This one's been floating in my head for awhile. A different version of similar elements. ~Sage

"The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches."

- e.e. cummings

There's blood in the snow, long, slashing streaks of it punctuated with little red dots, like nosebleed trickle.

It's likely from Gabriel teaching another fool friend a lesson. Or maybe Gabe was just drunk and decided to show off his "inner desert warrior."

The stench of fry bread clung to hair and skin like sand on wet feet. Within the rambler, Michelle's trying to help Aunt Cora clean up the whirlwinds of Gabriel's twenty-first birthday party—not that age mattered to Indians when it came to drinking—and that included disguising booze, blood, and barf stink with deep fried fumes.

The blood's turned black in the snow, the frost devouring the oxygen red like the desert heat eats green.

Yes, it snows in Arizona. Sometimes our temperatures rivaled that of Minnesota's, to the Midwesterners' chagrin. They thought they owned the cold.

But Arizonians were all about extremes, both in terms of Mother Nature and human nature. We could have negative 10 degrees weather in the winter; we often suffered more than 100 degrees days in the summer; and we had the most racist sons of bitches running the state. Luckily for us on the reservation, we could choose to laugh most of these extremities away; sovereignty had its perks and so did knowing your ancestral land better than any meteorologist.

Laughter's the only medicine that kept the crazy in line, that separated us from them.

Wrapping the wool blanket closer around my body, I rose from the porch and poked my head inside my aunt's house. Now she's arguing with Mom about which type of beans to use for the "hangover soup" they were gonna force feed Gabe.

It's the same old routines. I retreated to my perch and all its wintry glory.

It's beautiful here. Terrifyingly so.

But spend your entire life in this place and you might make bloody snow murals too. You might stop laughing.

I tried convincing people that I could be normal. Boring, even. But even I wasn't allowed that.

I was one of the few of my tribe who attended college outside of the rez. Michelle practically shoved me out the door to pursue "big things," just as my cousins warned me not to turn into an apple—red on the outside, white on the inside. They forget that I'm part Chinese, so I suppose the correct term would be "orange," but whatever.

I was also one of the only human beings on the planet who turned down an all expenses paid scholarship to Yale. But before you crucify me, I accepted a free ride to Seattle University, where I was introduced to the ambrosia that is Starbucks (no endorsement intended, as I highly suggest you save your money and your brain from possible lifelong caffeine addiction). The incessant rain really put a damper on things though. As a high school senior deliberating where I should spend the next four years of my academic life, I remembered envisioning Seattle as a flooded city prowling with limping zombies, their skins sallow from dearth of Vitamin D. It wasn't too far from the truth once winter hit.

I still wondered why I studied there and not at Yale, or closer-to-home Berkeley, where the hipsters roamed rose bushed calles in frumpy frock they called fashion. Maybe it was Seattle's coffee cults that did me in, or maybe I just thought Seattle was more genuine. I'd yet to learn that nothing in the world was genuine except for one's libido and basic survival instincts.

Needless to say, I excelled in school. I wasn't much of a socialite, but I got good grades, I never got drunk, I didn't bewhore myself, blah, blah, fucking blah, you know, all that goody stuff they taught you to do but never to be. Perhaps I too had become that putrid zombie hungering for sunlight. After all, I always came home for the holidays as pale as this Arizona snow, and Mom thought I was depressed, and I was sometimes, but not enough to put a blade to my wrist or make my grades suffer anything less than a B.

When I felt like being funny, I liked to say it was 'cause of the Chinese blood. When I was feeling Navajo funny, I blamed the skinny vanilla lattes that kept me up all nights, and the skinny vanilla blonde girls who thought to steal my GPA.

The irony was that I fell in love with a vanilla blonde, though he was a far cry from those Valley girls. The only thing he stole was my favorite pen, which he'd "borrowed" for an assignment. Yes, I had a favorite pen, and when you developed favorite pens, you became angry volcanic when you lost one.

The next time I saw him I demanded it back, but was surprised when he wagged it in my face and told me the only way I could retrieve it was if I let him buy me coffee. Everything revolved around coffee nowadays, even though everything hurt thrice as much when you were awake. I kept trying to figure out how he knew I would confront him about a damn pen, when every other normal person would let it go and buy themselves a new one. But, his English accent was hot, and I never thought I'd find blonde so tantalizing, so what do you think happened? We gorged ourselves on chai lattes, that's what happened. Three months later, after staged study sessions and too many Indie movies, I gave him my virginity in his apartment while Depeche Mode blared from his sound system.

It was awkward and painful and absolutely hot, just like everything else.

Then Blondie and I broke up eight months later.

After that I think I finally stopped laughing.

One year ago, we were in the bathtub together. Yes, the bathtub, just like in those cheesy romance movies, minus the rose petal flurries and candle votives balanced precarious on every slippery surface.

"Julia...Julia…"

"That's not my only name."

"Oh?"

He touched me underwater. I didn't shiver.

"I'm also Yepa."

There. I let him unravel me.

My mother said I was Yepa before I was ever Julia, as I was born during the most beautiful blizzard Arizona had ever seen—or so Michelle claimed. Everybody knew blizzards were rarely beautiful, especially in the desert. But, nearly a decade after my birth, I was named after that storm.

It's not uncommon to delay naming a Native child, nor was it rare for a child to be re-named; names were powerful. For a long time I was only Julia. Julia got me through second grade and mountains of paperwork. Julia was what the teacher called out when I raised my hand, and Julia was the name printed in black block letters on my laminated library card.

But one afternoon, when I was eight—moments after I'd pummeled Gabriel bloody for purposely tearing out pages from my favorite book—my mother saw in me that cool-headed, piercing strength she'd felt since my blizzard birth. She called it lovely. But I saw fear in her eyes that day.

"What does it mean?" he asked.

"Snow Woman."

"You mean like, the three snowballs with a carrot as a nose?"

"Quit playing."

Julia was the one he loved, the name he whispered against my ear. Julia was the one who coaxed perfection and compassion from her finger's tips, the one who studied hard in college and called sex "making love." Arizona summer.

Yepa was...different.

Like my homeland, I too possess extreme dualities.

Eight months earlier I was at a rez bar.

Bianca, a Hopi-Mexican homeless girl Aunt Cora took in, convinced me to join her in a midnight jaunt around town. Her fuck buddy Gabriel was out with his friends, and she needed a drink "badly" and didn't want to be alone with strange men. But strange men were Bianca's specialty. As I sat in the corner sipping my Coors Light—beer like water—she put her charm and her pudgy thighs to work. When I tried to rescue her from a man with arms like a tree trunk, I saw things I didn't want to see, but kept tugging at Bianca. Let's get the hell out of here. You don't want to do that, Bee. It's getting late.

Then four men were around me. One of them knew me by name; he was someone who didn't run with Gabriel, someone who knew I was dating a white boy. He didn't like that.

"Look at this trash," he sneered, his breath a cloud of alcohol. "She thinks she's better than us."

It wasn't the first time I'd received flack for dating outside the culture, so I ignored him and continued tugging at Bianca.

But he thrust his hand in between my legs, pushed up against the jeans and squeezed. I shoved him so hard he collided into the nearby pool table like a crash test dummy.

"You bitch!" he cried.

After I broke his wrists for good measure, I seized Bianca and again tried to drag her away; but the other three men flung me onto the pool table before I understood what was happening. Two of them held my arms held above my head as the third spat in my face and reached for the button of his jeans.

I cried out for help, screamed, thrashed and twisted on the table, cursed, pleaded for them to stop. Customers saw me, the bartender saw me; they raised an eyebrow and looked away. Turned back to the television. Turned back to their mundane conversations and toxic drinks. And Bianca laughed against the wall with another stranger.

Something shifted.

When the third man approached, now boasting hardened genitals, I kicked out with my foot and smashed the thing, like flattening stray tumbleweed. One of the men holding me down released my arm in shock, and I used this free fist to punch my other captor hard in his gut. In seconds, I was free.

But rather than running, I picked up a pool stick, broke it in half across my knee, and stared coolly at the remaining man. I invited him to come and get me, to come and finish the job his friends had started. When he did, a lazy smirk on his face, I stabbed one pool stick into his chest, where I knew that horrid heart would be, then pierced his belly with the other. He slumped to the ground and began to drown in a pool of his blood.

As for the man I'd emasculated, who was still groaning—weeping—on the ground, I straddled him and pummeled his face until I couldn't recognize it, until he ceased to grasp at himself and gazed at me with glass eyes. I spat in those eyes like he'd spat in mine. When I found the third man, he was cowering in a corner with his hands raised; I didn't care. I kicked him like I would a rabid animal come too close, again and again, with the steel tips of my boots. I took the 8 Ball from the pool table and smashed his head in. Again. Again. Crunch of bone. Sprays of red. Bubbles of spit at your thirsty mouth. The vengeful blizzard you thought you could tame.

Blood covered my fists and soaked my clothes, stiffened in my long hair. Copper or booze, it all smelled the same.

Now people were watching and, whaddya know, reacting. The bartender and another man tried to pull me away; I elbowed one in the nose, the other in the ribs.

By the time I decided to run, Bianca had stopped laughing.

For a week I was afraid to sleep. I drank fucking Starbucks like crazy.

But I should have known they would go after him. He was a brilliant boxer, but they still broke him bloody, so I broke his heart to make them stop.

Love wasn't the answer to life's callings. I didn't know which literati first conjured up that bullshit, but I learned the hard way that life was just blood. The Red stuff. All other variables erased, you lived and fought to keep Red inside you.

Love did nothing but make you bleed.

Lucky for me, Gabriel and Michelle slept like the dead.

I took a backpack of money, clothes, and food and started walking. It was three in the morning. A lot of the snow had melted and it was almost 50 degrees, so I pulled off my jacket, slung it across a shoulder and trudged to the makeshift bus station. The Greyhound made a half hour dinner stop at the Hardee's up here, the little grease joint they were remodeling, as if truckers and vagabonds cared about aesthetics and bleached bathroom tiles. Everything about this place had bad feng shui anyway.

"What'll it be, sweetie?" the cashier asked, the last word added without sugar. Everyone in the South was a sweetie, even murderers.

As I scanned the menu, she tapped her two-inch long fake nails against the counter and hummed a country song through her Power Ranger pink lipstick, as if the graveyard shift was like any other afternoon, and she wasn't drunk tired.

"I'll have the sausage and egg biscuit, and one of the apple turnovers," I ordered. I couldn't bring myself to look her in the eye, or anyone else's for that matter. It's been eight months since everything, but I felt like it's only been eight seconds. I expected her to recognize me and refuse me service.

Outside the box of the restaurant, the sky was black. At this hour, nothing's awake but the occasional semi truck bellowing along asphalt road, tearing across the steady haze of foggy city lights, which blinked like heavy-lidded eyes. It was lonelier than I expected.

Thirty minutes later I boarded the bus with the other zombie passengers and barely remembered to flash the driver my ticket. The bus cabin glowed a dim light blue; mothers cradled sleeping children in their laps, silver lines of drool stenciled across pouting mouths cracked from the cold air. A man whispered Hindi into his cell phone as another flipped through a Dean Koontz book, the pages illuminated by a measly shaft of light from the tiny bulb in the overhead compartment; a husband and wife curled against one another beneath blankets of sweatshirts in the uncomfortable upright chairs.

I chose a seat next to a man with his head leaned against the window; he's the only one who looked fully awake.

"You can't sit here," he scowled.

"I'm sorry, is it taken?"

"Yes."

I sat down and pulled my backpack onto my lap.

The man flashed me a glare, then looked out the window again. When the bus began to move, a brief flash of streetlamp light reflected a head of red hair in the glass, as well as a full, smooth mouth clamped into a hard line.

The redhead thrust his left leg into mine and kept it there. I could feel the snow lurching beneath my skin, but I melted it with a mouthful of apple turnover.

But when he pushed my elbow off the armrest, I shoved him against the window.

"Are you always this polite?" I snarled.

"Always," he smirked. "I told you the goddamn seat was taken."

"Hey, I dunno what kind of angst drove you onto this bus, but now is not the time, okay?"

"And why not?"

"Just…don't."

I returned to my apple turnover, which turned to cement in my mouth. I ate it anyway with carnivorous need.

"Are you okay?"

With that simple question he seemed to see the blood on my hands and the blonde in my memories.

"Of course."

"You're a bad liar."

"And what would you know about lying?"

"Everything."

It started snowing fat cotton ball flakes, the type that sticks to eyelashes and nose tips like cold morning dew. The man looked out the window once more and grinned, a big toothy one that took me by surprise. Was he fucking bipolar?

I'm one to talk.

"It's probably snowing like this in Korea right now," he said. "Who knew it could snow in the desert? Guess the impossible is possible here."

"Are you going to the airport?"

"Airport? Naw. I ain't goin' back to Korea, if that's what you mean. I might get shot."

He laughed as if that was supposed to be funny.

"Where you headed then?"

"It's a long story."

"It's a long bus ride."

He looked at me straight on, as if trying to read my thoughts, failed, then shrugged.

I liked the sound of his voice and the easy way he spoke to me, along with the injections of sarcasm and humor. I used to have that same boldness, that same lack-of-secrets luxury. Now I was afraid to say or tell anything. The police weren't looking for me, but I still felt like a fugitive.

"You should come with me."

He said it, demanded it, with that same assurance, as if inviting a stranger—a murderer—was something he did everyday. His fearlessness was a bit daunting, not to mention ludicrous, but then I remembered those trails of blood in that snow.

"Sure."

"So what's your name?"

I hesitated.

"Julia."