Synkroniciti is honored to welcome Chiricahua Apache writer Tommy Cheis with “Good Guys & Bad Guys,” a heart-breaking and insightful story about a family in Gaza cracking under the strain of occupation.
“The electricity was off again. Muhammad Jihad could not nap on a stifling afternoon that converted the Jihad house into an oven. He sat on a prayer mat with Bear and Tyrannosaurus Rex, pretending he and his charges were flying a carpet in outer space, not in a bedroom strewn with toy trucks, soldiers, and books about kung fu and trauma medicine. What looked like a picture of Big Bird, contemporary art, and photographs of ancestors were really planets, asteroids, and stars.”
Overhearing an argument between his Aunt Latifa, who is an idealist, and his cousin Lutuf, who, hardened by the deaths of his father, aunt and uncle, has chosen to become a suicide bomber, Muhammad find himself trying to make sense of a reality that no child should face. A mother tries to talk her son out of martyrdom and a small boy, still innocent in many ways, realizes that the same choice his cousin makes today will be his tomorrow. Tommy creates empathy without sentimentality by painting the family’s humanity–how they are like any of us except for the terrible truth–their lives have been declared at best expendable and at worst verminous. He does not excuse Lutuf’s violence–in fact he has Latifa passionately and eloquently argue against it–but shows us where it comes from, the underlying desperation of resisting oppression and genocide, the desire to retain a shred of dignity where none is allowed.
Read “Good Guys & Bad Guys” in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Tommy Cheis is a Chiricahua diyyin who lives with his horses near the Cochise Stronghold. His stories (will) appear in Yellow Medicine Review, After Dinner Conversation, NonBinary Review, Maine Review, Invisible City, University of New Mexico Look to the Mountains Anthology, and more than twenty other publications. He is a winner of the Colonel Darren L. Wright Memorial Writing Award, and his work appears on the CLMP Reading List for Native American Heritage Month November 2024. He is a PEN and Pushcart nominee. His first novel, RARE EARTH, is on submission; his second, CHILD OF WATER, will follow shortly.