Double Incision Diary

Nov 18, 2025

“Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld,” oil on canvas, by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, 1861.

On the afternoon I come home from surgery, I converse with a giant snake.

*

On an evening six years before surgery, I am teaching a poorly-attended church group about Jungian theology. The wounded healer. Chiron the centaur. How to lie in the cave of Asklepius, on the couch from which clinic gets its name, and receive a vision that closes your sores. How to be the first of your kind that your praying sisters know. Jesus is grafted to the cross like an animal body, a seam between hero and beast.

*

On the day after surgery, two chickens arrive at my house. My dear friend in Austin, a woman of blunt speech and deep tenderness, has sent our family the Jewish cure-all, roast chicken and kosher pickles. We are—we were—boob twins, which gives her first dibs on my best jackets. I want to visit her new home, as she has visited mine, but Texas has made it illegal for me to pee.

*

On the day before surgery, I point a knife at my chest. Magic before me, magic behind me, magic within me. Witches keep a black-handled knife on our altar to represent Air. The power of thought become flesh. For fourteen years, I wrote letters to the man who gave me this knife as a birthday present when he was released from prison. Twenty-five to life for receiving a stolen motorcycle in the state of California. He calls me brother.

*

On one day or another, forty years before surgery, I examine the brownish-pink nubs on my chest. I can’t believe they will swell into the fleshy sacks I see on my two mothers, shirtless in our small apartment bathroom. I will be told they are my best feature, besides my eyes, veiled behind nearsighted glasses. I will be told to lead with them for marriage. Even though the mother who says this doesn’t want me to get married, would rather suckle herself on my heart.

*

On the third and fourth days after surgery, I receive gift baskets. My cousins-in-law, who are all therapists, send lox and bagels from Zabar’s. My best friend in Buffalo sends a month’s worth of fruit and chocolates. We met thirty years ago when I fell down the stairs. Harvard health services left me at the bottom of a hill with crutches and he helped me onto the bus. Every day, I pray his doctors will find the reason his joints are on fire. He says God created our painful world to grow stronger with the struggle, like a man lifting weights. Which I am not allowed to do for the next six weeks.

*

On a morning one year and eleven days before surgery, my husband drives us to meet the plastic surgeon in Longmeadow. Her office is in a white-pillared mansion with wallpaper depicting the 19th century’s idea of a jungle. She draws lines on my chest with green marker. I feel like a diagram of a pork roast. Which is to say: appetizing. A body that is ready for itself.

*

On an afternoon twenty-seven years before surgery, I play pool badly on my first date with my husband. I warned him about this in the cartoon I drew to reply to his personal ad. He buys us glass animals of our zodiac signs: his centaur, my crab. I have more hair than Brian May from the band Queen. All of my shirts show tremendous cleavage. I’m slow to understand why I attract short men. Perhaps I seem kinder than I am; perhaps they are eye level with my nipples. I’m just glad he’s taller than me.

*

On the second week after surgery, I am mad at my family. I am able to fold laundry again. My son needs help with his fifth-grade science project: whether plants can grow if you hang their pots upside-down. Am I not a magician? Can’t they see me reaching for the sun, drawing down the moon? Not literally, because I am still not allowed to raise my arms. Books about what I have done are being banned in Florida. I shouldn’t have to turn your socks right-side-out.

*

On a red-gold autumn weekend five months before surgery, I read dick jokes from my poetry collection at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Afterward, two college girls tell me how great it is to meet a trans elder. Gurl, I’m forty-nine.

*

On another weekend thirty-one years before surgery, I am flown to New York City as one of Glamour Magazine’s Top Ten College Women. I am the only one whose parent forbids makeup and ear piercing, or the only obedient one. I experience this as a hardship. Every blouse I wear has gaps between the second and third buttons, like the pause after one of my mothers introduces the other as her sister. She throws away the videotape of my award ceremony before I can view it. I wouldn’t like how I look, she says.

*

On the second week after surgery, my friend who had their breasts removed by the same doctor takes me to the tattoo parlor for new earrings. Before anesthesia, I’d removed all metal jewelry in case they had to electrify me back to life. Wedding diamond, engagement flower ring, the sigil necklace I bought during the pandemic. I buy a dagger-shaped stud for one ear and a trans symbol for the other, because everyone knows mismatched earrings are more gay. My friend calls themself a lesbian trans man. I say I’m an MTF: mom-to-faggot. After they defend their dissertation, we’ll return for their tattoo of birds in flight.

*

On a day eight years before surgery, my mother’s ex drives me to a hotel for novel research. I am sick with imposter syndrome. For seven years prior, I have been writing a novel in a gay man’s voice that feels autobiographical and I don’t know why. He is a terrible slut who tells me to stop wearing frilly blouses with polka dots. The conference is called Transcending Boundaries and I am here to find out whether we can be gay and Christian. In a meditative movement workshop, we close our eyes. Take five minutes to walk as our assigned gender, one-third of the way across a small room. Five minutes in the space between. Five to the wall, as any gender not our own, or none. A warrior with a black beard emerges inside me. I am larger, freer, truer than I’ve ever known. My husband names him Belvedere, after the Looney Tunes bulldog. Oh Belvedere, come here, boy. Bel vedere: beautiful to see.

*

On the night before surgery, I drink an excess of water, afraid of being thirsty. Anticipating lack, regret, a once-loving gaze turned away. Over winter vacation we’d watched Gremlins, my son’s and my first time, my husband’s second. No food after midnight. Don’t get them wet. The Chinese sage’s instructions the same as my anesthesia prep. No one knew what creature would emerge from the unexpected pupa. What tinsel-draped destruction. What ridiculous love.

*

On the night before surgery, I refrain from tweeting Dr. Johnson’s quip, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” I cannot concentrate on anything, including sleep. My surgeon is also named Dr. Johnson.

*

On the night before surgery, I meditate at my altar. I have been studying witchcraft by correspondence course for two years, like the protagonist of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I count down to enter the World Tree. I descend to meet the Master of the Forge. The blade we have crafted is ready. It is by my will that I undergo the wound.

*

On the morning of surgery, I try to understand what the hospital receptionist is asking about my gender. In my driver’s license photo, I still have hair. What bathroom do you use? The men’s room. Uh, I mean, when you pull down your pants … do you have a pee-pee or a vee-vee? Insurance needs to know.

*

On the morning of surgery, Dr. Johnson draws her final diagram on my skin. My husband takes my bra and eyeglasses. He looks at my breasts for the last time with a sad smile, like I’m putting his old dog to sleep.

*

On the morning of surgery, I descend to the Underworld. I am wearing yellow socks with grippy dots. They give me a tranquilizer through my IV before wheeling me into the OR. I sing in fake-Jamaican, “I smoke two joints in de morning, I smoke two joints at night,” even though my husband, who would get the Dr. Demento reference, is not there to hear.

*

On the afternoon of surgery, I am not dead. I wake up with a flat chest in a ruched bodice so tight it would make Marie Antoinette long for the guillotine. I am the kind of fag who uses words like “ruched bodice.” Plastic tubes drain into bulbs dangling below my armpits. My husband will help me empty them and measure the fluids twice a day. It is not as disgusting as menstruating for thirty-five years. It is not as painful as talking to my mother, which I no longer do. Everything will be all right.

*

On the afternoon of surgery, I am in the cave of Asklepius. Meditating in bed, I descend into a crevasse of black rocks. Steam rises from the stones in the underground river. I bathe in the shallow, hot water. The Ouroboros, endless serpent, coils high as the roof. It tells me not to worry about the long-lost years or the shortness of those to come. This moment’s satisfaction is infinite. Time is only time.

*

On our wedding night twenty-five years ago, we go to Fairway, the supermarket across from our Upper West Side studio: my husband in his late father’s tuxedo, me in my white veil and gown. We are leaving for Paris the next morning, we still need to figure out how to have sex, and we have nothing in the fridge for breakfast.

*

On the morning I get my drains taken out, one week after surgery, my husband and I go to Costco. It’s on the way home. He took pictures of my first sight of my new chest, strutting in the doctor’s mirror. We pay our respects to each aisle, floor to ceiling stacked with towels and bread and jars of mango in syrup. The enormous strawberries smell like summer, red as a kiss.

Jendi Reiter is the author of five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man, the story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes, and the novels Origin Story and Two Natures. Origin Story was a finalist for the Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press, and Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.

On White Violence, Black Survival and Learning to Shoot

Nov 8, 2025

“Mater Dolorosa,” oil on canvas, by Charles White, 1946.

On the outside, the local shooters club is pretty much what I expected: a graceless gray warehouse tucked off the highway behind a gas station in a dumpy part of town. Inside, however, the club is surprisingly clubby: deep leather chairs, slate-gray floors, a wine bar glowing warmly in the incandescent light. There is an ammo vending machine, the first I have ever seen, tucked unobtrusively in a corner and a beautiful blue globe gleaming on an end table, as if waiting for the Great White Hunter to enter and give it a spin.

“This is the Cadillac of gun clubs,” brags Joe, our instructor. There isn’t, he says, another like it in Massachusetts.

Joe is small statured, silver haired, and non-posturing, a man who does not strike me as a cop. This is a relief. When searching for a basic firearms-safety class, I’d purposefully avoided the one closest to our house because it was also near the state police headquarters. Its website bragged that most of the instructors were officers.

Once the rest of the group has arrived, Joe introduces himself: NRA-certified instructor, “shooting enthusiast,” many years of teaching experience. Pointing to his American-flag neck gaiter, he says he has a hard time talking for four hours through a face covering. “Anybody going to freak out if I take it off every now and then?”

I raise an eyebrow but say nothing. It is January 2021, a full year into the pandemic; at this point who even has strength to complain? Anyway, his gaiter will do about as much good on his neck as it does on his face, so why insist he pull it up? The conference-room door is open; the club, I have been told, uses MERV 13 filters in its air system; and my husband and I have come prepared with N95 masks. I inch my chair away from Joe, and we go on.

Thanks to the pandemic, the class is small: just seven students. In addition to us there are a married couple from Brookline in their thirties, two strapping young brothers barely out of their teens, and a thin young man who sits alone at the end of the table, dressed head-to-toe in black, including a hoodie. Mrs. Brookline is Asian. I am Black. Everyone else is white.

The basic firearms-safety course approved by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires only four hours of instruction. By comparison, a motorcycle license, which I obtained last year, requires fifteen hours of instruction over the course of two days, the bulk of which is operating the bike itself. The Commonwealth does not require live fire to be part of its basic firearms course. In Massachusetts you can get a license to carry a gun without ever touching a weapon, much less shooting one. Still, Joe assures us that, unlike some other, inferior, courses, ours will include the chance to actually shoot.

“I want this class to be fun,” he says.

While Joe talks, I flip through the NRA Guide to the Basics of Pistol Shooting, a 150-page, spiral-bound textbook featuring many, many photographs of guns and people shooting them. A Smith & Wesson ad on the first page reads: “Congratulations on Becoming Part of the Firearms Community.”

The guide says that “Americans own pistols today for many different reasons. Some people compete in the various types of pistol shooting matches held throughout the country, including those held at the collegiate and Olympic level. Hunters, too, have found that the use of a pistol to take game can be a challenging and exciting experience, and nearly all of the fifty states allow pistol hunting. A new shooter will quickly discover that pistol shooting is fun!”

For the second time the word fun startles me, given the context. I did not come to a class about weapons expecting to have fun.

Joe asks us to go around the table and introduce ourselves, giving our history with firearms and our reason for taking the class. Unexpectedly he begins with me. The first part of the assignment is easy: I have never fired a gun, never held one, never wanted to do so. No paintball or air rifles, no water pistols since I was nine or ten. My family includes many veterans and at least one member of law enforcement, so legal gun ownership is not beyond my experience, but knowing there’s a gun in the house makes me feel less safe, not more. Statistics back me up on this, but even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t matter, since feelings are what we’re talking about. All safety is an illusion, said James Baldwin. It’s just a matter of which illusion you pick.

My feelings about guns are wholly negative, a fact that causes me to stumble on the assignment’s second part. While the class waits, my mind races for a response. In truth I’m reluctant to say what has brought me to this place on a bitter January morning; reluctant to tell a room full of white people why a progressive, NRA-hating, middle-aged Black woman has decided, this late in life, to get a gun.

*

What violence I saw as a child was enacted mostly by white people, in whose glowing, televised company I spent much of my time. From heroic cops like Kojak and Baretta, to heroic cowboys like those on Bonanza, to heroic freaks like the Bionic Woman and the Six Million Dollar Man, the white folks who strutted through our living room every evening were forever solving their problems with fists or feet or guns. Even the women on Dynasty, so rich they never wore the same dress twice, rolled around in the dirt smacking one another. My sisters and I never fought that aggressively. My mother would have had a fit.

By comparison the Black folks on television largely spent their time helping or joking or making people laugh. On Starsky & Hutch, Huggy Bear was a hustler, but he never shot anybody. Fred Sanford was a grouch who aimed his stinging barbs only against other Black people. “Boom Boom” Washington on Welcome Back, Kotter was a slacker, but to solve problems he used his charm. Setting aside the Blaxploitation movies (which we were not allowed to watch) and the occasional Black actors who played law-enforcement officers, like Clarence Williams or Georg Stanford Brown, the Black folks who appeared on the screen were strikingly nonviolent. Even the enslaved people in Roots rarely fought back, preferring to outrun, outsmart, or endure. Maybe a little spit in massa’s cup. Thus the message was absorbed long before it was understood: in America violence is for white people. The only acceptable stance for Black folks is nonresistant suffering.

I am not a violent person. I have never been in a fight, never hit someone, never been slapped or kicked or punched. The closest I’ve ever come to a physical altercation is getting in the face of a few white people: A woman who touched my hair. A repo man who kept showing up at my mother’s house to harass her over a debt she didn’t owe. (A relative had used her name to finance a car.) A man who asked, at a park near my house, if I “even live[d] in this town” after I asked him to pick up after his dog. A neighbor who called me “uppity.” In these moments I stood up but did not strike out, restraining the urge toward violence not for their sake but for my own. It is possible to be angry without being violent, especially if one lacks power. Especially if one is non-wealthy and female and Black.

It is also possible to be violent without being angry—just ask the cop who knelt so casually on George Floyd’s neck. Not every person attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was raging mad. See the people taking selfies in the hallways. See the insurrectionist leaders calmly carrying their zip ties and issuing instructions. See the hordes chatting gaily as they mill around their hangman’s noose. Not everyone was angry that day, but everyone had power and knew it; it was precisely that power they were there to defend. Beforehand they flew across the country on private jets or rode on rented buses from suburban Boston, toasting and singing as they came. Afterward they sat around in hotel lobbies, drinking beer and jovially recounting the day.

For all the lies about the Black Lives Matter protests—and about the Civil Rights Movement protests before them, and the anti-lynching crusades before that, and the Red Summer before that, and the abolitionist writings before that—the simple truth is that Black people in America have never been as violent toward white people as white people have been toward us, and that white violence against Black people is usually calculated. A friend of mine gasped reading that statement, but the only surprising thing about it is that anyone, knowing history, should be surprised. Consider the incalculable violence of 250 years of slavery. Consider the bloody rise of the KKK. Consider the nearly 4,500 lynchings of Black people by white people documented by the Equal Justice Initiative, and the thousands more yet to be documented. Consider Tulsa in 1921 and New York in 1863 and Memphis and New Orleans in 1866 and Wilmington in 1898 and Atlanta in 1906 and Springfield in 1908 and East St. Louis in 1917 and Chicago in 1919 and Rosewood in 1923. Consider Ida B. Wells’s groundbreaking book The Red Record, in which she documented the true causes of lynchings and anti-Black violence during the Jim Crow era as overwhelmingly economic. Consider, for just one example, the Elaine Massacre, which took place in Elaine, Arkansas, during the Red Summer of 1919: white mobs slaughtered between fifty and one hundred Black sharecroppers who had asked for a better share of the profits from their labor. Consider Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and Medgar Evers and Dr. King.

Conservatives love to decry the violence of Black uprisings like those of the Long, Hot Summer of 1967, or those following the 1992 acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King, or the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, without ever mentioning the relentless white violence that ignited them. But even in those uprisings it is inevitably Black people who bear the brunt of the violence. The 1967 riots, largely sparked by police beatings or shootings of unarmed Black men, left between eighty and one hundred people dead, the vast majority of them Black and a large portion killed by cops. No one knows the number of Black men killed by police in the years preceding either those uprisings or more recent ones. Though organizations such as Mapping Police Violence have been trying to subvert governmental unwillingness to track this public-health data by doing it themselves, such efforts go back only a few years. The true toll of decades and decades of police violence against Black people remains as much a mystery as the number of Black lives lost to lynching and white mob violence.

But some things are clear: Power begets violence. Violence reinforces power. White Americans damn well know this much.

*

Why are you here? This is the question Joe has asked me in front of the group. Why do you want a gun?

I try to dodge the question. “I’m … interested in things,” I say.

“Interested?”

“I’m a writer.”

“A writer! I hope you aren’t going to write about me!” Joe says with a grin.

A lot of people say this when I tell them what I do for a living—or, rather, a lot of men do. I have learned to ignore it. “I’m curious about all of this,” I explain. “Last year I was curious about motorcycles. I got my license.”

“Motorcycles!” He laughs. “A lot more dangerous than shooting!”

Motorcycles are indeed dangerous. When my husband first told me he intended to purchase one, after having given up riding for twenty years while raising his kids, I was nervous. But, for the record, more than nineteen thousand Americans were killed in gun-related violence in 2020, compared to roughly five thousand annual motorcycle fatalities. Motorcycles are dangerous, but motorcycles are made for transportation. Guns are made to kill.

After I am done, my husband gives his history (more on that in a minute). Then the young brothers tell their story: they have shot air pistols and paintball guns, and now a lot of their friends are getting into shooting, and they want to do the same; it looks cool. Mr. Brookline already has his license and is, in fact, a member of the shooting range; he is just accompanying his wife to the class for support. Mrs. Brookline wants to learn how to handle their recently acquired gun. Why they have recently acquired a gun, they do not say.

Finally it is Mr. Hoodie’s turn. Alone at the end of the table, hands shoved deep into his pockets, chair tilted back, he says, “I want a gun for self-defense.”

He is the only person in the room who implies he might use a gun to shoot someone. I wonder if this makes him more dangerous than the rest of us, or just more honest. Joe also seems to wonder; he lingers longest with Mr. Hoodie, asking follow-up questions: Do you have a job that requires you to worry about your safety? No. Live in an area that feels particularly unsafe? No. Have you ever shot a gun before? Yes. What kind of gun was it? A Glock. (Later my husband will say: “Of course it was.”)

The ice now broken, Joe wraps up: “People own firearms for a lot of reasons.” He gestures toward me. “Some people want to have fun—”

“I didn’t say fun.”

My tone is sharper than I intend. Joe blinks, and I’m a little embarrassed. For some reason it feels important to let this group of people I will never see again know that I do not derive pleasure from shooting things.

“It’s just that I would never use the word fun in this context.”

Joe gives me a look. “Let’s move on.”

*

My husband got his first pistol permit (Firearms Identification Card) at sixteen when some friends were going down to the cop shop to apply for theirs and suggested he roll along. He remembers the process as pretty seamless: Four teenage boys stride into the Fitchburg, Massachusetts, police department and request permission to legally shoot things. The chief looks them over briefly and hands out the permits. My husband, I should remind you, is white.

His first gun came a few years later, a housewarming gift from his father for his new bachelor pad. It was an M1 carbine left over, his father said, from the war. That gun was eventually stolen during a break-in, but years later he got another one. His work buddies often went to the range after a long day of engineering, and sometimes he tagged along. The first few times he borrowed a friend’s gun, but he knew that generosity would not last: “It’s like a car—people will let you use theirs once or twice, but after that, you’d better get your own.”

A perfect analogy, I tell him. Americans are very intimate with, and very possessive of, their cars.

It turns out he had this gun when we met, though I did not know it. When we got serious, when it became clear we would be sharing a home and a life, he sold the firearm. “I knew how you felt about guns,” he later told me. “I didn’t want anything to stand in the way of us.”

Who would have thought one of the great romantic gestures of my life would involve a man quietly getting rid of a gun?

All of which explains his surprise, years later, when I raised the possibility of bringing a firearm into our home. It was the fall of 2020. George Floyd had been murdered, the latest victim in an endless stream. The birther president was ramping up his lies. Armed white cultists roamed the country, giant flags with the name of their idol waving from the back of their trucks. They chanted maniacally at rallies. They intimidated voters. They tried to run people off the road. The cops winked and smiled.

“Are you afraid?” my husband asked. “Is that why you want to get a gun?”

“Not afraid,” I said. “Pissed.”

*

For three hours we work our way through the NRA book: safe gun handling, safe storage, types of ammunition, shooting positions, parts of the pistol and how they work, how to clear a gun that jams.

At one point Joe asks a question about misfires, and I answer it. He looks surprised. “How did you know that?”

“It just makes sense,” I say, because it does, and because even here I am the eternal good student, always wanting to give the right answer, even if the question is about guns.

Then Joe announces it is time for live fire. He takes the two brothers and Mr. Hoodie into the range first, leaving the rest of us behind to take the required written test. Joe encourages us to work together to answer the fifty questions, reminds us to check the book if we get stuck. This is a test everyone is meant to pass.

Then it’s our turn to enter the range. My hands shake as I slip on my safety glasses and put in the earplugs. It strikes me that I am about to step knowingly and willingly into a room filled with armed strangers, most of them male, most of them white. This seems like insanity. I am astonished that people do this routinely, consider it fun. What is the positionality—the unearned, unexamined, unshakable social identity—that makes stepping into a room full of armed strangers feel like a way to increase one’s safety instead of a way to endanger it?

What is the version of history in which these facts—white men, guns, shooting—turn out well for someone like me?

Joe ushers us all into the anteroom, pausing to scoop a live round off the floor. Then he opens the door to the range. Silence.

“Looks like we have the range to ourselves today,” says Joe.

I nearly tremble with relief.

The area where the shooters stand is smaller than I expected, only slightly larger than the conference room we have just left. Eight or ten stalls, each the size of a shower, are separated only by what looks to me like a slightly upgraded office-cubicle barrier. Joe steps into the first one, reminds us of the three safety rules, hands us empty magazines and bullets to load in them, and then unpacks his gun. It’s a .22. He dismantles it with a few swift movements, showing us the parts: action, barrel, stock. I have never seen a gun this close, but even my decidedly non-mechanical brain can understand how it works. Such a simple, simple machine.

“Who wants to go first?”

I shake my head. My husband steps up, unloads his first clip at a rapid pace. Joe pulls in the target, compliments my husband on his aim, and advises him to slow down. My husband breathes, takes his time emptying the next three magazines. I watch his face. When Joe hands him the peppered target, he smiles.

“Your turn.” Joe looks at me.

“I’m nervous.”

“Don’t be,” he says. “I’ll take care of you.”

It’s a nice reassurance, but I marvel at his certainty. A person he has known less than four hours stands six inches away, holding a loaded gun. I could drop the weapon, or jerk uncontrollably, or turn it on him before he had a chance to react. Anything could happen; anything always can. All safety is an illusion, but maybe it doesn’t feel that way if your position in society has not only given you power but also protected you from the experience of being, and of feeling, powerless.

Taking a deep breath, I pick up the gun. It is neither light nor heavy, just a thing, an object, cool to the touch. As directed, I keep it pointed in a safe direction, downrange toward the paper target twenty feet from where I stand. I pull the trigger, bracing for recoil, but there is none, really. I finish the three magazines as quickly as possible, put the gun down. My husband beams, proud of me, but I avoid his eyes.

Joe holds up my target. “I bet you’re the kind of person who is good at everything.”

This is flattery, the kind of thing a good salesman says to a potential client. But I feel too grubby for flattery, too ashamed for false modesty. “Actually, I am,” I say bluntly. I do not say that this is one of the things that frightens me.

*

It takes a while to get an appointment with the local police officer in charge of issuing licenses, but when I do, he is surprisingly—almost disappointingly—accommodating. He checks my paperwork, takes my picture, takes my fingerprints (another thing I had not expected, another thing that makes me feel like a criminal). He makes polite chitchat and asks only one question:

“Been thinking about this for a while?”

I say, “Not long.”

Why do you want a gun? My friend is appalled at what I have just told her, shocked at my change of heart. I explain as best I can, trying not to sound sheepish. My friend is skeptical. My friend is white. My Black friends, when I tell them, ask where the class was given and how much it cost. My family—among them a police officer, many veterans, and several longtime legal gun owners—offers practical advice: size, cost, caliber.

Why do you want a gun?

A gun-owning friend, helping me fill out the required paperwork, says the right response to this question is “For all legal purposes.” He is a Black man, and the irony of the statement does not escape him. Rarely has the law been a Black person’s friend.

Why do you want a gun?

“It’s a skill,” says my husband. A skill like riding a motorcycle or changing a tire or starting a campfire. That there is skill involved in accurately propelling a small metal object long distances into a designated spot, I cannot argue. Nor can I argue that people should not take pleasure in possessing such a skill. I only wonder what all that practicing is in preparation for. What, exactly, are you practicing to hit?

“Others own pistols for personal protection,” the NRA guide says.

My husband thinks this is the reason I am suddenly interested in firearms. He knows the long, bloody history of white supremacy in this country, sees the emboldened anger, the rising violence. Even before the 2016 election we’d fantasized about moving abroad after retirement, finally leaving it all behind. Retirement is coming, but in the meantime we still live here. In the meantime we see what is clearly to be seen.

He says that even after I learn to shoot and safely handle our firearm, I will need regular visits to the shooting range to keep up my skills. I disagree. Say I do not need to become a markswoman. Tell him I only want to learn how to safely load, unload, and carry a weapon, how to store it properly so that no unauthorized users can find or wield it, how to keep from shooting myself in the foot.

“Survival is not my goal,” I tell him gently.

If a civil war breaks out, I say, if violent white mobs begin roaming the country as they have done in the past, I will not worry about precision shooting. I intend to sit on my porch with my legally acquired handgun and as much ammunition as I have and perhaps a bottle of Scotch and take them as they come. I say as much to my husband. My husband, understandably, is shocked. He’s not sure he believes me. I’m pretty sure he should.

“Are you afraid?” my husband asks.

Only of my anger. Only of becoming like them.

Is it possible to be angry without being violent? Is it possible to live in a violent society without becoming that way?

They march in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting about replacement. They run down Heather Heyer like a dog. I sit at home and watch, angry.

They march through Washington, D.C., shouting, “Reclaim America!” escorted by police. I sit at home, law-abiding, an exemplary citizen. Furious.

In Texas they try to run a Biden campaign bus off the road. In Oregon a Republican legislator lets them saunter armed into the state capitol. They try to kidnap the governor of Michigan.

They storm the United States Capitol, smashing windows, assaulting cops, chasing a Black officer up the stairs like a lynch mob running through the Mississippi woods, slinging racial epithets. They invade our government while waving the flag of slavery. “This is our house!” they chant. “This is our house!”

At home I watch the television, fists balled. Our house? Our house? This house that sits on a bloody foundation, which rests on stolen land? This house painted on the outside but inside left to crumble and rot? This house that has room for all but also locked doors and hidden keys? This house?

This house is not your house. This house is either everyone’s house or it is no one’s.

That’s what I want to defend.

Kim McLarin is an award-winning novelist, essayist and cultural critic. Her work has been honored by PEN New England, the Hurston-Wright Foundation and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her cultural criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, The Washington Post, Slate and many other publications. Her most recent book, Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed, was honored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book in 2024. She is a former journalist for The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and was host of Basic Black, Boston’s long-running television program devoted to African-American themes produced by WGBH. She is a former dean and Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College.

I Am No Beekeeper

Dec 24, 2024

“Fruit Still Life With Bee,” oil on canvas, by Andreas Lach, c. 1882.

My housemate sleeps all day, makes art all night, and paints giant bees. “I want people to feel my paintings,” she says, stroking the palm of her hand against a still dripping head-to-toe canvas.

I keep my hands in pockets. We’ve only been at the art residency for a week, and she has already transformed her garage studio into a world of whimsy. My art is trapped inside me. Weighs down my womb with rocks.

“Go on. Touch them,” she insists.

Reluctantly, I pet a painting underlaid with stenciled honeycomb, and as I stroke their ridges, they bring a kind of soothing, like touching my skin beneath the crushed lace of my underwear.

The artist begs me to collaborate with her. “Write me something, anything, about bees,” she implores. I scan my brain for memories: the only thing I remember is being a flailing girl, bees in my mane of hair, panicking in summer idyll. But at least this project will distract from my own private grief—from the story I promised I would never write.

*

As red courses through the chlorophyll, I am remembering the beauty of the trees last year and bracing for the betrayal that comes next. The way memory moves in all directions at once, leads us forward as often as it leads us back. The clenched muscles of winter already around my neck.

*

Each night, the four of us artists dine together. My housemate, the nocturnal bee artist, talks about the abuse of her first husband, the impotency of her second, and her passion for Cappuccino Häagen-Dasz ice cream without altering her cheerful tone. There’s also a famous painter in her eighties who has traveled the world reimagining female archetypes. She’s here with her daughter, also a writer, whose nest of frizzy hair and sparkling eyes make me want to climb into her lap and rest my brain.

These women are here to escape the burden of being a mother: the domestic responsibilities, the emotional labor. I am by far the youngest. At dinner I sit very straight and wipe my mouth with my napkin and try to resist pushing the last bite of crumb cake with my finger.

The two painters are discussing the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade. I grip the underbellies of my thighs. Then the older painter turns to me and asks, “What do you make of it?”

I am too stunned to lie. “Well, I had an abortion a month ago.”

She laughs. “Ah, there you go,” and the conversation flows onwards.

*

“The bees are vanishing” is an alarm bell I’ve heard ad nauseum, but I didn’t honestly know what it meant. I could live without honey, I thought. It would be disappointing, but hardly a global catastrophe.

I didn’t know that the bees are vanishing because their food is no longer safe for consumption—that it has been sprayed with synthetic pesticides, stripped of nutrients, drugged up with neonicotinoids—which is as poisonous as it sounds. I didn’t know that honeybees pollinate more than 1/3 of the world’s crops. Apples. Melons. Cranberries. Squash. Broccoli. 75% of the world’s flowering plants. I didn’t know that vanishing bees means that our food will vanish in turn. That our survival depends on the fertility of the bees.

Fertility. That word is everywhere, always meaning something good.

*

I take several walks a day up the swollen, dead-end hill. In the nearby orchard, I pluck apples from their stems. Feeling how readily they give, my heart breaks. The orchard asks nothing of me except to receive. I do not deserve these apples—blushing, crisp, tender. I do not deserve my own body’s fruits, rotting in the soil.

*

I soon learn the other artists have all born death: aborted embryos, fatal fetuses, ectopic pregnancies, children that died young. Between the four of us, we make sixteen pregnancies and only three living children.

The women adore their children as much as their art. Yet they lament the manifold challenges of being a mother in America. The exhaustion and isolation. The hit to their paycheck. The lack of support from their partners. The annihilation of their autonomy.

“If you want to be a serious artist, would you advise against having children?” I ask, optimistically.

“Oh, definitely have children,” they chime in chorus. “Just don’t get married.”

*

A year earlier, I was supposed to marry an actor. He was warm and funny and brilliant and always angry. We had moved from Brooklyn to Western Massachusetts into a lopsided cottage. I loved when I would pull into the driveway and see our home illuminated through the window—the strung fairy lights, the warm glow of our living room, Bob Marley spinning on the record player. I proposed on New Year’s Day over pancakes.

By Thanksgiving, the tree of our relationship was stripped bare. He wanted to move back to New York. I wanted to stay. This difference exposed the root system beneath. The rage bursting from his skin. My relentless appetite for connection. How I would bring him my grievances, like striking a match against a piece of wood, hoping we could sit together for a while and patiently warm our hearts. But he would pour lighter fluid on the whole thing, exploding into fury or shame, rendering the kindling I’d offered charred, unrecognizable. No longer mine.

Our last photos together were us apple picking in an orchard with crimson shirts that matched the trees. I don’t remember what we made from all the apples we baked, only that it made the kitchen smell like home.

*

Bees have long received the prayers of women longing for marriage and childbirth. In Scandinavian tradition, the “honey moon” was the moon cycle following a couple’s wedding, during which the newly-wed couple would be given enough mead (honey wine) to hopefully conceive a child. The Lithuanian goddess Austéja—a name that means “to weave,” as in the weaving of honeycomb—was the mother of bees who watched over newly engaged and pregnant women.

In Ancient Greece, the bees were protectors of the greatest Gods: Zeus was hidden by his mother and tended to by the “Melissae,” the Greek word for bees. Dionysus, too, was re-born and raised by nymphs who spoiled him with honey.

I imagine women drunk with the honey of marriage, their bellies bulging like a hive. Once I had wanted all of these things, or thought I might. Now at the residency, I lie in bed all afternoon, listening to the wind thrashing at the windows as the rosebud wallpaper shaves its petals. Feeling the summer slip away with each breath.

*

When my body created the cells of what might have become a baby, it was slanted sun afternoon on a summer beach. Warm salty song on my skin. My body pretzeled with a man I’ll call Dmitri, my head on his knee, his heart on my back. His strong arms carrying me into the sea. I was safe. I was ignorant. I was free.

Dmitri lived many hours from me and many worlds away, with his mother and sister and her two children that he was helping to raise. He was an immigrant and spoke four languages. He was Jewish, like me. The weekend that we spent together, he said I love you, and I wasn’t going to say it back, but our last day together I did, because I’ve never been any good at keeping my own secrets.

We both knew it would never work between us. This allowed us to be enthralled with our foreign tongues, our corporeal troves, the illusion that we could not create new life out of each other.

*

Two months later, I was hunting between my legs for the blood that wouldn’t come. I ate parsley by the fistful—an Argentinian home remedy that had saved me many times before. Now their limp chartreuse bodies littered my hotel rooms and rental cars. Bitter leaves of futility lodged between my teeth. I was traveling abroad and trying to feel free, happy, worthy of the beauty around me, so I delayed the knowing as long as I could, even though my breasts ached and my stomach groaned with foreign sensors, tiny dials twisted on and outwards.

Finally, denial was no longer tolerable. Crouching in my friend’s cool tile Berlin bathroom, warm urine spilled out of me and onto the flimsy plastic pregnancy test. Through the walls, there was the German sing-song of my friend’s son mashing his food, the swish and hum of the faucet, a day eager to be gotten on with. Acrid parsley at the back of my throat.

I’d always expected the choice about whether to carry a child would be the hardest part. That I would be forced to weigh the hunger that I had only occasionally felt for motherhood against the fear this might be my only chance.

In reality, I scheduled the abortion without hesitation. There was no part of me that was ready to birth or raise a child on my own. But it was more than that. I felt disgusted by this new life growing inside me, violating my body, making a home in a place where I already lived, and this overwhelming repulsion—more than the decision itself—was what made me feel like a monster.

*

Watching PBS documentaries, I discover that I am still terrified of bees. There is something so monstrous about their bulging black eyes, throbbing bodies, their mechanical drive for labor. They awaken a space of nightmares inside me.

I watch the bare-handed beekeepers, the way they talk about their hives as families, the way they lovingly twist and turn their hands amidst a swarm without any fear. I understand that I am no beekeeper. I’m not made to be a keeper of anything.

*

In the days leading up to my abortion, Dmitri came to take care of me. He changed the lightbulbs in my kitchen, screwed on the doorknob of my bedroom, bathed my dog, cooked me so much food, too much food and let a lot of it go bad. He fucked me pushed up against the wall, which I hadn’t known I wanted until I did.

Meanwhile I was pregnant with his baby, a baby he said he dreamt about the night we accidentally conceived, a baby he said would be a boy. All the more reason to abort, I joked. We joked a lot about these things. He came in me a thousand times. We did everything wrong, and this was the pleasure. We both knew this was an absurd, ravenous distraction. We both knew that once it was over, we would return to our separate lives.

For the bees, sex and death are intertwined. The queen bee kills the male drone in the act of copulation. The drone, who has no stinger or pollen basket to forage for food, has only one purpose: to impregnate the queen so that she can fertilize half a million eggs, the spawn of the next generation. She will mate with more than a dozen drones each time she flies through the air. She carries each carcass as a prize.

But I am not a bee, so I did not want Dmitri to serve me, but to love me beyond the mere moments we had together. Even though my heart thrummed every time I looked at him, every time he touched me, nothing about my decision was changed. Because I’m not a bee, my purpose was not to breed the next generation.

*

I carry the genes of Israelites as far back as can be traced, but where is the Jew in me now? My crooked nose. Dark tangle of curls. The creep of illness. Depression in the cavities. I’m a Hebrew school drop-out.

Yet I still feel the pressure to marry a Nice Jewish Boy, carry his baby, and prolong the fate of the Jewish people for the rest of eternity. The pressure doesn’t exactly come from my secular parents. It’s more a sense of duty that runs through my blood, infuses the air all around me. Rocks heavy in my belly.

But what would I pass down besides an alphabet that forks my tongue, melancholy melodies, a history of longing and leaving and loss? I don’t want this to be true, but I feel most connected to my ancestors in my twisted gut, the failed wings of my thyroid, the restlessness beneath my feet, as if my body will not acknowledge, will not accept, any inheritance besides sorrow.

*

My mother had four abortions. She says it was always the wrong timing. She thought she had her diaphragm in. Or was it five? She can’t remember.

Privately I had always judged my mother. For her alleged absentmindedness. Her dissociative disregard for her own body. As much as I believed in every woman’s right to choose, my mother’s misremembering seemed almost callous, as if proving the Right-wingers right in their views on women’s casual approach to life and death. As if my birth was as incidental as my death might have been.

When I called my mother from Berlin to tell her about the pregnancy, it was the middle of the night in New York, but she picked up, just as she always does. I thought she would be angry. I thought she would be disappointed.

“Oh honey,” she said. Her voice like warm milk.

She arrived just after Dmitri left. She cooked chicken soup fragrant with dill just as her grandmother had taught her, and rubbed my back on a sea of towels, promising that I would get past this soon. I stiffened my back, not wanting to believe her. I wanted this death to mean something. I wanted my own life to mean even more.

*

Within minutes of dissolving the chalky pills inside my cheeks. I was sweating, vomiting, shitting, unable to breathe. The pain tore at me from Inside-Out. The labor a fraction of a birth, yet the closest I may ever come.

Finally, the blood. Slow bloodied kisses into the hapless wings of my Maxi-pads. The agony dissolved and I climbed into the numbness.

So many of us want to forget. Why wouldn’t we? We celebrate pregnancy and venerate death, but there is no ritual passed down for abortion. We try to ignore the picketers proclaiming that we’re murderers. We force ourselves to remember that Life is always a Choice, no matter what the newscasters say. We pacify the pain with pills. We go back to work on Monday.

I vowed to myself: I will never, ever write about this.

*

Worker bees, all of whom are female, share the labor of caring for the queen and larvae. They gather nectar, make honey, guard the hive, and groom each other. As the worker bees age, they move through many different roles, from nurse, to undertaker, to honey maker, to a forager who flies hundreds of miles per day. The queen’s only job is to produce offspring and be cared for. She’s no nurturer—that’s what the community is for.

Hive-mind, we call those bees, operating in democracy as exquisite and structurally-sound as honeycomb. Hive-womb, I wonder.

*

Before dinner with the artists, I smear on winecup lipstick in hopes of drawing life out of ceremony. The famous artist squints her eyes and scowls. “That looks dreadful, darling,” she tells me. She is just trying to be motherly, but it stings. I singe the color from my lips.

Her daughter consoles me, embarrassed. We’ve begun to confide in each other over long walks—a ritual of connection I’ve come to depend on. She is newly separated from her husband and used to nurturing everyone else’s needs instead of her own. In these moments together, my chest softens and expands like the magnificent carpet of leaves at the hill’s apex.

She came here seeking respite, but instead she has found mold in her house. Gray-green blooms on the ceiling, in the cabinets, along the windowsills, everywhere she looks. She can’t sleep, can’t concentrate, can’t breathe, definitely can’t write. That night, as we wash our dishes, she tells me that she wants to leave the residency early. My heart retracts into a bud, the seasons moving in reverse.

Afterwards, the bee painter clings tightly to my arm as we hobble micro-steps back towards our house. She has had multiple brain tumors, the most recent of which has paralyzed her right leg, which drags deadened along the cement. Normally for me, this would be a one-minute walk, but together, it takes ten minutes to navigate these subtle topographies of road, and though I proclaim patience, I am burning inside. I don’t want to be anyone’s caretaker. I only want to be cared for, or else I want to crash.

*

The bees have always been associated with death. Celts believed that bees were divine conduits, carrying messages in the same places they carried pollen, itching to be released. Bees whispered to the gods just as they whispered to the dead. In the Celtic Underworld, rivers flowed with mead.

The bee is the embodiment of paradoxes, opposites that fascinate. The light and dark emblazoned on their striped uniforms: the sun of the fields and the deep mystery of the hive. The honey and the venom. The bridges they fly between Heaven and Hell.

At night I swerve on dark country roads. I am wild with grief, but it’s not for the child I might have had. The child is gone, and so are the others—my fiancé; Dmitri—leaving me alone in my wildness, grieving my uncertain future.

*

It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Dark clouds bleed through sun, taunting with rain.

I decide I’ve watched enough documentaries and schedule a visit to a local apiary. Perhaps the bees will frighten me less when I’m under their thrall. When my GPS indicates that I’ve arrived, my stomach drops. There’s an enormous Trump 2024 banner flapping in the driveway. I pull in, but only so that I can take a moment to decide what to do. I keep the engine running.

But it’s too late. There’s a woman waving at me feverishly from the house, beckoning me to join her. I trudge towards the door and her face is wrinkled with a million smiles. “She’s here!” she calls out to her husband, a Santa Claus type figure with red suspenders. I worry that they will ask me why I’m interested in bees, or what I’m writing about, or really anything about myself, and I will instantly betray my welcome. But they only ask me where I live, and when I say Western Massachusetts, they nod with satisfaction.

Though they do not ask for my story, it is only because they have so many stories to share with me. In the quiet of their office, they draw the seasons of the bees with their hands. They let me dip my finger into the honey vat and ask if I can taste the blueberries. They outfit me in a spaceship style suit and triple-check there are no holes in the netting.

When I allude to my “out of nowhere” curiosity about the bees, the man interrupts me: “They always come when you need them.” He tells me about his history of substance use and their adult son who died. “The bees brought me back to life,” he says, gesturing towards the swarms in the distance. His wife loops her arm around his and squeezes hard.

We head over to the barn, me in my suit, them in overalls and bare knuckles, lifting the lids of hives as we inspect for the dead among the living. The bees’ droning omnipresent and ominous. When one lands just inches from my face, peering at me with its cold black eyes, I trip over a plank and nearly fall right on my face. But the owners don’t make fun of me, a kindness that gives me courage. “They scare me, too,” the woman whispers in my ear. Still, when the sky gives way to storming, I’m grateful the tour is cut short.

Before I leave, the woman pushes a giant bag into my hands. Inside are multiple jars of raw honey—amber, creamed, and chestnut—beeswax salve, a candle of a carved turkey. “Come back when you have hives of your own,” they insist.

They refuse my protests. They make me promise.

*

After visiting the bees, I bleed again for the first time. Strangely enough, it’s on the day of the month that I’ve bled for years. Even in this death, my body is returning to its old cycles. Uterus shuddering with memory.

*

Late one night, my housemate shows me her paintings, turned even more intricately layered and vibrant. There are fuchsia bees. Tangerine bees. Cerulean bees. Bees contoured onto dyed silk and peeking through cheesecloth. Most of all, I am drawn to a painting of naked winged creatures poised atop the clouds, wings blazing fire and hands spread upwards in devotion. They are ancient bee deities, those gods and goddesses that people have worshipped since our earliest origins. Praying for life. Seeking consolation in death. Reminding us that humans have always intuited what science now makes plain: our fates have always—will always—be entwined with the bees.

*

I wish the abortion was a bee sting that would never quite heal. A swollen indentation, pink and bursting, just beneath my breast, or the inner cave behind my knee. A place that others who know this kind of grief space can detect. A place I can choose to show only to those who will understand.

*

On the nights that remain, the stories of sorrow flow like wine between us women. There are so many broken things in this world. So many lost men, lost mothers, lost children, and selves that have been slivered. But we do not starve for sweetness.

After each dinner we share together, we ladle honey onto our tongues, a punch of golden amnesia to the world beyond. The apples from the orchard kiss our lips. We ignore mold on the inner lids of lampshades. We hold each other’s hands on the cracked sidewalk. We always leave each other with leftovers.

Arya Samuelson is the winner of New Ohio Review’s 2023 Nonfiction Prize and CutBank’s 2019 Montana Prize in Nonfiction awarded by Cheryl Strayed. Her work has also been published (or forthcoming) in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Based in Northampton, MA, Arya is currently working on a novel and a memoir in essays. Her website is www.aryasamuelson.com.

Back to Me: A Love Letter, on purpose

Dec 23, 2024

“Sick Husband,” oil on canvas, by Vassily Maximov, 1881.

In 2017, I published The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life, a memoir developed from a Huffington Post column I wrote some years ago. During an interview after it came out, my friend, Tanya Baker, at National Writing Project Blogtalk radio, said, “you describe this as a writing life memoir. But I think this book is as much a love letter to your husband as anything else.”

I had never thought about this, but in that moment, I knew she was right. It was a love letter, albeit an unintentional one.

Every Saturday night for most of our married lives has been date night. Tonight is no exception. You have always loved to cook, to plan elaborate gourmet meals, set the table and pair the wine and so, from the bedroom where I read, I can hear you clearing the counters, preparing your mise en place, hear your footsteps across the scuffed wood floor, the way you like to talk to yourself as you go, “Okay, then. Okay.”

Then, a hard crash.

“John?” I call, “Are you ok?”

Nothing. I call again. At this point, under normal circumstances, you would have answered with a vaguely annoyed, “Fine, I’m fine!”

Silence.

I find you on your back, on the floor in front of the sink.

Your eyes, your beautiful blue eyes, are open, but you are not breathing.

No.

No. No. No.

I find my phone and dial 911.

“Talk me through CPR,” I tell them after they establish our address.

“Ok,” the operator says after finishing instructions. “Every time you see him breathe, say it out loud.”

“Breathe,” I say as the air comes out of your lips in soft puffs.

Begging.

“Breathe.”

Imploring.

“Breathe.”

Pleading.

Twenty-five years ago. Abundantly pregnant with our oldest child, struggling to perform CPR on a mannequin on the floor, while you knelt beside me, to take your turn.

“I know most of you are here to learn CPR to be better parents for your children,” the instructor, in a white polo shirt with American Red Cross stamped on the breast, told us. “But chances are you won’t perform it on them. You’ll perform it on an adult having a cardiac arrest. On a stranger. Or someone you love.”

Sudden cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death. Cardiac arrest is when the heart stops beating. Some 350,000 cases occur each year outside of a hospital, and the survival rate is less than 12 percent.¹

“Can I still talk to him?” I ask from the hallway where I go to get out of the EMT’s way.

“Sure,” he says, kneeling to position the defibrillator.

After the first shock. “We got a pulse!”

“Stay with us, honey,” I call. “Please stay.”

“We lost it. We lost it. Try again.”

This will happen three more times before you are stable enough to move to the ambulance.

“Ma’am,” they say. “Do you have someone you can call?”

“He’s stable for now,” Dr. Nagy, the cardiologist on call, tells me in the nearly-empty waiting room outside the ICU. “But his heart stopped and he was down a while. There’s damage. Death is still a possibility. What we’re looking for in the next twenty-four hours is that nothing else bad happens. No setbacks. That’s what we need.”

CONWAY REGIONAL HEALTH SYSTEM
CONSULATATION/AGE/SEX: 60M

NAME: VANDERSLICE, JOHN
DOB 5/29/1961
UNIT#: MOOO198400
ROOM: /CATHLAB
ADMITDATE/TM: 10/16/21, 1930

Consult HPI
Physicians
PCP: Bart Throneberry, MD

Chief Complaint: Cardiac Arrest

HPI: 60 year old man with history of hypertension presented status post cardiac arrest witnessed by his wife. By the time she came in he was laying on the floor having seizure-like movements. She started immediate CPR and called 911. EMS came on the scene and affected V. fib the patient required multiple shocks and he restored pulse in about 40 minutes. On his admission EKG he had new left bundle branch block. He had a traumatic CPR, some hemoptysis blood suction during intubation and NG tube placement. Given his new left bundle branch block in the setting of cardiac arrest he was taken to the Cath Lab emergently. The patient was intubated and sedated.

ADDENDUM: LH cath showed mild to moderate non-obstructive CAD with no clear culprit. LVgram showed EF 35-40%. Cooling catheter was placed via Right femoral vein.

After they put you in the coma and start the hypothermal protocol designed to save your internal organs, your brain, from the shock and inflammation of the cardiac arrest, Amy, the weekend nurse who administered the protocol, tells me they had to put you on a paralytic because you were shivering so badly. Of course you were; you are always cold. She also tells me she is hopeful you are “in there” based on how hard you were to intubate. “That,” she says, nodding assuredly, “is always a good sign.”

Amy is tall and slender with wavy dark hair that just brushes her shoulder and an open, energetic expression: wide, hazel eyes. She sits, erect, at a computer stationed just outside the door of your room, monitoring your vitals on the screen while keeping you in her gaze.

“Why is that a good sign?”

“He was aware enough not to want the tube. It says right in the notes,” she explains, “intubating him was traumatic.”

I tuck this information away, at the top of the mental list of “reasons why John might wake up,” a list I, a lifelong list-maker, never imagined composing as I stand beside your bed, your silver and black hair medusa-ed by tubes.

It is also Amy who tells me, “Well, his pupils look good,” after she examines your vitals with your new nurse, Kathy, at the shift change.

“What does that mean, his pupils look good?”

“They’re not dilated. His brain stem is functioning. You can’t do anything without a functioning brain stem. He has beautiful eyes,” she adds. “Doesn’t he have beautiful eyes?” she says to Kathy.

“He really does,” Kathy agrees.

I used to think my eyes were my best feature until I met you, when I had to concede that while I had pleasant-enough blue eyes, yours really were extraordinary. They were also routinely fussed-over, often by total strangers, your reaction routinely awkward and embarrassed. Their color a luminous blend of aquamarine and peridot they still disarmed me from time to time, even after thirty years. And so, “your pupils look good,” goes next on the mental list of hopeful signs, even as I am afraid to hope.

Of the three ICU nurses upon whose every word I hang (we will get to Rachel in a bit), the new nurse, Kathy, is more cautious. Circumspect. I put her at around my age, mid-fifties, tall, with a loose skein of long, dark-brown hair graying at the roots and a commanding knowledge of her field.

A student nurse, with glossy brown hair pulled into a bun and cheeks that seem permanently flushed, shadows Kathy that first day. Kathy quizzes her throughout the shift.

“And why do we do this?” she says as they adjust the sheets to shift you, sling-wise, to the left side of the bed.

“So he doesn’t get bed sores?”

“Correct,” Kathy confirms.

“Do you think it looks good for him,” I venture timidly toward the end of the shift, after the student nurse has left. I know I shouldn’t put her on the spot, but I can’t help myself. Obviously, Kathy knows things. “Do you think he’ll wake up.”

She shrugs. “It’s so hard to tell. There are some good signs but you never really know. You just have to wait.”

Dr. Nagy returns in the early evening. The day has passed relatively quietly. Nothing bad has happened. You slept, your head and mouth still blooming with wires and tubes, but your face was placid, your eyelids smooth.

“Ok. So far so good,” Dr. Nagy acknowledges. As I’m coming out of the fog of the last twenty-hour hours, I am realizing that he speaks rapidly, with an accent I can’t quite place—Eastern European maybe. He has dark curly hair, graying slightly at the temples, an olive complexion. “Next, we bring in the neurologist, do an EEG and a CAT scan to see where we are. We’ll start tomorrow. But we won’t know anything for sure until we try to wake him up.”

“When will that be?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Couple days. We have to see. We don’t know.”

Every day, I park in the same row near the hospital entrance. Otherwise, I cannot find the car. Fortunately, because I live nearby and tend to run home at odd hours, early in the morning or late at night, there’s usually a space. I park carefully, pulling in and out a few times to perfect the angle, because I know you like a good parking job. I also lock the car when I leave it, even though the few seconds it takes to find my keys in my bag right now brings on a wave of tears. Before all this, I parked with relative abandon and considered leaving the car unlocked the best solution to digging for my keys. But that was then. Now I finding myself doing these things because I know you’d approve. As if doing them will summon you back to me.

When I arrive, Dr. Tarcher, the neurologist, is standing at your bedside. My own neurologist, Dr. Becker, a kind, earnest man who treats me for the mild tremor in my left hand, the one you gently pointed out some years ago, also attends at this hospital but he must not have been on call. I’m not sure how I feel about Dr. Tarcher. For one thing he seems a bit glib for someone who regularly confers with people about whether their loved ones will ever be conscious again. But mostly I just wish he was Dr. Becker, because I know him, because he comes from my own past, such as it is now.

According to Dr. Tarcher, they need to do the first brain scan because of the paralytic. Every time they try to take you off it, you start shivering violently. But since you can’t move on the paralytic, a brain scan is the only way to know if you’re having seizures, which could potentially cause further brain damage.

Dr. Tarcher is what I suppose one would call conventionally handsome, with short, wiry silver hair, steel-blue eyes and a soft, vaguely patronizing voice that reminds me of the male evangelical radio hosts who make me instantly reach to change the station. “Brain injury often doesn’t show up for at least 72 hours so we probably won’t see anything,” he explains. “And anyway, we’re looking for seizures. But we could see brain injury. So if we see nothing it doesn’t mean anything but it is better than if we do see something.”

“So we’re hoping not to see anything. Especially not seizures?”

“Exactly,” Dr. Tarcher says, smiling approvingly at my apprehension of this neurological version of “Who’s on Second?” “That’s it.”

I spend a lot of time those first three days leaning on the metal railing of your bed, staring at you. Partly just because I can, because not long ago, I was not sure I would ever be able to see you alive again and partly because in spite of the terrifying place I have found myself, your face is so calm and even, it’s kind of beautiful and almost comforting. The rhythm of the vent reminds me of when I first I caught a glimpse of you sleeping with your CPAP mask on, years ago. The most restless sleeper I had ever known, for whom our bed sometimes seemed more an object of torture rather than a place of rest, fitted for the first time with that plastic mask over your mouth and nose, the machine humming rhythmic breaths, you were so still, so serene, I almost burst into tears. Instead, I stood at the end of our bed, staring at you for several moments, just taking you in, in a way that after more than twenty years of marriage, I’d never seen you before. Peaceful. Peaceable. At rest.

But I’m not at your bedside staring at you when Rachel, the new weekday nurse, is adjusting your IV. I step out of the way whenever the nurses need to do anything, taking the opportunity to update our family on your status, which means I am probably staring at my phone.

“Oh my God, did you see that?” Rachel says, mouth agape. Rachel seems impossibly young, a tiny blond with long, straight, center-parted hair and imploring green eyes, but she is just as quick as the other nurses have been, perhaps even more so. Nothing gets past Rachel. “He just reached for the vent!”

I hadn’t seen it and to be honest, the idea seems a bit far-fetched, if only because I want so much for it to be true.

“Mrs. Stephanie, I just had to hold down his arm to keep him from grabbing it again.”

“Wow.” I say, still unconvinced.

“That,” Rachel says, nodding conclusively, “is a very good sign.”

Reaching for the vent, she explains, demonstrates a purposeful motion that could indicate brain activity. But I don’t put it on the list. Not yet, anyway.

My caution bears out when Dr. Tarcher returns later that afternoon and says that he is more inclined to attribute what Rachel saw to wishful thinking, partly because he tried to get you to do it again.

“I don’t know,” he says glumly, as if you are just being stubborn. “He won’t do it for me.”

Rachel shakes her head. “Nope,” she insists, resolute. “He reached for that tube. With his left hand. I had to hold it down.”

My heart leaps so hard it hurts. “He’s left-handed.”

If you were going to purposely reach for the tube, you would absolutely do it with your left hand. You reached for the tube.

“Well, at least he hasn’t been seizing,” Dr. Tarcher says. “The scan hasn’t shown any damage, so far anyway, although we’re still not at 72 hours yet. I would say I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Cautiously optimistic. I’m a writer and a college professor. I know what cautiously optimistic means, but I look it up on my phone anyway: “Hopeful but recognizing problems.” “Cautiously optimistic” tells me Dr. Tarcher thinks, “this could turn out okay but I’m still hedging my bets.”

I don’t know what I think. But I don’t add it to the list.

“He said he was cautiously optimistic?” My cousin, Thomas, a cardiologist in Scarsdale, says that night during our check-in. “Stephanie, that’s good. That’s really good. Doctors never say that.”

I know I am lucky to have my own personal cardiologist on call, especially since Dr. Nagy is not especially forthcoming. Born when I was a freshman in college, Thomas was a fragile, premature baby who grew into a sturdy, good-natured toddler with bright blue eyes and a wispy nimbus of white-blonde curls. Now he talks me down every night in a quiet, unoccupied hallway around the corner from your room. I recount what happened that day, what the doctors said, and he explains what they are doing and why, and reassures me, usually, that they are doing exactly what he would do in your situation. And, he reminds me, “this is the hard part. The waiting.”

Three of my cousins, all brothers, are doctors in the New York metropolitan area: Eddie, also a cardiologist and Michael, Jr. an anesthesiologist. Thomas is the youngest. Their father, my uncle, Michael Pettei, is a pediatric gastroenterologist at Cohen Children’s Hospital-Long Island Jewish. Not long ago, in the early days of the pandemic, as it pummeled New York, they were at the nexus of all our familial worry, our sighs of relief practically audible when photos of them receiving the first wave of the vaccine began to appear on social media. Apparently, they were all commiserating on your case, but Thomas had volunteered to be the point person.

Fifteen years before, they had all stood side by side performing a vigorous rendition of “Sweet Caroline,” at their sister’s wedding.

“Future doctors of America,” you had said, grinning at me as we took a spin on the dance floor. “Future doctors of America, right there.”

A strange thing began happening to my memories that week. They froze. Before, my memories seemed to exist on a sort of continuum that had been our life together. Now the continuum had vanished, and each memory that passed before me had a period to it, like an end-stop in a line of poetry. An end-stop to us.

Rachel is your day nurse. Joon is your night nurse. Joon has straight black hair and a wide, easygoing grin. He’s been a critical care nurse for over thirty years. His kids are older than ours. Half-stars radiate from the corners of his eyes as he tells me about his grandchildren.

Just before Rachel leaves, she takes me aside. “You should sleep at home tonight,” she says. “He’s safe here. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day. They’re going to try to wake him up. You should get some rest.”

I know you’re safe here, that you’re safer here, now, with machines counting every breath, every heartbeat, than anywhere else in the world. I just want to be with you. I don’t know if I need to count the days now. The hours. The minutes. But Rachel makes a fair point. It’s impossible to get a full night’s rest sleeping beside you on the recliner in the ICU. Amy already warned me if I didn’t get more sleep I might start hallucinating and as if to illustrate her point, last night my uncle told me about the mother of a recent patient who got so little sleep she started to believe her child was possessed by demons. “You don’t want that to happen,” he says.

So, I stay until around eight and then tell you that I am going home for a bit, to eat and walk the dogs, which is always a good excuse where you are concerned. We have some of the best walked dogs in the neighborhood thanks to you. I am not so solicitous. We have a big, fenced backyard for them to run around in. As far as I’m concerned, once a day around the block is enough. In fact, I am tempted to remind you that another reason not to die is that the dogs will only get walked once a day if you do. But I am holding that in reserve.

Joon is not at the computer station in front of your door when I leave because he is the shift leader. “Please take good care of him,” I plead when I find him at the nurse’s station. “He doesn’t have any grandchildren, yet.”

I’m not beyond invoking a little pathos in my desperation.

Joon smiles a reassuring, don’t worry, I have seen it all smile. “You can call and check on him if you want,” he tells me. “Before you go to bed.”

In the end, I do not call. I know that if I call and they give me the slightest whiff of not-so-good news, I will start obsessing and not sleep at all, which is what I came home to do. I’m planning to sleep tonight like it’s my job. People call and need updates, so I don’t get to bed until midnight but that still leaves a solid seven hours before I go back for the shift change.

Our dogs, a rat terrier-dachshund mix and a lab mix draped on either side of me, do not stir.

My phone goes off at 7 am.

“He’s awake, Mrs. Stephanie. He woke up around 4:30. I asked him if he knows who Mrs. Stephanie is. He said yes. Well, he nodded. He really wants that tube out. We had to put him in restraints to stop him grabbing it.”

“I’ll, I’ll be right there.” I tell her. “I just have to throw on some clothes.” Why didn’t I sleep in my clothes?

I pass Joon in the hallway as I run to your room.

“You said you’d call,” he chastises, grinning still. “He gave us a lot of trouble.”

“I know. It got too late.” A half-truth.

“Go on in,” Rachel says from your doorway as I tear down the hall. “He’s waiting for you. Mr. John, Mrs. Stephanie is here.”

And then there you are, your eyes, those beautiful blue eyes, wide with fear and confusion.

I take your hands and stand there, staring into them. I tell you, I’m here, I’m here. You’re going to be ok. I tell you what happened. I tell you we’re going to take care of you, that’s it’s all going to be ok. I tell you so many people, so, so many people, here at home and all over the world, have been holding you in light. I tell you I love you like a period, at the end of every sentence. I stare into your face, at your wide, frightened eyes, greedily consuming your features, your consciousness.

You will remember none of this. None of it. I don’t blame you. You’re anxious, confused, uncomfortable. Erasing the memory protects you from the trauma, or so they tell me.

“Don’t talk above a whisper for forty-five minutes,” the pulmonologist tells you, after your gulp for air when he removes the vent. “Otherwise, you could damage your vocal cords.”

Besides nodding and shaking your head, you don’t have much to say. You are with us, but tenuously, still groggy, and bewildered.

After an awkward hour passes, I ask Rachel if you can talk yet.

“Oh definitely,” she says. “You don’t have to whisper any more, Mr. John.”

You gaze at her blankly, so she starts asking questions.

“Do you know where you are?”

You shake your head. No.

“You’re at Conway Regional Hospital. Do you know why you’re here?”

Again, no, although this has been explained to you several times.

“You had a sudden cardiac arrest. EMT’s had to revive you and bring you here.”

Again, your eyes widen in surprise as Rachel tells you this, as they will several more times in the next twenty-four hours when you are given the same information. But slowly, it will begin to stick.

Your room is on the first floor, looking out on the rear of the hospital: a loading dock, a parking lot, and then an expanse of lawn that leads to one of the oldest houses in Conway, the Frauenthal House, an enormous brick colonial shrouded by pine trees. After I open the blinds you stare into the distance as if trying to make sense of it, find your place in a new world.

“It’s the back of the hospital. If you keep going that way,” I point toward the Frauenthal House, “you’d reach Prince Street.”

You nod, a sober flicker of recognition passing over your face.

“The sunsets are nice out this window,” I tell you. “The light is kind of golden.”

You nod again. Making words is still difficult. I hold your hand and we gaze out the window in rare, tranquil silence, just the two of us, until the cleaning woman comes in. She was here yesterday as I was reading aloud from my phone all the names of the people sending their love. Their prayers. After she finished emptying the wastebasket, she put up her hand. “Lakeisha Cordon,” she said, nodding toward me. “Add my name.”

Today she is smiling. “Oh, I know,” she says, shaking a new liner into the wastebasket. “I know when you fell for this one. The minute you saw those eyes.”

You give me a sheepish look and I add another sign to the new list I have just started. “Reasons Why John is Going to Be Okay.”

You have begun to speak more today, haltingly. There are long hesitations after every question while you form your answer.

“Is it hard,” the speech pathologist asks, “to make words?”

A few moments. Then, “Yes.”

“Okay,” she says. “Today I’m going to ask you questions and all you have to do is say “yes” if the answer is true and “no” if it’s false.”

You nod.

“An apple is a fruit.”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Good,” the speech pathologist says. “Try this one: A bird is a mammal.”

“No.” You shake your head.

“Ok,” she continues. “It is sunny at midnight.”

“No,” you say, then pause. “Unless you’re in Alaska.”

“That,” the speech pathologist says, barely concealing a smile, “is true.”

Another sign to add to the list, the list I will soon stop composing, as the signs start coming faster and faster.

In 2005, hypothermia after cardiac arrest was added to the American Heart Association guidelines for post-resuscitation care, but adoption of this protocol had been largely limited to major academic centers and tertiary care hospitals.²

In 2005 our sons turned five and nine. We moved into our second home, which was one hundred and four years old. We had been married thirteen years. In 2005.

By the end of this morning you will be moved to a regular floor. By the end of the day, you will be asking me what channel ESPN is on.

Months later, I find a photo of Joon in a local magazine, at the opening of the hospital’s new ICU.

“This is Joon. One of the nurses who took care of you in the ICU.” I point at the image of him in his scrubs.

You shrug. “I don’t recognize that person.”

It is not certain that those who wake up during the time at ICU will remember it later. Instead, it is often later in the hospital’s cardiac care ward that conscious awakening takes place. Some patients describe the time at the ICU as a large black hole.³

We have been together now many more years than we have not. And yet, I carry those seven days, first the worst and then the best days of my life, without you.

“Savor these days,” another writer friend urges me as your waking continues, as I witness it to our friends and family, day by day. The dark days, the fearsome days, are still to come—and go—as we will stagger together through your recovery on what feels like the surface of the moon, but right now it is fair to say I am almost delirious with joy. “Savor them.”

I do savor them. I also don’t want to forget them, forget what this kind of elation feels like. I have been in love—with you, with each of our children after they were born. But I have never felt anything like this before.

So I write them down, here, these days. And I offer them, now, to you.

*

Stephanie Vanderslice teaches creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and directs the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop. In addition to many books and essays on the teaching of creative writing, she is also the author of The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life and the novel, The Lost Son. She lives in Conway, Arkansas with her husband, John, where they raised two sons.

What He Won’t Tell You

Dec 15, 2024

“Cast Shadows,” oil on panel, by Émile Friant, 1891.

What he won’t tell you (at first)

A mutual friend points you out across the crowded room as someone familiar with the politics of the country where he was born.

Once you have a conversation, he can’t stop thinking about your husky voice.

He’d like to ask you out but fears you’d turn him down. He thinks you’re too smart to be moved by his smoldering good looks, that you’re above all that.

He will be wrong.

What he won’t tell you (until he’s sure he has your interest)

He comes to a meeting because he’s told you will be there. He has not heard of the proposition, would not notice if it passed.

The beautiful Latina in the tight dress he brings with him is a lesbian.

He’s already sure he’s in love with you.

What he won’t tell you (until you kiss him with an open mouth)

He won’t ask you out until he hears an inaccurate rumor that you’re moving away. That makes the possibility that you might turn him down tolerable.

He’s so worried about being late to your first date, he arrives forty minutes early. Waits in his car, watching you, silhouetted through the window shade, finish dressing.

The woman’s voice on his answering machine is his sister’s.

What he won’t tell you (until you confess you want him)

He stays up late each night reading the Marquez book you casually mentioned on the phone, reads it all the way through twice.

When he tells you this, you become enamored by what you believe it reveals: that he is unusually open, capable of a rare vulnerability.

You will be wrong.

What he won’t tell you (until after you sleep together)

Your wild hair reminds him of DNA. Whenever he looks at you, he wants to touch it.

Although he tells you he is a painter and a poet, he rarely paints or writes.

Until recently, he sold shoes to make a living.

What he won’t tell you (until he moves into your house)

He doesn’t have a bank account.

His paintings are all copies of other artists’ works or, at least, their styles.

He told you everything he knows about his country’s current political situation in your first telephone conversation.

He will never speak to you in Spanish while you make love because endearments in his native tongue remind him of his mother.

What he won’t tell you (until after you return from a journey together overseas)

He doesn’t like eating foods he’s never tasted before.

He says he prefers staying in rundown hotels because it’s closer to how the locals live, but it’s actually because he is almost out of money.

Change makes him so uncomfortable, he only enjoys traveling in hindsight.

His green card is expired. He will have a hard time getting back into the U.S. You will have to drop names and raise a ruckus before the authorities allow him to reenter.

This is what he won’t tell you (for many months)

His résumé lists a degree from a college he never attended.

He owes several years in back taxes.

He can fall asleep anytime, anywhere.

Especially when you are upset with him.

What he won’t tell you (until much later)

His father once hit him so hard, it broke his ribs. He still thinks he deserved it.

His last girlfriend was an IV drug user who has Hep C. He has not been tested.

You will have sex six, eight, ten times a week for two years. Then not at all—not once—though he says he’s still in love.

What he won’t tell you (until after he begs you to let him stay, to try and work things out)

He promises to go to couple’s counseling in hopes you will forget all about it.

Once he realizes you might actually end things, he will beat you to it.

This is what he won’t tell you (until it’s over)

He hasn’t had a driver’s license for more than two years. He knows if he’s stopped by police, they will impound the car.

It is often your car that he drove.

His mother has told him he is crazy if he doesn’t marry you.

Which is exactly why he can’t.

What he won’t tell you (because he cannot tell himself)

The bouquet of irises and daffodils he brings on the day he moves in will be the last flowers he ever gives you.

He is afraid of turning into his father.

He will stop making love to you after you confide you would not mind getting pregnant.

What he won’t tell you (because he doesn’t know it himself)

Even though he says repeatedly you are his last attempt, the only one he will ever love, within three months of breaking up, he will have a new girlfriend.

In the two years after he leaves you, he will:

apply for and receive a new green card
pay his back taxes
finish his bachelor’s degree and begin a masters
obtain a driver’s license and car insurance
land a steady, good-paying job

He will begin painting in an original style combining folk and post-modern influences.

What he won’t tell you (because he doesn’t want to lose you as a friend)

He enjoys traveling now and usually stays in nice hotels.

He urges his girlfriend to try new foods, to go to therapy, to handle her finances responsibly.

She never mentions things he’s having a hard time facing, so he’s never sure she actually loves him.

This is what else he won’t ever tell you (or you won’t tell him)

Once it ends, you will miss him terribly for approximately three years. Even though you were uncertain all along. Even though he didn’t turn out to be who you’d imagined.

He will get over you almost immediately.

When you see him, it will seem he has become the person you first believed he was.

He’ll no longer want you because you knew him when he wasn’t.

Sharon Gelman is a writer, editor, and activist. She was the U.S. managing editor and an interviewer for 200 Women: Who Will Change the Way You See the World. She also conceived of and produced the audiobook version of Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales, which won Audie Awards for Best Audiobook of the Year and Best Multi-Voice Performance and received a Grammy nomination. Her creative work has been recognized with the Page One Prize for Novelists, a Maryland Independent Artists Award, and as a semi-finalist for the 2022 Story Foundation Prize, among other honors. Gelman holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and has workshopped at Bread Loaf, Tin House, the Norman Mailer Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is at work on her first novel.

The Tabbies

Apr 9, 2024

“Girl With a Cat,” oil on canvas, by Ivan Kramskoy, 1882.

“Writing is also my cat. Writing lets me face it.”
—Charles Bukowski, On Cats

I.

My mother chases my female, Ernie, out of the kitchen so her two females, Iggy and Ginger, can eat their breakfasts in peace. I’ve had Ernie since she was a kitten and never denied or rationed her food, yet she’s grown into a borderline psychotic adult when mealtime comes. Meanwhile, Nicolas, my male, patrols the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms, howling about God knows what. Perhaps the horror of being trapped in a house bristling with estrogen. These are cats of the developed world. Their litterboxes are freshened daily, which is the human luxury equivalent of taking a warm bath every day; their food and water dishes are never empty; their communal Amazon best-seller cactus-shaped scratching post is replaced as needed; and since I moved in with my mother not long ago, the tabbies have two laps to choose from for their midday naps.

Since my childhood, my mother has had the same breakfast every morning: Two Shredded Wheat Original biscuits, a chopped banana and handful of strawberries, 2% milk. I wish I could cut loose like that, just plunk some strawberries and pour some milk into my bowl of cereal. But right now, measuring everything with my mom’s vintage yellow Tupperware cups is the only life choice I can trust myself to make without inviting bad consequences. Something I can safely follow through with. Last night, on a whim, I joined Noom. I’d like to lose the weight I’ve gained this past year, and Noom keeps popping up in my Facebook newsfeed, promising I can do it. I just have to believe. It’s Day 1 of my free three-month trial and I’m unable to complete the short task list the program has set before me. I’m too distracted by my anxiety about being distracted by a new app on my iPhone. I guess I don’t believe. I’m 45 and living with my 75-year-old mother, who’s in the early middle stage of Parkinson’s Disease.

My cats love to be groomed. They purr and weave around my legs whenever I put on the glove with the rubber nubs. If I start with Nicolas, Ernie sits and stares rather creepily at me; if I start with Ernie, Nicolas lies on the floor and washes his face, squinting up a storm. Both are confident they will get their turn. They are cats of the developed world. My mother wishes I would brush them more often so she wouldn’t have to vacuum so often. Four tabbies generate a lot of fugitive fur, a lot of expelled hairballs to step in on your way to the bathroom at three a.m. But by the time I get around to it, usually my mom has beat me to it. She’s always reminding me to do all kinds of things around the house, and she’s always beating me to it. This arrangement seems to suit us. My mother has accepted that I’m depressed, even if she doesn’t understand why or why I can’t move past it; I’ve accepted that one way she copes with the tremors in her right hand and arm, the right side of her face, is by criticizing me but then picking up my slack without complaint. It validates her to have someone to look after, and I need looking after.

I didn’t realize X was grooming me. I just knew nobody had ever demonstrated such enthusiasm for me, and I was willing to overlook our vast age difference and other red flags for a shot at love. We had everything in common. I believed everything he said: You are beautiful, talented, our meeting was preordained. He had just retired from a long and successful career as a journalist and wanted to write a novel. He said he needed prompting, I said that’s my specialty, he said, “You’re hired!” Four months later, while we sat at the back of a restaurant one evening, I was drunk and crying to a friend on the phone about how I couldn’t understand why I kept getting yelled at. X snatched the phone from me and demanded, “Who is this?” The next morning he threatened to surrender my cats to a local shelter simply because I went for breakfast without him. I needed to leave but I had lost myself and my sense of purpose.

But I loved my cats and now we are six, two humans and four tabbies, and hopefully someday not too far off, I’ll feel safe enough again to freely pour milk into my morning bowl of cereal.

II.

It is only Day 2 and I’m hooked. Coasting on the adrenaline from completing yesterday’s task list, which included skipping the morning weigh-in (apparently it’s normal to avoid this in the beginning, and who am I to contest the wisdom of Noom psychologists?), logging my food and beverage intake (I was at a caloric deficit, although my waistline would disagree), and setting my fitness goal for today (in a nutshell: wake up). Now it is today. I have achieved my goal of waking up and am listening to a mini-lesson on Noom’s food color system while I prepare my stovetop espresso. Ernie is staring at me from across the kitchen. It’s five a.m. and I haven’t fed her yet, and the simple fact is that she must be fed before I may prepare my espresso. With last night’s “fall back” time change, I could be accused of animal neglect.

Noom’s color system—30% green good-for-you foods, 45% yellow good-for-you-in-moderation foods, 25% orange consume-with-caution foods—is superior to the traditional food pyramid thrust upon us early in life. Every parent has or will eventually affix the pyramid infographic to their fridge. And every child has or will eventually weigh the future consequences of refusing their dinner veggies against the immediate consequences of holding their noses and swallowing an overcooked carrot-cauliflower-broccoli medley that “smells like butt!” Noom doesn’t mind if you skip the medley. A plate 30% filled with strawberries or shrimp is just as healthful. Binge away.

A medley of differences between X and me kept me from entering into the relationship with complete abandon. Some cautious, watchful part of me knew it would not end well, and still I got hooked. Now I think I understand why: Our relationship plate was, in the beginning, 100% orange. According to X, after a decade of celibacy to heal his heart and focus on his career, he was ready to devote himself fully to love. To me. He wanted to swoop me out of my drab apartment and into a seaside cottage, be at my beck and call while I wrote my next novel. He suggested we get married so he could make me the beneficiary of his pensions. Mornings when we didn’t wake up beside each other, he texted, “X loves April more than he did yesterday, but not as much as he will love her tomorrow.”

And then the love portion abruptly dropped to 0%. I questioned X about why he wanted me to block this male friend or that on Facebook and was punished with an absence of gushing texts from him the next morning. Texts, period. Not even a reply to my late-afternoon, “Are we still on for dinner? I love you…” I was sick with anxiety when he arrived to pick me up. At the restaurant, we sat at the bar instead of a table and I drank three Old Fashions while he chatted with the barmaid for over an hour, never inviting me to join the conversation. He never once looked at me or touched me.

Several days later, on our way to Walmart, X said, “I will not be treated the way you treated me at the bar.” I asked what he meant. I hadn’t treated him any way, while I might as well have been invisible. He yelled, “I will not put up with this abuse!” He knew I don’t like to argue in cars, so his solution was to idle over the double-yellow line dividing Route 7. There were no vehicles behind us or coming toward us, but that could change any second. “Please, keep driving,” I said, straining to keep the shaking in my hands and legs out of my voice. He started scrolling through his Twitter feed. He wouldn’t do anything until I stopped talking to him that way. A car came into view behind us and I started crying. X continued scrolling through his feed, liking and retweeting, until the car honked. The rest of the way to Walmart, he rested his hand on my thigh, content. “It’s about communication, baby. We must be open with each other if this relationship’s going to work. I want it to work. Do you?”

Ernie is psychically trying to murder me with her stare. I still haven’t fed her. I’m fixated on today’s Noom task list. Nicolas comes into the kitchen and stares at me in solidarity. I decide there’s nothing the love of two cats can’t cure, and orange remains my favorite color.

III.

My mother says my tabbies are terrorists. This might be true. Hers wait primly for their morning and evening meals and never dare get caught on the living room sofas, whereas mine scream for their food and force my mom’s cats into surrendering theirs. Furthermore, once their bellies are full, my tabbies lounge brazenly on the living room sofas, grooming themselves and squinting approvingly at each other as my mother scolds them.

My mother says I drink too much of her wine, especially since I typically down a double Kraken and Coke before dinner. Much like an aspiring sly teenager (or self-satisfied, bullying cat), I’ve come to believe if I sneak a glass of cab at bedtime, while my mom is downstairs watching Survivor, she won’t notice.

But I’m not self-satisfied like my tabbies. And I am not a bully.

Last night during my habitual pre-sleep wine and phone chat with a beloved and wonderful friend, I learned about Kitty Genovese*. Her story has been in the foreground of my thoughts since. In my hyper-focused, compulsive thought process style, Kitty’s story has been all I can think about. It’s a classic tale of the bystander effect. It’s severe and horrific, and it has led me to reflect anew on how some people treated me after I lost my husband to suicide on August 9, 2020—how, in the years since, as I’ve stumbled and fallen and stumbled even more, some people have averted their eyes as others have vultured in.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting my story is severe and horrific like Kitty’s. The young woman died, for fuck’s sake, because no one called for help when she was clearly in danger. Not only did bystanders allow Kitty to lay in her pooling blood after being raped and repeatedly stabbed by her assailant, but also, they allowed the assailant to return later that night and finish her off.

After Sam killed himself, I disappeared into a world of dark liquor and Miss Vickie’s chips. Friends fell away as my grief escalated, and my tabbies asserted, in their feline language, “We’ll stand by you.” Nicolas was diligent about sustaining my capacity for love. At every opportunity, he would knead the left side of my chest, where he believed my broken heart still beat. Ernie, perhaps being female, was attuned to the disease that would eventually make itself known in my cervix. Any time I was sitting cross-legged, she would curl herself into the diamond-shaped space between my legs and rest her head against my pelvis.

I can’t stop imagining what went through Kitty’s mind as she lay bleeding to death in the community she had entrusted with her safety. Did she know people could hear her cries for help? Did she convince herself, “I’m sure they would if they could.” I told myself similar stories about people intending to do good after Sam’s suicide. I even traded a promising Montréal life for a “fresh start” in the Appalachian town where I’d fallen in love with Sam eight years earlier. As someone with a propensity for perfectionism, fresh starts have a lot of appeal. But there’s no user’s manual for how to start fresh after failing to save your most precious human from murder a priori.

The move to O-Town was rough on my tabbies. A jerky six-hour U-Haul drive is more than enough to induce motion sickness in a person, so imagine how it must feel for two teeny-tiny beings whose trust and safety are entirely in your hands. The night Kitty Genovese was murdered, her life was entirely in the hands of all the bystanders who did nothing. Someone else will call for help, they reasoned. Who could let such a thing happen? they cried after Kitty’s assailant returned to kill her. When I returned to O-Town, I was crying for help myself, but I didn’t see it. I blundered often and often publicly during my year there, and the rawer I became, the easier I was to target or spurn. Circumstances beyond my control kept the insatiable rumor mill spinning, and few people came to my defense. Until, one night, I tried to join Sam.

That’s the thing about bullying: It’s not always overt, in-your-face cruelty and humiliation.

Bystanders play a role, too.

This is why my mother scolds my tabbies for eating her tabbies’ food.

My mother is not a bystander.

IV.

One of my friends has a knack for titles. During our ongoing conversation about the last several years of my life, their senseless cruelty, he will sometimes deploy a turn of phrase that compels me to write. “There’s a poem/essay/short story/novel in there!” I’ll sometimes shout. And sometimes some writing follows. It’s how this work started, although I initially saw it as a book of standalone short-form essays. The passage before my attempt here at a conclusion was previously titled, “A Cry for Help in the Middle of the Night Never Comes at a Convenient Time.” I thought my friend’s turn-of-phrase-cum-title was an incisive commentary on Kitty Genovese’s death, and a fair description of how I’ve often felt over the last several years.

Then one morning as I exercise-biked my way through a hangover while listening to the Spotify playlist “O-Town,” which I’ve since deleted because the pain linked to each song is too fresh, I reached the conclusion I’ve been reaching since my novel Carousel debuted in May 2020: I am not a writer. Any work I’ve sold, awards I’ve received, all fortuitous at best and now I must return to the life path I was travelling prior to a 20-year literary detour. This conclusion brings me at once relief—I’ll never again have to feel guilty about all the time I don’t spend writing—and disquiet—I’m giving up too easily. The bullies, who aren’t my readers yet proclaim that I can’t write, who hate the fact that I can write and I do, and they cannot or they can but do not: They win if I retire my pen. So for now writing is my Bukowski cat, so I can face the bullies.

We’re four days into the New Year. Twenty twenty-three rolled in like a lion and out like a trailer full of slaughtered lambs. My mother’s tremors have worsened, and though it appears to have happened overnight I know it hasn’t. Life has been bounding forward as I’ve been stalling, looking over my shoulder. I’m upset with myself about this, but instead of losing more time on wish-I-hads, I’m spending more time with my mother. She lets me help her now. In August, if I offered help when I saw her struggling to open a jar of pickles or load the printer with paper, she would either wave me away or submit with visible frustration. She wasn’t ready to renounce her ability to manage the details that define her. Yesterday, she asked if I would go to Costco with her for cat litter. She even allowed me to steer the massive, unwieldy shopping cart through the madness of post-holiday shopping, where people were rushing to replenish their kitchens and bathrooms with the staples they’d lost sight of in the blizzard of holiday cheer.

We nearly lost Ginger, my mother’s orange tabby, on New Year’s Day. She discovered a spool of sewing thread while my mother and I were out, so no one was home to intervene when the thread anchored on the jagged groves of her tongue and snaked toward her intestines as she panicked and swallowed in attempt to eliminate the foreign object. The night before Ginger’s surgery, my mother and I sat with her in anxious silence and smoothed her dorsal fur, which had become dull and coarse from dehydration. The other tabbies, Iggy, Ernie, and Nicolas, formed a cavalcade around her, circling protectively and touching their noses to hers, and then looking at my mother and me as if to ask, “What will happen to us when she’s gone?” We are a pack.

On Day 3, much to the automated disappointment of my Noom support team, I deleted the app from my phone. Like the epiphany born from the awkward morning-after parting of a one-night stand, I realized what Noom was for me: A smart alternative to self-harm, yet still harmful. My ongoing attempt at denying my truth, all because a few assholes claim it’s false. Largely, I have allowed my heart and sometimes my gut to guide me through life, and largely life has rewarded me for my trust in the inherent benevolence of the universe. Now is a time when trust (faith, if you will) is critical. We are six, my mother, the tabbies, and me, and as Ginger reminded us on the first day of this New Year, even though we have only now, we have one another and that is tremendous. We are a pack.

April Ford finds purpose and pleasure in helping underrepresented groups explore their passions and aptitudes for writing. Her books include Carousel: A Novel (Inanna Publications), winner of the 2020 International Book Awards for LGBTQ Fiction; The Poor Children: Stories, winner of the 2013 Santa Fe Writer’s Project Program for Fiction; and Death Is a Side-Effect: Poems (Frog Hollow Press, 2019). Her next book, People Are Metaphors and Goodbyes: Poems, is forthcoming Fall 2024 with Cactus Press Poetry. www.aprilfordauthor.com

Raiders of the Lost and Found

Feb 20, 2024

“The Fair Spinner,” oil on canvas, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1874.

My father would always play with other children at the pool. Not in a disturbing way, but just enough to make me jealous. He’d toss a beach ball to anyone’s eight-year-old or fetch a wayward pool noodle for a set of twins. He was always encouraging scaredy cats down the slide. As in, There you go! That wasn’t so bad, was it? As he played Daddy Warbucks to every floatie-armed, not-so-orphaned child in Nashville, I waved from the shallow end, my braid soaking water down my back. It was thick and long, that hair. I’d gotten it from his side of the family.

“Dad!” I called out, panting. “Dad!”

I had the hair, but I wanted the father. When he wasn’t submerged in water, he gave me all the attention I could ask for, ferrying me to Dairy Queen and letting me ride down our street with the better half of my body hanging out of the sun roof. He told stories by my bed and fell asleep telling them. My mother would call, “John!” up the stairs and he’d jostle awake. Then, I’d persuade him to tell another story and the process would repeat. An hour later, my mother would call, “John!” again. We had the calling thing in common, my mother and me.

My father was best friends with a boy named Clay, who had Down’s Syndrome and seemed to live at the pool. While Clay’s mother waved gratefully from a folding chair, my father lobbed Nerf Balls across the deep end and taught Clay to say, “Wassup!” All summer it was wassup this and wassup that. When it was finally time to go home I’d seethe in my towel, dripping with chlorine and anger all the way to the car.

“Why can’t you just play with me?” I’d beg from the back seat.

“Because,” my father would reply, “some children have parents who never play with them.”

“So?”

“So, it’s important to include people.”

“Next time, include me.”

Hot and tired, I did my best to rot the car with anger. I wanted to be like the tomato that had rolled under the seat on the way home from the grocery store. I wanted to stink.

The era of sunscreen and post-pool hair detangling was also marked by the passing of the red brick mansion in the woods. I’d beg for the long route just to see it, this Xanadu-esque estate that boasted not just a pool or a trampoline, but a trampoline in the pool. The girl who lived there was in my sister Graham’s grade.

“Graham says she has a hundred Beanie Babies,” I gushed to my dad one day as we drove by. Beanie Babies were a metric. If you were really spoiled, you’d get them from the tooth fairy. If you were regular, you’d get them from your grandparents. I remember having around ten, including the two Graham had bought me on a whim with her babysitting money.

“I bet that girl’s parents are never home,” my father mused.

“Probably not.”

“Would you rather have a hundred Beanie Babies or parents like us who are always home?” he asked.

I did not pause. I did not ponder. “I’d rather have a hundred Beanie Babies,” I replied, the tip of my braid leaving a dark, wet stain on the back of the seat.

Best-friend-Clay swam at both the outdoor pool and the YMCA pool. I’d try to guess which one he’d pick and then suggest the opposite. It was like flipping a coin. The outdoor pool offered the snack bar, where I’d order scalding hot chicken tenders and scam as much candy as I could off the bored teenagers working the sweets counter. I didn’t understand how the system worked. You uttered your last name and someone would hand you a Nutty Buddy until one day, they wouldn’t. It engendered a real scarcity mindset. As in, You better eat this sugar cone down to the tip because it may be the last one you ever lick. If I chose the wrong pool, I’d set myself up with some crayons and a snack. There, on the crisscross wrought iron table, I doodled away my frustration and waited for lightning to chase everyone, including my father, out of the pool.

One day, we drove home and never came back. Perhaps the ice cream budget had run out or, more likely, the pool budget. If I had known it was the last day, I would have ransacked the lost and found. It was a soggy, toy-filled junk closet with a rainforest of forgotten pool noodles and lock on the door. You couldn’t just mosey in. No, if you wanted a peek you had to bark up the tower and ask the lifeguard to open it for you. Then, as soon as he opened the door, you had to thrust your hand in and choose something immediately, lest it become clear that you were browsing. I could have won Oscars for my performances in that closet.

“There you are!” I fawned over Barbies I’d never seen before, or, “Hey, that’s my beach ball!”

If somebody had only clued me into our impending departure, I could have made off like a bandit. But that’s the thing about childhood. You have no clue when things are ending or that it’s even possible for them to end. Your institutions—your pool, your parents’ marriage, your love of waterlogged Barbies—can only be measured in forevers.

A few months ago my cousin came to visit for her thirtieth birthday and asked, in all earnestness, “Can we go to the pool?”

We hadn’t belonged to the pool since 2006. That’s how we’d say it as kids: What pool do you belong to? There was Hillwood and Belle Meade, Seven Hills and Sequoia. We’d ask our friends on the last day of school, in the middle of signing yearbooks, just as we were starting to realize we’d miss each other. Where do you belong? we asked urgently, assuming everyone belonged somewhere.

“We’re not members anymore,” I told my cousin.

“But we had so much fun there!” she protested, as if I’d been the one to nix the membership. “How much do you think it would cost to re-join?”

“I’m not sure.”

She looked it up on the website. “Look! It says here it’s only one hundred dollars!”

I took the phone. “I think that’s the application fee. It’s probably a few thousand dollars to join.”

“Oh,” she said, sinking.

My cousin had been one of those kids my dad played with instead of me. Every summer she’d waddle up to the chain-link fence with her Mickey Mouse t-shirt and her Coke bottle glasses. I don’t remember my aunt or uncle ever joining her in the pool. I don’t think they were even on the property. If she wanted a Nutty Buddy, she had to go through me.

Maybe growing up is just the realization that despite the slights and scrapes, you might have been holding the long end of the stick. I had a pool to wade in, after all. And parents who bothered to apply sunscreen. When I was on the swim team, my mother would spend hours after the meets untangling my hair. I’d sit on the closed toilet seat—blue Speedo, stolen Barbie—and wince as she pulled out the knots. She tried No More Tears shampoo, the kind that looked like a fish, and the pear-scented detangling spray that came with it. She dabbled in swim caps. Finally, she gave up and started coating my head with shampoo before meets, hoping this would protect the strands against the chlorine. The shampoo failed miserably, but it did make me easy to spot from the sidelines. While the other kids breast stroked without fanfare, I left a glittering trail of bubbles in my wake. Across the pool, my father waited under the slide where someone, he believed, would need catching.

Mary Liza Hartong lives and writes in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Nashville Scene, and StyleBlueprint, among other outlets. Mary Liza’s first novel, Love and Hot Chicken, is now available from William Morrow.

The Demulcent of Shame

Jan 22, 2024

“Il Ragazzo Imbronciato,” oil on canvas, by Antonio Mancini, c. 1875.

I’m sitting by the edge of a lake, waiting for my husband to come and tell me we’re over, that I’ve bamboozled him into our marriage, and he can’t stay in a relationship with a fraud.

He’s about ten feet away, inside our little lake house, lying on the floor where he’s been for two hours, a row of double-paned windows separating us. These windows let us look out on the waves churned up by pontoon boats and jet skis or look in to spot things we’ve forgotten, like marshmallows for s’mores.

Lying on the floor is most comfortable for his back, eases the two herniated discs that announce themselves to him almost daily. He’s been reading my book, and by now, he’s read the passages that worry me.

He knows now, that when I was six or seven, I hid in my childhood bedroom, petrified of what I heard outside my brown wooden door, afraid it would come to my side. I feared my father, on a tear against my mother, calling her “stupid”, and a “waste” of our financial resources, attacking her—I believe—only verbally. I believe.

He arrived home that day, like many other days, from his job as a project engineer at Raytheon, a leading American weapons manufacturer, and started pouring himself lowballs of Jack Daniels. One glass and we might get through the night with him just quiet and withdrawn, a disoriented bear in an armchair. Any more than a glass, which is his amount most nights, and he’ll turn, show his teeth, and make himself large. I’ll hide away, hoping it all stays on her, which is what she wants. If she’s not going to remove herself and me from this situation, at least she’ll take his swipes. Not every night, but most.

On this evening, which I write about in the early chapters of my memoir, I’ve made a mistake. So stupid, my self-admonishment echoes for years. I should have known better. I knew when he got home at five, I had 30 minutes to gather my He-man figures scattered around the rooms of the house. I’d embroiled them in another battle for the soul of Eternia, the fictional land of He-man and the Masters of the Universe, and I knew I had limited time to regroup them all with me in my bedroom. By 5:30, He-man, Skeletor, all the warriors, and I needed to be in this one safest room, because until 10 pm when he passed out, all the other rooms were the bear’s.

This night though, the one my husband has now learned of some ten years into our relationship and four years into our marriage, I forgot to use the bathroom before 5:30. Perhaps I had a particularly good scene playing out in Eternia and forgot about the real-life danger in my home.

I scrambled to my room, and only then did I feel how badly I had to pee; I might have imagined enough urine to fill the whole of my body pushing against my bladder, insisting, “I need to go somewhere.” If I went to the bathroom down the hall, I’d pass their bedroom where they’re acting out their scene, and I may have become a player in it. If he’d spotted me, he might have come at me as he’d done before, calling me stupid or ugly or fat or a drain to his bank account. It was too big a risk: I felt my father’s words like gashes to my skin.

Amidst the frightening noises outside my door, I panicked, my head swiveling back and forth looking for an answer. I reached for a full tissue box and lowered my Transformer pajama bottoms and peed onto the stack of white, clean material.

I miscalculated—the fresh box no match for what was in my bladder. As I peed, my distended belly relaxed. I might have sighed as the tissue box wilted in my hands, crumpled as I fell to my knees. I lurched over the box, holding myself in a push-up pose and pissed until the box wept, my urine seeping onto the hardwood floors, into the spaces between, and Eternia faced the threat of a yellow flood.

When I was empty, I picked myself up from the floor. I used dirty clothes from my hamper to wipe myself off and dry the hardwood. At 10 p.m., my father snoring in bed, my mother found me. She scooped up the piss-stained clothes, sponge cleaned the wood with soap and water. She guided me by my shoulders to the bathroom, where I scrubbed my skin with a washcloth. We didn’t speak of this—then, or the next day, or ever—just cleaned what we could.

This is the story I fear, in which I admit that as a child, I was neglected and abused. Words that I’ll only begin to use about my childhood in my forties, when my therapist will say, “So that’s child abuse,” to me, as I describe my experiences with the bear.

My husband knew only this before he began reading: my father came of age in World War II; after his family was murdered by Nazis invading Belarus, he was on his own from ten years old. He knows that when I was 21, I wanted to know why my father drank. At 21, shaking, sweating, and paralyzing panic attacks were routine for me, and I wondered, “Why? Is it connected to my time spent alone, on the other side of the door, fearing the bear?”

I have not told my husband about the box of tissues, about the times my father cornered me. He only knows I wondered at 21, “Why did he drink ‘til unconscious?” Knows I sat down then, across from a father long sober but always gruff and prone to snaps of rage, with a tape recorder between us, and insisted he tell me his stories.

My father didn’t want to tell me at first, just growled at me, poured himself cups of coffee to avoid the questions. I just waited, the tapes catching the clink of his teaspoon against the sides of a cup, his sighs as he saw that I hadn’t moved.

Eventually, he spoke. Eventually, he couldn’t stop speaking: about hunger so deep he slept through days rather than feel his empty belly’s ache; bombs ripping apart his friends; bodies hanged from street lamps; Nazis beating him until his own blood soaked his shirt; old discarded newspapers he shoved into his clothes to stay warm at night on the streets. He couldn’t stop talking—just as I couldn’t stop my urine from flowing and seeping onto the floor, into the spaces between.

Perhaps we’re all like this, full of something we don’t want to hold. Is that life? Is that why I write, at least in part? Is that why he couldn’t stop talking? Is that why he swung at my brothers—bruised them—because what’s inside of us needs somewhere to go?

By the time I’m 35 and falling in love with my kind husband, I’ll have done my best to freeze childhood memories inside, letting them hurt me from there. They are heavy. I strain to carry them. There is less room for life inside of me; these blocks of frozen moments consume space I could fill with better. I’ll share them only in therapists’ offices, not sure they’re worth mentioning, though I always mention them in such rooms.

Mostly I turned the painful memories, like the points of icicles, back on myself in my twenties and into my thirties. You fat, stupid, worthless nothing. I believed still in what the bear growled.

The pain also passed from inside me out into the world—transformed into a frost in my voice—or a raging storm that I directed towards friends or strangers. After seeing a friend or a niece or nephew draw back from me, afraid, I brought myself to therapy, trying hard not to be scary like the man who raised me.

This trajectory is now in the book in my husband’s hands, in the words I used to thaw some of the packed-in ice. When we were falling in love, I glossed over the trauma. I thought, as I kept the stories to myself and showed him my humor, my intelligence, my kindness, these other truths are irrelevant. It was so long ago. They don’t matter to who I am now. He can know me without knowing these stories. They’re for therapy. They don’t define me. I won’t let them define me.

Now as he reads them, I’m sure they’ll be fodder for a divorce. He’ll know, as the bear knew, that I don’t deserve better. I don’t deserve him or our love or love at all. “You tricked me,” he’ll say. “You are the nothing your father knew you were. You were a fat, stupid, ugly nothing and you still are. This is not what I signed up for. This is not who I married.” He won’t even be able to look at me.

I sweat in my seat outside. I check my phone. I read the day’s news.

When he meets me at the edge of the lake, it’s after noon. He’s read of the crumpled tissue box, of his husband covered in his own piss, alone and insignificant to his father. He’s surely read the other stories of my neglect or abuse at home or at school.

Dave laces his soft fingers with mine. “I knew it was bad,” he says, “but not that bad.” I sense he wishes me a re-do, wishes I’d gotten to use the bathroom, wishes me different memories. In these past few hours, separated from each other because he’s reading what I’ve feared telling him out loud, waiting for him to react to these stories, believing the worst, I’ve forgotten who he is, and who we are together, and who I found I could be with him—safe, important, touchable, cared for. I’ve forgotten ten years together, how he’ll drop everything if I cut my hand making dinner, apply antibiotic ointment and a bandage to the wound. I’ve forgotten how he never leaves me feeling unimportant.

That night we barbecue chicken breasts, broccoli and sweet potato fries. We swim in the lake. Underwater, I wrap my legs around his waist. My skin feels permeable, my head heavy when I lean it on his.

Three years later, when this memory still feels like an ice block I lug around inside myself, I share the same stories with a new therapist, who’ll challenge the words I use about myself in this memory—“nothing,” “pitiful,” “sad”—and suggest that that six-year-old is clever, resourceful. In my mind’s eye, I look at this little boy, and he is those things, too. He calculated how to safely pee, and how creative to have thought of a tissue box. In my memory, his spine straightens.

That same year, I’ll share these pages with a remote writing class made of nine strangers. When it’s my turn to have my selection about the boy who peed into a tissue box critiqued, I sweat in my seat at home, quiet as the strangers/writers discuss my work. I think If any of them wanted my opinions of their writing before, they won’t now. Who would want the opinions of this nothing whose family cared so little about him they left him to piss himself alone in his bedroom? His family knew the truth, that this person is worthless.

I dab away the drops trickling from my forehead, as they note the artful rendering of a horrendous moment, as they suggest ways to improve the showing. It doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that I’m a fraud. No one clicks their tongue in disgust or signs off. They teach me, in greater numbers than one therapist and one husband, that what I’m ashamed of doesn’t make me less. They provide more space to voice what happened, and to make sense of it, and to further convince me that that little boy deserved better, and that nothing was his fault.

They further complicate what I took as truth for decades. I’m 44 when they read my pages, when they encounter the shame I’ve carried. What I’ve carried inside for thirty years, I let out again with them.

Something, like a full balloon stuck inside me, unknots, and then, the steady release of what’s inside.

Jason Prokowiew earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. He has written for Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, and WORLD Channel’s “Stories from the Stage.” He is the winner of the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant and the Contributor Award in Nonfiction for the 2022 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He runs his own law office dedicated to disability advocacy and lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband.

You or Someone You Know

Aug 17, 2023

“Lumpkin County, Georgia, 2019,” photograph by B.A. Van Sise

Next to the sink, there is a bulletin posted with advice for any sex slaves that might want to escape.

Are you or someone you know, it begins, being sold for sex? Or are you forced to work for little or no pay, and cannot leave?

After seven days on the road, I am not ecstatic. I like the South. It’s America’s side porch: a great place to hang out, watch the world go by, stay dry when a rainstorm hits as you watch and whisper we needed this. And I must admit that, as long as one stays off the highways, it has its joys. For a week I’ve been humming slowly down wending roads past ramshackle lean-tos, drooping general stores, and humorless concrete churches, all set into the soil under scoliotic trees, moss hanging down, butterflies between them. The trick to finding America is to avoid it; you must steer clear of one of its most important creations, the interstate highway. It was the interstate highway system, and not any law or war, that finally united the states, but it also brought with it damp-pantsed Cracker Barrel nationalism: chain stores, bad restaurants, malaise, obesity. You can get from Los Angeles to New York in three days, and so can your french fries, but only one of you has any good reason to do so.

In a week of drifting through one meretricious village after another, I’ve rolled down old roads pocked with chuckholes so deep that you can hear China from their bottoms, past an endless litany of stores selling fireworks, whisky, or both. It’s unspeakably, cruelly hot, thick air that settles into your lungs and refuses to leave, that soaks your shirts as fast as you can don them. The air sounds like simmer, with bugs that swarm like maracas and little cracks of critters in the grass that snap like an upright bass. And the tarmac and gravel and mud have brought me here to a small town in southern Georgia, just a mile or two from the end of some runway or other, where I’m waiting for a flight to take off. The picture isn’t great, but none of them have been on this trip, and I’m sitting with my fingers crossed that one of the several meth addicts lingering on the street might do something: a drug deal, perhaps, or spontaneously break out into interpretive dance.

It’s a pretty town. You can picture it, if you’ve ever seen the south in literally any American movie: stately oaks, hanging vines, old plantation homes; its 952 people pining for their previous, there-were-gazebos Ragtime existence, with battle flags in their hope chests and shackles in their sheds.

Some eyes in some window have seen me, and found me lacking; the police have been called. What must certainly be the town’s entire police force shows up. Six guys. Three cars. Everybody’s in tactical gear. They surround me, their cruisers thundering up onto the sidewalk like they’d heard I was murdering a man.

“What are you doing here?” asks the first officer, a small, tossable man with a wen over his eye and an unusual last name that happens to match that of the street I’m on.

“I’m making photographs for a project, Officer DeLoach.”

“I see.” He glances back and forth with the other five officers, as two move behind me, and yet another perches himself in the window of the car, where Robin is sitting. “What kind of photographs?”

“I make landscape photographs of American scenes, using a unifying theme of flying aircraft to tell stories about both the unique mobility of American life, as well as the mutable everyday lives of those who remain in place.”

“Uh, sure, whatever. You know you can’t take pictures here, this is a public street.”

I try to explain to him, calmly and patiently, that I’m not a threat, and that a public street is exactly the sort of place where a photographer can make photographs. He’s friendly, but two more officers perch behind me. I show him some of the other photographs I’ve made, which to him are clearly just nice pictures of airplanes flying around.

“I’m not worried about you,” he says with a smile. “Do you got a card or something?”

I give him my card, an eccentric little token that says “B.A. Van Sise—by chance, or appointment,” and naught else, and he and another officer walk to their car and pull out their phones to google me. “Shit,” says the second one, “I think he might be famous.”

They look up at me, and back at the phone again.

Behind my back, at the car, the handsome young officer is still catbirding over the passenger window, flirting with Robin. He’s got good taste; she’s in her vacation dress: a patriotic polka dot affair, her very finest. She’s wind-swept from the drive. He asks her about our trip, and tells stories, and listens to hers, and is clearly smitten. Staring at her mouth, he keeps one hand pressed firmly inward against the door, and the other squarely on his Glock 9mm. You can see he’s ready: he’d like to fuck her, sure, but he can also shoot her in the head.

The first officer walks back to me. “Listen,” he says, “I’m gonna let you go, but next time you wanna take pictures where you’re not supposed to be, you ask permission first.” The officer pressed against Robin’s car door looks up. “We good to go?”

The first officer nods, and all the rest walk back to their cruisers, waiting in position for me to drive away.

One doesn’t expect slavery in the Waffle House, but apparently in a place defined for centuries not just by who they are but who they owned, it’s still a possibility. Interestingly, the abolitionists have placed no advertisement in the women’s Necessary, so any sex slave, yearning to be free, is going to have to first accidentally find their way to the gents’ and then, somehow, get their hands on a cell phone before sitting quietly and praying fiercely that the authorities can show up faster than their captor can polish off a stack of pancakes. It’s a well-meaning but flawed plan, and I can barely keep my attention on my scrambled eggs, always eye-minded and scanning the crowd for the desperate would-be fugitives, without any clear idea of what, precisely, to look for in a modern-day slave, in an age when they can be anybody.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a specific metric they use, called the Waffle House Index, in which they determine the true severity of a storm by the status of the Waffle House. It’s split into three categories, all based on the actual chain of restaurants, which are known for their disaster preparedness: in condition green, the Waffle House has electrical power, and the full menu is available; in condition yellow, the food supplies might be low, but generator power has kept the restaurant open; in condition red, the Waffle House has closed, and the government knows it’s truly time to act. It’s informal, but it’s real, but it doesn’t take into account other factors: what does the government do when the Waffle House cooks don’t wash their hands? Trump is in the White House and the hydrangeas are in bloom: what will the government do when the Waffle House suspects slavery in its midst?

I tell him that I don’t really have a plan; I just sort of wander around, but that I was thinking of heading west.

“Whatever you do, don’t go to Macon,” he tells me, naming a city that I confess to not having ever heard of in my life. I ask him why not.

“Well,” he leans in with a nod, “it gets real … dark around there, if you know what I mean.”

One knows an invitation when they find it. I know where to go.

Four hours later, driving around Macon, I stop in among many ruins; the city’s industry, once up-and-coming, has up and gone, leaving behind crumbling factories, warehouses, offices. Behind a railway coal plant, I find a hobo camp whose citizens have just scattered, leaving their wet laundry on lines to dry. Next to the socks, someone has mounted a happy note in a cheery hand, the sort of penmanship and message you’d expect from a third grade teacher: It’s a Good Day to Be Happy!

As I drive slowly down a Macon back road looking at the forgotten sprawl of the city’s edge, an elderly man steps out into the street next to my car. “You lost, white boy?” he yells at me, and I sputter trying to decide how existentially I want to consider the question. I fail to answer him.

That night, I sleep under the stars not far outside Macon, trying to digest the day before: the police, the ruins, the unbearable, choking heat. I remember the sign at the hobo camp: it’s a good day to be happy.

Those cheerful tramps are correct, I tell myself in the sunrise, folding up my tent and looking at my soiled hands. Only one thing to do: I’ll treat myself to a nice big breakfast at the Waffle House- get a big plate of eggs, and wash myself up. It’s a good day to be happy.

B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist focused on the intersection between language and the visual image. He is the author of the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, and Invited to Life: After the Holocaust with Neil Gaiman, Mayim Bialik, and Sabrina Orah Mark. He has previously been featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Center for Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, as well as in group exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Los Angeles Center of Photography and the Whitney Museum of American Art; a number of his portraits of American poets are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. His short nonfiction and poetry has been featured in Poets & Writers, The North American Review, Nowhere, The Los Angeles Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. His poetry has previously appeared in K’in Literary Journal and The Coil, and he is a frequent reviewer of poetry and photography titles for New York Journal of Books. He is a Prix de la Photographie Paris award-winner and an Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medalist.

Lobotomy

Jun 14, 2023

“The Steps by the Flowers,” oil on canvas, by Marie Adrien Lavieille, n.d.

It’s a traditional house, because every morning when the sun rises, when sweet yellow rays reach to kiss our bronze skin through the hand-sewn curtains and double-paneled windows, they only find mine. Habit. A syrupy morning dew floods my eyes, its own brand. Through the glass panes of the kitchen window I see my Grandmother and her shriveled pink lips that stretch and shrink and tell me the sun must always find the females first. Her buck teeth are barred, and her tongue spits house myths. I scrape cucumber seeds from their wet pockets over the marble island. And that’s only because Grandmother likes when I am at sacred work, upholding the rituals of a good Muslim girl. Habits and legends.

Her memory is one of my few possessions. I cherish it, though salt coats my throat.

Her reflection is still there, and then she tells me my brother, Matthew, will probably want an omelet and fruit for breakfast, and so I should begin. A ritual of old, heroic and such. I resist wrinkling my nose. Sticky pollen specks the silverware in the cabinet, and I laugh. Where are the bees? I’m loyal to my quiet cause.

I’m sick, sick, sick for it, though, wishing to neglect old tradition. An unwilling insurgent, but the modern woman is always under the weather. Is Father awake? Not yet.

This is a traditional house when I’m quiet and now that Mom’s gone, because whenever I wish to bury myself in text hugged by threadbare spines, poems of random sorts, scattered diagrams of brains, Grandmother asks me through our beige, patchy walls why I refuse to uphold the beautiful fables. When they’re so pretty, written dark in smeared navy calligraphy. Water stained now with disease. Her old tongue clicks against the roof of her mouth, and the sound pops through my ears. It stops me. Tangerine is stuck in my nails. Flakes of skin start to peel around the calluses of my fingers, always once winter arrives, and they remind me of dry cricket shells. I find them in corners under the stairs, all hallowed out like they were empty like that in the first place.

They’re wrong to be so dramatic. The drama grows when they stay there. They’re loyal to their own cause, too, my cause.

Tradition holds legend, and it’s golden because it is dying—skinning plums and the stench of wood polish. The more it dies, the further the gold thickens, and so housewife tales have become legendary. Grandmother spoke to Mom soon after she became golden, too, and so she used to read me myths like these at night. Grandmother’s raspy voice was, in the way nails against hoarse sandpaper might be, comforting. Familiar torment; it tumbles through the generations. I learned to hide my distraught under satin covers.

Adjust. A man will do what a man will do, and it’s your job to adjust.

Modesty is key to success, and so is the ability to shut your mouth.

Men don’t like loud women.

I learned to hide my distraught in hushed motives, and only the Tupperware and dust-ridden corners and satin sheets have a clue.

And I think that’s funny, because I live in America.

I frown as I suddenly notice the feel of fruit stuck in my teeth, the small orange slice I stole from my brother’s plate. I hope it’s citric acid doesn’t stain my taste buds.

Through the gaps in the covers I watched little red beads bloom from the corners of Mom’s painted lips when I was younger, already rouge enough; her tongue would flick them away quickly, but I caught those vermilion bulbs and found out she bit herself when she told me the legends.

When she was still at home, Grandmother too, I’d walk to the supermarket every Saturday morning, once celestial rays had sunken into me. Wind always fluttered around my headscarf, my hijab. Jellyfish around me would ripple in the wind. Cluttered shelves, bustling little women and their husbands and children, sharp mangled dialect all in true Arabic fashion, greeted me at the door. But when I saw the pistachio halawa stacked in packed containers on the fifth aisle and third shelf, I saw my reflection and Mom’s through the plastic. It is a favorite dish.

Each day I saw it, and it reminded me of her.

A savory-sweet image. Two strands of curly hair peek from under her hijab, her own cause, and she’s sitting on a thin white mattress on a cracked floor. My breath is warm when I exhale, lost in thought, and this spoils the chilly air. I pick at my chapped lips, bloody and torn.

Her eyes are lined with kohl, and they like to dart around her locked room. She asks for a piece of the halawa and calls me her love, ya habibi.

But then I find chunks missing. Chunks gone from the edge of her olive scalp and little bits of flesh eroded around her wrists. Slick black bars split her face in thirds. A pink line circles the base of her thumb. She wore her wedding ring there, a big silver stone that she lost in the wash. Pretty colors fill the missing parts, red, blue rivers in her arms, purple-brown swirls. Like hurricanes. It distorts her picture, until I realize she’s in a stone box with no bars at all, but instead a thin film of plastic barricades her away. Rainbows twist on the surface. The look in her eyes.

Her beauty is lost, as is her mind. I’ll never have the chance to confirm the vision.

I live in a traditional house of legends and gold with my brothers and Father. We live in America, the state of Washington. I have rights here, more than in Saudi, more than I’m used to, yet that star-spangled banner doesn’t kill Grandmother’s voice or mute it from the walls. Expectations and pressure of sorts.

The talk of legends. The will of a man against his wife and daughters, his power. The invisible whip of authority only Muslim girls see. And the men of this house don’t mind a maid. Matthew likes omelets and fruit in the morning. Aaron likes dessert.

The threat of stones choked Grandmother’s words, though. Throughout all her years.

But how are you, Mom? Do you like your baby blue gowns? Do the nurses feed you jello?

Egg shells crumble in my grip and the clumpy yolk spills onto my palms. I watch it spread for a minute. I live in the land of the free. The home of the brave. Grandmother whispers I’m free enough, more than she was, more than my mother, and I sometimes see Grandfather nodding his head, blotchy and bald in the corner with the old cedar rocking chair. Only on occasion. I’ve told my siblings they haunt me, but they laugh.

Crazy girl. And all that in the home of the brave.

Father once drove me, just me, in the family Toyota Tacoma to a lake somewhere far in the Olympic mountains, Lake Crescent. Mist and fog clouded my vision and quickly rendered our eyes useless, but the water itself was like a moving mirror. I peered over the edge of the dock, fenceless, and found clouds and the sky and chunks of myself missing. Gaps and gashes in my neck, my forehead. Rings of pink flesh circled my eyes and were connected by a thin line along the bridge of my nose.

I’m enlightened. Of course.

They looked like glasses. “Woke.” Father didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he didn’t care.

“This is where I met your mother,” Father sighed. His eyes, usually unwavering and unreadable, were seemingly sorry. He stroked the thick black hair on his chin and removed his thin spectacles. I sucked the inside of my cheek and tasted grapes. How strange to see a giant vulnerable and only tall in stance.

Grandmother laughed at me. A man is never sorry, silly girl.

This, when I live in America?

Mom chose to forget all that, Lake Crescent and my father, my brothers and her mother. How she did it, not sure, how did she do it? Tell me, Mother. Maybe the impossible caught up with her, the burden. I couldn’t forget, but could see the chunks out of her brain when I last saw her, right out of the top of her head. That’s where the memories were supposed to be. Perhaps my name was plucked out too. I wouldn’t know.

And so in substitution of surgery, I’m a patriot to my own loyal cause. Quiet defiance and such. The cricket shells will stay underneath the stairs, and pollen will cling to the Tupperware. I look at Matthew’s plate coated in swirling juices and pieces of shell.

I throw it into the sink.

I’m loyal to my own cause. Forgotten, far from legendary.

LaVie Saad is a junior who currently attends El Segundo High School. She has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and was recently shortlisted for the 2022 international Authors of Tomorrow writing competition hosted by the Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation.