Category: Nonfiction

when I stopped fearing ghosts

I learned about ghost hunting from my mom. When I was in elementary school, she drove me down to Louisiana every summer, and we’d stomp around the boggy summer heat in old cemeteries, reviewing etched tombstones, trying to find the names and death details for her ancestors.

 

We slogged through swamps, heavily forested areas where the heat bugs hissed so loud, I could barely hear when she called to me. We went all over the state—Mansfield, Baton Rouge, Grand Chenier. We stayed with friends in between, drinking sweet tea and eating collard greens, cornbread slathered with slices of cold butter. I was never quite sure what my mom was looking for, or why we needed to find it out there in the heat.

 

My mom was bad at picking up on things. That’s why she didn’t notice at first when a spirit latched onto her one summer in Louisiana. It just slipped out of the gravestone and sunk its claws into her, like a bad smell. The thing held tight to her all the way back to rural Vermont where we lived. I didn’t notice it at first. But then, a month or two later, it made itself known when she and I were alone at her office building one night.

 

The office building where my mom worked was four stories—a first floor, second, an attic, and a basement. I hated the second floor. It was dark and full of offices, crowded and narrow. Whenever I stayed late with my mom, I lingered on the first floor in an open office space, next to a large row of windows.

 

Sometimes she worked upstairs, and that night, she was working out of her boss’s office when I went upstairs to ask her for food money. It was dark, and the lights were off in the hallway. “Mom, can I get food money?”

 

“For what?”

 

“I want to go across the street.”

 

She hesitated, then rustled around, appearing in the doorway at the other end of the hall. There were at least five doors between us—five different offices along the hall. Some were open, some partially, one closed. I stood at one end of them. My mom was at the other. We looked at each other for a moment, and then I got the sense that something was wrong. I remember my skin prickling, like getting goosebumps in the cold, and then one of the open doors slammed shut.

 

My chest tightened. I felt the fear in my chest before my brain could register what happened. A second later, I went running for my mom.

+++

Twenty years later, I move from Vermont down to St. Pete, Florida, seeking the heat of my childhood. I get a tiny studio apartment and a new job working in development at a legal aid firm.

 

My ex-boss from Vermont texts me once a week. I keep the selfies she sends me saved in my phone and look at them when I miss her. I’m still in love with her, even though she’s married now, and I’ve moved two thousand miles away. In her texts, she tells me I’m pretty. She asks about the grants I’m writing at my new job, the beach, my friends. You’re pretty AND smart, she says, when I send her a selfie at my office. Her paragraphs always include winky faces. She doesn’t say much about herself.

 

After settling into my new office at my new job in St. Pete, I decide to decorate my desk. It’s black and chic and empty, so I print out pictures of me with my four best friends and tape them up on one of the monitors. There’s an empty space at the bottom. I leave it for a day, then print one of the selfies Lauren sent me and tape it up.

 

Back when I worked with her, Lauren and I spent eight to ten hours a day together. We went on field trips—to Stowe, to the islands, to happy hours. She told me once, on a longer trip, that things weren’t so easy for her as a child.

 

“But you’re so good with your dad,” I said. “You guys are like best friends.”

 

“It wasn’t always like that.”

 

“What was it like, then?”

 

Her mouth tightened. She was always doing weird things with her mouth – pursing her lips, parting her lips when she concentrated, these uncomfortable, awkward things that I loved watching. Sometimes, I felt her face moved on its own, like something else was guiding her that she couldn’t see or understand. “One time my brother and I were fighting, and Dad came up and,” she gestured with her hands, “wham. Knocked our heads together.”

 

“What was it like with your brother?”

 

“We hated each other,” she said. I asked why. She told me he could never forgive her for something. I waited for her to tell me what. She never did.

 

After two or three days of having her picture up at the office, I take it off the computer monitor and tuck it away inside my desk. I don’t look at it often, but sometimes, when I get out tea to brew, her face will come into view—the blonde hair, the freckles. Every time I see it, I think about those months I spent listening to her plan her wedding, talking about bridesmaids and dinner menus. I think about all the times I cried in the bathroom. How her face tightened when I told her I liked her. How inferior I felt standing next to her fiancé. How she looked at him like I wasn’t even there at all.

 

Yet every time I get close to throwing her picture away, she’ll text again.

 

I miss you, pretty, she’ll say and send a new selfie. I hope you’re enjoying your new life.

+++

The ghost that followed my mom home wasn’t malevolent, but it liked attention. It tapped on the walls at her work when she stayed late with me, large knocks on the plaster, as if someone were stuck in there from the other side. It ran up and down corridors and through the hallways. It smelled like cigarette smoke. The scent would balloon out, linger, then move. I’d sit there alone at night and all of a sudden the scent would creep up, eerie as a cold night wind, slipping its arms around me.

 

The next year, I started staying home alone at night instead of going to work with Mom, and the sounds disappeared. The spirit went away.

 

“You didn’t hear from her?” I’d ask my mom, day after day.

 

“Nothing,” she said. “Must’ve gone home with somebody else.”

 

I thought about the ghost off and on, wondering where it went, but as I grew, my interests diverged outward, and I thought about it less and less. Other things began taking up my time—basketball, grades, friendships.

 

In the seventh grade, I fell in love for the first time. Gina was short with long hair and a crooked smile. She was also my biology teacher. I hung around with her after school every day, and she paid special attention to me. I thought it was because she loved me.

 

It wasn’t until later that I found out she had a sexual relationship with a boy only a year older than me. She was fired immediately and, in the following months, lied to me repeatedly, begging me to help her get her job back, telling me she loved me. She missed me, she said. She asked about school, about sports, like nothing bad had ever happened.

 

After months and months, I stopped emailing her back. It hurt to be in contact with her. I felt creepy and weird, and thought there was something wrong with me for loving someone who’d done something so bad.

 

Still, even after cutting off contact, I thought about her. My thoughts eventually became less about missing her, and more about trying to understand what she had done. Why had she done it? Why did she lie to me? Why did she pretend she cared?

 

That’s the part that haunted me. I thought she loved me like I loved her. But she never really did.

+++

After I finally stop talking to Lauren, I go on my first date in over a year. I walk downtown in a button-up shirt and skinny jeans, sweat pinching under my arms as a cool breeze snakes in through my shirt sleeves. I’m early, so I grab a beer across the street at a local gay bar and watch the crowd around the coffee shop across the street where I’m supposed to meet my date.

 

We’ve been talking for a few weeks now, and I really like her. She’s in her early forties, and a therapist. She communicates well and gives me space when I need it. I like her boundaries and her maturity. I like how she looks and what she does for a job and how giving she can be.

 

I spot her walking in and finish up my beer, then head over. She recognizes me immediately and opens her arms for a hug. We sit at a porcelain bar, and she orders a fancy coffee while I get a beer. We make small talk at first, then ease into a conversation. I try to keep my mind on the present and not the worries burbling in my stomach. Everything seems to go well. After two hours, she heads off to a dinner with her friends. I visit a friend, too, at a bar down the street, and we talk until it’s pitch black outside and the wind gets too cold for sitting outside anymore.

 

It’s on the walk back that I start to panic.

 

This woman is beautiful, successful, and healthy. What could she possibly want from me? I worry about what I said during our date, how I acted. I worry I’m going to end up liking her too much and then she is never going to like me back the same way.

 

After crawling into bed, I start to cry. The wind is strong and cold in a way I never expected Florida to be. I stay huddled in the blankets, my face pressed to the pillow.

 

I didn’t stop dating just because Lauren broke my heart. I stopped dating because it’s just too hard. I can’t like someone without immediately wondering how they will hurt me, like Lauren hurt me, and Gina. It’s been fifteen years now since she was fired, but she still pops up sometimes, slipping out somewhere from the shadows, this little voice telling me that she is going to leave. She is going to hurt you, like all the women you love. I don’t know how to shut it off or make it go away.

+++

After leaving Vermont, I spent five weeks on an “art farm” in rural Nebraska to work on my writing. There, I learned how to install drywall, build survival fires, and cohabitate with field mice. The house I lived in was more than a hundred years old and had been transplanted to Nebraska without its foundation, then built back up into something that could stand alone.

 

The bones of the house had potential. They were wood, weathered and old, but with moments of stark beauty. The house was slightly crooked, too, and with the additions that had been made on the western wall, it looked like it had a face—two eyes, a nose, and a zippered mouth.

 

When I first arrived, I was terribly uncomfortable in the house. There were too many people there, too much going on. But after it started getting cold, and everybody left, I transferred bedrooms and began liking the space much better.

 

I started noticing the phantom noises during the afternoons. I’d sit downstairs in the kitchen drinking tea and writing, and I’d hear footsteps above me. My roommates had work studios elsewhere, and I was alone. I’d call out. Listen to the silence. Then it would start up again. It went away when my roommates were there, but on several occasions when I was nestled in bed, I got the distinct feeling there was something else in the room with me, standing at the edge of my bed.

 

One night, I had a dream that I was a little boy away at a boarding school in Greece. I saw everything from his perspective—the cliffs above the sea, white foam crashing, the old school uniforms, the sunlight. I’d never had a dream from someone else’s perspective before. I told my roommates about it the next morning.

 

“Could’ve been a past life dream,” one of them said.

 

We all sat downstairs, sipping tea and coffee as the sun burned in through the windows. The smell of buttered toast hung in the air. “Or it could’ve been a memory from someone who died in here,” the other said.

 

I went about the remainder of my time in Nebraska believing there was a lonely child ghost in that house, just looking for a friend. I played music in the afternoons to cover up his stomping. Before I went to bed, I said goodnight to him. I told him to rest while we were all asleep.

 

Nebraska was where I stopped fearing ghosts. Nebraska was also where I unfriended Lauren on Facebook because I couldn’t stand to see any more of her wedding pictures. It was where I cried in my sleep, and dreamed about her, and tortured myself wondering what I had done wrong, what I could’ve done better to make her love me.

 

Most days, I woke up scared she would text me something about her new life with her new husband and I’d have to pretend, like I’d already done for a year, that everything was fine, and it didn’t tear me to shreds. Most nights, I went to bed afraid I would keep Lauren inside of me forever.

+++

A week after my date in St. Pete, I dream I’m living in a haunted house. It’s a large mansion with thinly made plywood on the outside, but with grandiose, Victorian-style decor on the inside. I go from room to room in the house with a feeling of dread at the back of my neck. I know something’s behind me, but I don’t want to turn around to look. The entire mansion is riddled with shadows, and I keep throwing open the curtains only to have them fall shut again when I move away.

 

Finally, I realize I have to go. I can’t stand it anymore. I pack up my car with all my things. I place some stuff on top of the car, twining rope around the door handles to keep everything in place. I hurry. I can feel the thing behind me, to the side of me, all around me.

 

After getting in the car and starting to drive away, my tension begins to ease. I look around at the trees. The pines hang low, their needles brushing the windshield as I drive.

 

Suddenly, the car engine sputters. I know then that the ghost is still with me, even though I’ve driven away. It’s hanging onto the car, trying to keep me from getting away. I fight with the stick shift, but the car slows. I’m driving downhill and hope the momentum will keep me going, but then I lose control of the steering. The car fishtails. I take a turn into some bushes and then for a second, it’s all green and moss and branches scraping at glass. At the end of the underbrush, my view clears. I’m at the edge of a cliff. Rocks kick up under the car. Panic grips my chest, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.

 

I open my mouth to cry out and then I’m airborne, soaring over a hundred-foot fall, a rush of rapids waiting to devour me below.

+++

I wake up in the morning with that familiar feeling—that something else is in the room with me. It’s never happened in the St. Pete studio before, and the sensation is slightly different than it was in Nebraska. This morning, it’s more like this thing was with me and, as I woke, it slipped away.

 

I rise and make the bed. Shower. I bustle around in the tiny space, heating tea and stir-frying potatoes and eggs with onion and pepper. It’s cool out, and the sun peeks in through the blinds, falling in strips across the kitchen tile. I don’t have the sense of anything lingering anymore. It all faded as the sleep washed away from me.

 

My childhood was all about finding ghosts, about hunting them, and understanding them. I never learned how to get rid of them, though. It seemed like they were always just there, until they decided to go away, or I left wherever they were haunting. I want it to be like that with Lauren and Gina. I want to just wake up one day and they’ll both be gone from me.

 

That morning, I think a lot about my time in Nebraska. I think about how calm I was in that house, even knowing something else was there with me. I remember the cold mornings and the afternoons when the sun shined in, warming my cold feet. I remember turning the light off at night and looking at the outline of the room, my vision blurred without my glasses, dipping over rounded spots and shadows. “Good night,” I’d say to the room. “Rest now, so we can all get some sleep.”

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Among Schoolchildren

Like a cormorant turning on the wind before tucking its wings and descending into the ocean, my mother, five days a week for forty years of her life, submerged herself in the primary schools of small-town Texas, each brick or stucco campus at which she worked named for a hero of the Alamo: Travis, Crocket, Bowie, and Bonham, garrisons of the alphabet and basic arithmetic—crumbling and underfunded missions all.

 

As the school’s lone counselor, my mother traveled from classroom to classroom, her materials piled on a Rubbermaid cart as if she were a vaudevillian or ventriloquist, boxes and suitcases filled with dolphin puppets, marionettes of creatures from the sea, and stuffed-animal pirates, each one with an accompanying picture book to teach children about difference and compassion.

 

Abandonment was the fear that trumped all others, and the children carried it always, the fear dissipating only at the sight of a father’s arrival, or spreading like a fever at the close of the school day when a mother was not readily seen.

 

How deeply the children sank into worry, withdrawing into hooded sweatshirts like miniature monks, or carving row upon row into their desktops with the tip of an inkless pen.

 

To be sure, the children had cause to worry.

 

Parents deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and though most returned to the Air Force base on the city limit line, some did not: the brother ambushed in a sandstorm at night, a father’s helicopter losing sight of the ground, a mother’s Jeep triggering an IED.

 

There were the domestic and financial worries as well, and my mother scrounged shoes for the shoeless and glasses for the sightless, arranged pro bono visits from doctors, marriage counselors, custody advocates, and lawyers.

 

Each Friday, she filled backpacks with nonperishables for the poorest children to take home for the weekend, without which they would have nothing to eat, the great isolation of hunger, each child, not adrift for days, but helpless, inert, a boulder in a river around which all water flows.

 

For loneliness, consider the third grader born without cheekbones, a shrunken jaw, Treacher Collins syndrome, who met with my mother when a surgeon was found to perform a procedure in Dallas for free.

 

The recovery required that a helmet be worn for weeks to secure her features like clay dredged from a riverbed to dry in the sun. The young girl’s concern was not the surgery but the wearing of the helmet, conspicuous to all.

 

A deal was struck, and when the girl arrived back at the school, my mother was wearing a helmet as well. Other teachers and students joined in, and for two months all manner of headgear—whether bicycle, beanie, lacrosse, or hockey—bobbed through the halls.

 

Like Janus, the Roman god with counter-gazing faces, the god of new beginnings and transitions, the children relied at all times (naively, stubbornly, irrespective of evidence) on hope. Each six-week block, each promotion in grade, was a chance to start again, and if hope flickered and dimmed like a struck match, their final refuge was laughter.

 

When the vice-principal, svelte as an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers, the muscles of her right forearm hard as an ox’s neck from swinging a hole-bored hickory paddle (in a time before spanking was banned from public schools), tucked her mohair skirt by accident into the rear of her floral-print underpants and inadvertently promenaded through the hall, the laughter, shrill and instantaneous as the city’s lone tornado siren, overwhelmed the vice-principal’s calls for order so that, red-faced, defeated, she was left with no choice but to skulk to her office and brood.

 

The pièce de résistance (French, spoken with a Texas accent, could peel paint from the Eiffel Tower itself, and for two semesters in high school an English teacher referenced the “Bore-gē-OH-ēs,” the word seared in my mind until, in a Marx Brothers movie, I heard Groucho correctly pronounce “bourgeois”) was the story my mother told about puberty education, how, on one day every school year, the fourth-grade boys were sent en masse to the cafetorium as the girls retired together to the gym.

 

Television stands with VCRs were wheeled down from the A/V closet, and for forty-five horrifying yet fascinating minutes, as the teachers popped in the tapes and slipped out for a smoke, the children suffered a barrage of gender-specific information from menstruation to dropping testicles, body hair to voice cracks.

 

On one such appointed day, my mother heard shrieking from the cafetorium and gym at once, and as she rose from her desk, a teacher ran through the hall, her just-lit cigarette trailing smoke from her undulating hand like a priest swinging incense.

 

“The tapes are switched!” the woman yelled. “The students are watching the wrong tapes!” as the vice-principal, gopher-like, peered out from behind her office door.

 

In the end, parents had to be called, and though no explanation would fully suffice, the secretary (who got stuck making the calls) offered only a shrug and a halfhearted, “They would have learned about it all sooner or later.”

 

The one indisputable truth about children is that they grow into adults where personality, instead of evolving, calcifies.

 

“Joey!  We taught you better than that!” my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, would exclaim and slap her hand down on the newspaper article she was reading when a now-adult student was apprehended for robbing a convenience store or absconding with a neighbor’s car.

 

For my mother, the adult was never severable from the child, which became the measure of her work. Student replaced student each year until, at last in retirement, the progression, like the volley of soldiers against the walls of the Alamo, subsided.

 

I shall never retreat, Lieutenant Colonel Travis wrote in his final hours.  Victory or Death—the scene reenacted each year in the spring while the teachers mouthed lines to the costumed martyrs, and their parents, knowledgeable of history and fleeting time, raised cameras and tripods like bugles and swords.

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Some Trees: An Incidental Elegy

This essay was a finalist in the 2018 Editors’ Awards
competition here at The Florida Review. We’re proud
to present it here in Aquifer.

 

Let me be clear: I read the classifieds because I had nobody. Five or six years into the new century, I trudged through Southeast Portland, rented the upper level of a duplex across the street from a bar that served fried chicken all night and $1.75 domestics. I never cut back the ivy that crept all the way over the second floor windows, so the light in my room was always dim. In any case, the sky was invariably grey. The rain was less rain but fine mist.

 

In the mornings, I waited for the bus with the smell of yesterday’s oil in the fryers. I took the local newspaper from a dispenser outside the bar, then the same seat on the same bus every day. There were poems tacked above the windows as part of a citywide initiative to bring art closer to daily life. Each morning I read the same John Ashbery poem opposite my seat then opened the local newspaper and turned to the classifieds: the personal ads; items for sale or trade; miscellaneous services; missed connections. I never bought anything. I never replied. But I needed the idea that there were people on the other side. And the newspaper let me believe that even though I stayed so isolated. Other people existed, and as they existed they felt, and reached out with their advertisements. Not only did they exist but they were also alone and—since moved to action—maybe even more alone than I was.

 

Through these grey months, there is a single ad I remember most. It stood out among the used microwaves, gently worn tires, and everyday loneliness. It was exuberant. I could not believe it was real: a man, beneath a name eccentric and rich with consonants, offering formal pinball lessons at a location close to my duplex, and offering them in a tone ripe with awareness that these lessons were precisely what the world needed. “Master the flipper. Amaze your friends.” I tore the ad from the newspaper, circled it with a blue sharpie and tacked it on the fridge. I did not call. To call would invite the possibility that it wasn’t real. And I had to believe it was, that this person existed, offering his service at a time when all I could muster by way of invitation to the world was to drink too many $1.75 beers and in the morning peer into the semi-darkness through the windows of a bus.

 

—

 

A mile or so southwest of Fish Lake, Utah, there is a run of aspen more than 80,000 years old. The dendrologists have given it a name—Pando, from the Latin to mean “I spread.” Although Pando covers over one hundred acres and appears to be a forest containing a multitude of separate trees, it is in fact a single organism with a vast, interconnected root system, a clonal colony of Populus tremuloides or quaking aspen. Pando’s approximated mass of 13 million pounds lands it in the running to be the heaviest organism on the planet, and at 80,000 years old, very possibly the oldest. But even such an unfathomable lifespan may be an underestimation: some dendrologists argue that traditional aging techniques are inappropriate here and in fact Pando is closer to one million years old. One million years. I am thirty-eight. Yesterday I was looking at photographs from the early 1980s and felt a bodily dissonance between the world then and now. But Pando met existence in an era before human language and still exists today, adjacent to our sphere of depleted fossil fuels, snowballing automation, and deceit.

 

I keep saying “it,” but Pando is a “he.” This proliferation is the result of the asexual reproduction of a single male plant. It seems strange to me that such plurality could be contained in a male organism. I would immediately assume such capacity to be female, although it should be noted that in keeping with a cardinal condition of maleness, Pando has thrived and spread in the most favorable conditions possible. Geographic and climatic variations over the millennia have effectively wiped out competition from species of conifer or other younger aspen.

 

If there are degrees of solitude then Pando represents an exponential function. He may be prolific, but he is alone and—with only countless iterations of himself for company over thousands and thousands of years—compelled into an everted kind of introspection. It has been 10,000 years since Pando’s last successful flowering. The climate of central Utah is gradually warming, and, despite his monumental proclivity for survival, it has been agreed by the various dendrologists, environmentalists, and biologists that Pando is dying. The experts cannot be certain why. Grazing elk may have depleted new shoots and stems to replace the old. It could be the result of drought, of insect infestation. Or it could be that after multiple epochs, Pando has finally had enough. Regardless of the reason, without new growth the end is coming, and when it comes it could be sudden.

 

—

 

I am interested in impossible writing. As such I am interested in the plural text: how facing the impossible in language may necessitate and birth a text that dwells in the fractured amalgam of two or more known forms. I am interested in the new text that finds form in the aperture that this fracture creates: the text that becomes possible as the imprint of writing into the impossible. Such a work is realized through the multiplicitous capacity of that imprint, which is itself a function of the multiplicity inherent to language itself. Every word is a kaleidoscope of subjectivities, tamed by the socially determined conditions for its usage. The word was not complicit in this agreement. And words are not, by their nature, tame. To assume they are is dangerous. Every word maintains the radical potential for departure, and as such this potential for movement is retained by any sum of these parts. You cannot build a house of mirrors and not expect it to reflect the light.

 

So then a text that may appear in prose, in service to the form of the essay, may be constructed around an architecture more readily associated with poetry, containing further architectures beneath its surface, narratives that exist independent of the semantic value of the language. I mention this now because these are the ways a singular text might transcend its apparent plurality, how every word leads multiple lives in the air and on the page, and most importantly how a run of trees near a lake in Utah may indeed be the single oldest and most massive living organism on our planet.

 

This morning I flicked through images of Pando I found on the internet. Some had verses of scripture superimposed on the photographs. Others diagrammed the connection of each tree to its shared system of roots. Almost without exception, the photographs were taken in the annual interlude when the aspen leaves hang golden on pale boughs—that moment of transition, multiplied across acres of forest in singular association. I reread the poem I had read hundreds of times from my seat on the bus, John Ashbery’s “Some Trees.” Here it is again, today, opening in quiet triumph, moving through a quaking order into ordained stillness, deferring meaning toward a reality in which different perceptive realms are allowed to exist simultaneously. In each, the world is reborn: into the collapsed dimensions of space; a new desert music; the ramshackle frames we place upon time; the universe of the poem. “These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as though speech / Were a still performance.”

 

—

 

Several years ago, at a time between the bus rides in Portland and my life here today, I went on a weekend training to become a hospice volunteer. I ascended an elevator to the fifth floor of the largest office building of an out-of-town business park and took my seat in a loose horseshoe of Formica trestles that opened onto a cheap-looking podium. A young woman stood in front of the podium and greeted each prospective volunteer with a cheerful nod. This disposition, complemented by her yellow pantsuit, suggested she was only stopping by en route to a less somber occasion, so much so that when she spoke I was disarmed by the soft attention in her voice. If we had been recently bereaved, she explained, we were encouraged to withdraw from this session and enroll at a later date. She did not specify how much later, how long grief might linger until it became manageable, until we felt able to move beneath it and perhaps take on some portion of the grief of others. Nevertheless, her message was clear: if you think this may be too much, it will be.

 

Morning sun cut through the Venetian blinds leaving a thatch of light and shade on the Formica. A man in navy plaid cleared his throat. His cat had died the previous weekend. The room mumbled condolence. Nobody left, though soon enough the cheerful woman surrendered the podium to a middle-aged chaplain in a purple cardigan and red eyeglasses. She stayed for the chaplain’s introduction then issued a final smile and nod into the room as she turned and departed.

 

That morning we made our own introductions, talked a lot, drank coffee from diminutive paper cups, and assembled into various combinations of small and large groups. We watched films and slide shows about the ways people might leave their lives, about the companions who surrounded this passage, how they had begun to find meaning there, the way such rupture could not be closed but could become more familiar. Each table had a small box of tissues and a pale blue wallet folder with our agenda. We worked through it together, establishing a solid but temporary kind of trust. We ate sandwiches in the lunchroom. We did not really become friends.

 

On the second day, the chaplain led us through what she described as a difficult but important exercise. She closed the blinds and dimmed the lights in the room. She pressed play on a portable CD player: the sound of waves breaking, then piano, a harp. Close your eyes. We were to imagine ourselves in a private room, months after our own diagnosis of an aggressive cancer. There had been many treatments, visits, hopes, painkillers. Over the last few weeks, though, a new weakness had set in. Breathing had become labor. Movement required disproportionate effort. The time was drawing close.

 

In the midst of this scenario, the chaplain had us compose a list of those we held closest, and at the threshold of our departure from them, to select one name from that list and write. What would we speak on the cusp of speech becoming impossible? How would we locate the language of this transition? What would we say if we could?

 

—

 

Over the next months, I could not shake the idea of this utterance when facing the impossible; the language that originates both with and against death. I read deeply toward and around it. I found an anthology of Japanese jisei—haiku-like poems composed on the verge of death. I read Akutagawa and Edouard Leve. Desiring something more immediate, I found suicide notes collected on the internet and read them, and read them again. I felt suddenly like a tourist and withdrew and returned to the exercise I had learned in hospice training. I selected a name. I wrote toward them. I read. I returned again.

 

And I still return. Because it is this utterance that forms the center of everything I would write—this text spoken into the impossible, its capacity to contain all that it contains which is the impossible itself, the uncontainable. I want to bring language to approach the unapproachable. I want to bear witness to a singular text that holds these infinite pluralities. I want to watch it buckle. I want to see it fall.

 

I want the elusive syntax that embodies multiplicity, that collapses the moment and makes “tense” unnecessary, that creates a new pronoun rare to the ear but personal to all such that as I write I might address not only a named individual but everyone I have ever known and loved with no lapse in intimacy.

 

—

 

It wasn’t long after I found the pinball ad that my life changed. The events were as independent as two events in a single life can be. I met my partner in a different bar. The loneliness I had worn as a badge of honor began to subside. I rode the bus less frequently. I took myself and my life less seriously. My need for the classifieds diminished. The landlord’s son came by to cut the ivy from the windows, and it was too bright in the mornings. But the ad stayed on my refrigerator the whole year until I moved out of the duplex, then found a new space on our new refrigerator in our new apartment together. Then the next year when we made the cross country-drive to Colorado and started up again, we started up with the ad on the refrigerator. Master the flipper. Amaze your friends.

 

More than ten years passed. I don’t know why I googled the pinball guru. I don’t know what it was about that particular day that made me remember his ad, made me want to know. Considering it now, it was something more gradual: coming to a place where it didn’t matter if there had been a person behind the ad, if the man with the eccentric name had not been real. I no longer needed anything from him, and in turn, now feel an almost insurmountable distance between the person I was, drinking and sleeping alone in Southeast Portland, and the physician, husband, and father of two who is writing this.

 

I typed the name into the search bar and found an article from around the time I’d seen his ad, the top hit, an interview, conducted by the first and only person to take him up on lessons. They were real. I found a photograph of him beside a pinball machine, wearing a black and red shirt, not quite smiling. I found his real name, his photography and artist’s statement. Then I found the news of his death, tributes from the local pinball community, and, finally, posted by close friends on a personal blog, I found his suicide note.

 

It was long, more than four pages in single spaced ten-point Times. He had mailed it to arrive after he was already gone. And I realized that somebody must have sat and transcribed it, word for word, from the copy that arrived in the mail into the version published on the blog. I wanted to know if it had been written by hand. I wanted to know how. And then I felt stupid and invasive, that this wasn’t mine and could never be mine, and I closed my computer and sat in silence.

 

I turned over the basement trying to find the ad. I sorted through boxes looking for a scrap of newsprint with a classified circled in blue sharpie. I did not find it.

 

I came back the next day and clicked through his photographs, many of them arresting and beautiful, one in particular: the corner of a large building in black and white, spindled winter branches reaching over the foreground, silhouetted against grey concrete; pages and pages before the posts stopped abruptly in February 2011. I thought maybe there was another folder in another box in the basement. I continued this way for several days, turning toward him, then away. After nearly three weeks, I read the note.

 

—

 

It opens with love, apology, the blunt necessity of his action. That it would arrive after he was gone was long planned: he admits the prose itself had been through several drafts and revisions. His suffering is palpable throughout. As is the brute fact of his last desire—that he might cease to exist, that he might never have existed, caught in an excruciating balance with a fear of hurting those around him, of whom I was never one. His life touched mine in only the smallest way. It feels close to ridiculous that I need to take this so far.

 

“Pain is a relative beast,” he writes. And I understand that although sadness exists on a spectrum, despair is a singularity, whose gravity is infinite and cannot be escaped. There is sadness that drinks $1.75 beers alone. There is a far deeper sadness that casts spindled silhouettes over everything we build.

 

In the basement of the safety-net hospital in Denver is the Correctional Care Medical Facility. It is effectively a jail where patients who are incarcerated or in police custody can receive care. When I started my training there, a nurse told me about two women who had transferred from a regional prison with infected upper extremity wounds. They had cut into their arms and stuffed scraps of food into the lacerations hoping for the very infections they developed, for their transfer to the basement of the hospital where they lay handcuffed to the bed, hoping, because even this was better than where they were.

 

What I read over the single-spaced pages of the suicide note was that any previous capacity for hope had been absolutely depleted. Not only was it gone, but there was nothing that might bring it back. Not art, nor companionship, nor medication or other drugs: nothing that could imprint upon this pain. I like to think I may know something of distress, and that in turn I am developing a capacity for a broadening empathy. I have tried to place myself in such proximities, to be present and to listen. But I realize I know nothing. Because beside this darkness I have nothing, no true frame of reference for these emotions, no apparatus to understand this despair. It remains, always, around the next curve of the bay, hidden by the rocks and crashing waves, immense and impossible.

 

—

 

Midway through the note there is a volta, away from the devastation of personal struggle and toward the collective failure of humanity to examine ourselves, complicity in the gross disparities that are the engines of capitalism, our shattering capacity for willful ignorance, that cruelty. But it is in this bleak assessment of the world he is leaving that something emerges, that there could be a collective engagement to remedy our failures. “We must all learn to think on a vastly larger scale,” he writes. We must cultivate our capacity for empathy. We must indulge the pure qualities of our consciousness through education, through creativity, and through art.

 

It is art that has the negative capability to address the impossible, the potential to perform various grammars of simultaneity. The practice of art is an engagement of the imaginative mind at its intersection with the practical and as such a gesture toward simultaneity. In turn, a gesture toward simultaneity is a gesture toward the impossible. I want an art with the capacity to stack our multiple perceptual, introspective, and reflective realms into a simultaneous moment of consciousness, a mirror for the plural activities of thought. I want these moments multiplied across our numerous essays and failures. I want their silhouettes to thatch our daily lives, fading and brightening with the light and shade, for it is these oscillations that are the motor of our transcendence: to breathe, to fail, to return, to create.

 

When we realize this capacity is when we begin writing the impossible. A poetics of mortality depends on failure just as art is itself both a practice of failure and the persistent return from that failure. In this respect, the only requirements of the impossible are honesty and imagination. We need be nothing but ourselves: luminous beings that somehow occupy bodies, displacing in our own crude echoes the invisible matter that surrounds us, a silence already filled with noises.

 

—

 

On June 4, 1923, Frank Hayes, a thirty-five-year-old stableman, horse trainer, and occasional jockey, won the Belmont Steeplechase despite sitting dead in the saddle. He had been alive when the race began, had suffered a massive heart attack at some point before his horse, Sweet Kiss, crossed the line at 20-1 to win by a head. It was only when the owner and stewards approached him with congratulations that they noticed something amiss.

 

There is a middle-aged white man at the counter. He orders a cup of coffee. “Small, medium, or large?” asks the barista.

 

“Medium,” says the man, before the barista can finish the word “large.”

 

“Room for cream?” she asks.

 

“No,” says the man, “room for milk. For milk.”

 

But, I want to tell him, this is an absence that does not specify. It cannot decide on the presence that will take its place. As when god withdrew from the world to make room for creation, there was no specification for what would fill that space. Absence cannot see beyond itself because it has no beyond, the way grief is a kind of gravity: it doesn’t care who you are. What I am trying to say is that we will not be present for our own deaths, only the moments leading up to them. We cannot orchestrate the absence we will leave, despite our best attempts: notes left, debts paid, jockey’s silks pressed, 2% not half and half.

 

It’s all just around the next curve of the bay: children sleeping under blankets in the back seat of a 1980s sedan; a racehorse at full tilt with a dead man in the saddle; the tremendous quaking aspen southwest of Fish Lake; the moments in which we are able to move, to take on some portion of the grief of others; a man, an artist, in so much pain that he has tragically and meticulously chosen absence over presence.

 

—

 

When I was working the night shift at the safety-net hospital, I admitted a man to the inpatient mental health unit. I admitted hundreds of people for various ailments that year, but this man I remember so clearly. He had been seen in the ER for “suicidal ideation,” sent directly to psychiatric emergency services where upon more thorough evaluation had been adjudged an imminent danger to himself. He did not dispute this.

 

We sat a table on the acute unit where any means for self-harm had been meticulously removed. There were no door handles from which a noose might be tied. The blue plastic chairs in which we sat had only the softest contours, weighted so heavily as to resist being easily picked up or thrown. He kept his spine straight in his seat. Behind him through the wide windows spread out the condominiums and office blocks downtown. I will not describe his face, the color of his hair or eyes. I will leave unmentioned the particular timbre of his voice, but from this plastic seat with the city behind him, he spoke as an observer of an utterly impenetrable world, not as one who dwelt within that world but as one who had become only witness, removed from immediate experience, envious now of the objects around him: the table in his apartment, the books on the shelves beside it, the quiet trees outside his own window at home, their bare branches, their fallen leaves.

 

“When my body becomes ashes,” he said, “then I’ll become an object, too.” And he showed me the scars on his forearms, an inch or so proximal to his wrists, on his right side creeping onto his palm. They were mostly signatures of older wounds, years ago, the result of burning himself with cigarettes in brutal but earnest inquiries into whether he might still feel pain, feel anything. Most—aside from one fresh blister, that one seared only days prior to our encounter.

 

I saw such visceral self-interrogation on a disarmingly frequent basis that year. What marked this man apart was his attitude to these injuries. As he held his wrists out to me, he was not proud or ashamed. He did not wear his scars as medals, as intended testimony to the pitch of his suffering. He wore them with utter indifference, carried them as one would carry only the brute facts that returned him to an exhausting and circular logic: the drive to become object, accessible only through an act of ultimate subjectivity.

 

—

 

For the three or four years that bridged the 1980s and 1990s, after school was out for summer, we packed up the family sedan until it could bear no more weight. My father took his two-week holiday, and we crawled out of the driveway, to the south coast, on a passenger ferry, then along the Autoroutes of France until we came to a campsite by a lake about an hour south of Bordeaux. We unloaded the car into our rented trailer surrounded by maritime pine and spent every day at the freshwater lake. We were children. The water at the edge was shallow and warm, gradually deepening until the temperature chilled and the depth dropped off dramatically. The sudden difference meant you could stand chest high as a ten-year-old and stare out into the dark expanse of open water. We swam into that darkness and tried to find the bottom. We treaded water with no grasp of what might lie beneath. Younger siblings played closer to the shore. Our parents reclined on beach loungers, but my cousin and I, this is where we stayed, close to the darkness, swimming in and out, diving as deep as we could then returning to the shallows.

 

I have made several resolutions. I will make the journey to Fish Lake, Utah, and I will stand among the aspen. I will return to Portland, ride the same bus route and recite the poem I will have learnt by heart. When I do so, I will speak clearly. My voice will be sure. I will continue to place myself as close as I can to these things that I cannot fathom. I will swim into them. I will establish a new syntax of transition, I will live and write inside it, then I will burn it to the ground.

 

To write toward death is to engage the impossible. It is to pace the same ground over and over, to initiate and repeat, to mire oneself voluntarily, to sink. But it is also to remember oneself as an embodied being, with a beginning and with an end, capable of touching other lives in unknown or apparently trivial ways, seldom in plain sight, but in an unseen and tantalizing proximity.

 

You will be with me at the bus stop in the smell of last night’s fryers. You will be with me in the dark, on worn upholstery. You will be with me in the places where language refuses, light thatched on Formica, when breath becomes labor. You will be with me as our silhouettes rise and depart from each other, dappling the tallest buildings, taking leave from our bodies to maunder the city alone. Pinball is dying. Pando is dying. But for this instant, in these golden minutes we are here together, and everything I say to you, I say to myself:

 

If you think this may be too much, it will be.

 

Learn to think on a vastly larger scale.

 

Master the flipper.

 

Amaze your friends.

 

You and I are suddenly what the trees try to tell us we are.

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The Cut-Through

Over Cobb salad and mushroom ragù our youngest son tells us he was pulled over by the LAPD, their guns drawn as they approached his 1994 faded turquoise pickup.

 

He delivers this news while we are finishing up Sunday dinner at a local French bistro on Green Street in Pasadena, a small town just east of Los Angeles where the wide boulevards are lined with palm and oak trees and former Rose Bowl Queens reside.

 

I put my fork down, look at him sitting across from me.

 

“Where did this happen?” I ask.

 

“On Alameda, right by Chinatown, at 4:30 in the afternoon.”

 

I know this stretch of Alameda, on the edge of LA’s Chinatown. The tracks of the Gold Line subway looming high above. This is an isolated spot, a cut-through where a young man could be killed and the story never told.

 

My son looks away like his eyes are being drawn back to an afternoon memory of officers with guns.

 

“They came up to my truck and asked what I was doing.”

 

I can only imagine what went through his mind. Did he think of us? Did he remember my departing words, “be safe and I love you,” said each time he walked from my door? Did he think of his father, a teacher at a high school a few miles away from where two LAPD cops have guns pointed at him? I know he must’ve thought of those other Black boys—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin…gunned down, gunned down, their blood flowing in America’s streets.

 

“What did you do?”

 

“I put my hands up. I didn’t want to get shot.”

 

“What did you say?”

 

He waits until the waiter fills our water glasses and leaves before he answers.

 

“I told them I was moving a sculpture from my art show. Then I said, ‘What’s up, dude?’ They were young, young like me, Mom.”

 

Our son is an artist; his rebellious nature and questioning mind was subdued that afternoon in front of officers with guns drawn. Perhaps it was the “What’s up, dude?” his hands in the air, but guns were put away. My son was told to go on, no ticket written, no violations, only by the LAPD. Somehow his Black body is a threat, his Black body can be violated, his Black body still must bow down, even now…yes’em, master.

 

The waiter returns and asks about dessert. Crème brûlée, flourless chocolate cake and a raspberry tart.

 

What does one order when your son is telling you about having guns drawn on him?

 

“Just two coffees, please,” my husband says. The waiter leaves.

 

“Were you afraid?” Such an obvious question, but it needs to be asked.

 

The answer is yes, but now anger and confusion fills the table. His voice becomes louder. His fist comes down near his plate. Water spills and a couple behind us look up. This is what he knows: his white friends never have this happen. They never are pulled over for no reason, lives threatened, their mere existence questioned.

 

—

 

When he was a baby I would kiss him over and over again, telling him how beautiful his dark skin was, it was the best. He believed me and as a boy always thought this skin, his skin, his deep dark blackness, his fine mind were blessings, something to be honored and praised. He now stomps around our home, declaring that young Black men are engaged in an endless battle, “They are trying to kill us, Mom. It’s a war.”

 

Each death is personal to my boy.

 

“It’s worse since Obama was president!” he says. “A Black man was president, and they still can do this shit to us.”

 

My husband says he understands. “I used to get pulled over all the time back in Boston. The cops always said a car that looked like mine was involved in a robbery. I drove a silver vintage 1965 Mercedes. There were no cars like mine.”

 

The waiter brings the check. A credit card is placed down on a silver tray.

 

“When did this happen?”

 

“April.”

 

It is now December.

 

“Why didn’t you tell us then? Why did you wait?”

 

My son looks at me now.

 

“Because, Mom, you already worry enough. I didn’t want to scare you.”

 

So this is what it looks like when you unpack this oppression, this seemingly bottomless pit of racism. He carries the responsibility of protecting himself, of calculating how to walk safely in the world that often doesn’t see his worth. In his America, where he knows his education and class sometimes protect him, his “What’s up, dude?” might have saved his life, this time. He feels he has to shield me from this.

 

“You should have told us then. Maybe we could have done something.”

 

These are hollow words, seem empty as they leave my mouth. I wonder what we could have done. Two armed police who left no visible trace. They hadn’t killed him after all, only drawn guns. What harm in that, easily erased, never recorded?

 

Dinner is over. The table is cleared. We make our way towards the door. The restaurant is more crowded now. The hum of conversations mixed with laughter and a mother soothing a crying baby fill the air. On top of each linen-covered table is a small candle, giving the restaurant a soft amber glow. Most times I would have been comforted by this place, by a good meal out on a Sunday night, knowing we have earned membership in this world of candle-lit dinners, chilled wine, and crusty bread pulled and delicately dipped in seasoned virgin olive oil. Yet, tonight this restaurant with its seemingly polite people dining on carefully crafted plates feels like a surreal tapestry, weaving itself around me as I try to find my way out.

 

In front of me I see a white middle-aged couple with their adult son. They are laughing. The mother reaches out and rubs her son’s arm tenderly. Clear long-stemmed glasses filled with deep ruby-colored wine are raised in a toast of celebration. The mother glances up at me and smiles. She thinks we are the same, out on a Sunday evening with our grown sons. She looks like someone I could have been friends with once. We would have shared a carpool, arranged play dates, worried over how to set limitations for our little boys while we organized a fundraiser gala for the PTA. I would have been her one Black friend. Yet, we would never truly talk about how my concerns for my little boy might be different than hers. She would never ask, and I wouldn’t reveal the things that divided us. I have no smiles for her tonight, no balm for my own rage. I look away and follow my son’s lead out of the restaurant.

 

I pause at the glass door, waiting for a moment before stepping out into the night. There are little sparkling white lights strung outside along the restaurant’s wrought-iron patio railing. Beyond the lights, I see my son and husband standing side by side. These two men, one young, the other older, sharing the same American story. My husband reaches up, hugs our son in a deep embrace.

 

It is winter in this desert. A cold chill sweeps across my face as I step outside. My son puts his hands in his jeans’ pockets. I’m standing next to them now.

 

“I love you, son,” my husband says.

 

“Me, too.”

 

My boy is lighter now, the dinner conversation behind him.

 

“Where are you heading?” I ask.

 

“Over to Echo Park to meet some friends. It’s still the weekend, you know, Mom.” He smiles.

 

“Okay. Be safe and I love you.”

 

He grabs me around the shoulder, kisses my cheek and then makes his way down the alley towards his truck.

 

My husband and I watch as he walks away from us. We don’t say anything, just watch his tall thin frame in black skinny jeans and a blue oversized jacket go off into the night.

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Good Pressing

[1992, Nevada County, California]

Grandma takes my beating heart in her warm hands and holds it until it softens, until it knows it is safe to open. She sings stories so it will remember things it has never felt. She lulls its redness with her touch. When the heart opens she pours in all her love and all her fears with it. She pours in all her dreaming and her bruises. She touches its tissues to her swollen lips and weeps. The muscle grows bigger with her tears. The muscle grows tender, skittish to the touch. She sets a kettle on the stove and stirs in possibility, measuring out worries in her palm before sprinkling them in. She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells me to eat, to help myself to more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since age five there has been one constant: transit. Joint custody, foreign exchange, weekly commutes, overseas living. I left the home I knew because there were no other options for a girl who picked up the scent of rotting bodies buried in the women around her, who saw despair seething out tiny pores and ragged cuticles, the bloodied carnage piled high from generations before her, around her, closing in. Wasted. All this utterly wasted human capacity and the lethal rage it breeds. The biting perfectionism of the frustrated woman. The broken women who break babies the way they break mustangs. At twelve, I signed a pact in blood with momma swearing I would not marry or have babies. It was a pact with myself to remain human. At the first chance: a high school exchange program in Colima, Mexico. Free, except for airfare. Only two students per semester in a school of three thousand. I applied. Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I saved money for the ticket from an afterschool job. I was sixteen. Because the violence of gendering was not taken seriously, I could not call myself a refugee. I could only say: Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, Madrid, Sacramento, Chicago, New York, Brasília, Rio. I could only see my smiling white face in brochures and on billboards across Mexico advertising the international school I attended for free in the exchange. I could only say: I was privileged. I could only say: I was lucky enough to get away.

 

 

 

 

[August 2001, St. Louis University, Madrid campus]

I made it to college. I read Alice Walker’s recollection of three gifts her mother gave her when she left home and went off to study. I underline one gift – a sewing machine – and the rationale for it: that it was the one tool she could use to make anything she needed so she wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else. It stuck with me: the image of that sewing machine being part of feminist theory in an academia in which I felt so alien. I spent a day and a night in that basement apartment scrubbing the tile walls of their years layered in oil spatters, and in those hours, instead of the familiar shame, I felt proud of my mothers, my grandmothers. Of the practical skills they had gifted me. Of all they could give.

 

 

[September 2013, Rio de Janeiro]

I grew fascinated with language because language was the thing used to contain, to beat me into smaller pieces so that I would be easier for my family and my culture to masticate. They were busy. They didn’t have space for the room I needed. So, I studied the words, the syntaxes. I kept a spiral notebook where I composed rhyming poems, copied down strings of letters I didn’t understand and looked up their definitions. I made lists from a thesaurus of words to use in future rhyming poems. I turned to paper when punished for speaking. Dish soap and thumbs down my throat, the larynx closes. Be seen, not heard. Be accommodating and sweet. I was told terrible stories about myself, explanations for why I was so strange, so troublesome and mean. I became a bully who was bullied. I had no other way to say things. Bad words were off-limits but bad words turn toxic when kept inside a body. They eat away at the esophagus, erode the trachea. The difference between Brazilians and United Statesians, between those raised male and those raised female, it seems, has something to do with the way words are held and released.

 

It is strange to use text in this quilt, to employ written language in a tradition developed largely by silenced ones: the slave, the wife, the woman. But this is my reality now: writing, the privilege of my education. This is my contribution to the tradition, then. An expansion, not a breaking.

 

Bringing quilting into writing, integrating it: the only way this work is real. For it to exist only as Roman script on white paper would be a false making. Forced sterilization.

 

On paper, I cannot move my pen in a straight line. I have tried and it is terrible. Some would say good, but that’s not true. Things move sidewards. Lines round, contain too many hyphens, rests, commas, internal rhymes, refrains.

 

 

I give my head to clear thinking

My heart to greater loyalty

My hands to larger service

For my club, my community, my country, and my world.

– 4-H Pledge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[2003, California State University, Sacramento]

I design a Special Major in Chicano/Latino Literature & Art. It is not the novelty of an assumed cultural “other” that I find engaging, but the histories and articulations of rural, working class and Far West experience otherwise absent in academia. I resist the narrative that culture only travels East to West, North to South because I have seen it move in all directions. I know Indigenous America and Africa have had extensive influence on U.S. and European cultures. I know that Country & Western ballads are just boleros sung sideways and that cowboys are adaptations of Mexican vaqueros. I rebel against the cultural hegemony of an English Major. I study the ancient civilizations of this land, the Silk Road and the Islamic Empire, how Africa made its way through Portugal and Spain and into the so-called New World in ways our national narrative does not allow. I study how plants native to the Americas became the base for contemporary Italian cuisine because Italians were the only Europeans willing to experiment with fruits and vegetables new to them. I study the undocumented intermixing of our One Drop heritage, and the ways languages change and adapt just as readily as culture even in spite of institutionalized racism. It is through the language of Chicanismo that the Eurasian aunt who raised me and I can speak about our family: my Dust Bowl kin who call themselves White who were once High Germans who shame Low Germans who lie about Gypsies who marry poor Mexicans who marry poor Swedes who marry poor French Canadians who lie about any kind of Indian who marry poor Nicaraguans who marry poor Blacks who marry poor Blackfeet who marry elite Japanese who marry wealthy Englishmen who marry whomever the fuck they please. It is in the overlaps and blending, in the mestizaje I feel most at home.

 

 

 

[2012, Rio de Janeiro]

I cross the street to the pharmacy. The military police are outside yielding assault rifles, occupying the entrance to the favela down a side street. Rio has just secured its bid for the 2016 Olympics. I notice my visceral response to assault rifles on men in uniform is different from other passers by. I notice myself as foreign in this instance, as gringa hailing from the radical left and libertarian hills of Northern California: my response is terror, then rage. Milling around me are faces that convey we are used to this. This is normal. I mask my reaction. I enter the pharmacy, buy toilet paper, toothpaste. Commerce drones on down the boulevard: un suco de abacaxi e um pão de queijo, por favor.

 

 

 

[2013, Rio de Janeiro]

Apathy in a year’s time has turned to outrage, action, political mobilization. Protests one million strong all across the country finding solidarity in a global network of anonymous sites, authors. There is deep fear in the daily proof that life here is not valued. But there has been enough. Basta já! There are reverberations of Brazil’s past revolutions, of the Arab Spring, of Occupy. There is no face, only moving.

 

[2013, São Paulo]

We set up our table at Feira Plana, the largest artist publications fair in the country. Makers are enflamed. The medium itself again becomes an active one, full of nuance and risk. R staffs our table while I hop from press to press examining new work, swapping samples and talking shop. I return to staff our table while she tours the fair. We have become part of a traveling band of independent publishers in a place where independent publishing was long illegal. Until the mid-1800s, printing in the colonies was forbade; all published materials had to be printed in Britain and then imported from the Portuguese crown. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to acquire a printing press (Mexico was the first), let alone to legalize publishing in the colony. This is part of the reason we have found it hard to buy paper or print books locally: there is no strong tradition of papermaking or printing, and, by extension, a limited number of well-trained printers. There are letterpress printers from the Cordel tradition, but not much by way of commercial printing. Our small press had to limit a recent edition to 750 copies because that was the maximum quantity of a particular paper to be found in all the country. The past is present is not philosophy, but economics. Today at Casa do Povo, we are part of a blend of small presses, fine art presses, self-publishers, poster makers, book artists, artist-instructors, cartoonists, zine makers and poets. Many print with the aid of salvaged technologies that allow hands to smudge ink: letterpress, silkscreen, risograph, Xerox. The immediacy and resilience of our mediums are especially resonant now. Again.

 

 

 

You repair the thing until you remake it completely.

Louise Bourgeois

 

 

It is the compulsion of the Western fine art tradition to break from that very tradition. We call this Innovation and True Art and deny that it came from anything but Pure Genius. We are often blind to the continuity, even the continuity of the impulse to make it new.

 

It was not until age thirty that I could write in first person plural. It was not until age thirty that I felt entitled enough to write using the word “we,” to claim myself as part of a larger cultural conversation.

 

I resist the act of writing to be fully present in my body – stitching, making, moving. This need makes the shaming come alive: you are lazy, too feminine, too poor to be smart, too rural. A bumpkin. But if I keep moving, if I stay in this wordless making, I soak in its power on its own terms. I am released from the peculiar colonization of the written word upon my flesh.

 

 

[April 2014, California]

I begin sewing a welcoming quilt for my new nephew from scraps of worn-in clothing from each member of his family. Sometimes we must make a thing only for our love of the person receiving it. I am pulled to make him something to touch, something to hold over his little boy body when it feels fragile or alone or battered by this world, something to remind him he is loved. Something to protect him from the particular brutality this world holds for his little boy body.

 

The making of his quilt takes months away from my studio practice, places me in the bedroom with a fold-up table, sewing machine, chair. I love this making. It returns me. But, I cannot help but feel plagued by the notion that turning my making toward a loved one minimizes my work, places me back in the world of country crafts and women’s work –quilts, scrapbooks, embroidery. I have swallowed the myth of male genius, too, despite my body’s attempts to reject it. It poisons my love of other ways of making, insisting that I am less of an artist when I care for those around me, when I hold the capacity to hold them close and give.

 

I refuse this. I see all around me a world of makers, many of them women, equally adept at committing to their own making and at elevating those around them. I slash open a vein to drain the poison. I suck out the altered blood and spit mouthfuls on the ground. I cauterize the breakage, begin interviewing makers who also make space for others. I make plans to publish a series of these interviews, then a book.

 

In their most active years, members of the Royal Chicano Air Force —originally called the Rebel Chicano Art Front— did not distinguish between those who secured the grants, organized the events, repaired the engines, and those who made the artwork. This act of denying divisions was a conscious subversion of Eurocentric frameworks of art and life and culture. Or, as Dr. Ella Maria Diaz writes, “An important component of the RCAF’s creation of a Chicano/a mural environment was their collapse of artistic hierarchy in opposition to the idea of beauty and artistic genius as the realm of the individual artist.” In the tellings and retellings of their story in the popular press, however, this ideology is downplayed and the more conventional story of the RCAF as a core group of visual artists becomes History.

 

How does one convey a different narrative to a reader unwilling or unable to read any other way than the one they already know? The widespread exclusion of historically marginalized voices from prominent venues of culture is attributed to this unwillingness to think beyond convention.

 

People who have survived atrocities … witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma. It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen.

Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery

 

Everywhere I carry my North American body – Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Japan as reconstructed inside the Sacramento home of my WWII-surviving great-aunt – there is a physical layer I must shed in order to be in that place. I am made acutely aware of a covering I carry in the place I most often call home, a shield crafted against the daily violence of life there. It is a different kind of shield than the one I carry in Rio on my way to work where the violence is honest – armed robberies, murders, looting. There are other kinds of violence, too: class warfare, threats of another military coup, hate crimes, rape. And yet my body remains open in particular ways as I walk the street aware of very real danger. I am guarded, yes. I am hyper-vigilant all the time. Watchful. Weary. It is exhausting. The artist Alma Leiva crystallizes this feeling in her installation-photograph series Celdas (Prison Cells), in which she recreates the interiors of homes in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras and a narco-city now infamous for being the most violent in the world. Leiva brings outside elements such as playground sand and teeter-totters inside, giving the intimacy of home space the weight of the prison cell it becomes in a city where the danger outside seeps into everything. In her essay, “The Other Side of Fear: Alma Leiva’s Prison Cells,” Dr. Tatiana Reinoza writes, “Home spaces are records of embodied and situated knowledge that allow viewers to connect the private with the collective sphere of experience.” Reinoza goes on to cite the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains, María Brito and several artists in diaspora whose work focuses on intimate space as sites of violence and memory. These troubled intimacies are more common than we care to admit.

 

We drink excessively in Rio. Drinking allows dance and laughter, but the weight of history and its consequences is left unaccounted for, untended. The body doesn’t close, but it craves numbing, a safety. We spend our days off from work indoors, attempting to unravel. When I am designing Leiva’s exhibition catalog years later, the sight of her photographs causes blood to rush to the surface of my skin. The feeling that radiates from the pixels haunts, finally distilled.

 

In the United States, it is the body that closes. It shuts in on itself to ward off the myriad micro-assaults to the senses: separation, subdivision, the aggressive insistence of a thing called personal space, the sound of English in the way we speak it, the threat of white male terrorism that knows no consequence: mass murder, serial rape, shootings by police. My skin braces for the chill of contact: the handshake, the monotone speech that inquires about what I do for a living, the askance looks at any slip into vulnerability, desire, feeling. There is little space to be human here unless I am alone. And while solitude can be cause for elation, the prolonged isolation of one human from others causes the heart to stop. It incites death by a slow, steady calcification layered upon the flesh. This subtle closing is not the same as one that threatens immediate survival, of course, but it threatens survival all the same. The body only breaks more slowly.

 

And what happens when intimate space itself is a warzone? Where does the body break then?

 

In empire, violence becomes a proud part of family narrative. We are sons and daughters and grandchildren of heroes who fight in wars to protect our freedom. We absorb the trauma of the soldier. We treat their pain as elevated, as honorable and just. And yet our domestic homicide toll accounts for more of our own deaths than all the soldiers in all the wars we’ve fought, but we do not honor these sacrifices or their repercussions. Violence becomes a comfort when tied to home life, like the scent of vanilla or a wood-burning stove.

 

[1992, Nevada County, California]

Grandma dresses me in a button-down shirt, pressed with starch, dried by the fireside. She talks me through the binding of a tie, pointed at the end like my father’s, knotted perfect. Don’t you never kiss no man’s foot.

 

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Sunday

A long car trip to the desert in the outskirts of Juarez. A Tecate in a coozie between my dad’s legs and my mom’s arm outstretched, her hand caressing his neck.

 

Loud Mexican music plays on the car radio, either Pedro Infante or Luis Miguel. Depends on their mood.

 

My brother and I look out the window at the cotton fields and abandoned farmhouses.

 

My dad turns on to an unpaved road and keeps driving. Dirt hits our face in the back seat.

 

The car stops. The dust settles and reveals we are on the edge of a mesa. He gets out of the car and we follow.

 

As far as the eye can see: coarse sand, spirited tumbleweeds, a sunset like an erupting volcano.

 

My dad takes one last sip of beer and looks down at me. With one swift move, he launches the bottle into the virgin desert.

 

“Don’t litter, kids,” he says dryly.

 

I roll my eyes, and he erupts in laughter, loud and piercing in the open space.

 

It was the decade AquaNet was eating away the ozone layer and I, an impressionable pre-teen, had been very vocal about recycling. I thought he hadn’t been listening.

 

“Vamonos,” he says but I stand on the precipice a bit longer, the humiliation cementing itself into my consciousness.

 

In the car, he snaps open a fresh bottle of beer and my mom resumes her pose in the passenger side, playing with his hair. The drive back home is darker. Not even Luis Miguel can break the silence.

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Silence Is a Language I Cannot Reset

The Mycelium of Memory

The announcement comes over the intercom as I am spelling out words at my desk. Or it is a math quiz. Or it is a blank paper. I am in the front row of the classroom and when the principal’s voice comes pinging into the room I stare up at the bright yellow and royal blue borders that adorn the bulletin boards. Her name is Mrs. Jones. I put my pencil down because everyone must pay attention when the principal speaks.

 

“There has been an attack against the United States,” Mrs. Jones says.

 

The pencil on my desk has absurd ridges, and I feel them with my fingertips. Metal and rubber and wood are all tastes my tongue knows. I put the pencil in my mouth.

 

The teacher rolls in a boxy TV on a tall metal cart and we watch the towers smoking. This does not happen, but the images of the towers smoking, of the planes crashing into the buildings, of the towers falling inundate the media for the weeks to follow. It drenches the surrounding time and leaves imposing stains. Many of my memories hold metal shrapnel and ash.

 

My memories of that time also contain Tyler. We are friends when the towers fall. He is the boy who lives down the street. Friends well before; for as long as I can remember. In the spring he plays baseball; I played soccer once in kindergarten but was too shy to take the field. We play whiffle ball in the gas line easement across the street from my house or in an imagined triangle in his backyard. I am a year older, but I happily do whatever he says. There is a hierarchy to our friendship, and my role is the slavish sidekick, servile, always with a yes on my tongue. I am a mother doting on my child, attending, supporting, yielding. He is spoiled and easily riled. I do everything I can to keep him appeased.

 

We play videogames together in his basement and mine. We have Nintendo 64s and we play Diddy Kong Racing and Mario Cart 64, blast each other with egg-shooting birds on Banjo-Tooie. We ride bikes through the neighborhood, pass through the forested short-cut, and buy sodas from the Wal-Mart vending machines.  A friendship large like skyscrapers, encompassing my childhood; monolith never expecting crash.

 

Introduction to Life Simulation

In 2002, I live with a purple Nintendo Gamecube controller in my hand. Nine years old and one year into the post-9/11 world my mom buys my brothers and me a copy of Animal Crossing. It comes out just four days after 9/11 in Japan, but it doesn’t hit US shelves until the next year.

 

On the front of the box, there is a two-story house: animals lean out of each window waving, and a human pops out of the front door. A sign above the house reads: Welcome to Animal Crossing. Inside, there is the small Gamecube disk and a limited-edition memory card with a sweater-clad cat.

 

Animal Crossing is a life simulation game. You are a human who moves to a new village populated by humanoid animals. You buy a house on loan and pay it back slowly. You can chat with your neighbors and do favors for them. You can collect shells, furniture, fossils, fish, bugs, paintings. There are special visitors who come every week. The seasons change: it rains, it snows, the trees bloom pink in spring. There are things to do—almost an infinity of them.

 

It is a single-player game, so my brothers and I have to split our playtime. One person plays while the others watch with varying degrees of impatience. Our mom bequeaths her stove timer for the purpose of resolving any disputes.

 

In the town I share with my twin brother Jared, I make a male character named Justin and choose the house with the yellow roof for him. The male characters wear round hats with horns coming out the sides. The hats change color and design to match the shirt you wear. Justin likes to collect fossils and display them in his house. He also likes the Spooky Series (a matching, pumpkin-themed furniture set, carpet, and wall paper), the Blue Series, and fruit-shaped furniture.

 

The first memory card I own for myself, I make another Animal Crossing town and populate it with all female characters: Hannah, Lily, and Anne. The women’s hats are conical like a princess’s costume prop. They have round brown eyes with long lower lashes or sparkly black eyes with wingtip lashes. They love the Citrus Set, tulip chairs, fish from dainty pop-eyed goldfish to giant coelacanths, and the Green Series with its cute check patterns. For all the characters I restart the facial feature selection process until their eyes and faces are just right. I want them to perfectly embody me. I love being all of them, though Hannah is my favorite.

 

Tyler also has Animal Crossing and my brother, Jared, and I go to his house and play in rotating shifts. There are some in-game NES consoles that can be played with two players, and we switch between the three of us. Or, sometimes, it is just me and him and we switch on and off. I like to be helpful. I clean his room once while he fishes in the large, river-fed pond, imagining that I am cleaning up an Animal Crossing house.

 

His mom comes downstairs and sees the cleaned room and gives me a complimenting smile. “Wow, what a good friend!” she says. She is always friendly, and I want her approval. “I could sure use your help around here.”

 

I want to be her perfect son. Her perfect daughter. The perfect child.

 

We plant flowers. We swap fruit. We sail to a tropical island on the dingy of a crusty sea turtle.

 

I am so excited for life. There are no ash clouds. There are no towers falling. I spend summers playing how I want to live.

 

Animal Years

I tell myself I am a red snapper aficionado. Jared rolls his eyes. I fish five of the seven fish out of the ocean against the algorithms’ odds. They are worth 3000 bells a piece. I collect gyroids, K.K. Slider songs, fossils I have dug from the star-shaped marks in the ground. My most prized possessions are my collection of turkey-themed furniture with matching wallpaper and carpet.

 

I spend hours a day during the summer playing Animal Crossing. There are bugs to catch, rare clothes and art to fill wardrobes. The kitchen timer goes by the wayside. I spend three hours hounding the neighbors for favors to do, I clean out the town dump, check the lost and found at the police station, sell fruit and shells. I walk around and around with nothing to do. My eyes ache from the brightness of the screen. The timer’s beeped three times, but I refuse to forfeit my controller.

 

The September 11 attacks change things before I know any different. A disparity between the life simulated in Animal Crossing and the life represented on TV begins to open. Years pass and the United States begins undeclared wars against countries in the Middle East. My oldest brother starts locking his things away behind a closed bedroom door. He is diagnosed in the 99th percentile for anxiety, something my parents say I must never speak of. We are all uncertain. I begin to quiet. There are mechanisms in my life that are moving beyond my comprehension and control. But, being a simple, quiet cog is manageable, expected. It is easier for everyone.

 

Around this time, Animal Crossing codes begin appearing in issues of Nintendo Power which my oldest brother has a subscription to. The codes unlock exclusive Mario-themed furniture décor. But neither Jared nor I is allowed to bother him in the slightest. And we are definitely not allowed to go in his room.

 

The call of the codes is too alluring. From reconnaissance I know he keeps his Nintendo Power magazines in the bottom of his closet. I wait until he is playing videogames downstairs and my parents are not lurking about to sneak into his room and prowl through the pages.

 

His room is dark with the blinds drawn during the afternoon. On the walls is a constellation wallpaper. I creep across the dark wood floorboards, halting when one creaks. The closet doors open like theatre curtains. On the floor, there are a few magazine organizers. I sift through the magazines with a constant eye on the door. The codes section is toward the back and I look for the familiar yellow text box. The first magazine is one I have already harvested the code from. The next one, too. I fumble through them, heartbeat racing, the breath caught in my throat. I find the latest magazine with a brand new code. I print the letters and numbers plainly on yellow, lined paper. With the secrets in hand, I sneak out and close the door behind me.

 

Later Jared and I take turns unlocking items from Tom Nook.

 

Tom Nook says: “Then tell me the password.”

 

I whisper the tedious codes to Nook, twenty-eight characters each.

 

“I see, I see,” he says.

 

Out of his pocket he pulls wrapped presents and passes them to me. The small boxes contain impossible wonders: huge flagpoles, glowing stars, fire flowers, coin blocks, bullet bill cannons.

 

After we claim our prizes we destroy the codes, tearing them into tiny pieces.

 

The US declares war in Iraq. I wonder if it will still be going on when I am old enough to be drafted, if I will have to kill people, if I will be killed. I am not aware enough to wonder about the people who have already been killed by military action so far away from the stability of Kentucky. Thousands of civilians killed in countries that, in my ignorance, I can’t even find on a map as life carries on here just the same.

 

The Infinity Pocket

Your pockets store a ridiculous quantity of items in Animal Crossing. You can carry thirty six-foot long living coelacanths or thirty ebony grand pianos or thirty four-poster beds. The pocket is a mysterious place. You walk around with tons of items without any sign of distress. When you put anything in your pocket it transfigures into a green leaf.

 

You can mail impractical items in envelopes, too. If you want you can slide a fishing rod or a pink kitchenette into a standard envelope and mail it to your neighbor.

 

The media reports that the United States is at war, but not officially. It is Afghanistan. It is Iraq. It is whatever country, whatever group we are fighting. It is a fierce debate what we are fighting for. In the eighth grade, our parents have to sign a permission slip so that we can watch a documentary on 9/11. We sit in the classroom, gathered around a TV on a metal cart.

 

I remember clearly the pixilated blobs tumbling out of the building, down and down. I see the hovering bodies stuck mid-plunge, their faces obscured, choked with smoke, flushed suddenly with all of that fresh, breathtaking air. The Falling Man appears, their human body signing a four or a nine. The body has a mouth with a voice lost in vacuity of falling.

 

Tyler has a friend who lives at the end of his street named Hussain who we play with sometimes and ride bikes with on his street. His family is the only Muslim family I know living in our neighborhood. On Halloweens, they have their front porch light on, but on their door they have a sign explaining that they are a Muslim family and that they do not celebrate Halloween. The Halloweens after 9/11 their front porch light is never on. Hussain never comes to play at Tyler’s house. Their entire family retreats as if into the infinity pocket. I imagine now the fear they must have felt in the sea of white faces. And I, a white child, fail to ask a single question. I recognize now the privilege and racism holding my tongue. Silence is a complex, intersectional language that reflects dynamics of power. Already I knew the weight of silence, but to the detriment of those around me I hadn’t realized how I too could wield absences of sound.

 

Tyler and I never talk about Hussain. We never speak about 9/11 or the war or what the United States is doing to countries in the Middle East. In Animal Crossing, I start a campaign against Dotty, a rabbit who wears a blue check dress. She is programmed to have a peppy attitude, and I have tired of her constant positive vibes. I wield an axe and approach Dotty. Tyler is there, next to me, watching. I go up to her and press the A button, hoping to swing. The game initiates a conversation instead. I try again and again. I just keep talking to Dotty, hearing her inane catchphrase: wee one. “I’ve seen you a lot today, wee one!”

 

I try other implements. The fishing rod, the shovel. Finally, I try the net. I sprint toward Dotty and fire the A button. The net falls, clunking Dotty in the face. Her eyes widen as if she has been caught off guard. Tyler laughs at the ingenuity of this tactic. The approval invigorates me. I do it again and again. After the third time, Dotty becomes sad and dark clouds crowd her skull. I want her to move out, I want her to be sad. But I am also scared. Who am I trying to imitate? Tyler’s approval in this act unnerves me.

 

This is a life simulation. The worst you can do is bonk your neighbors on the head with a net, but in real life there are no limitations to suffering.

 

There are things concealed in my pockets I do not want to touch. I do not want to contemplate the edges of the dark leaves lurking; I do not want to uncover profane items I cannot display in my house or sell to Tom Nook.

 

What is a human capable of carrying within them without someone noticing? Our pockets are deep. Our feelings are a torrent of green leaves. All of this baggage is so inexplicably light.

 

The Cost of Wishes

The waters of the Animal Crossing Wishing Well reflect my face. I am sitting on the cool flagstones in the town square, peering into the water. The face floating on the surface of the water is mine, but from when I do not know. It is shifting from me at twenty-three recovering from years of awful buzz cuts to me at eight clutching my stuffed pikachu to me at twelve with a mouth sewn shut with a bitter thread. The great tree behind the Well rustles quietly in a dark breeze. It is night, a full moon.

 

I am here to apologize to the Well and to ask it for forgiveness. I do not have an undeliverable item as is required by the program. I am here to apologize to the twelve-year-old me for delivering a story I promised never to tell.

 

In the Well is my reflection. The water obliterates the face. Always it appears an unrecognizable smear. I remember what they wanted. They wanted to be a masculine little boy—they feel the safety of it now. They know inherently it will protect them.

 

The moon hangs in the Well alongside spent-coin wishes and an old reflection with bubbles streaming from deep below the water and a living body staring up with wobbling, wide eyes.

 

Placing my hands in the Well, I reach down to you, Justin. At the bottom of the Well, you hope the darkness of the night and the water will protect your story. You have yet to learn that even silence has a language to tell its story.

 

Obsession

Animal Crossing is a life simulation game where there is always something to do. But after playing for three hours straight, seven days a week for a year and a half, the neighbors repeat their programmed lines. The fruit and the fish are sold. My house is redecorated and all the items in Tom Nook’s store are bought. There is nothing to do.

 

I have a vision of an Animal Crossing avatar standing in the middle of an acre with nothing to do, nothing to say. Every task and chore has been resolved. The avatar stands there, holding its breath. There is no need to breathe in a life simulation.

 

I start playing other games with Tyler. We fall heavily into Phantasy Star Online: Episodes 1 & 2. It is a completely customizable RPG with different classes of humans and androids in which you can select clothing, facial features, hair, and more. We replay the levels again and again, playing through Hard Mode, Very Hard Mode, and eventually, our crowning achievement, Ultimate Mode. I have two characters: Zelda, a FOmarl female wizard with a blue dress and long brown hair I eventually dye blonde, and Robot Version 2.0, a HUcaseal who is a tiny female android with a mighty purple body. She wields scythes and blades twice her size. Zelda is the perfect support unit who also has well-rounded weapons. Robot Version 2.0 is of the Hunter class and, being a robot, she cannot cast spells to help her team out. She dives singularly into the fray, dealing massive damage, taking devastating hits.

 

Something begins to shift in the dynamic between Tyler and Jared and me. He has hit us before, has yelled at us in anger. It has been our responsibility not to make him mad, not to win too many times in video games, to accept whatever he says to us without response or critique, to acquiesce. We are older; we have to be more mature. We are part of this world of anxiety, paranoia, war, and rhetoric of violence and we seek understanding for Tyler’s behavior. His tempestuousness must fit somewhere in this unrest. And if we just stay silent, the violence will stay far-off.

 

The eggshells we’d been tip-toeing around are all broken. Our bodies are beginning to change. Tyler demands more attention from Jared and me, but he plays Runescape and Maple Story for hours while we stare mechanically at a board game spread on the floor of his family’s computer room with sparse rotations.

 

Tyler’s brother is throwing balls at us while we ride bikes in my driveway, and we are throwing them back at him and at each other. We pedal away to go to Tyler’s house. I drop a ball that I’m holding, and Tyler runs over it on his bike. When I turn around, he is on the ground crying. His arm is broken. “Maybe it’s not broken,” he says through the tears. But it is swelling, and I know it is. He gets a blue cast put on it and says time and time again that we broke his arm and when he and I are alone that I broke his arm.

 

Tyler’s mom brings him takeout for dinner while we are playing in his basement. He thrusts his food into my hands to hold while he fishes in the paper bag for napkins. I am hungry. His dog, who I thought was outside, is too. She jumps up into the air from behind and gulps down a portion of the quesadilla. He punches me hard in the side of the head, demanding to know how I could have let that happen. I want to cry, but I can’t in front of Tyler, so I turn my head down and mutter some apology.

 

We are playing whiffle ball in Tyler’s backyard. His brother pitches hard and beans Jared in the eye with the ball. Jared drops the bat and begins to run home, crying. Tyler tells him to come back, that it’s not that big a deal, that it doesn’t hurt that bad, that he shouldn’t be a baby, a pansy. I run home after Jared, and Tyler and his brother follow and stand in our front yard saying they’re sorry, saying it won’t happen again, saying it was an accident, saying that it wasn’t that bad, saying we just need to come back. I hide in the house and don’t answer the door.

 

You Cannot Reset

Tyler moves his bedroom into the basement of his house so that he and his brother can have separate rooms. We are all getting older now and need privacy. I have to share a room with Jared so I am jealous. There is nowhere else in our house for us to sleep. Tyler has his own light wood furniture and a TV of his own. We play video games sitting on his bed.

 

Sometime after Jared and I have harvested all the Super Mario codes, I bring my memory card over to Tyler’s house and we sit in the basement, and I show him my Animal Crossing treasures.

 

He loves them. He wants them, too. He asks how I got them.

 

“I got the codes from my brother’s Nintendo Power magazines. I had to steal them.”

 

“Hey, I want them, too.”

 

I don’t want to upset him. But the codes are gone. Shredded up. My oldest brother has stepped up security. The last time he found me in his room, he chased me out and kicked me senseless on the floor.

 

“I don’t have them anymore. Jared and I got rid of them.”

 

“C’mon, I know you’ve still got them,” Tyler says. “Give me the codes.”

 

I am speechless. What else can I say? The codes are twenty-eight characters long: I don’t remember any of them let alone more than a dozen. I spent hours stealing them from my brother. I am not about to repeat that process.

 

Tyler views this silence as insubordination. “What do you want for them? Huh? What do you want?”

 

He is too physically near, so I shift away.

 

He punches me in the arm, grabs at my shoulder. I stand up to leave, and he pushes me. I turn in the air and land on my back. The back of my head hits the ground. I try to stand.

 

He pushes me to the ground again. “Is this what you want, huh? Is this what you want?”

 

He pulls down the front of his pants by the waistband, exposing himself repeatedly. The shorts are blue or red or white. I am scared. I do not know anything about my body. I have brought this upon myself. My head hurts from the impact with the ground.

 

“Huh? Is this what you want?”

 

If you reset without saving in Animal Crossing, you are punished the next time you play. Mr. Resetti, the vitriolic mole, springs from the ground as soon as you exit your house and berates you for irresponsibly resetting without saving. If you reset too often, he takes away your money and later he strips away your eyes and mouth leaving gaping holes where your features used to be.

 

I am begging for him to stop. To let me go. The wood paneling on the basement walls is dark. The carpet is white and thin. “You’re hurting me,” I say. “You’re hurting me.” The back of my head vibrates. He steps back for a moment, and I am up and scrambling, darting past his grasp, up the stairs. His mom is in the kitchen preparing a snack. I shove my shoes onto my feet, huddled by the backdoor. She says something to me, but how can I respond? I run all the way home and say nothing.

 

I do not think about this event. The blank space of my mind is where I place every failure I feel I made in our friendship. Every issue I have instigated.

 

I am his friend, silently, for two more years. Then I stop trying all together, and I let the phone calls ring when I see his number on the caller ID.

 

In the weeks after, before I blot the event out completely, I wonder if he would have done this to anyone else. Members of his baseball team? His brother? I am not certain. Did he recognize the subtle dissonance in my presentation way back before even I knew? Something he could comfortably victimize?

 

I try to reset that afternoon for a decade in my head. But Animal Crossing is a life simulation. You are conditioned not to reset. There are things that cannot be undone. Navigating the immutable programming of the past, you must adhere to the limitations of the coding.

 

Mr. Resetti is always there, wating, face red, ready to yell. Ready to take away my mouth.

 

Credits Roll

I go to school. I sit at my desk I take notes. I study. I don’t study. I smile. I deserved it. I am quiet. I am loud. I eat quietly at dinner. I am changing. I get detention and conduct referrals. I forget, I say. I deserved it. I feel my parents cannot handle what has happened—they have so many other things to worry about. I am something they do not understand now. I must be their normal child. Their child without problems. The one they confide in. I deserved it. I start running track and cross-country at school. The miles wear down my mind. My body. I deserved it, but it is forgotten, I say. I forget.

 

How could I be so silent?

 

It is strength.

 

It is shame.

 

It is incredible, incredible naivety.

 

Time-Travel to the Beyond

In Animal Crossing, it is 31 December 2030. I have started time-traveling, passing through multiple days in a matter of hours, mining them for their valuable interactions. Check out the furniture in Nook’s shop, scour the land and seas for fish and bugs, fossils. Track the special visitors. And then I move on to the next day. It is life in fast-forward. Days and weeks passing by in the span of an afternoon.

 

In this scope, life is full, teeming, hectic, demanding. The town is overrun by weeds. The villagers count the days since I last spoke to them, yellow waves of shock springing from their heads when I speak to them. It is easy to brush past them.

 

Peaceful, busy day after peaceful, busy day.

 

If life is boring, skip forward. If you need money, skip forward to summer when the bugs and fish are plentiful. If you start to think too much, skip forward and chase the next exciting thing. If you want special furniture, skip to holidays. If you want to celebrate your birthday, skip to your birthday. Celebrate decades of your birthdays. Celebrate the same birthday time and time again.

 

If you want a neighbor to disappear, skip forward years without speaking to them until they move out.

 

Open up their goodbye letter.

 

Do not read it.

 

Shred it quietly between your fingers.

 

Animal Crossing is a life simulation, but it is not. Under such pressure, the game falls apart, becomes tedious. I skip to 31 December 2030 because it is the last day Animal Crossing is programmed to simulate. I watch the game clock tick toward the New Year, closer and closer to the great mystery of the beyond.

 

What will happen on the last day when the fireworks go off? I survived Y2K. I have lived in the post-9/11 United States of America. I am paranoid. The animal neighbors are all gathered together, singing, smiling. They are either unfazed by their impending doom or unware of it. Life, even in simulation, can be cruel.

 

The bell rings, the announcement is made, the fireworks boom. The clock shockingly reads: 1 January 2031. Is this an unprogrammed continuation? I am amazed that something exists after.

 

The air is full of smoke. Tiny embers and ash flutter down. The fireworks cease. The game becomes a wintered quiet. I shrug and save the file. I open it up again. The clock reads 1 January 2030. A reset. This is the farthest extent I can run. There is no more time.

 

I will have to live this year again and again and again.

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The Flood

It was a hard winter. Everything became further away and darker. The roads battered cars; they buckled and heaved and slowed everything down to the point that I stopped wanting to go out. Every time I got in the car, I imagined my own death. I asked myself, Is where I am going worth sliding off the road into the cold water, into a dark tree, into another frozen, creeping vehicle, into the smooth blade of a state plow? So I cut back. I worked from home. I did my grocery shopping once a week, on Sunday afternoons, although by the time I left the store it was already getting dark around the edges of the mountains and I had to follow the lights of my high beams up the valley road. Other things were cut away, visiting friends, going to dinner in the bigger town, seeing a movie, shopping, going to the gym; all these were non-essentials. I imagined that that winter was like the start of the end of days, all of the good things, the extra of civilization falling off.

 

I saw death everywhere. People were freezing in their homes, the news channel reminded us to check on elderly people, our oil bill asked for a donation to help those who had no money for heat. People got thinner, tougher, and meaner. I didn’t make eye contact in town. I pulled my coat collar up and my hat down over my eyebrows. I kept safe at home.

 

Joe and I started to lock the doors when we were out. I don’t know if we ever spoke about it, or if it was just something we both felt at the same time. We locked up the poor, little cabin, and all of our poor, broken things inside of it. People were stealing dogs and selling them. People were taking the copper and gold out of the underbellies of cars. They were even carrying off firewood. We watched the long driveway for strange headlights in the dark and looked in the snow for tracks, for footprints, for signs.

 

The cabin we were renting sat at the base of a cliff covered with tall, straight spruce trees. A swift stream ran between the cliff and the house, always in white water, stumbling over huge boulders. The stream rattled and spilled down through the rocks, collecting in big pools, bottomed with smoothed bedrock or soft sand. Just below the house the stream flattened onto a broad flood plain, mingling with another mountain brook. The two waters came together and raced along, white, towards the Connecticut River.

 

The cabin was heated by a cast-iron woodstove. There was a backup propane heater in the living room and another in the bathroom downstairs, but we could never figure out how to run them because the instructions were in French and the pilot light would not stay lit—it would flicker blue and then vanish back to air. The stove ate through wood, burning fast and hot. The place had been a summer home and, looking to make money quick, our landlords had done almost nothing to winterize it. There were gaps under the doors and where the windows met the wall. There was a hole in the ceiling above our bed through which wasps spilled in the summer and in the winter the cold would come in and hover over us as we tried to pull the blankets up. Worst of all, the house was built on stilts because the stream flooded often. They had surrounded the stilts with black plastic and fencing but still the cabin sat on air, a freezing pillow of winter that reached up through the floor. The dogs would refuse to get off the couch; the cats would walk the backs of chairs, over lamps, across the windowsills to avoid having to touch it. The stove fought the cold, but the heat wouldn’t stick—it would just slip away so that even as the stovepipe glowed amber the cold sat in the bathrooms and the laundry room and the downstairs bedroom. The cold was more comfortable in that home than the heat.

 

That winter I lived heavily, wrapped in layers. I wore two pairs of socks and walked the floors in slippers. During the day Joe and I rationed wood. The winter was so long and cold that we were worried that it might not end, and we would be left with no fuel. We’d keep the house right above freezing, so cold that the olive oil became solid in the pantry. I lost all sense of my body. I was never naked except for the brief moments between the shower and my towel. I felt like I gained twenty pounds, but, I don’t know, it could have just been that my body became alien to me, strange, a buried thing.

 

I stayed inside and watched TV wrapped in a fleece blanket on the couch. I cross-stitched Christmas stockings for Joe and me and for each pet. I went to bed early and slept late, following the long darkness. I walked the dogs with a headlight. The trees rose like bodies, and the shadows behind the trees became monsters and thieves. The winter made us animals. It took away everything nice and human. We were cut back down to size by it; we were bodies that needed calories and warmth. We could have slept for days, like skunks and bears. We stopped dreaming for anything besides this life. We became smaller that winter, and less beautiful. I lost things I never got back from that cold.

 

The brook between the cabin and the cliffs had been frozen for months. Early in December I could see running water between the icy banks, but then I could only hear it, dark and rough. The ice grew and grew in the cold of those days. It was the only thing that got bigger. It grew like continental plates. It changed color. Sometimes it was clear, others it was white, or gray.  When there was enough sun, it was blue. The blue ice looked like a blade—it was the ice of the freezing days, when the sun appeared but had no heat, just light in which to cast the world in shadow.

 

When I was out in daylight, I walked the dogs along the ice banks. It was so thick that it made no sound to walk upon it. Underneath I could hear the water, rumbling. The dogs were afraid of crossing the ice in the center of the brook, where they could hear the water. The ice made sounds of its own. It groaned. It creaked and snapped, brittle pops and long breaks. It shuddered like a fallen tree settling into the earth. There were other sounds that were harder to describe, hums, wavering tunes like Tibetan chants that sat right between two notes and seemed to be trying to break the world at its weak parts. Sounds rang along it, down the cracks, through the broad flat shelves. Dripping and grinding.

 

That winter the animals became restless. Fox and deer and coyotes stood in the yard and locked eyes with me through the windows without fear. The cats scratched at all the furniture. On the warmest days, I would try to let them outside, but they refused to step into the deep snow. Instead they tore away the legs of our couch. They peed secretly on the loveseat in the back room. They shredded it too, turning the canvas into threads. The dogs pulled apart my books. They got onto the couch and attacked the cushions until there were no cushions left; they had all been emptied of their stuffing and flipped inside out.

 

By the time the dogs completely destroyed that couch, it was early spring. The light was a little longer in the morning and the evening. The sun has some force behind it. I could turn my face to it and feel something in the sky. There was a day of rain, cold, steady rain that beat the snow down. That night we dragged the couch and the loveseat outside to the backyard, tired of living with those tattered things, tired of flat pillows and torn fabric. We had to pour gasoline on them to start the fire. We waited until it was dark. The gas burst and then snaked inside the forms of the furniture, under the skirts and up the backs, twisting along the wood inside it, slow at first then smoking. Smoking horrible thick black smoke that joined the dark sky. It burnt up the smell of that winter, the animals’ fur and our skin cells, our hair.

 

Joe and I stood back and watched it. The light from the house stretched out to meet us like an apology. We didn’t touch, we gave each other space like the one, or the both of us might burst into flame too. The snow melted out to our feet. The flames came through from the inside of the furniture, wearing the fabric thin and then bursting out hungrily into the air. We watched it in silence. The fire ate up everything and then, gnawing on the bones, the wood, the springs, the bolts, shuddering and collapsing, like skeletons in a mass grave, all the parts mixed up. We kicked the pieces that fell out towards us back into the fire. We watched the sparks rise into the black smoke pillar, following the raindrops back up. Shivering wet through all our coats and boots and hats, we walked back up the hill to the bright house. The fire lay in coals behind us, gnawing on the hardest bits.

 

The ceremony of it all stayed heavy between us. That winter had been hard. Joe had picked up smoking again, standing on the porch just an arm’s length from the door as if it might be warmer near the house. When he had quit, I thought we might be moving somewhere good together. With each night he shuffled in the cold, sucking on those menthols, I didn’t know, maybe we weren’t going anywhere at all because I was slipping too. I started seeing things at the edge of light, in the shadows. My fear of driving at night was a real fear. I saw things, my death, the death of the dogs, of my sisters, huge dark primal monsters made of the hills and spruce and rock. I was scared of little things, headlights in the night. I had to understand every sound I heard, place it, or I rocked myself to sleep, trying to rationalize my terror. The ritual of burning the furniture felt like our first attempt at ridding ourselves of these things, casting the devil out. The house was emptied. We sat at the dining table, looking at where the couch used to be. It reminded me of when we had first moved in, all the blank spaces and how tender we had been with each other.

 

In the morning, the fire was still smoking. I took the dogs down to look at it, the bent nails and twisted springs, the feet and rollers and joints of metal all blackened. I kicked some half-burned pieces into the coals. The snow was melted, and the grass was brown around the fire pit.  The morning was warm; there were invisible walls of heat in the woods and along the driveway. The sun was rising, laying a thick haze over the cold water. It was the sort of day when you are excited for no reason. I went out to lunch; I didn’t eat what I had packed for myself. I bought a $20 bottle of wine for dinner.

 

Coming home, the ice along the road was still solid. I could hear the water under it from the car, running, running. At the cabin, the ice was still solid on the brook, but the water was so loud, a contained scream down the valley. The rain had loosened the sand on the hill, and snowmelt ran off it, picking up big stones and dropping them on the ice like cannon balls. The stones bounced off the ice, bounced into a tree, rattled down with the water, or punched their way through. The water ran like a trapped thing. I couldn’t hear myself think for the noise. The dogs were spooked when I took them out—the rocks had been crashing all afternoon, the water screaming, they had spent the day looking out the windows, wondering what was happening, wondering if the world were coming to an end.

 

The rain came again as the night settled, warm and dark in the valley. Joe and I talked about floods. Two years ago, a tropical storm had burst through these mountain streams and cut off towns for days. It took weeks to get past mudslides, washed out bridges, roads swept away. The brook we lived on had flooded; the water had risen under the house and run through the driveway. Huge rocks had bowled down the hill, knocking over trees in the front yard. Gravel and riverbed were strewn through the woods. The driveway disappeared. A big section of the hill had fallen into the river. It remained a crescent of naked sand and rock where a few trees hung. It was an ugly slash on the hillside right across from the porch; we had looked at it all summer. We also drove past a safe and a refrigerator that the flood had swept up into the trees along the driveway, mixed with river bottom and debris. The people who had been living there when it happened had been stranded; the water pushed their cars up against the pines. They had walked out over the field to the higher, paved road when it was safe to leave the house.

 

We talked about the cuts on the trees along the river that had been made by the flood, how high the water had been, how strong, that it would use stone and wood to cut through things like trees, riverbank, to cut away forest. All the time the noises outside got bigger. The rocks were breaking open trees on the slopes, popping, crashing, and punching through the thick ice and the hiss, the scream of the water. The dogs were looking around in terror at the noises.

 

We lay upstairs and listened to the ringing, crunching, breaking up. It was like a storm but not from above. It surrounded us. At some point, deep in the night, there was a strange, big sound that woke me from sleep. The dogs were sitting at the window; the puppy’s head was cocked to the side. I was too afraid to go to the window and see what they were seeing. The noise finally settled, and the night lay broad and uninterrupted after that. Sleep flattened my fear.

 

At dawn, we could see that the ice had broken up in the night. It was piled in tall cairns in the front yard and it pushed against the trees along the driveway. The water ran—open, seething, twisted gray and white water—so loud as to need to be yelled over. It hissed and boiled like static. With the dogs I walked around the piles of ice, some pieces a foot thick and stacked in piles six or seven feet tall. These heaps bordered the river; I had to climb to look down into the flood. Some of the ice was cut into bricks, and other pieces had been moved in huge, flat sheets, like countertops, and plowed through the yard to the distant pines. Our fire pit had been washed clean, erased; only the grass kept its char. I found pieces of the couch springs in the driveway and charcoal that had been pushed hundreds of feet away by the water.

 

Sometime in the night, the water had jumped out of its banks and knocked the ice back into the trees. The stream had used our driveway as a riverbed until it found its way back to the low ground by our mailbox. For some time in the night, we lived above a huge, rolling lake of ice and snowmelt, a flood, flashing through the land around us.

 

I found a brook trout resting on top of a stack of ice pieces like it had been placed there carefully. I took a picture of it with my phone. This beautiful, bright fish, recently dead and still colorful, six or seven inches long, ended up on top of the ice which had been its ceiling for months. I thought of its strange death, the fear of the flood, the shattering of the ice, the change of its worlds, its gasping for air in the cold night under the dark sky, raised up like an offering to the low clouds. It wasn’t transformation, the slow dawn I hoped for. The thought of the flood roaming our yard in the night scared me more than the endless cold of winter. I imagined water running under our home, under our bed, breaking through the trees, the flood erasing our coals, as if nothing we did mattered and no one would remember.

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Standoff

It was February, mid-afternoon and sunny, but the wind was blowing, and the sun wasn’t doing enough of what I needed it to do: smother the chill, whisper something warm in my ear, something about spring and starting over. I was back in my hometown, about an hour’s drive west of Philly, after thirty years away—kids in college, a divorce in the offing. The world thinks Pottstown is the kind of place people go to, or get stuck in, when they have limited options, the kind of place abandoned once upon a time by Bethlehem Steel, Firestone Tires, Mrs. Smith’s Pies, me, and people like me, the ones who went to college and didn’t come back. Until they did.

 

I was across town at the local radio station when I first heard about the standoff a couple of blocks from my house, and I got into my car and headed toward it. It wasn’t the first time I’d run toward confrontation. I was the tomboy who picked fights with the older boys, and for as long as I can remember I’ve also needed to know what was going on around me, what I myself might be up against. As I approached the area, I squeezed into an open parking spot on the street. In the rear view mirror I saw people standing on the corners behind me, just one long block from the SWAT truck and police vehicles stationed in front of the three-story, brick apartment building where all this was going down. I heard a series of bangs then, and something inside me stiffened. They sounded like gunshots, a sound I’d heard throughout my childhood as my dad test-fired weapons in his gun shop in our backyard in a residential neighborhood not far from where I now sat; he was a full-time German teacher then and a part-time gunsmith. I waited a few seconds. It was quiet, and I figured it must have been tear gas or something like that. The cops wouldn’t let all these people get that close if they could get hit by a stray bullet, right? So, I got out of the car.

 

I went up to a man and woman on the closest corner and asked what was going on. The woman was young, maybe in her twenties; she looked like she might have Down syndrome. She let the young man do all the talking, and he told me what I already knew: there was an armed man holed up in the Logan Court apartments. He’d been in a standoff with the police since that morning. I got the impression that they themselves had been there for hours. They weren’t holding hands. I don’t think their arms were even touching, but there they were, together, like sentries. They turned away from me and continued their vigil, staring ahead. My eyes followed. A SWAT team was poised behind an armored truck, which began to move, slowly turning and facing the apartment building head-on. A police car was nearby with officers hunched over the hood, weapons trained on the building.

 

On our corner a man in a navy work jacket and thick glasses arrived, along with a woman with reddish hair and crow’s feet. At first I took her to be his wife, something about the way she corrected him several times, the implications of ownership, how we’re allowed to do that to those closest to us, or how we slide into it, one person doing it, the other person accepting it. He was wearing a cap, though, so it was hard to discern his age and, at some point, it occurred to me that they could also be mother and son. Apparently, they lived in the building that was under siege—Building B—and they knew the gunman. He was their neighbor, Albert. They put him at about seventy years old with an arsenal in there.

 

Just the word—arsenal—made me think of the weapons that have always been a part of my dad’s life and our family’s life when I was young—his guns, his customers’ guns, the metal cases of ammo. All that firepower, all that just plain power, amassed to defend against “it,” my dad’s continued reference to some sort of anticipated invasion or revolution, the parameters of which seemed to change with the times. During my father’s childhood, the enemy was the German army, when all Americans were alert to the possibility of U-boats just off the coast. During my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s, the revolution might have involved black militants attempting to overthrow “decent” white society. During the Clinton administration, to my father “it” meant the U.S. government trying to take arms from its own citizens, in which case secret militias and individuals like him would have to fight it out in the streets against their own government. Or “it” might have meant the United Nations’ stripping sovereign nations of their military authority, forcing people like my father to defend themselves against an armed international agency. And in a post-9/11 world, “it” might be the “foreign” terrorists among us, or again, “lawless” black and Latino gangs, venturing from their cities to attack law-abiding citizens in the suburbs. I didn’t understand or agree with him on any of this—the fearsome “it” always haunting my father.

 

There at the standoff, a small amount of clear drool trickled from the left corner of the man’s mouth—the man in the navy work jacket—as he described some kind of metal framing around Albert’s doorway so no one could see inside his unit. I couldn’t really picture it, but I felt a sense of impingement, started to imagine Albert as a secretive, paranoid type who barely cracked his door open when anyone was in the hallway, and then I became aware of the way the bone cold of the pavement sent a chill all the way through me. I hadn’t planned on being outside for any length of time that afternoon. I hadn’t planned on being at a standoff. The man did not wipe away his drool, and I wondered if he was cold, too, or if his mouth was numb from dental work. He kind of talked like that. He mentioned that he had seen the police arrive that morning, but then he had to go to school. He would mention that again, a couple more times, while we’re all standing there—how he goes to school. At first, I assumed he meant college, but then I didn’t know. I mean, he never really said what kind of school.

 

Another neighbor joined us then. She was petite. Her hair was dark brown, dyed, and teased. Her teeth were bad. She was just a little thing, but she talked tough. She had a smoker’s voice and she was smoking as she talked. Every movement was quick and sharp. Inhale. Exhale. Her beady eyes darted here and there like a nervous bird’s. Puff. Puff. Apparently, Albert had had previous altercations with the building manager.

 

“That manager has got to go,” said Bird Woman. “This is ridiculous.”

 

It was implied, and the others murmured in agreement, that the building manager didn’t deal well with people, that things had been known to go missing from people’s apartments, that maybe he was partly responsible for Albert’s behavior. Not that anyone should ever shoot at someone else, but … still. The consensus of the group was that this was a waste of their tax dollars. Then, they turned on a dog. Apparently, a dog might have been at the root of it. Someone’s dog in their building. It would start barking early in the morning and it wouldn’t shut up. Albert got mad, complained to the manager, an argument ensued and escalated to the point where Albert shot a hole through his own door and the manager’s door across the hall. Supposedly, the shot through the doors did happen that morning, but it wasn’t clear to me if the dog’s barking was the actual inciting incident that morning, or if the current standoff was being conflated with other annoying, dog-barking episodes, arguments, and slammed doors.

 

It hit me then that I was in the midst of a self-selected society, or at least a subset of the self-selected society of the Logan Court Apartments, Building B, and they were letting me, a stranger, in on the particulars of their lives there, some of the comings and goings, the things they knew, or thought they knew, about Albert and the manager, the way a doorway was constructed, the way we can or can’t see inside people’s lives, the mystery of it all. This was what people did in times of crisis: huddle on the sidewalk and squint into a weak winter sun and try to make sense of it, worry about what might have been, the what-ifs. I definitely felt like an outsider. Or maybe I was dissociating in that moment. Maybe I was still too good at that, and that was why I felt this wasn’t really happening to me, except to the extent that I had grown up in this town and felt a kind of ownership of it; or to the extent that I had moved back in midlife and could see the back of Building B from the alley behind my rented house, where I parked my car; or to the extent that gun violence seemed to be a fact of life in these United States.

 

“It’s a yappy dog,” said Bird Woman. “A REAL yappy dog.” Puff. Puff.

 

Everyone nodded in agreement.

 

One of Bird Woman’s fingers was bleeding. When she swiped at her hair, she smeared blood across her right temple, a macabre kind of make-up. She was aware of the bleeding finger and periodically dabbed it against her coat, but none of us told her about the blood now on her face.

 

Down the street, the SWAT truck changed its position. The lid at the top lifted up and someone poked his head out. Men outside the truck moved as the truck moved, using it as a shield. The tank rolled slowly up over the curb and onto the grass, heading straight toward the building.  I couldn’t actually see the tank’s point of contact with the building, but it seemed to be backing up and going forward a few times, as though it were battering its way into the building. I wondered if everyone else was out of the building, and how the police could batter it without causing structural damage, and whether they were going to demolish the entire building just to get to Albert?

 

“How do they know if Albert is still in his unit?” I asked. “Could he move through the hallways, up the stairs, and shoot his way into another apartment?”

 

I was thinking he’d then have a sniper-perch from a second-floor window, in which case, we were all easy prey, just a couple hundred yards away. Just as I needed to be aware of my surroundings, I sometimes thought about the speed and paths and trajectories of bullets.

 

“Nah, there were cops in the stairwells this morning. He can’t move,” said the man who drooled and went to school.

 

It welled up in me then, unbidden, the memory of the mental fortress of my childhood, the feeling that someone was out to get us, our family, our dad, me, and it came to rest on Albert, the sense of his being trapped, pinned down by the police, a militia. Was this Albert’s “it?” Who did he think he was fighting right now? What did he think they were trying to take from him or do to him? If we could have looked out Albert’s window, through Albert’s eyes, what would we have seen? The police or someone else or some sort of monster? If he had, indeed, exchanged gunfire with police, then he must have had a death-wish. And I was struck again: He would not come out of there alive. When you got to that point, the point where Albert was at just then, how could you give up? How could you make it stop, the narrative running through your head, the one where the whole world is against you and right outside your window, pressing in, battering their way in? And let us be honest: Your manhood is at stake. Yours versus the guys’ in uniform, the ones who have rolled in their military vehicles to bring Albert to his knees.

 

Another woman joined the makeshift community on the corner, these partial witnesses, who lived up close to Albert, and me, the interloper, the eavesdropper. This woman’s elderly aunt lived in Building B and she didn’t know if she had been evacuated or where she was. She didn’t think her aunt would be able to handle this; it was too much.

 

At the radio station I’d just been interviewed about my new job as the executive director of a small, nonprofit, community land trust, albeit part-time, ten hours a week. I was between things then, without knowing what the next thing was, only the ones that were over: a long marriage, child-rearing, the silences, the words holed up in my head, trying to shoot their way out. The land trust’s first project was to build a community garden right in the middle of what was supposedly Pottstown’s most-troubled neighborhood—historically occupied by African-Americans in what was overwhelmingly rental housing, much of it subsidized, much of it rundown, in what had been the arena for a drug turf war during 2010 that had resulted in several shootings. Now here was this standoff taking place in the North End of town in 2012. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen here, where the white people lived, and it became a repeated refrain of the standoff audience: “I moved to that apartment [or this part of town] because I thought it was safe.”

 

They seemed to have forgotten about the armed robbery four months earlier and, literally, two blocks from where we were standing. The cashier at the Turkey Hill Minit Market was robbed at gunpoint the prior fall just after midnight. The police were on a stakeout—there’d been a rash of late-night, armed robberies of area Turkey Hills and other all-night convenience stores—and the police saw this one unfold. An African-American male with a white t-shirt over his head pointed what looked to be a handgun at the clerk. As the robber left the store, they told him to stop and drop the gun. He turned toward them, and they fired. It sounded very Wild West to me. The robber was struck in the leg, but managed to get away, leaving behind what was actually a BB gun. The police couldn’t find him for several hours. They roped off the street in front of my house. Helicopters with searchlights hovered overhead around 5:00 a.m., when he was finally located, bleeding, in the Presbyterian church one block over. I slept through the whole thing; sleep has always been my release.

 

These neighbors didn’t mention the Turkey Hill shooting, and now we all stood, voluntarily and in broad daylight, as close to danger as we were allowed to get, to men in uniforms with guns drawn, to a man with a gun or guns, who had snapped. There was no getting away from it, no neighborhood you could live in and get away from it. Well, no, I take that back. I knew there were places where money still insulated their residents from poverty and the rumbling aftershocks of poverty. I had lived in those places for thirty years. Anyway, you couldn’t get away from guns and violence in a place like Pottstown, couldn’t pretend it didn’t concern you. And, after all, there was danger all around, everywhere, not all of it having to do with guns. Most people don’t want to admit that. If you really thought about it, if you really faced up to it, how could you even get out of bed? How could you leave your house? To go to work, say, if you’re a woman. To be a person of color or an immigrant or someone who wears a hijab or a turban. For that matter, in a lot of cases, how could you stay in your house? You know what I mean. You go to enough memoir workshops, you teach enough adolescents, you listen to enough people talk about their lives, their childhoods, their parents, their partners, you really listen, you allow for the possibility of violence, and you begin to see what I mean. You read the newspaper, you read between the lines, you think back, you remember—you have to remember—if you do not want to remember what it was like to be a child, to interpret the world for the first time—your parents, other adults, other kids, the systems at work. If you do not want to remember what it was like to not know how they worked, what it was like to not know the rules, and the moment you started making one assumption or another, one interpretation or another, then, of course, you are not going to begin to see what I mean. There’s not much this story, or any story, can do for a person like that. You have to allow for the possibility.

 

At first, I thought it was mainly girls and women who were in danger in the world, and maybe that’s true enough anyway. Now, though, when I think about someone like Albert, I think about my father. I think about a little boy who was once in danger. I didn’t know who put Albert there, in Building B, surrounded, guns trained on him on February 9, 2012. I didn’t know if it was someone inside his house, someone outside his house. I’m talking about when he was a boy. So, of course, we can’t always know, because they don’t always know—someone like Albert, in Albert’s position during that standoff—and they’re the only ones who could tell us, but only if they know and, then, only if they want to tell.

—

Here’s a story: A six- or seven-year-old boy has to go down the street along the railroad tracks and around the corner into the firehouse to tell his dad to stop drinking and playing cards; it’s time to come home. One time he watches as the ambulance takes his dad away; he’s had so much to drink, he’s got the DTs. That’s how my dad put it when he told me this story a few years ago, around the time of the standoff. So many times my father has erased the stories of his father’s sometimes violent alcoholism with one line: “He was a good man.” Yes, in some ways I’m sure he was. And he drank too much, and he hit you, and you stuttered, and you pointed a loaded gun at him when you were sixteen and he’d been drinking and was coming after you, and he left you alone after that. And you’ve surrounded yourself with guns ever since. He was a flawed man, like the rest of us, and you loved him, like I love you.

 

“So,” I said to him after he told this particular story, “Your mom sends you out to bring your drunk father home on a regular basis. You watch your dad seizing up. You were just a little kid. We call that trauma, Dad.”

 

The blank look, then a shift, something coming into his eyes. My dad is not stupid. He is a reader and a storyteller with a beautiful singing voice. He is friendly and generous; his former students, relatives, and customers seek his counsel. He is really quite perceptive, but I could tell this was a whole new way of seeing the world, himself: vulnerable, trusting, the child he was before he ever had to look at his father in that condition, before he had to start making calculations about his own safety. His father’s steps heavy on the staircase leading up to his attic bedroom. Where is Richard? Where is he? This is what I mean about remembering, about wanting to remember. But in the end, how much does he want me to know or tell? He has told his stories to me out of order, and since they didn’t happen to me, I can be something of an editor and put them back in order and draw my own conclusions. Your father. Coming at you. The enormity of it. The stated enemies may have changed over the decades, but I can’t help but believe that my dad has armed himself his whole life for a standoff with his father, the real ones and all of the imagined ones.

 

We already know that domestic violence begets domestic violence, like sexual abuse and substance abuse, cycling through generations until it is consciously broken. And we are now learning of the correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings. I understand that my attempt to understand someone like Albert—and my father—makes me susceptible to accusations of pandering to white males, to giving them special dispensation perhaps because of mental illness, to accounting for their fragility. But I am not saying that Albert, or anyone who takes up arms against fellow citizens or the police, should get any special treatment in the moment or after the fact. I am not talking about letting them off the hook for their actions as adults. I’m talking about preventing them from being harmed in the first place, from feeling the need to pick up a gun and aim it at innocents, as if that will avenge the original harm. Or from feeling the need to own an arsenal, as if that will prevent additional harm. My grandfather has been dead for more than fifty years; he’s not coming for my dad ever again. And so, I wondered, and still wonder: What about Albert? All the Alberts? All the white men with guns? What to do about them? And more specifically, what to do about them when they are boys? People are mysteries, will always be mysteries, every single one of them, but I can’t let go of the notion that there are clues. There are always clues.

—

Before I left the standoff—I didn’t see how my waiting there in the cold meant anything—I ran into the Borough Council president and his wife, who lived on the block where we had all gathered.

 

“Congratulations on the new job,” he said. “I caught the tail end of your interview.” And then he said something like, “Thanks for moving back. It’s good to have you here.” The way he said it made it sound like he was referring to right then, at the standoff. You know, like he was glad there was, perhaps, a kind of outsider to be a witness. He knew I’d been gone for thirty years, knew I’d become the town’s cheerleader on a town blog I’d created, knew I’d been volunteering in several capacities. What he could not have known was that these gigs were a limbo for me— my own standoff with the things closing in on me: middle age and the whole of my childhood, the need to make meaning, to make sense of the past before I could make some new future.

—

In the end Albert did give in. The paper said his full name was Albert J. Dudanowicz. He wasn’t seventy; he was fifty-six, not much older than I was at the time. He had shot through the manager’s door, but there was nothing about the yappy dog, nothing about Albert’s mental state. It turned out there was no arsenal either, although he had a .50-caliber Smith and Wesson five-shot pistol and a Remington .375 H & H bolt-action rifle, which was powerful enough to kill an elephant, according to the paper. It was reported that he was bleeding from one hand, where a sniper had hit him. The photo in the paper showed a burly white man, alive, walking, unshaven, his chest naked, massive spotlights shining on him, darkness around the edges.

 

Three weeks later, a local reporter pelted Albert with questions in an online video taken as he left a hearing.

 

“Albert, do you have anything to say?” she asked. “You want to apologize? Why’d you shoot at those police officers that day? You’re not sorry? Why wouldn’t you come out of your apartment? No apology? You’re not going to apologize?”

 

Rat-a-tat-tat. She sprayed him with questions.

 

Albert’s beard was full then. His right hand was heavily bandaged. He shuffled from the chains around his ankles. His eyes didn’t seem to see, and then he cast them downward. At first, he whimpered, and it was high-pitched, until all the whimpers started running together, animal-like and wounded.

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A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard

My brother has always had a knack for crafting memorable metaphors from complex ideas. He tells me this one about my mother’s Adult-onset Leukodystrophy—the disease then in its earliest, most unnoticeable stage—when I am young, maybe eight, and I remember it forever.

 

The myelin sheath is a greatly extended and modified plasma membrane wrapped around the nerve axon in a spiral fashion. Picture it as a hose.

 

A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard. Imagine the hose is green; the yard, too. At the crank of a wrist, fresh, clean water sprints up from the property’s subsystem, glides through the casing, and pours itself into place effortlessly. Prior to appearing at the spout, water is an unthought. The ground drinks up. Grass and flowers flourish.

 

But eventually, the hose begins to peel; its vibrant green wears. Yes, all hoses deteriorate over time, but this one specifically has a certain defect that makes it deteriorate faster.

 

Are you following?

 

Deterioration. A hundred holes leak fresh, clean water. There is nothing wrong with the water, it just doesn’t get to the spout and therefore the grass.

 

. . . so the myelin sheath is like the hose, right, and Mom’s neurotransmitters—or the messages from her brain—are like the water that’s supposed to flow through the hose and arrive at the grass, except it keeps leaking out. Does that make sense?

 

 

I remember this. I repeat it and relay it to a select few throughout my childhood: a best friend, a teammate, and once a grade-school teacher I shouldn’t have told. It spilled out how lies do, nervous and quick.

 

Signed proof by a parent that I had done my homework—that was the hurdle I was trying to clear when my tongue tripped me up and I went down a precocious-sounding rabbit hole on the intricacies of the Leukodystrophy and the function of the myelin sheath.  I was in fifth grade and had forged my mom’s signature, something I’d done tens of times before and never felt bad about. It was a ridiculous requirement. Of course I had done my homework, it was right there in my handwriting. Why all the extra red tape?

 

The overbearing administrative aspects of school irritated me and my mom both. When she first learned of the new nightly oath demanded from her, she flippantly filled four weeks of pages at once with her initials. My teacher, Mr. Smith, took notice of this when he looked through my assignment book the next day and sent a snarky note home explaining to her how that wasn’t the point of the exercise and if she could please just cooperate and sign nightly, that’d be great. Instead, my Mom, a teacher herself, and I, a rambunctious but nonetheless A-student, entered into a kind of low-key rebellion together: she taught me to forge her signature.

 

With practice, she coached me on the rounded curve of a capital n and taught me how to loop a lowercase y. She handed me an interest in untangling letters and an attraction for working them back together. Excavated from this experience were my first small associations of art with pen and of pen with protest. Why sign on the dotted line when you can sign through it? By now, I have written my mother’s name a thousand times; it is an act of love. Still, I practice it.

 

For months, the forging was a non-issue until suddenly it was. Mr. Smith was intimidating and I was ten. His voice boomed when he yelled, and I knew he just didn’t like me. I had a propensity for talking without raising my hand, shirking the rules, and just kind of being a high maintenance student in general. He must have been waiting for a reason to let me have it. So, one day in early spring when I routinely handed in my homework and showed him my assignment book that held an unusually messy—and of course forged—signature (I had fallen into the sloppy trap of comfort), he challenged its validity.  I froze.

 

He asked if it was my mom’s signature: Yes that’s it wasn’t enough to appease him. Then he asked again. And again, giving me that look that told me he just knew, and I, feeling as if I had nowhere else to go, mumbled down a path about my mom having Leukodystrophy, which made it so her handwriting was sometimes poor. At that, his voice and eyebrows rose and he said Leuko-what? There was no turning back. I picked up speed: Yeah it’s because of neurotransmitters and this thing the myelin sheath . . . We all have it, but hers is deteriorating . . . So it’s like a hose, right . . .

 

I went through the whole metaphor.

 

He was disarmed out of confusion and let the challenge go, but I held onto it for weeks, angry at myself in cycles for letting out secrets I knew not to under the slightest, most selfish pressure; for betraying my family’s trust. See, my mom worked as a teacher in the same school district, and while her condition was only just beginning to show in brief, elusive bouts, we were explicitly told to never, ever discuss it with anyone.

 

For weeks I waited nervously for the moment I’d be found out. I imagined my mom waiting for me when I arrived home, arms folded in disappointment, or maybe it would come through in the form of a call during dinnertime from Mr. Smith or an administrator to my father: Mr. Chen? Yes, we’re calling about Mrs. Chen’s Leukodystrophy. We know all about it.

 

And then what exactly would happen? I didn’t know for sure, I just worried about it happening at all. Later, I learned that my parents were concerned my mom wouldn’t get tenured if the district knew she had a neurodegenerative disease. We were all on her insurance.

 

The anxieties of secrecy root inward early and become near-impossible to purge. In fifth grade, I not only knew what the myelin sheath was, but I had been disappointed with myself for talking about it with the wrong person and worried about who might find out that I spilled the beans. Some grade-school gossip that was.

 

Weeks after the event, I would finally find relief. I arrived home on a Friday, hands full of dandelions.

 

Put your weeds down, will ya? Hurry up and come inside. It was my brother, waiting for me on the front steps. I couldn’t understand how a flower so perfectly bright could count as a weed, but before I could defend the wrongfully categorized, he ushered me inside quick.  Mom and Dad have big news!

 

Inside, the sun-filled kitchen felt as light as the outdoors actually was. There was a pitcher of lemonade on the table and an already-dug-into plate of cheese and crackers. The whole family sat down in our unofficial spots on the big white cornered couch in the living room where we always had important conversations. Usually it was where I was spoken to when in trouble. In that moment, despite the mounting anxiety of Mr. Smith and the myelin sheath, I knew I wasn’t. Finally, my dad spoke: he was quitting his job up in New York and taking a shot at starting his own business around town. This was huge news.

 

I now realize it was less about business, and more about being home for Mom—for us—as the Leukodystrophy progressed, but at the time, we were all elated nonetheless. To be home together as a family.

 

Oftentimes, the only way to rid oneself of a big anxiety is to occupy oneself with a bigger excitement. From that moment, I never worried about Mr. Smith again.

 

Life felt new. I forgot my mishaps and forgave myself. Summer arrived. All July and August that year, in the evenings, Mom and Dad drank wine on the deck—or in the garage if there was a thunderstorm on. Jesse and I indulged in endless cheese-and-cracker plates and got along. On the best days, we’d connect the garden hose to the sprinkler and run through over and over again, not once thinking about a disease of any kind. Sometimes, we’d chalk the entire driveway. Sunflowers, hopscotch, the usual. Once, I covered the entire front steps with my mother’s name, a hundred perfect signatures. When my masterpiece was finally complete, I called her to come see. Look, Mom, I can really write your name perfectly now.

 

It’s great, sweetheart, she replied, now let me see you write yours.

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Two Views of Florida

Rita Ciresi is our 2017 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook contest winner
for her collection of micro-stories Second Wife,
published in cooperation with Burrow Press
and available for purchase here.

 

I. The first time I hear the thudding overhead—so loud the windowpanes vibrate—I think someone’s rooting around upstairs. Then I remember we’ve just moved to Florida, our house is one-story, and we don’t have an attic.

 

A squirrel must be trapped in the upper wall, or gutter, or one of those weird parts of the house I didn’t even know existed until the home inspector walked us through the property, speaking in what to me was a foreign language:  check throat, cricket, fascia, scuttle, scuncheon.   

 

Since moving to the Sunshine State, I’ve gotten myself into a heap of trouble calling 9-1-1:  after I spotted a long, slithery snake in our backyard (“This is Florida, ma’am,” the dispatcher told me, “and they live here too.”) and when I spotted black smoke belching in the distance (“This is Florida, ma’am, and that’s called a controlled burn.”)

 

What would the dispatcher tell me this time:  This is Florida, ma’am, where burglars are common as alligators or This is Florida, ma’am, and you better get used to raccoons burrowing in your soffit?

 

The thudding continues, finally becoming so insistent I could swear Santa and his reindeer are on the roof four months too early.  I slip on my sandals and walk into the blazing sunlight.

 

On the ridge of our roof sit half a dozen black birds.  Buzzards or vultures?  They weren’t included on the home inspection tour, so I’m not sure what to call them, except grim and ugly.  Each has a hooked nose.  Beady eyes.  And a glossy feathered body that must weigh forty pounds.

 

Why are they on our roof and not our neighbors’? Don’t they know I’m superstitious enough to take them as a warning sign?  But of what—a lightning storm?  a sinkhole?  hurricane?  death?

 

Shoo, I say.  Like they’re cats or rats.  Shoo.

 

When that doesn’t work, I wing one of the pebbles lining the pathway onto the roof.  The noise startles one bird into hopping onto our neighbors’ roof.

 

Five rocks later, and the rest have moved over.

 

I go back inside, satisfied I’ve chased those birds off.  But this is Florida, ma’am.  It doesn’t take long to find out that just like hail and lightning, sinkholes and hurricanes, the buzzards will keep coming back.

 

II. Every Sunday morning we hear them coming. First the neighborhood dogs herald their arrival with a volley of angry barking. Then comes a hiss of flames and a pneumatic rush, as if God were pumping a huge set of bellows overhead.

 

The fleet of hot air balloons flies over our suburban Florida development at sunrise, their bulging fabric envelopes gaudy against the muted swath of pink and blue sky. The first is Easter-egg purple and forsythia yellow. The second, a neon-orange tomato. The next is an emerald green worthy of Dorothy Gale’s fabled ride from Oz back to Kansas. The last is studded with red, white, and blue stars and stripes.

 

Our dogs are gun dogs—bred not to startle at the crack of a rifle—so while our neighbors’ poodles and Chihuahuas and dachshunds yap at the balloons, our golden retrievers keep on sleeping. But I always step outside and look up. Sometimes the balloons fly low enough so I can see miniature people standing in their baskets. Once a bride in a white dress and a groom in a tux toasted me with a glass of champagne.

 

In just a few moments, the balloons will descend to the empty field behind our house. The baskets will bump to the grass and the fabric slowly deflate into colorful puddles. Yet for these precious few moments, every Sunday morning, they glide overhead. And I too soar.

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The Devil in Your Pants

Lying in my sleeping bag, I thought of three things: black eyes, round asses, and God. The boys from my youth group were stuffed in the storage room of a Protestant church. The girls were isolated down the hall. Sleep was impossible, but on the first night of our divine mission my restlessness was given a reprieve. Our leader, Geri, burst in screeching with an issue of Cosmo squashed in her fist.

 

Geri had to have been in her early twenties, but to us kids, she carried all the wisdom of the Lord. She routinely searched our belongings, and one of the girls had been cavalier enough to buy a secular—satanic—magazine at a pit stop on our bus ride from Sarasota to Miami. The girl cried outside in the hall.

 

“I want to send her home,” Geri said, “but it’s too late for that.” Her eyes welled up. “We’re here for a very important reason. We can’t let anything separate us from God. We’re here for Him.”

 

Geri had little breakdowns like that all the time. She’d shed tears for us kids whenever she smoked a cigarette: “I know with every puff Jesus suffers longer.”

 

I made sure I wasn’t exposing myself and walked over to her. “You would really send her back?”

 

She put her hand on my shoulder. This aroused me. As much as I was afraid of her, she gave me more attention than any of the girls in my middle school.

 

“Yes, Brett.” Her hair was messy and gold. “Don’t you realize the promise we made?”

 

Oh, I made a promise all right. I promised to give up everything for God: my possessions, dreams, thoughts—my goddamn identity. I was part of something larger than myself, or some bullshit like that. In order to finance the ugly school bus we took from Sarasota to Miami, I spent all summer mowing yards and raking leaves. I had entered a black hole for Jesus, and I was charged with saving pagan souls from it. That was our mission.

 

“I’ll pray this doesn’t happen again,” she said.

 

Everyone thanked her, not knowing what else to do, and then we returned to our polyester masturbation tombs. I wrapped up tight, touching my groin, but not loud enough for anyone to hear. The thick sleeping bag warmed my twig and acorns. Closing my eyes, I tugged my member and thought of Geri, but my rodeo was silent. I’d learned another kind of stealth at school. To prevent a fist from crashing into the back of my head, I studied my tormentors’ routines, let them walk down the hall before I did. I used the bathroom during class instead of on breaks to keep my head out of the toilet. I was a ninja at avoiding bullies, just not defending myself from them.

 

This was why I made my promise to Jesus. I would save souls in exchange for him saving me. Geri had seemed a strange instrument for his salvation, but I attempted not to question God. As long as the beatings stopped, the Lord could ferry Daffy Duck down from heaven to save me.

 

The next day we met the Miami pastor. He bounced in his chair and yanked tiny, green things from his beard. “I was a pimp,” he began. “I sold women. I sold myself. I worked as an enforcer sometimes.” He shook his head. “It’s not pleasant, hurting people.” After wrenching himself from the chair, he trudged back and forth and told us the tale of how he found Jesus.

“My wife and I were watching TV. The Preacher opened our hearts. Now I live for God.”

 

That’s right. A televangelist convinced him to love Jesus (and give up his money). This seemed completely normal to me at the time. God works in mysterious ways, they said. I worked all summer, so I could be shipped to Miami and sleep on the floor of a church whose pastor was a pimp.

 

This pimp was a hell of lot preferable to my best friend back home. A few months prior my best friend had punched me in the face during a laser light show. I disagreed with him about music, and so I lost the skin under my eyes. It was minor compared to what I was accustomed to, so I still slept over at his place that weekend. At least he didn’t beat me up all the time.

After the pastor finished, we handed out pamphlets in neighborhoods with windows shielded by iron bars. People either cussed us out or shared their mutual love of Jesus–ultimately accomplishing nothing. It was either A) “I love Jesus TOO” or B) “Fuck off, children.”

 

There was one miracle, however. Geri wore tiny little silk shorts that showed off her pumpkin-sized booty. It was that day I discovered my sexual orientation: big-booty-o-sexual. I wasn’t Catholic, but my personal Protestantism had its only holy trinity: the father, the son, and Sir-Mix-a-Lot.

 

Geri turned to me. “We’re saving a lot of lives today, Brett.”

 

“No one’s really changed their mind.”

 

She gripped my wrists. “God knows what he’s doing.”

 

I nodded. Her words calmed me, and I really believed them. God was looking down on us, admiring his chosen instruments doing his work. And how could I not be spellbound by this delusion? It was a relief to be away from the kids back home dragging me across the baseball field by the legs. No one flicked my ears from the desk behind me. No one sucker-punched me for my lunch money. I didn’t have to endure a room full of kids laughing at my gym attire because someone broke into my locker during P.E. and stole my clothes. Sure, people slammed their doors in our faces, but it was heavenly compared to physical assault. If following Geri’s bouncing cinnamon buns under the light of God wasn’t deliverance, I didn’t know what was.

 

After wasting paper all day, our traveling circus lingered at a basketball court. Geri was still riled up like a crack fiend, but our other youth group leader, a self-important prick named Chuck, decided we needed a rest. Unlike Geri, Chuck had no redeeming qualities. Unless you count being old and rich as redeeming. He never let up on me. Every night, he barked at me about my untidy sleeping bag or lectured me about the evils of loose women and The Simpsons. His favorite topic of conversation was about how much money he donated to our church back home. “Kept it alive,” he said.

 

On the court, a boy rimmed out a shot and said, “Shit.” Chuck whispered “Shoot” to make sure our ears hadn’t been soiled, which made me want to shout “Eat a dick” into his tender lobes. Instead I read through the pamphlet for the twentieth time. The kid cursed again, and Chuck shook his head like he just heard about a baby getting run over by a truck.

 

On the way back to the labor camp, we passed a voodoo shop. Well, in retrospect it was probably just a store that sold bongs and Ouija boards, but Chuck and Geri steered us away from it like it was Satan’s private sex dungeon. I broke rank and ran over to it.

 

“Brett, stop. It’s too dangerous,” Chuck cried.

 

I didn’t look back. I’d made no progress knocking on doors, and if I could save just one soul from the fiery pits of hell, I’d march right into the heart of the devil’s ballsack, and all the schoolyard beatings would be worth it. Chuck could swallow his words along with his fluffy mustache for all I cared. I marched into the shop and tossed the pamphlet on the counter in front of the clerk.

 

The guy behind the counter eyeballed it, and then he winced at me for a few seconds before hissing, “Out… OUT.”

 

Back at the church, Geri, Chuck, and the pastor went at me three-on-one.

 

“You need to listen when we tell you not to do something,” said Chuck.

 

“This isn’t why we came here,” said Geri.

 

The pastor quivered, his face paling. “There are some places too dangerous to go, son. Demons stalk their walls.”

 

I looked at Geri. “Isn’t this what we came here for?”

 

She walked over to a table and sat down.

 

The pastor continued. “There is war between light and darkness. We can save some from the darkness, but we can’t enter it.”

 

I walked over to Geri. “Why shouldn’t we try to save everyone?”

 

She mumbled something and shook her head.

 

“This isn’t why we came here,” she repeated.

 

“Then why did we then?” I asked.

 

“Don’t talk back to adults,” said Chuck.

 

The pastor paced around. “Demons,” he said. “Darkness. War.”

 

I wouldn’t leave Geri. “Shouldn’t we try to save, you know, everybody?”

 

She stood up from the table and said, “We don’t know God’s plan,” before leaving the room.

 

“Brett, I told you—”

 

“Yes, Chuck. You’re right.” I whispered cock face under my breath.

 

As I walked back to my sleeping quarters, the pastor kept on. “Devil’s home. Can’t cross the line.”

 

This was the first time Geri had ever not known God’s plan. She was my constant in deciphering what the Almighty wanted from us.

 

My first memory of her was when I was twelve. She supervised children making crafts for a pageant at my church. As I cut through red construction paper, she asked me if I was going to heaven.

 

This struck me as a silly question. I hadn’t murdered anyone, and hell was for really bad people.

 

“Actually, real Christians ask Jesus to come into their hearts,” she told me.

 

“And ones that don’t go to hell?”

 

“You can’t enter God’s kingdom without asking Him to come into your heart.”

 

That a particular phrase must be uttered, like a password, to get into heaven short-circuited my radio to Jesus. I was an adolescent, and she spoke like someone who knew shit, so I bought it.

 

Jesus, please come into my heart.

 

I said the phrase. Jesus, please come into my heart. Jesus, please come into my heart. Jesus, please come into my heart. Was I glad to have that task scratched off my list! I imagined hell as a giant desert with people burning on stakes as a minotaur poked them with pitchforks. That I might fry there for all eternity for not saying the right phrase made my bladder hurt.

After I became accustomed to being in the saying-the-right-phrase club, I annoyed my friends into saying it too. Do you accept Jesus into your heart? You have to accept him into your heart.

 

But I didn’t really know what that meant. Not exactly.

 

With the beatings I took from other kids in school, day after day, year after year, the main thing that brought me any relief was biking over to the local comic book shop every month and reading the latest issue about the mutant team. I didn’t have many friends, especially ones I could count on, but I did have my comic books. One day, I snuck an X-Men comic in at youth group. Not wanting to be scolded, I hid it in my jeans under my t-shirt.

 

Spotting a lump in my jeans, Geri loomed over me.

 

“Brett, what did you bring into this holy place?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

“It looks like you have something there. Hand it over.”

 

I didn’t budge.

 

Geri leaned close. “You got the devil in your pants. Don’t ya?” Her hot breath made the hairs on my arms rise.

 

“What?”

 

“The devil. You got the devil in your pants.” She glared at the lump in my pants as a smaller lump grew beside it.

 

I shook my head no.

 

“Give it over.” She extended a firm hand.

 

Taking a last look at Wolverine on the cover, I relinquished it. “It’s just a comic book,” I said.

 

She scanned the pages with fire in her eyes. “You shouldn’t have brought this here. I’m going to store it away for safekeeping.”

 

“You’re not going to give it back?” My neck tightened up.

 

“No. You don’t need things that take you away from God.”

 

“It doesn’t.”

 

She grinned. “Then why can’t you give it up?”

 

“Because. Because I love it.”

 

“Exactly,” she retorted and walked off with my comic book.

 

I followed her. “You can’t take that from me.”

 

“You lost it the second you brought it here.”

 

My body trembled. “You can’t take it.”

 

“If you won’t sacrifice all your earthly possessions to Jesus then you haven’t really taken him into your heart.”

 

“So, I’ll go to hell if I don’t stop reading comics?”

 

She became solemn. “Anyone who doesn’t fully give themselves to God will go to hell.”

 

All I had were those comics.

 

“Give it back or I’ll leave youth group forever.”

 

She laughed. “Don’t be silly, Brett.”

 

“I mean it.”

 

“We’ll see about that.”

 

When I left that night, I thought I’d never return. A few weeks later, however, my rebellious spirit broke, and I was back listening to diatribes about the evils of rap music and Bill Clinton. I read comics less often, and when I did allow myself to sin a little I couldn’t indulge my superhero thirst without pangs of guilt sullying the experience.

 

On our mission trip our main targets for convincing others to say the magical phrase ended up being the children of parents who couldn’t afford daycare. The little nuggets were left for us to attend to at the church. One boy in particular stood out to me. He had dark bruises on his arms and didn’t play with the other children. As I tried to get him to smile, an alarm blared inside me. When you’ve been through enough abuse, it’s easy to recognize it.

 

The other kids in the youth group either didn’t notice or didn’t care. They were happy preaching that Jesus was Lord and savior to kids, many who were Hispanic and could barely speak a lick of English. When it was clear I couldn’t save the bruised kid’s skin, I tried to save his soul. I had no such luck. He wouldn’t say a word. The other youth members managed to get their prospective clients to say the phrase. The kids had no idea what they were saying, but that didn’t stop the youth group from celebrating like heroes.

 

Later that night, we held hands in a prayer circle. Geri wasted no time lamenting our wickedness. “I’m so sorry, God,” she said. “I’m sorry for all of our sinning. We don’t deserve you, but we will be your instrument.” It wasn’t long before the tears were flowing.

 

Another teenager in the youth group, Damian, leaned over to me. “How broken is your instrument?” he asked.

 

I smothered laughter as Geri wailed on.

 

“Help us, Lord. Use these children,” she said with tears plopping down her face. “Now sing, everyone.” She started for us: “Our God—” she sang through her snivels, “is an awesome God—.” Snot poured down her chin. “He reigns”—I closed my eyes— “from Heaven above” —she crooned, “with wisdom, power, and love—.”

 

Damian snickered, but I kept my head down.

 

“Our God—is an awesome God.”

 

Damian patted me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes as she repeated the refrain, and a long thread of snot swung back and forth from her nose. It almost reached her legs, but the booger didn’t break.

 

She returned to prayer. “Jesus, help us. Guide us.” The snot swung even more precariously.

 

I bit my hand to keep myself from laughing, but when I looked over at Damian we both lost it. Our laughter didn’t stop her, though. She finished her prayer, snot dangling from her nose like a limp dick.

 

After waking from another night tickling my balls so quietly you’d think I was tunneling my way out of prison, Geri invited me to make crafts with her. She wanted to decorate the church. I agreed, but the forbidden nature of the voodoo shop still bothered me.

 

“I’m proud how much you’ve grown as a Christian,” she said.

 

“You think so?”

 

“You’ve come a long way.” She stared at me intensely.

 

“Have I?”

 

She put her hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s hard. Maybe when we get back to Sarasota you can come over and have a beer sometime.”

 

I didn’t know how to respond to this offer.

 

“We can talk about whatever you want,” she said.

 

A numbness spread through my chest. “What would you do if you were given proof that there was no God?”

 

Cocking her head to the side, she said, “But that’s impossible because God is real.”

 

“Yeah,” I said, “but what if there was proof that He didn’t exist?”

 

She gazed up at the ceiling and shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine my life without God. I guess if that happened, I’d just believe in Him anyway.”

 

I sleepwalked through the last two days of converting Miami’s doomed sinners into Christians. By that point we had all the children standing on a stage together and repeating the line in unison: I accept Jesus into my heart. I accept Jesus into my heart. I accept Jesus into my heart.

 

While the rest of the youth group beamed and said things like “It’s a miracle” and “Praise Jesus,” I just sat in silence watching the bruised boy. He remained silent. The image of him is still seared into my memory: dirty hair and bruised eyes. On the last day, I approached Geri.

 

“I know something bad is happening to him,” I told her.

 

“Just focus on saving him,” she said.

 

I couldn’t save him or Geri. I couldn’t even save myself.

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Postscript, Nighthawks

In the Spring 2017 issue of The Florida Review, we featured our 2016 Editors’ Awards winners and finalists,
including Robert Stothart’s near-fantastical yet thoroughly realistic essay “Nighthawks.”
For the beginning of 2018, we give you this postscript, which highlights the fragility of life,
yet the perseverance of friendship, fascination, and the healthy ability to look both
back and forward, and to keep our sanity through all kinds of soul-challenges.

 

My essay “Nighthawks” isn’t really about the bird itself; rather, it’s about what came to mind after seeing an extraordinary descent of nearly a hundred of those birds out of the sky and into our yard to catch tiny drops of water from our lawn sprinkler as smoke from wildfires all across the West reddened the sky at sunset. After The Florida Review published the essay, a box of extra copies arrived. I sent some out to friends across the country and delivered a few to neighbors along Owl Creek Road in Wyoming, where we now live.

 

Just a couple of days later, while walking east down our road, I found a nighthawk on the edge of the blacktop. This was shortly after sunrise, the low sun blinding, so I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. A road kill of some sort. A bird. But it looked alive, sitting in front of me, its wings crossed motionless across its back.

 

When I picked it up, I found the body flexible, unbroken, and unblemished. No blood, not even a bent feather. But dead. Its tiny claws, a delicate blue gray, intricately articulated for grasping, reached out motionless and empty. When I turned the bird over, tan and white chest stripes suggested some kind of little owl. Our road is aptly named, and there are some very tiny owls. But the head seemed much too small, and the beak tinier still, not at all owl-like. When I unfolded the long and pointy wings, I saw at once the bold white stripe across each. I knew then, without question: Nighthawk.

 

I wanted to take it home and preserve it, but not as a trophy. There are enough of those lifted out of the Wyoming landscape. I wanted to keep it so that I could look at it and think more about it. I wanted to study it in stillness after first seeing it in that great rush, down out of the sky. A totem perhaps, an animal that Claude Lévi-Strauss says is chosen not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think.”

 

I studied the bird as I walked the last mile home, carrying it in a small nest that I made with my hands. I turned it over. The underside was geometrical with those parallel chest stripes, but over the dark wing edge onto the back, the geometry gave way to drab colors in wilderness chaos. The back and head blended in masterful dense, dark camouflage.

 

I walked through the door and briefly lifted the nighthawk to show my wife, but went immediately online to look up preserving dead birds, like looking up how to cook a turkey for one’s first Thanksgiving away from home. I worried that I’d have to cut it open and remove the internal organs, though I think I would have done that.

 

At first, I found information on preserving body parts—claws, heads, and wings. Then finally how to preserve a whole bird. A quick survey of instructions online made it look simple: spread a bed of borax in a tight box and pack the body of the bird under a thick mound of borax, then close the box for six weeks. The borax would apparently draw out and absorb all the body fluids. I stopped, however, when I noticed several websites warned that I might need a permit. Fines for possession of certain species are steep, even threatening significant jail time.

 

I called Game and Fish for Hot Springs County. They gave me the number to the office in Cheyenne, our state capital. The state capital said to call Denver and the Feds for our district in the Rocky Mountains:

 

Nighthawks are a protected species. Yes, you will need a permit even before picking up the bird.

 

I already picked it up. It’s right here on my desk.

 

You’re in violation.

 

Can I get a permit?

 

You already picked it up. You’re already in violation. Are you Native American?

 

No, but I worked for a tribe in Washington State for ten years.

 

Doesn’t count. Are you associated with a museum?

 

No, but I’ve been a member of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West since 2000.

 

Doesn’t matter. Would you be using this bird for educational purposes?

 

I just wrote an essay on nighthawks.

 

That’s a stretch. We have a backlog of permits right now. A permit will take at least two months. Will you be using the preserved bird for at least twelve presentations a year, each of which would require a written follow-up?

 

No. So what should I do?

 

You’re already in violation.

 

Should I put it back on the road? (I was kidding.)

 

If someone were to see you and report you, the fine would be substantial.

 

I live thirty miles out of town. I’m not going to put it back on the road. What should I do?

 

You should burn or bury the carcass.

 

Thanks for your help. 

 

I emailed my friend Rob Koelling. I’d sent him a copy of my essay. He loves birds with a passion and is skilled in observing them. He is a master at catching a distinctive image plucked from their flight or from their rest. He goes out taking their pictures whenever he can, in all lights and weathers. Recently, however, he has been at home caring for his wife, who is seriously ill. We haven’t seen each other for nearly three years. When I email him, he frequently replies with pictures of birds, some from his archives or some of birds he’s recently spotted off his back porch. He emails when he can, sometimes after long silences.

 

Within a few hours this time, however, I received this email:

 

Coincidence? I got out for the first time in a while to take some photos. I stopped by a dead cottonwood near the road to look at a western kingbird’s nest.  Then I noticed the nighthawk. It has been years since I’ve seen one of these guys sitting still.

 

He attached his picture:

 

 

Totem, from the Ojibwe, indoodem: my clan.

 

I took the nighthawk to a cottonwood that leans out over a dry wash, far back on our place. It’s near our south fence that borders grazing land of the Shoshone and Arapaho. I placed the small bird up in a sort of nest of twigs, shadowed with overhanging leaves. A Coast Salish man up near the Canadian border told me a long time ago that when you want something that you’ve found, something that seems left behind or abandoned, you need to put it in a tree overnight. I’d asked for a baby blanket that belonged to his two-year-old nephew for whom I’d just served as pallbearer. If it’s there the next morning, he said, you are supposed to keep and care for it. If it’s gone, you weren’t supposed to have it.

 

My granddaughter’s one-eyed dog followed me out to the cottonwood. I can see the tree from my back porch. The dog and I are the only ones who know where the nighthawk is.

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City of Bridges

 

And groping arms and thick strong legs; city of salmon-pink and dusty-orange buildings; and boats and bicycles and busses; subway cars that climb out of the ground in Gamla Stan, Old Town, to a tangle of crooked, cobbled side streets and the monkfish mouths of muted alleys.

 

Stockholm. City of the brackish Baltic Sea, where bare-breasted women sidestroke the gentle currents of the quiet canals and old men fish for herring near the castle. The city that took me in at twenty-two and refuged me for ten years more: invandrare, in wanderer, legal alien, where I grew a second tongue that struggled with certain sounds that resembled the shh in hush now baby don’t you cry, but wasn’t. Where I grew up, grew teeth; grew a pair; grew snakes from my head—harmless; grew a new heart for every old heart I’d lost under solitary lampposts on the south side of town, near the shops that sold vintage guitars and that cluttered used bookstore, where I found James Baldwin, ex-patriot, queer, who had discovered what it means to be an American, in Paris, in Sweden, in a dog-eared paperback, in English.

 

City of red busses running on time, from Slussen to Hasseludden, to Benny’s house, to every room a view of the sea; where we slept in on Saturdays and woke to white boats ferrying summer tourists and the morning paper and strong coffee, new potatoes in summer, lilacs in spring, and fish stew laced with saffron, heavy on the cream. Then Benny died of that virus and his house caught fire from a bird nest in the wires. An accident, the fire crew said, no one to blame; smoke damage only, the structure remained sound.

 

My city: stalwart, patient, knowing I have been faithful in my absence, knowing I will return one day, after dogwood but before lilac, to seek out the place where I first heard the blackbird sing with a woman who could never be true but whom I loved nonetheless. There, I will take stock of my life outside its city walls, these years of return, the hero’s call come to a comfortable close after all that fuss over umlauts and broken hearts, when all that really mattered were the canals and cobbled streets, the bridges I could never cross over. They were beautiful; they were all beautiful—like the decorative compass roses on outdated maps.

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Balance

Mud

 

 

The strange thing isn’t the mud—it’s the formal pose, her neutral, detached expression in this obviously abnormal situation. Her composure is the anomaly, and I have to admit I admire her strength, her ability to transcend the situation, her power over physical discomfort. If I ponder the idea of her long enough I can almost forget about the mud, until I look at the image again and then the central conflict of the photograph pulls me back in, makes me uncomfortable—the tension between my expectations of what a portrait should look like and the messy reality of this photo at odds with each other, as stark as the dark mud, her damp hair and white hoody. Her eyes open wide, unflinching.

 

And yet flinching is what this woman did most of the time: flinched at her boyfriend’s moods, flinched at the judgment of a community that expected everything and nothing from its members. They were trying to live well at a hot- springs resort in a small valley, where it rained almost every day in the winter. The dampness seeped into everything. So, one day, when the rains became Biblical, the river crested the walls of the bathhouse; when the waters receded, a foot of mud covered the walkway, filled the claw foot tubs.

 

She pitched in, like everyone else—wielding a shovel, grunting at the weight of the mud. Her boyfriend took out his camera.  To show her team spirit, her upbeat attitude, she smeared the muck across her face, though they found out later it contained poison ivy. She dared not smile or the mask would crack. It’s the only photo where she looks the photographer straight in the face without grinning a self-conscious, lopsided smile. The earth highlighted her eyes, made of her a figure that simply exists in the world without apology.

 

Balance

 

 

Did you ever really see her in person? The woman in her sequined leotard leading the bedazzled horse into the ring? Did you hear the muffled roar of spectators, smell popcorn and dirt and elephants, feel the dusty light spear in through gaps in the tent flaps?

 

Probably not, but you feel as though you perched ringside as this woman stepped toe-first along the perimeter, one arm unfurled in a gesture that said, look here, prepare to be amazed! At first she simply vaulted in one smooth motion onto the horse’s bare back, rode the creature into a loping gallop, then, quick as a blink, stood up and balanced on the horse’s spine. Smiling, always smiling, the ta da! of her arms and the crowd roaring in approval. She cartwheeled into a handstand and then dismounted, running alongside the horse, both of them barely breaking a sweat.

At home you balanced on anything you could find: the sidewalk curb, tiptoeing one foot in front of the other, swaying first to one side then another, or the retaining wall of the eucalyptus bed, or even the back of the couch. You pretended to defy the laws of gravity. You reflected the light of many suns. Your skirt billowed in the wind of your flight.

 

Did you ever think to be afraid? The time you climbed over the crib railing and down the hall to your parents, dragging your leg braces behind you. Scrambling up the bookcase or the oxidized poles of that second-hand swing set just because you could. Your tricycle became a vehicle for daring—perched on your bare feet or careening around the corner on one wheel.

 

Years later, when your life tilted off-balance, you climbed the chalky limestone cliffs high above Lake Travis and gripped the edges with your toes before plunging into the lake far below—only to climb up and jump again, no crowd roaring in approval, no horses, or popcorn, or elephants. But the water did sparkle like sequins, like flint.

 

Schoolhouse

 

 

We loved school. We loved being with each other. We loved the chalkboard, the eraser, the scent of dust rising from old books. When we were young, we loved our pencil cases: the way everything aligned there, each sharpened point facing in the same direction. It zipped closed easily, opened easily, was clear enough to see what was what. Everything a person could need fit inside that pouch. We loved naptime. We loved the sound of other bodies near ours, breathing, all of us pointing in the same direction.

 

We loved snack. And lunch. And modeling clay. We watched the older kids on the playground: kids who pretended disdain, who called us babies and flounced away. We were babies, but felt so big, every day something new within our grasp: letters, numbers, maps, history. All of it lay waiting in cupboards, innate within the chalkboard, waiting to be revealed.

 

The most important lessons weren’t from maps or books or parent-teacher conferences, or even from every kid’s favorite subjects: lunch and recess. We learned our limits, how to push ourselves, how to find interests, then articulate them, then stick to them, and ourselves, when you find out they aren’t “cool.” How to bounce back—like when I started a new school in sixth grade and sat alone for two whole weeks with no one even coming over to say hi because everyone thought I was a student teacher. Or when I chose to hang out in Mrs. Collier’s room during lunch, the two of us eating in silence while reading together. It never bothered me because I grew up knowing the importance of an education, my family story one of escape from poverty and subsistence farming only because of school, my Grandma Ruth’s first job as a teacher in a one-room, sod schoolhouse her ticket out, the world within her grasp.

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I Called Mine Beautiful

2016 Editors’ Award in Creative Nonfiction—Winner

 

Maybe it would be useful to know that when I was a five-year-old girl, lying alone in the dark, I invented ways to twist my pink Care Bear nighty into a sexy outfit. I knew what “sexy” looked like because I’d seen Jessica Rabbit and the way her matching sultry eyes and mountain-breasts made the room stop and drool. I’d also spent many secret hours in the basement watching my grandmother’s taped “programs” (read: countless episodes of As the World Turns on stacks of VHS tapes) full of muscly men fervently whispering into the diamond-lobed ears of women in silky blouses. I understood sexy. In these late hours, alone on my small mattress, I would yank one elastic ruffled sleeve down my shoulder and rub my cheek on the smooth skin. Even as this tiny person who didn’t have a clue what sex was, I wanted to be sexy—seen as a beautiful object—worth keeping around just to look at. It had not yet occurred to me that my paralyzed legs might have an effect on that dream.

It might also be useful to tell you about the Saturday afternoon in the late summer when I decided I needed to wear something dazzling to the library. I put on my blue-and-white floral dress-up gown—the one overwhelmed by ruffles and lace, of course. It was made for a body much larger than mine, so the sleeves sagged around my child-arms and the hem landed well below my feet resting limply on the footrest of my hot pink wheelchair. As my dad pushed me over the bumpy sidewalks, cracked with the growing roots of old trees, I felt regal. I was a princess riding an elephant, tilting my chin up with a graceful smile. I was beautiful.

Before we saw the boys, we heard their wild-boy sounds, joking back and forth on their front porch. I prepared myself to be admired. They would certainly catch their breaths at the sight of my splendor. As my dad pushed me past, I could not bring myself to look at their smitten expressions; I only heard their chatter disappear. I imagined their eyes transformed into throbbing red hearts as we glided past.

I glowed for the rest of the afternoon, soaring in the revelation that I was powerfully beautiful. As soon as we got home, I flew to my mom, anxious to relive the experience with her.

“They couldn’t even speak as I walked by, Mom. All of them just stared and stared at me.” I was bursting. I remember my mom’s silence. She looked at me, and I saw sadness in her face. In a rush, like a full balloon gushing icy water over my head, I knew. They were not staring at my loveliness. They were staring at my wheelchair.

Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe they all went silent as my dad pushed my chair past their porch because one of them had just whipped out a dirty magazine, and they were hovered over the pages glossed with forbidden curves. And maybe my mom failed to match my excitement because she was an exhausted mother of six. Maybe she hadn’t even heard what I said. Certainly she would have felt the need to protect me from misinterpreting the world as a place that celebrated the visual appeal of girls in wheelchairs. The only thing I can confidently tell you about that afternoon walk to the library in my stunning ball gown is the consuming thought that sutured its greedy, gaping mouth to each cell in my body. Boys do not think you are beautiful. The only reason they gaze at you is to gawk at your difference. I felt ashamed for believing otherwise.

—

When my sister Sarah and I were fresh teenagers, we constantly begged our parents to take us shopping. We spent roughly half of our youth in thrift stores, filing through rows of graphic tees and puffy vests, swishy dresses and lacy tank tops. But this was important work—the chance to pick and choose the costumes that would assert to the world what kinds of girls we were. Sarah would fill her arms and I’d stack my lap with every possible style, and we’d try on all the outfits. Hours and hours of fashion shows and what I remember the most was my parents’ constant concern for Sarah’s modesty. The ritual took on a predictable pattern.

“That’s a lovely slip,” my dad would say to Sarah.

“It’s not a slip! It’s a dress,” she’d say, rolling her eyes.

“Oh no, I don’t think so. Dresses aren’t that small,” he’d reply, feigning confusion.

“Daa-ad, come on! It’s not that short.”

“You don’t know how boys look at girls, Sarah.”

“It’s just a dress!”

“You wear that dress, and none of the boys in the room will be able to think straight.”

I noticed that neither of my parents ever said this to me. In their silence, I heard: When men look at you, they are able to think perfectly straight.

I was beginning to piece it together. My sister’s body and my body meant different things to the people who looked at them. Hers inspired, tantalized, and mine? Mine—didn’t.

—

I am a nearly thirty-year-old woman. I know that objectification of women is a bad thing. I know also that having a body that gets a pass on cat-calling is a bonus, a shield, a super-power of sorts. I also feel compelled to tell you—and why, I really don’t know—I should keep this to myself—except, maybe it’s an important piece—but I was wildly jealous of my sister’s ability to put on a little dress and make the room stop and drool, Jessica Rabbit–style.

—

Once, when moving down the main drag of my small college town with a group of friends, a man shouted at me on the street, “You’re the hottest girl in a wheelchair I’ve ever seen!”

“And you’re the sharpest bowl of mashed potatoes I’ve ever seen!” I shouted back.

No, I didn’t say that. Next time, though. Instead I rolled my eyes, kept moving, and laughed every time I retold the story for the next one hundred years. The man hollering at me on the street was rude and spoke with the thoughtlessness of a drunk man, but he did not make me feel as small or powerless as the man who, unprovoked, approached me from behind, grabbed the handlebars on my chair, and pushed me up a long ramp in front of the library. “There you go!” he said cheerily, when we reached the top, convinced, I’m sure, he’d met his good-deed quota for the month.

—

I suppose I do understand objectification. It’s just, instead of being read as an object for sexual gratification, I’m read differently—a signifier of brokenness, helplessness, always in need of some friendly assistance. I wonder, though—it’s scandalous, I know, but sometimes I do—I wonder what it would have done for my developing self-perception—my understanding of myself as a woman among women—had my body been included in the objectification most non-disabled women experience. For good or bad, would it have changed my relationships with other women? The course of my career? Would it have affected the outcome of my romantic relationships? (Which, historically, have been a bit of a wreck, in case you were wondering.) Would it have been easier to imagine myself as somebody’s wife? Somebody’s mother? Am I a feminist because or despite the fact that bodies like mine are consistently represented as asexual? While I can see that I’ve gained, I wonder, is there something I have lost?

—

My sister Sarah started nudging me to create an online dating profile about three years before I actually did. She’d take a picture of me—always something flattering, by the way, like hiking my leg up to jump into my truck or stuffing my face with a plate full of pancakes—then show it back to me with a cheesy smile: “New online dating profile pic!” When I looked at these images of myself, the first thing my brain did was picture the faces of the men who would see this photo. There they would be on their sleek Macbooks, scrolling through the profile pictures of all these bouncy yoga marathon runners, and I could see them pausing at my photo—the smiling girl in the wheelchair—and cringing. Or worse, stifling a laugh.

“I’ll never do it!” I would scream dramatically at my sister. “It’s too much like an SNL skit. The pathetic girl in a wheelchair, looking for love? It’s too awful!” You see what I did there—I made fun of myself before anyone else could. I made sure to start laughing first.

—

“What do you think about this part of me?” I asked Jared on our first date. He wore Hollister jeans with bejeweled back pockets. “I mean, what do you think about my wheelchair?” What do you see when you see me? I wanted to ask.

Jared didn’t miss a beat. “It doesn’t matter to me. It’s not like it defines you.”

Ding, ding, ding! I could hear the crowds cheering from the audience. What a well-packaged answer, wrapped in glossy-gold paper. Why did I feel like pushing him out of his chair?

Maybe it’s because I wondered what it meant if my impaired body did define me. Would this be tragic? Could Jared claim that his body did not define him? Is he not somehow defined by the fact that he was born with a penis? That his skin is light? That he towers above most people at six feet and three inches? That he started balding at age twenty-two? Surely all of these characteristics of his body played some part in shaping him into the personality that sat in front of me, but Jared believed that my personality had to be shaped apart from this body that sat in front of him. As if associating me (my personhood) with my body (my crippled legs) would be an insult. A body ignored, discarded, erased.

After Todd and I had exchanged a few messages online, I asked him whether he had any questions about my disability. He said no. His mom is a physical therapist, he said, so he knows all about that kind of stuff.

Was I aware, though, of the role diet plays in paralysis? No? My doctors probably hadn’t told me, but Todd knew how a nutrient-rich diet actually had the power to cure me of my ailments. We might have to add a few stretches, too, but Todd was willing to draw me sketches of these exercises. He was hopeful of the results!

I loved telling people about Todd’s plan for my rehabilitation. “I mean, who would have guessed that all this time it just came down to kale?” I would screech.

Todd’s plan seemed so ridiculously misinformed and unaware that I couldn’t talk about it without giggling. Underneath its hilarious surface, though, there was a darker, rougher thought that I only took out when I was alone, running my fingers along its sharp edges. Todd assumed, without any prompting from me, that I wanted someone to fix me. When Todd saw the photos of my paralyzed legs posted to my profile, he fixated on a problem to be solved. He wanted to talk about the mechanics of my limbs, the emaciated shape of my legs, and devise a way to normalize them. Surely I wanted to be able to walk! Surely I didn’t want to be what I was. Right? A body reduced to an object—a piece of broken machinery.

—

So, objectification that rushes to help, gawks at difference, erases, pities, belittles, but never sexualizes. And do I want to be sexually objectified? Not right this minute—not while I’m working this through with you. But do I want to be consistently, comprehensively, and automatically asexualized? Well, no, because this invites another twisted form of damage. Let me try this from another angle. Before I had seen how others saw me—before I started constructing an identity for myself based on the gawking gaze of others—I enjoyed my body for what it was. Did you do this, too? I called mine beautiful—worthy of celebration. Did you call yours strong? I proudly wore ball gowns to the library. I smiled coyly, confidently for school photos. I propped myself against the couch and conducted dance classes for my imaginary pupils with a steady, poised hand. It was only after I spent more time in a world that consistently read me as undesirable, helpless, pitiable, that I began to see myself as something other than beautiful. To live in a world that operates on a tight grid, categorizing bodies into tiny slots—“If you look this way, you fit here, if you move that way, you belong there”—suffocates nearly all of us. What would it mean if we were able to pick our own slots? What happens if we break open the grid?

—

“You mention in your profile that you’ve used a walker and a chair since you were young,” Micah messaged me after a few online exchanges. “How has that shaped your life? Maybe it’s a ridiculous request, asking you to fit such a large matter into a typed message, and maybe there’s a more polite way to be curious about such a situation, but curious I am, and so I ask.” This made me pause. It felt different. It wasn’t rushing to assist my body. It wasn’t anything like the blind assertion that my body meant nothing. It didn’t assume I was anxious to fix my body. It was curiosity about a body that held stories—stories that he wanted my help to read.

—

We are more than our bodies. We also have these miraculous bodies. I want to live in a world that does not objectify bodies. I also want to live in a world that allows all bodies to be beautiful objects. I don’t want bodies to be erased, but I also don’t want them to be read without the voice of the owner dictating the narrative. I don’t know how this fits together, but I do wonder what it would feel like if we looked at bodies as records of stories. Try this on with me: bodies as evidence of the nights you stayed up grading papers or writing your thesis or talking to that boy until you could hear the morning birds singing, the millions of times your sister made you laugh until you cried, the grief that ripped through your gut and out all your pores when your grandmother died, the hundreds of greasy pizzas you consumed with the friends who reminded you how to enjoy life. The cancer you beat, the habits you kicked, the wars you survived, the fires that did not consume you, the losses that bent your spine but didn’t break it. Our bodies display resilience as they record and carry, sag and stretch, bloat and shrivel, shine and crack, under the weight of our stories. Bodies as beautiful objects—worth displaying, not because they align with a very narrow standard in contour and shade, but because they have lived. What would that feel like? What would that change?

—

My niece found a lump in her breast last year. The doctor sliced deeply into her young, unmarred body to cut it out, and she grieved the big scar that now scrawled across her body. When she expressed her sense of loss, I understood, and I reeled. If I had feathers, they would have plumed across the span of my body with primal fury at a world that taught her a big scar was lamentable. When I was young, I remember hearing a lot about my “inner beauty,” my “beautiful heart”—the consolation prizes for ugly girls. I won’t tell my niece that it doesn’t matter what she looks like on the outside. How can it not? At the same time, I don’t think her scar mars her. You are beautiful, will always be beautiful, can be nothing but beautiful as long as you live, and I want you to keep living as bravely and loudly as you can stand, even if it means wounds and stretch marks and ten thousand wrinkles, I wanted to shout. Instead, I said, “I think that scar is evidence that your body has survived some pretty horrific stuff, and that’s beautiful.” I wonder if she believed me for even one second.

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