this either.

Fully aware of my presence, the elderly woman looked up at me. You are not real, she said.
The last time I heard this line, I wished it were true. I did not want to be real. I was going to find
myself with bullets and blood. I am not white. I am not indian. I do not know what it means to be
half, or I didnt. I felt betrayed by my blood for not making up its damn mind and by fate for not
stepping in and giving me a home and someone who loved me. I sound really sappy, huh? I am
not going to say that I was suicidal or anything dramatic like that. Sometimes, I just felt like
everything would be easier if I just didnt exist at all. You know?
I dont feel like that anymore.
It is a different feeling to be excited to start a new day. To have something to look forward to. I
want to try. The elders words repeat in my head, so much that I start to repeat them myself.
I am not real. I am not real. I am not real.
I look down at my nasty bubbled skin. I refuse to continue being a product of betrayal. I am
better than that. I am more than that. I am not worthless. I am half indian and half white but
more importantly, one-hundred percent Michael. I am not any part of my appearance, not even
my Zits.
At the edge of the flaming pile of corpses, there is a knife. I know just what to do. I know what I
should do to release myself from this reality that I refuse to be apart of. I take the knife and
plunge it into my own heart.
This is not real.

Works Cited
Calloway, Colin G. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. Boston,
MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2012. Print.
Fenn, Elizabeth A. "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery
Amherst." The Journal of American History 86.4 (2000): 1552. Print.
"Smallpox Disease Overview." CDC Smallpox. Web. 09 Feb. 2016.