1969

I was a sickly child, often diagnosed with upper respiratory infections because my tonsils were entirely too large. On nights when my airway became so blocked I could not breathe, Momma held me tightly in her arms and called me “Shady,” while I snuggled into her, my breathing lulled by her words and her smell. Momma’s favorite perfume was MaGriffe Carven, a French fragrance with notes of gardenia, sage and lemon, and I believe my love for the smell of fresh gardenias to this day is connected to those nights and her tender words to me.

“SHAdy-girl.”

“My sweet Shady-girl.”

“Just breathe, baby girl.”

“Just breathe.”

As the youngest of six children, these middle-of-the-night moments were rare, so when I was ten years old and the doctor decided it was time to have my tonsils out, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to give them up.

“Momma, I don’t want to have my tonsils out.”

“It’ll be fine,” she said.

I could see her face in the mirror of her dressing table from where I sat at the foot of her bed, my legs crossed and one hand tracing a floral pattern etched into a blue chenille bedspread, and I shrugged my shoulders and sharply shook my head side to side at her words. Then, noting her raised right eyebrow in response, I looked down and said, “I’ve never been away from home overnight.”

“I know, Shady, but it will be just one night and one day,” Momma said as she expertly applied lipstick with just a hint of pink to complement her Cover Girl-blushed cheeks. She continued, “AND you’ll get as many popsicles as you can stomach!”

She stood and faced me, a picture of confidence in a navy-blue pencil skirt and light blue button-down blouse with an elongated collar tied in a pretty bow. “Now let’s go!” she said, smiling and holding out her hand, which I grasped and held all the way to the car.

***

When we got to the hospital, Momma led me down several hospital hallways before turning into a room with two beds, side by side, and a long curtain that ran around a rail in the ceiling between them. The curtain was closed so I couldn’t see my hospital mate, but I could see a pair of flat oxford-style lace-up shoes dangling under the curtain and someone else wearing a pair of high heels with dark nylons.

Our nurse showed us around the room, pointing out the sink just across from my bed, a door that led to a toilet, and a tall floor-to-ceiling gray metal cabinet. She suggested we put my clothes in the cabinet and pointed to a white, starched hospital gown lying on the bed to change into. Momma thanked the nurse, then turned to me and pulled my favorite red polka dot turtleneck shirt up and over my head. My face flushed red, and I crossed my arms over my chest until I could thrust them into the hospital gown Momma held up for me. Right behind the relief of feeling covered again, I realized that the back of the gown was open, and I looked at Momma, my eyes wide.

“Why doesn’t it close in the back?”

“It’s just the way they make hospital gowns.”

As the curtain between my bed and my neighbor’s bed slid open, I peeked around it and saw a young Black girl peeping around the curtain too. Those dark nylons weren’t nylons at all but instead belonged to her momma who was looking back at us, her mouth open. I looked at Momma who was looking at my roommate’s mother with her mouth slightly open too. I turned my attention back to my new neighbor, and noted that she was skinny like me, her hair chin-length and combed into a bit of a wave at the bottom and tucked behind her ears with a little flip at the back. My hair was wavy also but in a messier way flipping back and forth in different directions as it rested here and there around my shoulders.

She was sitting up in her bed, her body a silhouette in front of a hospital window through which the summer sun shone in bright rays. I watched her while she watched me, our heads tilted in opposite directions, and I was just getting ready to say something to her when my momma spoke.

“Hello, I’m Mrs. Clemmons, and this is my daughter, Sharon.”

She didn’t reach her hand forward like I normally saw her do when first meeting someone, and I tilted my head again.

“Hello, I’m Mrs. Walker, and this is my daughter, Betty.”

Mrs. Walker pulled toiletries from a brown hard-backed suitcase and placed them on a white porcelain sink on their side of the room. Her voice was calm, but her eyes did not rise above a tube of toothpaste she held in her hand, inspecting it as though there was something new to learn from it.

“Sharon is in for her tonsils,” Momma went on to say. She grabbed the covers across my knees into her hands and then, with a little flick of her wrists, poofed them up with air and settled them again, a little further up this time across the lower part of my abdomen.

“Yes. Betty is too. She has been a very sick little girl, and the doctors agreed it was time,” said Mrs. Walker.

“Same with Sharon,” said Momma, her eyes and hands busy tucking the sheet around and underneath my legs.

I noted their words and their strange study of toothpaste tubes and sheets for a moment, then decided to add to the discussion.

“Momma says I will get some ice cream after,” I said.

“And popsicles,” Betty added, rewarding my effort with a smile.

“What grade are you in?” I asked. “I’m going to be in fourth this year.”

“Me too,” said Betty.

She reached toward her momma and grasped a stuffed teddy bear, pulled it to her chest, and bowed her head into it for just a moment while she breathed in and then out. Then she turned her eyes back to me.

“What is your favorite subject?”

“Reading and spelling.”

“I like math,” she said.

I frowned because math was the worst. I bounced my shoulders up and down a few times as an added gesture of disagreement and then noticed that Momma seemed to be finishing up her work.

“Momma, are you going to leave me now?” I caught my bottom lip between my teeth to stop a tremble, and she patted my leg. “Yes, Shady, and you’re going to be a big girl and not cry like we talked about, right?”

I nodded my head and blinked to stop water accumulating in my eyes and dripping down my cheeks. Momma leaned forward to kiss me on the top of my head, and with a final glance in the direction of Betty and her momma, she left.

I sat in my bed, my head down and my fingers interlocked, and listened as Mrs. Walker said goodbye to Betty. She kept her eyes straight ahead as she walked past my bed and out of our room. I took in a deep breath, my eyes awash with uncertainty.

Then I heard Betty say, “Do you still like to play dolls?”

“I do!” I looked up to see Betty sitting cross-legged in her bed facing me, and I turned and sat cross-legged too. “Who do you like better? Barbie or Skipper?”

“I like Christie.”

“Christie? I never heard of Christie.”

Betty reached into a bag next to her and pulled out a Barbie with brown skin and black hair. “This is Christie,” she said.

“Wow! I’ve never seen a Barbie that color!”

“I like her because she looks like me,” Betty said. “I also like that her knees bend, and her waist turns.” She balanced Christie on her right knee, with her knees bent, and then twisted her waist from side to side.

I nodded and then said, “I like Skipper because she’s a little sister, and I’m a little sister. I didn’t bring her though.”

“Well, you can play with Christie and me then,” said Betty, and I nodded again.

“I did bring some books to read,” I said as I picked up Charlotte’s Web from the nightstand and held it up. “Have you ever read Charlotte’s Web?”

Betty wrinkled her nose and said, “Yes, but I didn’t like the ending.”

“Well, don’t tell me then,” I said, and put the book back down.

And so, the rest of the day went by with the two of us chattering about dolls and books, foods we liked and didn’t like, and about how scratchy the white sheets on our bed were until the nurses turned down the lights in our room and shushed us.

It became quiet then except for the beeps and buzzes at the nurse’s station, and I wrapped myself up in a blanket, pulled my legs up to my chest, and turned my body toward Betty’s bed.

“Betty?”

“Yes?”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.” Betty’s voice was a whisper.

I crawled out of my bed, padded across the distance between our beds, and with a tremor in my voice, I said, “Can I sleep with you?”

Betty opened her covers, and I climbed in next to her and snuggled up to her warm body. She put her right arm around my left shoulder and said, “We’ll be alright, won’t we?”

“Momma said yes,” I whispered.

I felt Betty’s chin tap the top of my head as she nodded, and then I said, “Do you think we can visit each other? After?”

“I hope so,” she said. “I think we are best friends now.”

I nodded and yawned. “I think so too.”

We fell asleep then, snuggled up to one another’s warm bodies, our arms wrapped around one another, promising to be best friends forever.

***

Sometime during the night, the doctors collected us for surgery, and I woke in my own bed the next morning with a sore throat. The nurse gave me a popsicle to soothe the deep scratchiness I felt, and I nodded to Betty across the way as she slowly licked her promised popsicle. I could tell from the look on her face, scrunched up with squinty eyes, that she didn’t feel her popsicle was worth the pain she felt. I agreed.

Definitely not worth it.

We couldn’t talk, so we waited together until our mothers arrived and busied themselves as they had the evening before, gathering our belongings and getting us dressed to go home. As Momma pushed my red turtleneck shirt over my head and brushed my hair into a ponytail, I heard Betty croaking something to her momma about us staying in touch, and I tried to tell Momma to get Mrs. Walker’s phone number.

“Betty and I want to stay in touch. Can you get their phone number?”

“Sit here, Shady,” said Momma, pointing to a wheelchair on which I sat, looking up at her. I looked at Mrs. Walker, and she looked very busy, grabbing toiletries from the sink and tossing them into their brown suitcase.

I tried again. “Can you get Betty’s phone number?”

Momma was pushing me out of our hospital room by this time, and as my chair pivoted around the corner of the doorway, I looked back at Betty. She was watching me with the same confused look on her face. I knew in a way I could not yet understand nor articulate that we were not the best of friends, and we’d be unlikely to see one another again.

Sharon Clemmons Thomas is an aspiring author working on her first memoir about growing up and living in the rural low country of South Carolina.

When we heard about the shooting, my brother Geoff and I drove to my mother’s house in suburban New Jersey to hear the details. Our youngest brother, Patrick, had gone on a Rambo-like offensive against my mother and stepfather, Ed. As my mother choked out the details of the previous day, I thought, Who is she talking about? Not us. This could never happen to us.

But then I thought about Ed’s massive gun collection, the same collection that he and Patrick had bonded over when Patrick was ten, when they built the shooting range in our basement and practiced target shooting. Ed had more than fifty firearms in the house. And more than enough ammunition to go with them.

When Mom finished her story, I thought about Ed’s arsenal, and I wondered, How could it not happen to us?

My mother repeated the details of the incident, bringing them into crisp relief. As she spoke, it felt like I was right there by her side, reliving every terrifying moment.

She spoke of the static that squawked from the police radios in front of the house. Silhouettes of watchful neighbors appeared in their windows and craned their necks to find out what was going on in my mom’s front yard, in this peaceful, upscale cul-de-sac, on this balmy summer evening.

Patrick lay face down, spread-eagled, on the black tarmac in front of the house. Guns lay on the pavement a few feet away from him: a 9mm Browning pistol and an AR-15 assault rifle, both from my stepfather’s collection.

A young officer, probably not much older than Patrick himself, crouched down, his knee digging into the small of Patrick’s back, while he locked my brother’s hands behind him in handcuffs, palms together, in an ironic, prayerlike posture.

When she heard the policeman reading Patrick his rights, my mother whispered to herself, “It’s just like on TV.”

She staggered through the corridor in a daze toward the front door. She got to the foyer and reached blindly for the doorknob, moving instinctively toward the street. The only thing on her mind, after all she’d been through, was to protect her son.

A policeman stood at the door, blocking her path. “Where’s my son? I need to see him.” She tried to look beyond the patrolman.

He reached out a stabilizing hand. “I’m sorry, Ma’am. You can’t go out there now. Your son’s been charged.”

“Charged?” she asked blankly.

“Yes, Ma’am. Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. We have to take him into custody.”

“But I don’t want to press charges,” she said.

“It’s out of your hands now, Ma’am.”

She was bewildered, wondering why this wasn’t up to her. On other occasions, when there had been problems with Patrick, she decided whether to press charges. She never had, but maybe she should have.

The officer softened his voice then, as if he was talking to his own mother. “You go inside now, Ma’am, and let us do our work. He’ll be at Bridgewater station overnight. You can see him in the morning if you want.”

Startled by his words, she nevertheless appreciated his profound tenderness.

When she finished the story, I shook my head in denial. I thought again, This could never happen to us. Not to our family.

But, sure enough, it had.

***

I remember the date of the shooting because it happened on Geoff’s 30^th birthday. A beautiful, late summer night in 1984. Domestic gun violence was not as frequent then as it is today. School shootings were unheard of.

This is what happened.

Patrick got into a fight with his girlfriend, Maureen, and it grew violent. He threw Maureen down the stairs and went out into the backyard. Patrick was drunk and tweaking on an eight-ball of coke. I thought about that, a whole eight-ball. That’s a lot of coke.

Mom went out to help Maureen, but Patrick returned, pulling them apart, and told Mom to mind her own business.

Ed heard the quarreling from the living room and strode into the kitchen to intervene. He started to raise his fists in an aggressive, man-of-the-house gesture. He threatened in a low pitch, “Why…if you were my son…”

At this, Patrick squared off and said, “OK, Ed. Let’s pretend I am your son.”

He swung at Ed and landed a blow. Although Ed was taller than Patrick, he couldn’t compete with Patrick’s youth, strength, and coked-up state. Stunned by the blow, Ed fell to the floor. Patrick dropped to his knees, put his arm around Ed’s neck, and started choking him.

“He’s turning blue,” Mom screamed, hoping to make him stop. But Patrick only elbowed her in the face—a move he had learned during a brief stint in the Army before he was discharged for punching a superior.

Mom was afraid that Patrick was going to kill Ed, so she picked up a kitchen stool and, with as much leverage as she could muster, hit Patrick over the head. This only caused Patrick to drop Ed and turn his attention back to her. He began beating her.

When Ed regained consciousness and saw Patrick assaulting Mom, he ran and grabbed his faithful Remington, a pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun. Standing next to my mother, he aimed at Patrick. Mom swung at Ed’s arm just as he pulled the trigger. Fortunately, Ed missed Patrick and shot a ten-inch hole in the kitchen ceiling. That shotgun blast was the size of a pie pan.

Patrick ran to the guest room where Ed maintained part of his arsenal. He grabbed a loaded 9mm Browning pistol kept under a mattress. He took the Colt model AR-15, a civilian modification of the M16 assault rifle used by the military, characterized by a huge ammo capacity and tremendous stopping power.

Once armed, Patrick rushed out the back door and into the woods behind the house. The light was fading fast, and there would be plenty of places he could hide.

Ed knew that his shotgun was no match for Patrick’s AR-15—but he was hoping that he could lure Patrick away from Mom and Maureen, so he too ran outside and into a different part of the woods.

From there, it escalated. Patrick shot several rounds at the back door. When he saw a moving shadow through the master bedroom window, he fired multiple times at the shadow. The shadow was my mother, who called the police on the bedroom phone. She heard the gunfire in the yard below her and the ripping sound as shells whizzed past her into the walls and furniture of her bedroom.

Mom realized that all the lights were on, and that Patrick could see inside, although she couldn’t see out—making her a perfect target. And then the awful truth of her situation started to dawn on her with heartbreaking clarity: That’s my son out there. My son. He is firing his loaded gun at me.

She had to protect herself from her own son and shouted to Maureen, “Turn off the lights—he can see us!” Then she ducked for cover.

I considered how she must have felt, knowing that her son was trying to shoot her. Knowing that she didn’t want her son hurt, or worse, killed. Her feelings must have been overwhelming and confusing. As she told me this part of the story, my breathing became shallow.

Patrick then circled the house until he reached the garage. He fired at least a half-dozen times into the trunk of Ed’s car, hitting the fuel tank and causing fuel to leak on the concrete floor. He hoped to create an explosion. Fortunately, Ed drove diesel cars, and diesel doesn’t combust as easily as gasoline.

Patrick heard the sirens as police cars raced to Fall Mountain Court, a quaint cul-de-sac where residents had moved to escape urban violence. He made a run for it but tripped and fell. The police grabbed him while he was still down.

***

My mother, looking tired and fragile, showed us the damage in the home. She concluded our tour in the master bedroom. At first glance, the scene revealed nothing of the drama of the preceding evening. The floral-patterned duvet was pulled tight across the king-sized bed. Half a dozen pillows were plumped against the headboard in their pastel-colored shams. Sheer curtains billowed in the slow, sticky breeze, the smell of fresh-cut grass wafting in from next door. Only when you looked at the recently painted Sheetrock walls did you begin to experience the horror. A trail of pockmarks resembling adolescent acne displayed Patrick’s reign of terror. Geoff would later count more than twenty bullet holes. They would have come from the assault rifle. My mother was lucky to be alive.

***

Several months on, Patrick was charged with two counts of “terroristic threat against life”—what many people describe as aggravated assault—for the attacks on Mom and Ed. He was also charged with “assault, threatening” against Maureen.

Mom, Ed, and Maureen all contacted the district attorney’s office to formally request that the charges be dropped, but the DA, no doubt confident of a win in court, wanted to proceed to trial. It was an election year, after all.

Patrick was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released on parole for good behavior after serving three years and three months.

***

For a long time after the shooting, I couldn’t stop thinking about Patrick’s prison time. What was his cell like—how big was it? Was it a private cell or did he share it with other convicts? Were they muscular, tattooed thugs or anemic wimps? Did he have a stainless-steel toilet without a seat? Was it noisy with the clamor and shouting of other inmates? Did he shower with the other convicts, always looking over his shoulder to protect himself from possible attack? Was he ever put in solitary confinement? Did they turn out the lights at night, or did he have to sleep with the lights on? I wondered if they fought in the yard or if he joined a gang for protection. I wondered if he’d been raped.

When I asked him these questions, he told me it was worse than I could have imagined. He didn’t want to talk about it.

I ruminated endlessly during long sleepless nights about the ways we should have anticipated his emotional problems and protected him from this tragedy.

In addition to my deep sadness, I was also angry. So very angry. I was furious with my mother. I was livid with Ed. They could have prevented this. There should never have been so many guns in the house. And any guns should have had trigger guards or other safety devices. I kept returning to the question of how this could have happened to us. But eventually I realized the real question was: How could it not have happened?

The trouble started when my parents first separated, when Patrick was ten or eleven. During this period, they turned their backs on him when he needed them the most. They were too busy licking their own wounds to notice his problems. It was Geoff who had to tell him that Dad wasn’t coming home and that “no, Patrick, it wasn’t your fault. They just grew apart.” Like most children his age, Patrick wasn’t reassured by Geoff’s explanation. He believed he had caused the split.

Up until that time, he was our “baby brother.” Patrick, the last of seven children, was born in my mother’s errant attempt to save her dying marriage to my unemployed, alcoholic, gay father. By his own admission, Dad had only ever wanted the first child. A child would prove to his fellow Navy officers that he was a real man. Just like them. The rest of his children he could have done without. Especially the last—Patrick.

When I think of my brother Patrick, I try not to think of the shooting. I prefer to remember the three-year-old kid who was nicknamed “Patch” because he didn’t like being called Pat. Pat was a girl’s name, he said. I recall the kid who invented the puff kiss, an elusive, irresistible kiss that was as light as a dandelion blow-ball and tickled like a feather being drawn against the skin. When Patrick started giving puff kisses, everyone liked it. It was one of those awful-wonderful moments that made you put your hands up to stop it and had you simultaneously asking for more. “Do it again,” we would say. We loved it, and we loved him, and Patrick loved that we loved him.

I think of the six-year-old who played a reluctant angel in my high school’s annual nativity play. Carrying a staff that was taller than he was and wearing a shepherd’s toga made of worn bath towels, he hadn’t wanted to be an angel, feeling alone and exposed up on stage, but I had insisted. I was so proud of him. I wanted to show him off.

It wasn’t until he was about ten or eleven, right before the split, that he became truly awkward and self-conscious. He had started to put on weight. My father constantly and publicly subjected him to a stream of crushing, acerbic criticism. Patrick grew lonely and depressed.

After their divorce, my mother moved from our home in New York to Hartford, CT, about one hundred miles from everything Patrick knew—friends, school, family. That’s when the real trouble began. He didn’t understand what had happened to his family, only that half of us were gone. His father never returned home after that Thanksgiving when Mom kicked him out, and his oldest four siblings had gone off to college or enlisted in the Navy. The one sister who remained at home was at college or working most days. Patrick blamed himself for the loss of family members in the egocentric way that young kids do.

In his new town, he grew friendly with a group of kids who prided themselves on their bad-boy behavior, truancies, and devil-may-care pranks. He filled the hole left by his family by hanging out with them, shoplifting, doing drugs, and occasionally dealing them. It was during this period that Patrick discovered he could make easy money by selling Ed’s guns. Ed never seemed to notice they had disappeared.

The school encouraged my mother to put Patrick in therapy, but my mother gave it only a half-hearted effort, believing that therapy for Patrick was an indictment of her mothering. Denial was my mother’s preferred strategy. Although Patrick was occasionally violent toward her and one of my sisters, it was easier to brush it under the rug, excusing him with the age-old trope “boys will be boys.”

Patrick attempted suicide at the age of sixteen by taking a bottle of pills and then driving Ed’s car into a telephone pole. His cry for help was met with disbelief. Despite his suicide note, Mom did what moms in denial do—she said he was “pretending so he could get attention. It wasn’t a suicide attempt at all.”

Maybe if Patrick had received the help he needed, he could have managed his anger without turning to drugs, alcohol, and violence. But instead, he was abandoned. He had a drunken father who lived in homeless shelters on the Bowery, and a mother who left home during the week to stay at her fiancé’s house, tacking her weekly $20 bill on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a banana and a note that said, “Gone to Ed’s. Be back on Friday.”

Patrick learned from his parents’ examples, as children are wont to do. He confirmed what he already thought: that he was alone, abandoned, and unloved.

If only, if only, if only.

***

There’s no question that Patrick committed a terrible crime. But to me, he was also a victim of untreated mental illness, of negligent parenting, and of an American gun culture that invites disaster. I always believed the responsibility should have been shared with Mom and Ed, who were as much perpetrators as they were victims.

Patrick was twenty-two when he got out of prison the first time. He moved into a halfway house in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His prospects were not promising. He had only a GED and a criminal record. What he had in spades was a bounty of good looks, intelligence, and an immensely likable personality. Had none of this happened, the world would have been his oyster. Instead, he had a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount St. Helens and a soul-destroying lack of self-esteem. Convinced that he was a loser without any prospects, his life became a self-fulfilling prophecy. There would be many more arrests. Many more prison sentences.

Here and there, for brief periods, Patrick rebounded into sobriety. During those times, he was a responsible adult. He even lived with my husband, daughter, and me in New Jersey for a couple of years, working as a construction freelancer. Sadly, his sobriety never lasted for more than a few years at a stretch. During the sober times, he was a sweetheart, not unlike the little kid who invented the puff kiss. He would draw me in close for a hug, cheek to cheek, then plant a kiss so soft that I wasn’t sure it happened. That’s how I like to remember him. Not the kid who turned to violence for his answers, but “Patch,” the three-year-old who invented the puff kiss.

Jill Quist earned her BA in Creative Writing from NYU. Her essays have been published in Her Stry, Minerva Rising Press, The Manifestation, Chicago Story Press Literary Journal, and Mud Season Review. She loves spending free time with her family, making new memories wherever their adventures take them.

It’s my turn today to almost ruin us, and I do it splendidly: I flood the basement where my partner keeps his dreams. The flood is accidental, beginning (as most accidents do) with good intentions.

“Did you clean the washing machine’s pump filter?” he asked.

And I hadn’t. Not last week. Not even last month. I had a vague memory of maybe doing it back when the basement smelled of orchard apples. Was that early fall?

It’s spring now.

“I’ll get to it later,” he promised, his whole body sagging under the weight of adding one more check-box to a list of things he didn’t actually want to do.

To be fair, I didn’t want to face that check-box either. But we’d made the same promise—for better, for worse—so I shifted the last check-box from his list to mine. I drained the filter, tooth brushed it clean, and replaced it. Then I loaded the towels and let the drum whirr as the water filled. It wasn’t even hard.

But now—one hour later—the entire basement is submerged under a quarter inch of water. The vein in Steven’s forehead rage-pulses. And we’re starting to drown too.

In the basement corner where dreams stall, Steven’s seventeen forever, frozen in a poster-sized print from his aspiring artist/gymnastics State Champion era. His head covered in hair I’ve never known. Gut still miraculously tolerating lactose. Body hovering over the pommel horse like a ready-for-launch rocket. Chalked hands memorizing the world they’ll sketch later. All of this: fueled by Coca-Cola in plastic bottles, red-40-laden Doritos, cheesy gorditas—every delicious sin we’ve learned to avoid.

Now mattes bleed, photos warp. I’m not sure I can save them. Or him. Or us. But I de-frame prints, sponge up drips, blot the onionskin pages of his portfolio’s still lifes, roll the throw rug, which once lived in the kitchen but now hides by the washer, into a soggy burrito and wrestle it upstairs, onto the patio to dry.

Outside, I study the rug—and the life we’ve made with our sweat, the life we gave up our lives for. I find the ghost of our younger son’s spit-up. Hairs from the dog that our older son named; hairs from the dog that grew old with him. Snags from forgotten wedding dances and forgotten toys. When I splay the soggy burrito throw rug’s tassels, I remember that terrible storm with its wind-crush and rain-slant pommeling the still-bare trees of three weeks ago, the ones I’d worried were quiet forever and dead for good. The morning after, we walked our younger son through the debris in the park and held our breath as he gleefully off-roaded his bike just in time to avoid three dead baby squirrels, blown from nests to drown in puddles before their eyes ever opened. He never saw them, never wondered as we did why happiness sometimes twists into tragedy, why love sometimes isn’t enough to hold together what needs holding.

Now I leave the soggy burrito throw rug to catch what sunshine is left as afternoon slants toward dusk, toward the dinner I need to make but don’t want to think about, and toward the angry silence I fear we’ll slip into. Thirteen years into our story, this rug remembers plenty of stomping feet. Steven’s, when the flood took his photos; mine, when he yelled. His, that day I accidentally knocked my engagement ring into a flushing toilet. Mine, when he inadvertently erased half of my music files. How many years since the garbage can I backed over dented the new car’s bumper, and the parked car he tapped bent the front tire’s rim? How many times has he said, “Don’t let the door slam behind you” as I let it do exactly that? How many times have we nearly given up on us, but chose to break our own silence and stay?

Outside, thin spring sunshine evaporates this mistake to make room for the next. In the basement, Steven uses a leaf blower to coax water from the emptiness under the dryer and away from an untuned guitar, then funnels a great wave toward me with a giant squeegee. I sweep it past the corner of stalled dreams, into the drain with the kid-sized broom we meant to donate. Although the wave is my fault, Steven frets between his cussing and sends me upstairs for rain boots. “It’s slippery,” he says. “You could fall.”

If I could re-do this day or this month, or everything, I’d wait under that squirrel’s nest with a catcher’s mitt. Twist the washer’s pump filter until it clicked completely. Have the rain boots ready. Dance and dance and never drown.

Here in the pond I’ve made, Steven chassés left. I chassé right. He funnels. I sweep. There’s a quick hop with a hand change that would have pleased both his gymnastics coach and our wedding dance instructor. And then we breathe again in tandem: fragile air filling fragile lungs.

When we’re done, Steven doesn’t ask about dinner. He leaves, shutting the storm door softly behind him.

And opening it just as softly twenty minutes later when he returns with a pizza and wordlessly accepts my peace offering of Lactaid.

“Is it pepperoni?” our younger son asks. He knows nothing about the basement, having emerged from his bedroom only to refuel and update us on his Minecraft game. When he complains about characters from the game, Steven and I become a united front of befuddled nodding. Neither of us understands what our younger son is talking about. Both of us are grateful he still shares these details at all. We’ve learned—from our older son, and from our own memories of being moody teenagers—that someday this openness will segue into long years of eyerolls and silence. But not today.

As our younger son talks, I marvel at his voice, and the scars on his chest that rise and fall with it. I marvel at the miracle of his heart, still beating after he blindsided us at birth with open-heart surgery. And at the way tragedy sometimes twists into happiness, the way love is sometimes exactly enough to hold together what needs holding—the way Steven and I are both still here with him, listening.

The next morning, I marvel at how we’re both sorry.

Me: “…for ruining your photos.”

Him: “…for all the yelling.”

Outside, the bare trees of three weeks ago are beginning to grow leaves, not quite loud with color but almost. I re-roll the throw rug, wrestle its sun-starched stiffness across the patio, and let the light amaze me. Today we’ll make for ourselves a soft place to land. Tomorrow, we’ll fill again this fragile space we’ve dared to own.

Tracie Renee (she/her) is a librarian, a Publishers Weekly book reviewer, and a BOTN-nominated writer who lives and dreams in sort-of Chicago. Find her in HAD, Orange Blossom Review, on Bluesky (@tracierenee.bsky.social) and at https://linktr.ee/tracie.renee.

It was a normal Saturday afternoon in Wheaton, Illinois. I rode my bike to the library to pick up a VHS and maybe stop by the popcorn shop afterward. I had a lot of “free roaming” privileges now that I was eleven.

The VHS collection was in the children’s section of the library—well, all the ones I was allowed to rent. Luckily, they had some newer PG ones. “Practically PG-13,” I told myself. Choosing the Saturday night movie rental for my brothers and me felt important.

I waved to the librarian, who only knew me because I had lost my card at least five times that year alone, and headed downstairs.

The children’s library was actually my favorite place. It had large tree statues and a fake fort kids could read in. I was there every Tuesday for Battle of the Books. Battle of the Books was essentially competitive reading. We devoured a towering list of assigned novels, then answered increasingly impossible questions about them as if literary recall were an Olympic sport. The library felt like a second home. I was browsing the VHS shelves, checking to see if The Princess Bride was available, when I heard a whistle. Not like a train. More like a singsong tune, almost like it came from a little tube. Too loud for a library, but not abrasive.

I followed the sound.

Under a fake tree, at a large table shaped like a lily pad, sat a woman who looked like a mom and a teenage boy with bright, circular blue eyes. His eyes caught mine as his mom told him to stop whistling.

“Oh, he’s not bothering me,” I said right away. “I just wanted to find the origin of the whistle.”

“Well, you found it!” said the bright-eyed boy, standing up immediately. “I’m Dave. Can I give you a hug?”

I smiled. Dave was clearly older than me, maybe a late teen, maybe an adult, but only about my height. Not scary, just a little loud for the library.

I looked at the woman, silently asking if it was okay. She sighed and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

I nodded yes.

I had a feeling this kid—teen—man (he somehow felt like all of those at once) was often told he was too loud. And often apologized for.

“Of course, Dave,” I said. “I would love a hug.”

I lied. I hated hugs from strangers. I hated physical contact from anyone unless I initiated it. Plus, he seemed a bit slobbery, like my baby brother.

But this felt different. I just knew it.

He hugged me for what felt like an eternity without slobbering on me, and then sat back down.

“I’m reading a book!” he said proudly, showing me his choice: Frog and Toad.

“It has chapters!” he added, clearly trying to impress me.

I smiled, eager to get my movie but also genuinely intrigued by my new acquaintance.

After struggling through a sentence to show me, his mom asked if I could watch him while she used the restroom.

I was slightly annoyed. I had no intention of babysitting on my free Saturday—even for a delightful kid older than me. But her pleading eyes made me concede.

“Of course,” I said, without a hint of annoyance.

I sat down at the lily pad table. He hugged me again.

“What’s your name?” he asked, suddenly seeming much smaller.

“I’m Kari,” I said.

“Well, Kari, I’m Dave,” he said, shaking my hand. He explained that now that we had a proper introduction, we could be friends. I think it was the handshake that sealed it. Or maybe he had forgotten he’d already introduced himself.

I didn’t care. It was really sweet.

He whistled again.

“I like your song,” I said.

“Really? No one likes my song. But it’s mine, so I love it.”

I smiled and helped him find his place in Frog and Toad. We read a chapter together before his mom came back.

“Thank you so much!” she said. “I even filled my water bottle!”

“No problem. Anytime.”

I got up. “Bye, Dave!”

He stood up like a soldier at dismissal.

“Bye, Kari!” he said, and then whistled.

For the next few years, I’d see him every couple of months at the library or the park. Always friendly. Always a hug. Always a whistle. My friends would look at me strangely, but I didn’t care. Dave had a place in my heart.

One evening, a few years later, when I was probably fourteen, I heard the whistle on my way to the park.

“Dave?” I called, louder than usual, trying to find him.

It was almost dusk. He shouldn’t have been out wandering. The park was near some busy streets.

Suddenly, I was scared, though I didn’t know why.

“Dave!”

I tried to whistle back, but mine was pathetic.

Then I saw him. Under a tree, hitting himself. In rhythm. Hit, hit, whistle, cry. He looked bigger now. More like a man. I hesitated. Then I realized there was no one else around.

“Dave?” I said, approaching slowly. “It’s Kari.” I gently took his hands. “Let’s not do that. Why don’t you sit and tell me what’s wrong?”

He hugged me—harder this time. Stronger. It startled me.

He was sobbing.

“Dave,” I said, suddenly treating him like my younger brother during a tantrum. “I can’t help unless you tell me what’s wrong.”

“My… my…”

“Do you know the game twenty questions?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. But counting to twenty is hard. So if we don’t keep track, it’s fine.”

It was his first full sentence without sobbing.

I smiled.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lost?”

“No.”

“Did something happen?”

“Yes.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes,” he said. “Kari… she’s hurt.”

“Dave, who?”

No answer.

“She won’t get up. She’s hurt, hurt, hurt—” He started hitting his head again.

“Okay, Dave,” I said. “I don’t know who she is. But I think we need to find an adult to help.”

“I am an adult,” he said.

That startled me.

“Yes,” I said gently. “But like… an authority. Someone who will know what to do. Can you walk with me?” I held out my hand.

“I’m not allowed to walk with strangers,” he said.

“I’m not a stranger. I’m Kari.”

He paused.

“You’re my friend, Kari.”

“That’s right.”

He took my hand.

We walked to the police station. I told him to plug his ears when we went inside. I explained everything and waited until a woman from social services came.

I hugged Dave goodbye. He whistled, and I gave the woman my new cell phone number.

I felt very much like an adult.

I waited at home for a call, but never got one. I wanted to know what happened. Eventually, I called the non-emergency number.

“Oh, hi, Kari,” the receptionist said. “Dave’s back home. It’s a good thing you found him. His caretaker fell and broke her hip. We don’t know how long she was down, but everyone is okay now.”

I exhaled.

I asked her to have the social worker call me.

She never did.

I moved to Arizona a year later. I didn’t think about Dave. I was too busy surviving high school.

Years later, at age thirty-three, I flew back to Wheaton to meet my newest nephew. I was at a Super Target, grabbing last-minute items, when something stopped me in my tracks.

The whistle.

I turned.

“Dave?” I said, half question, half certainty.

“Kari!”

A fully grown man with those bright blue eyes ran across the parking lot, carefully looking both ways.

He was wearing a reflective vest and an employee tag decorated with stickers.

“Dave!” I said. “I’m so happy to see you! How are you?”

He hugged me, resting his head on my chest. I didn’t mind.

“Kari! I have a job! And I bicycle!”

He pointed to a large recumbent tricycle with a tall flag and a little license plate.

“Dave, that’s so cool! Do you ride it to work by yourself?”

He nodded enthusiastically.

Then he showed me the cart system.

“It’s like a train,” he said.

“I love trains,” I replied.

We looked at each other, and we both said, “Because they whistle!”

We sat on a bench outside. He told his coworker he was on break.

“Kari?” he said, like a question.

“Yes, Dave?”

“I like the carts here. I like organizing them and lining them up…”

He paused.

“…because everything has a place.”

I didn’t realize I was crying until the tears were already there.

“Yes, Dave,” I said. “Everything has a place.”

Kari Burroughs Kraakevik is a writer, composer, and educator from Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, Open Secrets Magazine, Divergents Magazine, Larina’s Lit Lounge, Backsliders Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Infocalypse Arts & Literary Magazine. She writes literary nonfiction exploring identity, memory, and human connection.

In November 1983, two nights before we were scheduled to leave Seoul, I believed our work was finished. My friend Tom Kim and I had spent nearly two weeks traveling across South Korea on behalf of two American companies. One firm was interested in replacement radiators; the other in engine and valve train components. These were not glamorous products. They lived under the hood, out of sight, subjected to heat, friction, and repetition.

There is nothing trivial about a part that fails. A radiator either holds or it leaks. A valve train component either performs or it does not. You can market many things. You cannot market around failure.

That was why we had come.

By 1983, South Korea’s automotive industry was no longer marginal. It was part of a national project, an effort to shift from labor-intensive manufacturing to a more advanced, self-sustaining model. And Hyundai, Kia, and Daewoo were not just companies. They were instruments of that ambition.

Tom and I were not thinking in those terms. We were moving from factory to factory, asking questions, taking notes, photographing what we were allowed to photograph. We were trying to determine whether the firms we represented in Cleveland could source Korean-made parts. What we saw impressed us. The quality was solid, sometimes surprisingly so. That was our conclusion.

Two nights before our departure, we returned to the Plaza Hotel around 11:30 p.m. after a long day. I was tired in the dense, disorienting way that comes from sustained travel, too many meetings, too many translations, too many attempts to read what was being said and what was not.

My briefcase sat on the desk. Inside were notes, brochures, business cards, pricing details, and photographs. Some of the film had been developed. Some remained in canisters.

Then came the knock. It was not tentative. It carried authority.

I looked through the peephole. Four men stood in the hallway, two in suits and two in uniform. Something tightened before I had a reason for it. When I opened the door, one of the men spoke in English. They wanted me to come with them to discuss the nature of our work in Korea. I asked if I could call Tom.

“That will not be necessary,” he said. “He is already coming.”

They asked me to bring everything: notes, photographs, undeveloped film, all materials related to our trip.

That was the moment the trip changed. I was no longer simply a business traveler. I was something else, unclassified, and no longer free. I dressed quickly. The men were polite. That made it worse. No raised voices, no visible force, just a calm certainty that we would comply.

In the hallway I saw Tom. We exchanged few words. He understood far more than I did, and I could see in his face that this was not routine. We were driven through Seoul to a government office where Trade Ministry officials were waiting.

The meeting lasted nearly five hours.

Some English was used, but most of the discussion unfolded in Korean. Tom translated words, tone, and implication under pressure. He was not just translating language. He was translating our current risk.

The officials focused on our visits to suppliers in the Kwangju area. These firms, they explained, worked with Hyundai. We had not obtained proper permission from Hyundai or from the relevant authorities to visit them.

We had violated protocol. The word repeated itself, steadily narrowing the room. To us, the visits seemed ordinary. We were evaluating suppliers, asking questions, and taking photographs. No one had stopped us. No one had told us no.

But Korea’s auto industry was not simply a marketplace. It was structured, protected, and closely watched. A supplier connected to Hyundai was not just a vendor. It was part of a system with national importance.

We had entered that system with notebooks and cameras. No one said “industrial espionage.” No one needed to. The officials asked for our clients’ names. We refused.

It was not a dramatic act. It felt less like courage than like being pinned between two obligations. The officials had control over our immediate future. Our clients had trusted us. There was no safe direction to move.

So we did not move.

They examined everything: notes, photographs, and film. The materials of an ordinary business trip took on a different character in that room. They looked less like records and more like evidence.

I remember the moment my confidence disappeared. In the United States, I understood the boundaries of authority. I knew when a situation was merely uncomfortable and when it was dangerous. In that office, after midnight, in a language I did not speak, I had no such framework. I depended entirely on Tom and on the discretion of men whose decisions I could not predict.

I imagined not being allowed to leave. I imagined charges I did not fully understand. I imagined a future unfolding inside a system I could not navigate. Looking back, I do not know how realistic those fears were.

After hours of questioning, the officials reached a decision. We would be allowed to return to the hotel. We would be allowed to leave the country. They kept our materials, notes, photographs, and film.

When we returned to the Plaza Hotel, it was nearly dawn. The city sat in that suspended hour before morning fully arrived. We went to the restaurant and sat down, too alert to sleep. Only then did we begin to speak freely. We were frightened. There was no use softening it. We had not been clever or heroic. We had misread a system we did not understand.

And yet our intentions did not protect us. That realization settled in slowly. We had believed we were conducting routine business. From the other side of the table, we may have looked like something else entirely—foreign visitors moving through supplier networks tied to a national industry, taking notes, taking photographs, withholding client identities.

There was an irony in it. Our assessment had been positive. We had come because we suspected strength, and we found it. The suppliers were capable. The products were good. But even a favorable judgment is still a judgment. And judgment directed at a young industry bearing national expectations can feel like an intrusion.

Sitting there in the early morning, without our notes or photographs, we began reconstructing the trip from memory. Names, impressions, product lines, conversations: we wrote down everything we could recover.

It took hours. There was something almost monastic about it, two exhausted men at a hotel table, trying to rebuild a record that had been taken from them. Memory held more than we expected, but less than we wanted.

We did not contact the American embassy. Perhaps we should have. At the time, we wanted only to leave.

We did return home and reported what we had learned to our clients. The experience ensured that the report would not be easily forgotten.

For years, I explained the episode as a product of our inexperience. That is true, but incomplete. We did not understand protocol. We assumed access where none had been formally granted. We believed that openness in a conversation implied permission. We mistook hospitality for authorization.

Those assumptions now seem distinctly American. We carried with us an expectation that business practices travel easily across borders, that inquiry is neutral, that observation is harmless, and that interest is welcome. Nothing in our experience had prepared us to question those assumptions until they were questioned for us.

Looking back, it’s clear how much we did not see. We did not see how much pride and vulnerability were intertwined in Korea’s industrial ascent. We did not see how carefully supplier relationships were managed. We did not see that an evaluation, even a positive evaluation, could feel like scrutiny.

Four decades later, the outcome is clear. Hyundai and Kia are global competitors. Korean automotive manufacturing stands on equal footing with the world’s best. What we glimpsed in factories and supplier plants has fully emerged.

That success reframes the night at the Plaza Hotel. At the time, I experienced the officials as intimidating. I experienced the encounter as frightening. But they were also representatives of a country guarding something still in formation, something not yet secure enough to be casually examined.

They were watching the watchers.

That does not diminish the fear. It complicates it.

When I was younger, I told this story as an adventure. There is a version of it that invites that treatment, late-night questioning, confiscated film, a narrow departure. It can be shaped into an anecdote.

I am less interested in that version now. What remains with me is the border we crossed without recognizing it—a boundary around knowledge, authority, and expectation. We crossed it carrying ordinary tools, questions, notebooks, a camera, and discovered too late that those tools meant different things on the other side.

That night taught me something about travel that tourism rarely reveals and business travel often conceals. A country is not just a market or a destination. It is a place where the rules of interaction, including those for business, are often unspoken.

It also taught me something about power—its quiet forms. Power is a knock at a hotel door. Power is a request that is not a request. Power is a conversation you cannot fully understand, while it determines your immediate future.

And it taught me something about friendship.

Without Tom, I would have been nearly helpless. He translated words, but also tone, hesitation, and implication. He carried the additional weight of understanding what I could not.

Sadly, my friend Tom passed away in 2012.

We did leave Korea. I remember the lift of the plane from Kimpo Airport, the almost physical sense that the future had reopened. Still, part of me remained in that office, watching faces, waiting for meaning to arrive through translation.

We had gone to Korea to ask whether the parts were good enough.

We had not asked who controlled access, what permission meant, or how observation might be interpreted inside an industry still defining itself. We had not asked what our presence represented beyond our own intentions.

At three in the morning, those questions condensed into a single thought: I may not be going home.

The knock at the Plaza Hotel remains because it marked the moment I realized the world is not made only of visible doors. There are others, constructed from custom, authority, and history, that you may pass through without knowing.

Don Iannone is the author of six nonfiction books, two works of fiction, and twelve poetry collections. His recent work is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Hemingway Short Literary Journal, 3Elements Review, and the Southern Poetry Journal. He holds a PhD in philosophy and teaches at Transcontinental University. He lives in Greater Cleveland.

Photo by Lynne Weiss

A painting in the Mughal style of India hangs in my dining room. It depicts a wedding procession: a maharaja on an elephant with the maharani on a litter behind him. The wedding couple is surrounded by dozens of onlookers in turbans and saris against the backdrop of Udaipur, the most romantic city in India. Nearly everything in the painting—the sky, the water, the buildings, the clothing, the ground upon which the people and the animals walk—is blue: indigo, azure, periwinkle, ultramarine, navy blue, powder blue, baby blue, and other shades I don’t know the names of. “In India,” the painter told me, “blue is the color of love.”

The painter was a man named Hukam, and it was only after I saw this painting in my dear friend Terri’s bedroom in Amsterdam, where she had settled into life as a designer for several Dutch magazines, that I fully grasped the depth of their relationship. Hukam was twenty-five years younger than Terri. In the painting, Terri appears as the maharani riding in the gilded litter, while Hukam is depicted as the maharaja.

The painting is in my house now because Terri died in June 2021.

Terri told me the story of how she and Hukam met. More than two decades ago, while visiting Udaipur, in the northern state of Rajasthan, Terri, a graphic artist and designer, stopped before the open door of an art gallery to watch a painter at work. She and the artist began to talk. Even though they were strangers, they began to tease one another. After several minutes of banter, Hukam said, “Lady, we must have known each other in another lifetime because I am in love with you.”

And then he kissed her.

***

The loss of Terri was profound for me. She and I became friends a little over fifty years ago, in our senior year of high school. I was kicked out of my honors English class that year because I had made some ill-considered comments on a teacher evaluation form. The teacher agreed to give me an A if I never returned to class. Instead, I spent English period in the art room. Terri volunteered to join me. Together we built a larger-than-life seated Buddha out of papier-mâché, coating the green tempera with chalk dust to make our creation look as though it were made of weathered stone. At seventeen, we somehow found it hilarious to use our paltry German to say things like “Wir bauen ein Buddha” (we are building a Buddha), as we slathered the form with strips of newspaper dripping with sticky, watered-down paste.

***

After meeting Hukam, Terri returned to India several times for visits of a few weeks. He visited her in Europe a couple of times. Between visits, they communicated via texts and phone apps. Given their age difference, I wondered if this guy was after her euros. Maybe he was trying to move to Europe?

Hukam asked Terri to marry him. Repeatedly. Terri always refused. She felt that Hukam’s future happiness depended on him marrying a woman of his own culture who could give him children. As the eldest of three brothers in a traditional Hindu family, Hukam was under pressure because his younger siblings could not marry until he did. And so, about ten years ago, Hukam accepted the marriage his family arranged for him.

I expected the relationship between Hukam and Terri to end at that point, but it did not. They stayed in touch. Hukam shared his frustrations with his role as a new husband and, before long, a father. Terri gave him a lot of advice. She could be bossy, and she used that tendency to tell him he needed to consider his wife’s feelings and consult her on important decisions like where the family would live and how to raise their daughters.

“She made me a better husband,” he said at her Zoom memorial. “She taught me to respect women.”

Her advice, I learned from Hukam, didn’t end with telling him how to treat his wife. Hukam confessed to me that as a young man, he had hated Mahatma Gandhi, the hero of Indian independence, because he thought Gandhi’s adherence to the principles of nonviolence was a sign of weakness and made the Indian people seem less powerful. “Terri helped me see that he was a real hero,” Hukam said. “She helped me feel proud of Gandhi and proud of India.”

***

After high school graduation, Terri and I went to different colleges. She attended school in Michigan while I went to Philadelphia. But we stayed in touch through the mail. Terri, a collector of quirky postcards, crammed as many words onto the back of a card in her precise printing as I could fit on an 8½-by-11 piece of paper in my looping cursive. Her writing style was distinctive—filled with her own brand of contractions, colloquial spellings, and resistance to capitalization. We sometimes wrote to each other two or three times a week. We told each other about our love affairs, hoped-for and actual, and parties and concerts, as well as about our new dorm mates—who we found fascinating or repulsive—and eventually our housemates. We complained about university bureaucracies and raved about stimulating courses. Terri was in an architecture program, but she also loved her courses on film, especially documentaries and avant-garde, and was always drawn to “the Beats,” the beatnik writers of the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the last gifts I gave her was a book she’d expressed a longing for—a used copy of the 1958 Robert Frank book of photographs, The Americans. Those were the days of “streakers,” a prank in which people, usually men, dashed naked across stages for various events. They seemed especially frequent in Ann Arbor, to Terri’s great amusement. Our college years were also the days of widespread protests and of questioning the role of the U.S. government in world affairs. We both joined activist organizations and took part in study groups and shared our changing perspectives and insights in our frequent letters.

We visited once a year or so during college and afterward. After Terri moved to Amsterdam in the mid-1980s, her annual visits to her mother in D.C. usually included a side trip to Boston, where I eventually settled, to visit me. I made it to Amsterdam every few years, and some years we met up in D.C. or New York or Berlin or Glasgow.

But as much as I loved seeing Terri, I was also a bit relieved when a visit ended. The experience was always intense, as we dashed from one museum to another, sought out music festivals, performances, and quirky spots to eat, and talked and talked and talked and talked. I suspect that part of the reason we became such good friends was that we never lived in the same place after we were eighteen. Ours was always a long-distance relationship and richly rewarding because each visit was a chance to show off and share or explore together the museums and performance venues of the places we lived or were visiting. She was delighted to take me to the Tropenmuseum near her Amsterdam apartment—a small museum filled with colorful dioramas and fabrics from tropical countries—and equally awed by performances by activist singer-songwriter Billy Bragg and by the Black drumming artists I took her to see in my home territory. During the days we were together, we took time off of work and our daily responsibilities to immerse ourselves in art and one another.

***

After Hukam married, he began painting his imaginary wedding to Terri. It took him three years, he told me. “It was what I had hoped for,” he said, “but it could not be.”

When I saw the painting in Terri’s apartment, I knew that despite the obstacles and improbabilities of their relationship, this had been the kind of love about which poetry and operas are written. Every detail attested to that—every tiny stroke of facial hair on the myriad onlookers, every spot of twenty-four-karat gold trimming the garments and the details of the buildings. The look on Terri’s face when she showed it to me told the other side of the story: I saw what she had given up to ensure Hukam’s future happiness.

***

Hukam and his wife had two daughters. Because the girls were close in age, they had their traditional first hair-cutting ceremony together, an event attended by hundreds of guests. Terri was honored to be invited, but nervous about attending. It would be the first time she and Hukam had seen each other since he married.

She was charmed by the little girls. “I found myself doing things with them I didn’t know I had in me—playing, teasing, joking, wrassling around on the floor together,” she wrote in 2019, adding that Hukam was more than ever “like the Hukam I first met and fell in love with. We weren’t lovers anymore, but the friendship felt just as wonderful!” She praised the cooking of Hukam’s wife, Madhu, who thought Terri was only a former client of Hukam’s art gallery. “Why should I tell her something that would only make her feel bad?” Hukam told me later, answering a question I had not asked.

After the painting arrived, I hung it in my dining room, where I saw it every day. I soon found myself imagining, and then planning, a trip to India to meet Hukam.

My husband and I arrived in Ahmedabad, the city where Hukam had found work as an art teacher. He and his family lived in a two-room apartment in a fourteen-story building. My husband and I booked a room in a hotel a short walk away. Hukam met us in the lobby of our hotel the afternoon of our arrival and walked us to his home.

He was a tall, handsome man, smart and opinionated, and his family was excited to meet us. The little girls greeted us at their apartment door, carrying a brass ghee lamp on a tray and marking our foreheads with crimson bindis.

Hukam insisted that we eat as many meals as possible in their apartment. I had envisioned family meals around a table, but Bob and I were seated on a small sofa before a low wheeled table while Madhu and the two girls served us rice and dahl. Hukam sat and chatted while we ate, but he did not eat himself. The one time we saw Madhu eating, she was sitting on the kitchen floor.

The girls, now seven and eight, remembered Terri as their Auntie and were excited to meet their Auntie’s friends. They performed for us, playing a harmonium and reciting from the Bhagavad Gita.

***

The last time I saw Terri was in the fall of 2019, when she spent a week at our home. Arthritis had made walking painful, and while we talked as much as ever, she moved more slowly and often had to rest. When her persistent abdominal pain was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer in early 2021, she was clear about what she wanted to do. Much of what had given her pleasure—travel and museums—had become almost impossible. As her strength failed and her pain became unbearable, she wanted no visitors so as to concentrate on getting her affairs in order in the short time she had left. Getting her affairs in order meant setting up a trust to cover the costs of educating Hukam’s daughters. In some sense, these girls were daughters whose existence she had brought into being.

***

“We promised each other we would marry in our next life,” Hukam told me one day when the two of us were out shopping together.

It’s a romantic notion, but I wonder whether part of the magic of Terri and Hukam’s love affair lay in the fact that, like our friendship, it was carried out over a distance. My visit to Hukam showed me a handsome yet opinionated man. He was willing to take at least some of Terri’s advice on how to treat his wife—but I saw enough to realize that the relationship between Hukam and Madhu was very traditional. Madhu was gracious and beautiful. She showed us her hundred or so silk saris, neatly folded in cubbies along a wall of their apartment to create layer after layer of gorgeous color. Terri, the designer and artist, would have appreciated that visual display. Color was one of the things she loved most about India.

But I could also see that Madhu was subservient in the way she smiled and bowed to us. Terri bowed to no one. I gathered that Hukam had been stimulated by her challenges to his ideas, but I was sure he would not have tolerated such challenges in everyday life, and I knew the relationship, even carried out long distance, had sometimes been demanding and even infuriating to Terri.

That wedding with Hukam on an elephant, Terri enclosed in a gilded litter behind him, may have been well-suited to a former life if Hukam was right that a love affair in a prior existence explained their immediate attraction. Yet if his wish that they find each other in a future incarnation comes true, I suspect that Terri won’t be seated in a gilded litter behind her maharaja. Their love will likely take a very different form, one that better reflects the woman I knew so well for so many years.

I also know that if there is a next life for Terri and for me, she and I will once again be dear friends. Dear friends who live a distance apart and, whenever together, immerse ourselves in whatever art and performance is available to us, and we will talk and talk and talk and talk.

Lynne Weiss is a Boston-based writer and theater reviewer. She has received residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center, and her MFA is from UMass Amherst. Her work has appeared on many different literary sites. You can see her progressively optimistic opinions at lynneweiss23.substack.com.

“I miss my sister,” my four-year-old says.

How could he? My youngest son wasn’t even conceived when she left us.

I didn’t think we would continue to talk about her. It’s been six years. She was with me for seven months. Five beautiful months and two terrifying ones.

The year was 2020. COVID was claiming lives and shutting down the world. I felt like I was living in a different plane of existence because I was pregnant. Our family was finally going to be complete. COVID ruined medicine for everyone. You might get treated for COVID but not for anything else. I had an eight-week ultrasound to confirm my pregnancy and the baby’s heartbeat. The rest of my medical care was done by telephone. How that made sense, I’m still not sure. At twenty weeks you’re supposed to get an anatomy scan. Mine wasn’t scheduled until week twenty-two.

I decided to treat myself to an early gender reveal scan. The ultrasound tech at Love My Baby Bump made my husband and I sign a waiver that she couldn’t be held liable for any medical findings on the scan. She was only allowed to reveal the gender.

My husband, eldest son (then two years old), and I sat in a dark room. The tech squirted the cold ultrasound gel on my belly. There the baby was! Head, arms, legs, fingers and toes. And the baby was a girl! I was so excited. I would have one of each—a boy and a sweet baby girl. She would be beautiful. I knew it. I didn’t pick up on how quiet the tech was.

We left the room. In pink chalk we drew a line on the “girl” count on the Love My Baby Bump chalkboard. We picked up a pink boa, and my son held a pink “It’s a girl” sign as the tech snapped our photo. We had four weeks of bliss left.

When it was finally time for the anatomy scan at the OB’s office, I was so tired. I had to go to the bathroom and I sweated under my mask. The tech at the hospital seemed to be taking forever. I tried to keep my eyes open to watch the ultrasound on the small monitor above my head, but my eyes were just so heavy. I opened them to realize the tech was spending a lot of time on baby girl’s head.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. And left me in the room.

That was strange, I thought. I studied the images, trying to see what could possibly make the tech leave the room.

She came back in. “They want to see you upstairs.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, tears welling up.

“The OB will talk to you. Do you know where to go?”

I tried to hold it together in the elevator. My heart felt like it was going to pound out of my chest. I couldn’t breathe as I waited for my doctor.

She came in, sat down. “The baby doesn’t have any orbits,” she told me.

“Like eyes? She doesn’t have eyes?” I gasped. Blind people can’t see, but they live full lives. Not having eyes isn’t the worst thing.

“No. She doesn’t have orbital cavities. I’m so sorry.”

My daughter, I would learn, didn’t have a “mid-face.” Her forehead started at the bridge of her nose. Her beautiful nose. Sweet, little baby nose.

The next few weeks were a living hell. We were on a timeline to figure out what was wrong with our baby girl and what we could do to fix it. My husband, an Army physician, was scheduled to go to field training. We needed to figure things out before he left.

My daughter had more than missing eyes. Her brain was a mess of malformations with an underdeveloped cerebellum, a missing corpus callosum, and shallow folds on what cerebrum she did have. She wouldn’t be able to see or control her body. Her organs wouldn’t work properly. Her kidneys were starting to fail because she didn’t have the part of the brain she needed to make them function. My daughter was a miracle.

A miracle she made it that far with what little brain she had.

I sat on the couch with my husband. Each minute felt like a ticking time bomb. I was hurtling toward the end of my second trimester. Every day my daughter grew more…malformed.

I felt like I lived in a constant panic attack. Every result, every scan showed something worse than the previous one, until there wasn’t even a name to encompass everything she had anymore. It was like waking up every day just to be hit by a train engine plowing into my body, dragging me along the tracks. Each rail tie ripped a bit more hope from me until there was nothing left. I felt like puking. I cried all the time—in small moments—at the doctor’s office, watching my toddler play. My eyes also hurt from holding back tears around him. All I wanted to do was mourn. Instead, there were parks and playdates, focusing on one breath at a time as I pushed him in the swing. They ask at the checkout line, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t want to be pregnant anymore,” I said. My eyes hurt from crying. I thought of my son sitting upstairs watching TV. How much would he have to endure? How much of this would he remember?

“I know.” My husband held me.

I never thought those would be words to come out of my mouth. My daughter was part of me. Everything I did was for her, from the food I ate to the vitamins I took to the exercise I tried to do. I pored over forums and tried to read studies about the conditions my daughter had. It would not be an easy life with just one syndrome. But she didn’t just have one brain malformation, she had a whole list. Our daughter was suffering.

We lost Astrid on September 14, 2020. It was a Monday. She was just shy of twenty-eight weeks in my womb.

Later, I was told Buddhists believe the soul doesn’t enter the body until ten minutes after it’s born. Maybe Astrid’s soul realized it wasn’t the right time or the right body.

***

I think of my youngest child. He’s cute, funny, and vibrant. He’s so full of life that it bursts out in balls of energy, big hugs, and “I love you, Mom” in random moments. Maybe that’s Astrid’s soul in him. Maybe his body has a shared soul because I also see her in Heaven, waiting for me. I imagine her with my childhood pony, in the grassy fields of eternal paradise.

“I love my sister,” my eldest says as we drive to school. “She’s not here. I know she can hear me. She’s always with us,” he says from the back seat.

“She is, buddy,” I say. She must be.

Lily Snyder is a writer and speaker based in Michigan. Her work explores motherhood, loss, and the intersection of technology and identity. She writes at Lilyotron.blog. This is her first literary magazine submission.

I’m hurrying up our steep driveway during a rainstorm when a sudden wind swells the canopy of my umbrella. I’m swept briefly into the air and sent crashing to the ground, where I lie, stunned with an amorphous throbbing pain in my upper arm. My husband rushes over.

“Are you O.K.?” He helps me stand.

“I’m fine!” I dash to the car for the appointment with Dr. Green, an osteopath who treats me for nerve pain from last year’s spinal surgery.

As I start to drive, I don’t understand why I can’t fully turn the wheel of my car without stabs of pain every time I move my arm. By the time I get to my appointment I’m shaking and teary. Dr. Green picks the bits of gravel from our driveway still embedded in the palm of my hand. I didn’t notice my skin was shredded. This upsets me more than the throb in my arm.

He hands me a vial of Arnica. “For swelling,” he says.

My hand is starting to sting. I pop some pills and dab a tear.

“And something for shock too.” He gives me a different vial.

I examine the bottle and hand it back. “I got over double knee replacement two years ago with exercise and physical therapy. I’ll get over this too.”

He shakes his head. “At least don’t drive. It’s not safe.” He gently takes my arm, moving it in a slow circle by my waist, before letting it go. “It’s not broken,” he says.

I phone my husband, who arrives in an Uber to take me home.

When I talk with my primary care doctor, she’s concerned that I can’t raise the arm above my waist and recommends an X-ray. The next day at the local hospital I sit on the examining table swinging my legs, almost childlike, as we wait for the results, certain that the pain and lack of mobility will subside quickly, but when the X-ray is read it seems that I have, in fact, broken my humerus, the long bone that runs from the shoulder to the elbow.

“You don’t need surgery,” the doctor says. “The bone is fractured, but it’s still in place.”

“What about Pilates?” I’ve recently started the exercise to strengthen my lower back.

“Not for a few months.” She hands me a sling. “Four weeks. And no driving. But you should recover nearly all of your mobility.”

Nearly. This seems to be good news. At least I’ll get back to normal. Why then do I suddenly feel profoundly broken?

A nurse shows me how to do arm exercises while wearing the sling. She hands me a prescription for physical therapy. I want to crumple it into a ball and toss it in a wastebasket, but, like a responsible adult, I thank her and stuff it in my pocket.

I trudge out of the hospital with my arm in a sling. My birthday is in two weeks. I feel old. It seems now there is no use in denying that I am in decline. At my next visit to the endocrinologist, he’ll probably prescribe a bone strengthening medication—which I’ve dodged thus far—because I am a post-menopausal woman who has broken a bone. He’ll likely tell me I have to take it until I die.

After a week I pull myself together, decide to stop feeling sorry for myself. I resolve to dedicate myself to a new regimen of daily weights and strengthening when my arm comes out of the sling. For now, I can at least do leg exercises. I’m determined to make something positive out of this accident—I’ll get stronger, write a new essay, who knows what else I’ll do. I manage eating, typing, and cooking with my left hand. After the sling comes off, I start to push through arm exercises, weights, cardio.

One day I learn about a drop-in chorus in the area and a local singing teacher who is highly recommended. I’d always loved to sing as a girl and later with my children. I liked the way it opened my heart, though I had no voice, and I shuddered listening to a recording of myself during the pandemic when I’d participated in a group concert. I’d also tried Zoom singing lessons during that time. I felt silly and couldn’t ignore the instructor’s expression of pain when I opened my mouth to produce a note. I quit after two lessons.

Although I was a terrible singer, singing touched my core. When I sang by myself or with my family, it was as if my insides became my outsides and, like a child, I offered to the listener—and myself—some open, vulnerable part of my heart, trusting I would be treated with kindness.

I look up the local teacher—Pollyanna—perhaps named because she is exceptionally sunny and good-natured? I expect another professional who makes everything too technical and doesn’t have enough interest or patience to work with someone like me. Her website pictures a pixie-ish woman with deep blue eyes and long red hair outfitted in shiny dresses and ropes of glittering necklaces. She holds a microphone and sings before a piano. She offers technique training, performance and pre-production coaching, piano lessons, music theory, sight reading.

I’m ready to close the site when I scroll a little further and see “Healing Through Music.” She offers “Transformational Work Sessions” and “Confidence Building Courses.” I need healing! I need confidence! I read on. Her mission, it says, is to inspire people to use “the sacred act of singing” to express love. She sees singing as a path to foster the spirit. She has a testimonial from the director and founder of the Chaplaincy Institute, where she’d been on staff.

I fill out her intake form, and two weeks later, I walk reluctantly up rickety wooden steps in downtown Fairfax, a small hippie town in Marin County, north of San Francisco. By now the initial euphoria of signing up for a trial lesson has worn off, and the thought of singing in front of an actual singer fills me with dread and the sure sense that humiliation is imminent. And yet, desire and curiosity drive me up those steps. I want to sing. Can I finally learn? How will singing make me feel?

Near the top of the steps outside her studio a giant peace sign made of white painted wood is nailed to slanted redwood. Inside Pollyanna stands near the piano, her head down, absorbed in reading. She wears a green knit hat over her red hair, a nubby yellow sweater, reddish pants tucked into elfin brown suede boots. Behind her on the wall hangs a whiteboard, a drum and guitar propped below it, more small drums in front of the piano next to maracas, and rattles in a basket. Pollyanna is tiny and of indeterminate age, though I come to realize she’s nearly as old as I am.

She smiles and holds out her hand, suggesting we warm up with stretches. Pollyanna then tells me to stand in front of the piano.

“How do you feel?” she says.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I say.

She nods her head. “I know what you’re thinking. ‘No purpose to singing. Can’t do anything with it. Not a productive use of time.’”

I feel relieved hearing those safe, logical words instead of the pounding of my inner chaos. “And I have an awful voice too,” I add.

She sits at the piano. “Nope. You got that wrong. If you have a voice, you can sing. Everyone can sing, despite what you’ve been told.”

Wait until you hear me, I think.

“What song do you want to start with?” she asks.

I choose Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game,” sung at a dear friend’s funeral and now it’s making me think of death, decay, time.

I’d hardly gotten a line out when my nose starts to run and soon I’m crying and can’t stop. I’m so tired. Tired of being responsible and strong and dealing with injuries and surgeries. Tired of what the kids call adulting. I want to travel back to the days when my mother put a colorful band aid on my scratch and made the “owie” go away. I want to be the young woman comforted by my father’s hug when I cried on his chest after a bad breakup. Broken bones, old age, decline. I’m hurting. Now, finally, unexpectedly, I’m doing something nice for myself and it’s more than I can bear. Adding to my unhappiness, I’m off tune and my voice creaks.

She pushes a box of Kleenex across the piano, and we keep going until she stops and says, “It’s hard to sing when you’re crying.”

I laugh a little. “I guess a lot of people cry in here.” I point to the Kleenex and she nods.

“Is there another song?” she asks.

After a moment I say, “How about, ‘If I Had a Hammer?’”

Pollyanna teaches me that the key to singing is holding back the breath, controlling the air flow, called support. As I breathe in, my diaphragm lowers and spreads out and my ribcage expands. I learn that singers modify vowels depending on the mode they’re singing in. In the “overdrive” mode she changes the “AH” sound to an “OH” sound when singing “warning” in “If I Had a Hammer.”

I start to feel better. At the end of the lesson, I say, “That was kinda fun” and she lets out a laugh and says, “What are you talking about? That was friggin’ fun.”

In the car on the way home, I let loose, singing the word warning over and over, laughing and yelling, changing the vowel the way she’d taught.

I sign up for a full course of lessons.

I attend weekly, trudging up the wooden steps with a mixture of fear, anticipation, and excitement. I learn about different modes of singing besides overdrive: neutral, edge, curbing. I learn that support, combined with twang—which Pollyanna explains is like putting your thumb over water spurting from a garden hose to direct the vocal stream—produces a smoother sound. I learn about tongue placement for vowels, melody, vibrato, and rhythm. We sing “If I Had a Hammer” again, and Laura Nyro’s “Stoned Soul Picnic” and Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move.” I start singing with a microphone and feel like a star, imagining myself at an open mic night at a local café and belting out a song, though if the opportunity became available, I know I’d let it pass.

The lessons are fun, but also hard. They require thought, practice, physical effort. It is an actual cardio workout. I finish the lessons exhausted but somehow have more energy as I go about my day. I never realized that singing was performing and good performance employs drama, never thought of myself as a performer, or dramatic, yet here I am with Pollyanna, standing at a microphone, pushing myself to let my voice ring out like a struck bell. I have an audience of one. And she has established our sessions as a judgment-free zone. I struggle to, but I let go.

In my twenties and thirties, I’d tried to fade into the woodwork. Now, at seventy-two, I’m telling myself to pay attention to me. Stand out. Stand up. I reach out through sound and song to my past self, my present self, my future self: “I’m here! I’m alive! My voice matters!”

I tape all the sessions and sing along to them almost every day, laughing and singing loudly, when my husband isn’t home. Singing takes me way out of my comfort zone in a way I need and like. I feel vital after every practice. I forget my age and the last two years of injuries, surgeries, rehab. I also must admit I’m getting a tiny bit clearer and stronger, and for the first time, other than singing with my children, it’s ok listening to my voice.

I don’t know where I’m going with singing, but I don’t care. I think of what P.L. Travers had written in What the Bee Knows about the meaning of the word understanding: to stand under. She suggests embracing “not knowing” and letting an experience “rain down its truth.” I think of a book from my spiritual direction training, Josef Pieper’s In Tune with the World. Pieper quotes Nietzsche, who postulates that by saying, “Yea to a single moment…we have said Yea not only to ourselves, but to all existence.”

To all existence. To joy, to love. To illness and death.

I was clearly saying yea to being alive, perhaps saying yea to my body—to breathing, hearing, seeing. To falling and breaking too. To surgeries and rehab, to exercise and willpower, to injuries and pain, and to aging—they are all a part of it.

For so long I ignored my body. I could get away with it when I was young. My body did everything I’d asked it to, and I’d assumed it would forever. Someday my body will stop. I can embrace that too. But today I rejoice in what’s life-giving.

At home, I practice in front of the mirror. My body sings to my body. I can move my larynx up to produce higher notes if I pretend to sing like a child, so I try. And then I try again. I’m singing my heart and soul to my own reflection. Maybe someday if I get brave enough I’ll sing to the world. My eyes shine and I’m smiling. Over the next few days, I sing in the shower, I sing in the car, I sing in my office and my room—even to my husband. I sing exuberantly, with abandon, in a loud voice. Practice becomes play, and what is play if not pleasure? I feel my life split open.

Susan Moldaw’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Broad Street, Cutleaf Journal, Fourth Genre, Narrative, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Sweet Lit, The Millions, and others. She is a singer in the Threshold Choir in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I stole eggs from our refrigerator for the raccoons. I would lower them from my third-story bedroom window in a basket tied to a rope. I’d then walk through the fields until I entered the woods and find my tree. This was my special place. I loved that tree because when I sat at the base, I could hear the creek flowing just below, and I could see my house in the distance nestled in the sea of corn looking very tiny. I never told anyone at home about that spot or that I wished my house away. I would frame the house between my pointer finger and thumb, then pinch them together to make it magically disappear.

One day, my dog Peanut started yawping after getting caught in a rusty trap hidden in the water. The metal jaws gripped him as he thrashed, and he violently chewed at his leg to be free. The blood swirled in the water, turning pink and fading downstream. I tried prying the jaws apart while Peanut gnashed at my hands until I was finally able to release him. He sprinted toward home, leaving a trail of blood in the rows of corn.

When I wasn’t in the woods, I walked along the shoulder of our narrow country road knocking on doors in search of other children. The houses were far apart, built on old farmland, surrounded by manicured lawns, devoid of mature trees. The mothers answered the door, their husbands at work at the auto plant in town.

The house next to us sat vacant for a long time, but I spotted a truck in the driveway one day, so knocked on the door. The woman who answered had a long face and giant, doleful eyes, like the big-eyed “Pity Kitty” print we had hanging in our living room.

“Do you have any kids I can play with?” I asked.

She cracked a quiet smile and said, “Yes, I think they may be too young for you, but you’re welcome inside anyway.”

I stepped right in. Once inside, I saw two toddlers, hair the color of carrots, wearing only their underwear, wrestling on the worn carpet in front of the TV that blared cartoons. I followed her into the kitchen and both children looked up briefly before getting entangled again, the youngest, around three, clutched a pacifier between her teeth.

Her husband sat shirtless at the kitchen table and didn’t look up. His chest appeared concave and his left arm, unusually thin, hung limp from his shoulder. And instead of a hand at the end of it, he had a knob. He was pulling rusty contraptions out of a crate. He forced one open until it clicked and asked me to touch it. His wife, who was serving me milk in a plastic child’s cup and cookies on a saucer, told him to stop. He then took a stick and tapped it lightly on the contraption until it snapped shut. I jumped and he laughed so hard that the cigarette that was perched on his bottom lip fell out of his mouth. He picked it up off the floor, still lit, and placed it back on his lip.

“That’s a trap,” he said. He explained that he got five dollars for raccoons and opossums and twenty for foxes and minks. He then picked up an old milk jug that sat by his feet and pushed it toward my nose. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, grinning waggishly. The liquid burned my nostrils and my eyes watered as I held my breath. It smelled like skunk.

“That’s fox piss,” he said and burst into laughter as he wet a rag with the repugnant liquid and massaged it onto one of the rust-covered traps.

trap: A device for catching game or other animals

***

When I was twenty-four, I hitchhiked for three months across North and West Africa. I began in Morocco, then crossed Algeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso until I got to Mali. I was in Mali for one week before heading into the capital city of Bamako, to fly home to New York City. I’d wanted desperately to make friends with women from Africa on this journey, but it was difficult. In the small villages, the women gathered doing chores, cooking, and minding their children. The men could speak four or five languages, but the women mostly spoke their local language, some Arabic, and I didn’t speak either, making it difficult to communicate. The closest I came to bonding was when a group of women in a village in Mali crushed dried leaves of a henna plant to coat my hair and painted my hands in artful designs. I sat in the sun for hours, letting the henna bake into my skin while they laughed and pointed at me. Their children clambered all over them, looking amusingly in my direction. We swapped occasional smiles.

I was wandering through the souk, a local market, when I met Hawa. Unlike the other women, she was alone, and could speak several languages, including English, just like the men. She approached me and offered to guide me through the souk, which was like a maze, so I needed help. I felt happy that I’d finally made a friend, but also wished that it hadn’t been so close to my departure. I noticed the disapproving stares that we got and assumed it was because she was with a Western woman. She invited me to her house for peanut stew and Fufu.

During dinner, Hawa revealed that she was a sex worker. Suddenly it made sense why everyone stared at us at the souk. She was an outcast here, like me, but for different reasons. Once I saw a motorcycle in Niger fly by with a bumper sticker of a naked woman riding a cheetah in a sea of red, white and blue stripes. A lot of people there believed that Western women were sexually promiscuous.

Hawa’s profession did not bother me. She was in her thirties, had never been married or had children. She’d been orphaned at a very young age, and it was her only means of support. I told her that I understood. She offered her spare room to me and said I could stay for as long as I wanted.

trap: something by which one is caught or stopped unawares

***

I started going into the woods daily to set off all the traps in the creek to get revenge for Peanut, but also to save the other animals from a horrible fate. I excelled at recognizing the oxidized traps in the rippling water and set them off using sticks. I never got used to how the traps would snap with so much force that they would leap into the air. Peanut always darted away in fear.

I also visited my next-door neighbor every day. She always gave me cookies and milk.
Her husband complained, “Someone is setting off my traps.”

“Who do you think it is?” I asked, eyes to the ground.

“I know it’s those Quimby boys. They trap too and probably think no one else can, but they don’t own those woods. I’ll teach them to mess around with me like that,” he said with his cigarette perched on his lip, the tip growing long and red. At times the ash would fall, getting tangled in his chest hairs, and he would brush them mindlessly onto the floor. Although the Quimby boys were of school age, they quit to work on their dad’s farm. They rented land next to ours and I would see them on their tractors baling hay or plowing the fields.

I didn’t say anything.
During dinner one night, my dad said, “Don’t go over to the neighbor’s house no more.”

“Why?” I asked, pushing peas around my plate.

“The Quimby boys drove past their house last night and shot the front windows out with a gun. That’s a rough bunch I’ll tell you,” my dad said, shaking his head.

I told him I wouldn’t. I wasn’t used to him telling me what to do, or even knowing what I did. My mother was equally disinterested. But I knew I wouldn’t stop going into the woods to set off the traps. I needed to defend the animals.

The next day, when I began walking toward the woods, the Quimby boys sped past me on their dirt bikes. They were shirtless, their bellies hanging over their jeans. Their heads were newly shorn, and they had rifles strapped to their backs. The dirt bikes looked small compared to their bodies. One stopped abruptly, took the rifle off his back and aimed it at me. I pivoted quickly and raced toward my house, not looking back.

A week later, I tried again to go into the woods, and this time sprinted the entire way there. When I got to my tree, I found a charred opossum tied with barbed wire that cut deeply into its flesh, its mouth frozen open in pain. I untangled the wire until the opossum fell to the ground, buried it in the dirt, then covered it with stones. I cried the entire walk back to my home that day.

A few days later, while my parents were at work, as I swam in our above ground pool, one of the Quimby boys rode close to our property line, aimed his rifle at me and shouted, “I’m gonna rape you if you ever go in those woods again messing with our traps!”

I didn’t have a full understanding of what rape was at the time, but I knew enough to be afraid. I ducked under the water and swam a whole lap without coming up for air. When I popped up on the other side, sucking in air, he was gone. I got out, ran into the house, and locked all the doors, which was something that we never did back then. Safe in my room, I realized that I would have to stop going into the woods, that the Quimby boys figured out that I was setting off their traps. I never told anyone what had happened.

slang: keep your “trap” shut

***

From the time I was five years old until I was ten, I had uncles who liked to tickle me and let their hands slip into places that made me feel uncomfortable. One told me he was my boyfriend and once came into my bedroom while I was napping during a July 4^th party at my house. I would often retreat to my room during these parties to avoid the drunken adults. He laid down on top of me and kissed me. I don’t remember him leaving or my trying to get away, and I cannot recall to this day everything that occurred.

Another time my other uncle pinned me against the wall of my pool. I felt his hardness pressing against me and he demanded that I wrestle him to get away. I froze and stayed suspended in time, flattened against the cold, slippery wall, trying to avoid his eyes that seared into mine. Later that same summer, he was giving rides to family members in his new Corvette. He insisted on driving me down a gas well road and placed my hand on his crotch. I didn’t move my hand away. I only held my breath. He finally pushed my hand off and drove me back home without speaking. I was eleven.

trap: an unpleasant situation from which it is hard to escape

***

While lying in bed at Hawa’s house, I heard men coming in and out all night. I could hear her laughing, and a few times she called out for me to join them, but I feigned sleep. Then my door opened and a man walked into the room and lay down beside me. At first, I thought that he had gone into the wrong room by accident, but then he said my name. He started fondling my breasts and was quickly on top of me. Before I realized what was happening, he began having sex with me. Rather than fighting, I surrendered. Afterwards, he snored beside me as I lay still as a stone, my adrenaline so high that I could feel my heart hammering in my chest. Finally, when the sun began to rise, I slid out of bed, grabbed my backpack, and crept out of the house. In the daylight I looked for a ride, scanning faces, hoping I would not run into Hawa or the man.

trap: to catch, capture, snare, entrap, ensnare, to bag

When I arrived in Bamako, I stayed at a Peace Corps volunteer house while waiting to fly home. The volunteers swapped stories about their experiences in the small villages, and I told them stories too, but never revealed the terrible thing that happened to me. And I didn’t tell anyone when I returned home.

A year before I got my license, I dated a senior and we were in his bedroom because his parents were lenient. We smoked pot together, and when I got too high, he forcibly had sex with me. I remember being mostly afraid that his parents would hear us. When I left, I wished them a good night and let my boyfriend sit with me in the driveway while I waited for my parents to pick me up.

trap: to induce (someone) by means of trickery to do something they would otherwise not want to do

***

During the #MeToo movement I didn’t share my stories because I didn’t understand I’d been sexually assaulted. I felt I could have been more careful. I shouldn’t have sat on my uncle’s laps. I shouldn’t have gotten high with my boyfriend in his bed. I shouldn’t have befriended a sex worker in a foreign country. I never fought back. I froze. I couldn’t breathe. I slipped away. Was I ever there at all?

In my twenties, I finally told my parents what my uncles had done to me. My mother was silent, and my father only said, “I knew that I should never have trusted those pricks.” They never brought it up again. I couldn’t bring my own children to our family gatherings because I needed to protect them. I never went to my uncle’s funeral, much to the disapproval of my mother. I also hurt my grandmother deeply by avoiding family gatherings but didn’t want to put her through the pain of knowing why.

When I go back to my hometown, I sometimes drive past that house with all the traps. I think about how it swallowed me whole, with no one to protect me. I want to hold that little girl who tried to drown her pain in so many ways. I want to let her know that everything will be OK, and that she is strong. But I am sorry that she had to be so strong. I want to tell her that I love her.

***

I have two daughters and have shared my stories with them, so they can understand the world. I taught them to scream and to fight. I bought them mace, metal cat keychains with ears that can gouge out eyes and mini ear-deafening sirens to attach to their backpacks. I sent them to self-defense classes where they fought police officers in padded gear, then drove them home while they cried, bruised and shaken. I warned them about listening to music or texting while walking alone and about walking alone at night. I told them that people they know best will likely be the ones who will try to hurt them, but added that sometimes strangers can too. I did everything I could to spare them from the painful things I experienced. But sadly, they have stories of their own.

The word trap comes from a Germanic root meaning “that onto which one steps.”

I tell my daughters, “Watch where you step,” and then I remind myself to breathe.

Dawn McCombs is an essayist who currently resides in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has been published in The Audacity and Khora Magazine. She was recently shortlisted for the 2026 Fractured and Fused Prize hosted by Fractured Lit. When she isn’t writing, she dreams of living in a van and setting herself free.

In early June, when smoke from the Canadian wildfires drifted south and turned Chicago’s sky the color of diluted rust, I drove my daughter down the Edens Expressway toward a ketamine clinic we hoped might save her life. The air quality alerts had been buzzing on my phone for days—Unhealthy. Limit outdoor activity. The skyline looked rubbed out, the lake invisible beyond the gray. Even the Sears Tower—I still call it that—disappeared into the haze. Traffic moved steadily, as if nothing were unusual, as if the air were not thick with something burning hundreds of miles away.

In the passenger seat, my daughter watched the sky through the window. She had been reading about the fires, about the protests downtown, about the headlines that stacked themselves like sandbags against any sense of normalcy. The state of the world had begun to press against her already fragile mental health, and I could no longer separate what belonged to her from what belonged to the world.

When we met with the doctor the week before, she had leaned forward in her chair and said, with a steadiness that frightened me more than tears, “I need this to work in one week. That’s all I have left.”

He nodded, measured and calm.

I was not.

By then, we were no longer talking about motivation or mood. We were talking about timelines.

The clinic occupied a quiet building off a side street, far from the lake, far from the noise. Inside, the lighting was low. A reclining chair faced a wall washed in soft color. A nurse handed her a tablet so she could choose music, then offered a blanket and a sleep mask. The IV line hung with clinical indifference, a clear bag containing something we were trusting with more than chemistry.

I was in the room for every treatment. She wanted me there.

I sat in a stiff chair in the corner, angled just far enough away to give her privacy but close enough that she could reach for me if she needed. I brought my laptop and things to work on—emails, drafts, lists—anything to justify the hours. I typed quietly, careful not to disturb the hush. Every few minutes, I looked up.

I didn’t know what I was looking for.

Her breathing would deepen, then slow. Her fingers would twitch faintly against the blanket. Once, a tear slipped from beneath the mask and traced its way toward her ear. I stayed still. I didn’t want to interrupt whatever was happening behind her closed eyes. I didn’t want to do anything that might break whatever fragile process we were trusting.

Outside, the sky remained the color of smoke. News alerts lit up my screen: protests downtown, highways briefly closed, politicians arguing in language that felt both theatrical and cruel. The Canadian wildfires continued to burn. The air quality index climbed higher. I muted the headlines and focused on the small rhythm of her breath.

I had spent years trying to protect my daughters from the worst of the world—building ordinary days like scaffolding, filtering what I could, choosing schools carefully, reading bedtime stories that ended with light returning. But that June, it was impossible to pretend the atmosphere wasn’t seeping in. The smoke outside the clinic window was not a metaphor. It was measurable. It lodged itself in lungs and in laundry and in sleep.

After the first infusion, she was quiet on the drive home. The Edens stretched out before us, a slow crawl of red brake lights under a dimmed sun. I kept glancing at her, searching her face for some visible sign of change. She stared ahead, then finally said, almost as if surprised, “It feels… different.”

I didn’t press her to explain. Different was enough.

By the third treatment, something shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no declarations, no sudden brightness. But when we walked out of the clinic that afternoon, she held the door for me instead of drifting ahead. She adjusted the strap of her bag and glanced up at the sky as if noticing it. In the car, before I even asked, she said, “I think it’s helping.”

Her face looked less clenched. The tightness around her eyes had softened. At a stoplight, she caught me looking at her and gave a small, unmistakable smile. It startled me. I realized how long it had been since I’d seen her smile without effort.

Relief is not a clean emotion. It arrives tangled with fear of losing it again. I did not trust it fully. I didn’t let myself name it out loud. But something in the car felt lighter, as if we had both been holding our breath for weeks and had finally exhaled a little.

On the day of the #NoKings protests, I didn’t trust the parking garages near the clinic. My Tesla suddenly felt like a moving target. A symbol I hadn’t intended to display. I left it in Lincoln Park instead and we took the Red Line downtown.

The platform smelled like heat and metal and something sour that never quite leaves the underground. The smoke filtered down the stairwells and clung to our clothing. She leaned her head against the scratched plexiglass of the train window and closed her eyes. I stood beside her, gripping the pole, steadying both of us through the jolts.

Above ground, crowds gathered with signs. Chants echoed between buildings. The city felt tense, electric. It struck me how layered our lives had become—smoke from burning forests hundreds of miles away, protests about systems that felt both broken and immovable, and my daughter lying under a blanket in a dim room listening to music while medicine threaded into her bloodstream.

Inside the clinic, the lights were dimmed as always. The nurse spoke softly. The IV dripped with measured indifference. I sat in the corner and typed, trying not to make noise, watching her chest rise and fall while the world argued outside.

For a time, the treatments held. She slept more easily. She laughed at something on her phone and showed it to me without any prompting. The future widened beyond seven days.

The smoke, however, did not disappear all at once. Some mornings the lake reappeared in sharper lines; other days it vanished again entirely. The forecast sometimes read simply: Smoke.

After each treatment, I drove her back to her apartment in Lincoln Park. I would walk her dog, make sure there was food in the refrigerator, straighten what I could without making it obvious I was straightening anything. I tried to leave her apartment the way I wanted her mind to feel—orderly, stocked, stable.

Then I would get back in my car and merge north onto the Edens.

I held it together while I was with her. I knew how to sound steady. I knew how to ask practical questions and speak in measured tones. But alone on the highway, something in me unraveled.

Some afternoons my hands shook on the steering wheel. Other days I cried so hard I had to blink the road back into focus. I would call a friend just to hear another adult voice, just to say out loud what I didn’t dare say to my daughter: I was terrified.

What if this doesn’t work?

What do we do if it doesn’t work?

The world felt unstable in ways that no longer seemed theoretical. The air was thick with smoke. The news cycled through violence and fracture. And there were moments—brief, shameful, but real—when I wondered what exactly we were fighting for. What kind of future I was insisting she stay for.

Traffic moved forward regardless.

So did I.

By late summer, I found myself back on the same stretch of highway with my younger daughter in the passenger seat.

The destination had changed. No longer the ketamine clinic with its dim lights and careful quiet, but a partial hospitalization program tucked into another neutral building. The intake forms were different. The diagnosis was different—anxiety and OCD, spirals of thought that tightened instead of dimmed. But the drive was the same.

If her sister had retreated inward, this daughter fought outward. Some mornings she would be hysterical before we even reached the highway.

“I can’t do this. I can’t. Please, Mom, just take me home.”

Her breathing came in sharp, uneven pulls. Sometimes she clutched at the door handle as if escape were a physical possibility. I learned to speak in increments.

“Just to the next exit,” I would say. “Just ten minutes.”

At the program, she would text me within the hour. “I can’t stay. I’m leaving. You have to come get me.”

The Edens, steady and indifferent, became the backdrop for negotiation. I would sit in the parking lot for a few minutes before driving away, waiting to see if another message would come through. Some days it did. Some days it didn’t.

I wanted to rescue her from the building, from the fear, and from the world entirely. I wanted to turn the car around at the first tear, the first plea. But I had learned something in those months of smoke and infusion rooms: forward motion mattered.

So I kept driving.

That summer, Chicago’s air was among the worst in the world. Worse than cities defined by smog, worse than places we associate with disaster. The forecast named it plainly: Smoke.

I used to believe I could filter the atmosphere for my children—choose carefully, monitor exposure, keep the worst of it outside our walls. But smoke travels. So does fear. So does grief.

What I could do was drive.

I could sit in a stiff chair while medicine dripped into a vein and trust a process I barely understood. I could park miles away and take the train through protest smoke. I could keep the car pointed south while my younger daughter begged me to turn around, counting breaths until hers slowed.

The Edens is named for a garden. Most days it is only traffic and concrete and exhaust—a corridor of brake lights and impatience. That summer, the name felt almost cruel. I was driving through smoke and sirens on a highway that promised paradise, carrying children who were fighting simply to remain in the world. There was nothing untouched about it. Nothing whole.

And yet, we kept returning to it. North and south. Back and forth. As if the act of driving—of refusing to abandon the road—were its own small reclamation.

By fall, the skyline returned in clearer lines. My older daughter smiled more easily. My younger daughter learned to stay an hour longer, and then two.

The world did not stop burning. The headlines did not soften. The air did not clear all at once.

But we kept driving.

And sometimes, that was enough.

Renee Dionne Mies is a poet and essayist whose work explores motherhood, place, and resilience in an age of environmental and social unrest. Her writing has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Prosetrics Literary Magazine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and Atlanta Review. She lives in the Chicago suburbs.

Disney World, 2025

Haunted Mansion was our final ride of the day at Disney World. It was late, but the line was long.

Three sisters, all under the age of four, stood behind us and stared.

“When I was your age, my mom let me drive her wheelchair,” Jessie, my college-age daughter, pointed at me, her voice matter-of-fact.

I have cerebral palsy, and my body is always in motion. One moment my head is upright, and the next it tilts awkwardly to the left and shakes. I cannot walk without assistance, so I drive a powered wheelchair with my outstretched left hand while my right arm twitches in a padded trough. My chair also has four-inch-wide U-shaped restraints that engulf my shins and keep my legs from flying off my footrests.

Of course, I also have other traits like dyed red hair, blue eyes, a light complexion, and so on, but the average able-bodied stranger only notices the ways my body is different than theirs.

Jessie and I shared my body for nine months, just as I once shared my mother’s. However, my tushy left my mom’s womb before my head, presenting me to the world in an exquisite shade of purple. During the last part of labor, oxygen didn’t feed my brain, causing my disability. My parents did an admirable job raising me to ignore other people’s prejudices. But I wasn’t the able-bodied child they envisioned bringing home from the hospital. They had to adjust their expectations.

But Jessie never had to learn to accept my disability. It was inherent for her. She recognized my unique pronunciation and tempo soon after she was born.

Many children are intrigued by my wheelchair and specially equipped van, but growing up, Jessie thought these things were common.

My daughter experienced ableism when strangers assumed I was incompetent and asked where her mother was, even though I was sitting right beside her. Jessie understood that the world wasn’t always accommodating for my wheelchair. As a toddler, she pointed at stairs and said, “Mommy go boom.”

I miss the days when Jessie sat comfortably on my lap and steered my wheelchair. We shared a physical closeness that all but disappeared when she reached adolescence. I didn’t realize then that she’d remember these times and go on to use her experiences to educate others.

****

Moraga, 2007

My husband, Mike, and I moved from Berkeley to the pristine town of Moraga shortly after we married. The suburb of San Francisco offered a family-friendly environment and highly regarded schools. Most families had two working parents and employed nannies to care for their children.

We were no different.

One day, Whitney, our nanny came home from the park looking very upset.

“You won’t believe this,” Whitney said, lifting two-year-old Jessie out of her carriage and onto my lap. “I overheard a group of nannies saying that they felt sorry for Jessie because her mother was disabled and couldn’t take care of her.”

“What the hell?” I hugged Jessie tightly. “Who do they think they are? Whitney has the same responsibilities as them. I don’t feel sorry for the neighbors’ kids because they have nannies. It’s ludicrous that anyone would pity our kid. I know families with live-in help. We never considered doing that.”

Mike put his hand on my shoulder. “I cherish any time we have Jessica to ourselves. I love waking up to change her diaper and settling her on your breast for those early morning feedings.” I was touched by Mike’s comments and defensiveness. “I can’t believe they had that conversation with children around,” he added, his face now slightly red. The women’s comments intruded into our home, a place where my disability was accepted and accommodated.

I spent a lifetime educating people about my abilities. But that day I wasn’t prepared to be an advocate again. Tears rolled down my cheeks. As a first-time mom, any criticism hurt deeply. Infuriated that people judged me an unfit mother, I took shallow and rapid breaths. I feared that if we stayed in Moraga, Jessie would confront ableism too often.

Within a year of the nanny incident, we moved back to Berkeley, where I had gone to college. Since the independent living movement for people with disabilities began there in the 1970s, I felt more at ease. I wanted to raise my daughter in the city’s inclusive environment. At the bank, Jessie might see a woman who was paralyzed from the waist down. A customer with a breathing tube asked the pharmacist for help locating a product. Café patrons, some disabled and others not, drank coffee and argued about the merits of capitalism. At the park, there were other families with parents who needed attendants for personal care.

Jessie’s Berkeley roots have given her a unique worldview. Among the many toys in her preschool classroom was a set of toy figures with diverse abilities. Jessie assumed sole possession of one particular doll because she sat in a wheelchair and none of the other mommies looked like her.

Her friends accepted me almost as easily as Jessie. In most ways, I was like all the other mothers. I picked Jessie up from school, chaperoned field trips, and hosted playdates, blending into their everyday lives, creating a sense of normalcy for everyone. Of course, my norm was slightly different than the other mothers. I had an assistant who drove my van, helped me with personal care, and sometimes repeated my words if someone struggled to understand. Since no one made a fuss about my differences, Jessie’s friends never seemed concerned.

One day after school, the kids were on the playground.

“Jessie!” I called.

No response.

“Jessie, come on. It’s time to go.”

A few of her classmates looked in my direction, but Jessie climbed higher on the play structure. No one considered telling her to listen to her poor disabled mom.

“Jessica, you’re going to miss your dentist appointment. Let’s go.” I projected my voice as loudly as possible.

Her friend Elli stopped climbing. “Your mom wants you.”

I laughed. Elli seemed to think my daughter misunderstood me and naturally assumed the role of interpreter.

“I heard her,” Jessie immediately began her dissent.

Most of the time, Jessie’s just my annoying daughter, and most of the time, I’m just her pesky mom.

****

Walnut Creek, 2009

In the sea of children, my four-year-old was the only girl in the sandbox not dressed in frills. Jessie wore a bright yellow shirt, denim shorts, and sneakers that lit up with each step. A feminist at heart, I dreaded a potential day when my kid would only allow purple and pink in her closet. One of these summer afternoons, Jessie sat on her knees and explained the importance of a full pail of sand to a girl who looked to be about three. “You take a shovel and pour it like this.”

The child ignored her and stared. “What’s wrong with your mommy?”

“She has a disability.” Jessie picked up a neon green plastic shovel. “Now watch me.”

The explanation wasn’t enough, so I joined the conversation. “What’s your name?”

“Huh?” Her face crinkled into a puzzled look.

“What’s your –”

“My mommy wants to know your name.” Jessie interrupted.

“Katie.”

“I’m Jessie. Let’s make a princess tower.” She demonstrated the proper technique for building a sandcastle and Katie attempted to scoop up some sand, finally focused on playing again.

Vines of fragrant jasmine separated us from the busy road. Along the pathways were empty metal benches baking in the sun. Most parents vied for the few shady patches on the playground. I positioned myself a few feet from the sandbox with my book on my lap.

“You can’t get me!” A group of boys dashed by.

I looked up from the romance I was reading. Jessie and Katie were completely engrossed in their construction project.

“Katie, put your hat on,” the woman next to me said, handing the girl a light pink cap with GAP embroidered in white lettering.

Katie’s shovel fell from her hand when she reached for the cap. As she did, she gave me a curious look.

Jessie handed her a pail. “We’re not done yet.”

I laughed as Jessie began giving orders. Katie’s mother waved her off.

“Your daughter is cute,” I said, trying to start a conversation.

“Thanks.” She adjusted her phone against the glare and gazed downward, typing.

Disappointed, my thoughts drifted. Motherhood wasn’t the free pass to acceptance that I hoped for. I didn’t understand why people continued to exclude me. Didn’t my clearly bright and able-bodied daughter attest to my competence as a woman?

I noticed that Katie was pointing at me again. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She has a disability,” Jessie said.

The irritation in her voice drew my attention. The word disability was a part of Jessie’s vocabulary, but it wasn’t a word a typical preschooler used. She unknowingly became an educator whenever she met someone new.

There was more sand on Jessie’s lap than the tower. The summer sun had painted blonde streaks in her hair and turned her pale skin golden brown. Katie absently let the sand fall out of her pail onto the mound between Jessie’s outstretched legs.

A Blue Jay landed next to the sandbox, but neither kid noticed.

“Girls, look at the pretty bird,” I said.

Jessie scampered out of the sandbox to get a better look. Katie crawled over to the edge. Loose sand rained down from my daughter’s clothes. Their efforts caused the bird to squawk and fly away.

Jessie looked side to side. “What bird? I was playing with my friend. I don’t see anything.” She dramatically placed her hands on her hips.

My laughter made it difficult to speak. “Monster, there was a pretty blue bird sitting right there.” I pointed to the spot where the bird landed. “You made too much noise, and she flew away.”

“I did not! Can I go back to our princess tower?”

As Jessie turned to climb back into the sandbox, I spotted Katie watching us intently.

“What’s wrong with your mommy?” Katie asked. Her body was suspended over the red wall that was spattered with sand.

Jessie took her foot back out of the sandbox and stepped closer to me. “Mommy, hold your hand out like this.” Jessie held her own hand straight out, demonstrating what she wanted me to do. I was puzzled by this demand, but I was curious to see where it led.

I lifted my left hand off my lap, my fingers curled into a fist. It took a moment to force them to straighten. My engagement ring sparkled in the sun. The effort to mimic Jessie’s hand position caused me to spasm, making wavy motions in the air. I waited for further instructions.

Jessie pointed to me. “See, my mommy shakes. Now, can we please finish our tower?”

Jessie leapt back into the sandbox, directing Katie to follow her. I guessed that she was satisfied by the demonstration because she didn’t ask about me again.

I have no way of knowing if Katie truly understood, except she stopped asking about me and the girls played until it was nap time.

I was astounded by Jessie’s concrete explanation of disability. It showed that she not only recognized my differences, but she was able to communicate them in a way that her playmate understood.

I wish gaining acceptance from adults was always as easy as saying, “See, I shake.”

It isn’t.

Despite my best efforts, it’s often impossible for adults to see past their preconceived notions. They assume that I’m incapable of handling real responsibility and are often condescending. I live in a community where my neighbors are genuinely polite to me. They’ll greet me, but a rare few include me in conversations with any substance. I’ve tried to explain cerebral palsy. But ableist attitudes are hard to change.

Jessie may have gotten irritated with Katie’s questioning, but she answered until her playmate understood. I, too, tire of fighting ableism. It can be exhausting. However, I am a mother, a retired business owner, and a community leader. I can’t—or maybe won’t—allow perceptions about my disability to limit my achievements.

****

New Orleans, 2016

The thermometer read 99 degrees, but the humidity added another 15 as we made our way through the dense crowds of tourists on Bourbon Street. Jessie, my assistant Leslie, and I were taking a break from the Disabled American Veterans Auxiliary’s National Convention. Mike, my husband, was a disabled veteran, and I was an active member of the organization and had recently been elected National 4^th Jr. Vice Commander.

“Jessie, do you have to sit on my lap? I can’t see where we are going and I am dying from heat exhaustion,” I complained.

“We made a deal. I agreed to leave the hotel only if I didn’t have to walk.”

My daughter was born to be a lawyer. Everything is a negotiation with her, even a sightseeing excursion.

“What would you do if I wasn’t disabled and I didn’t use a wheelchair?”

The truth was any discomfort I might experience was outweighed by the intimacy of these wheelchair rides. I loved being able to snuggle her as we rolled down the street. Driving faster than my attendant could walk gave us precious mother-daughter bonding time. When Jessie was a newborn, the two of us fell soundly asleep sitting on the oversized recliner in our bedroom. I cherished the early morning hours when Mike took a shower and left Jessie cuddled next to me in bed.

Once my attendant and Jessie’s nanny arrived at eight a.m., I did not have the same sort of privacy with her. I watched and supervised as my husband or my attendant took care of her other physical needs. I felt disconnected and jealous. Ordinarily I didn’t think having cerebral palsy interfered with my quality of life. But my raging hormones pulled me in a different emotional direction and a mother’s instinct to bond felt frustratingly interrupted.

Jessie’s mode of transportation changed as she grew. As an infant, she lay in a baby sling that I wore over my shoulder. Later I buckled her into my seatbelt, and she sat on my lap as I navigated my chair with a joystick. Around the time she was eight, I could barely see over her head, and I realized that she would need to learn to navigate my chair.

I took her to the basketball court at a nearby park. “Jessie, if you want to keep sitting on mommy’s lap, you’ll need to learn to drive.” She was a motivated learner.

Now at the age of eleven, Jessie steered us toward Café Du Monde to get our nutritious lunch of beignets, her bony butt digging into my lap. Our sweaty skin was sticking together, and I regretted my decision to drag her out of our hotel. Jessie seemed unaware of my discomfort as she steered us down the cracked sidewalk.

It was like being on a roller coaster ride in the dark. Jessie’s back was blocking my view of what was coming. Every time my wheelchair got close to the curb, I got tense and closed my eyes, certain that she was going to steer us over the edge and into oncoming traffic.

“Jessie, don’t get so close to the edge.” I clenched my fists.

“Mom, relax. I know what I’m doing.”

Jessie was sometimes an overconfident wheelchair driver. Like most tweens, she quickly dismissed my input. So I gritted my teeth and silently celebrated when we finally made it to the café.

After lunch we headed back to my hotel.

“Mom, it’s a good thing you have me to be your bodyguard.”

I had absolutely no idea what Jessie was talking about. Sometimes she spoke in fragments; one sentence did not necessarily follow the next.

“Yeah, look at all your paparazzi staring at us. We can charge them to take pictures of us and get rich.”

The “paparazzi,” as Jessie called them, were the tourists who were indeed eyeing us with great curiosity. Neither of us was bothered.

****

High Point, NC 2025

Jessie is now attending college in North Carolina, in an environment where disability is less visible than it was in Berkeley. I’ve become accustomed to her outraged calls from across the country. “There’s a new student with cerebral palsy, and when I asked him questions, his attendant answered for him. I wasn’t talking to her. He should have a communication device.”

I smiled. Jessie assumes that with the proper support people with disabilities can live average lives. And she’s right.

Jessie didn’t learn advocacy the way most of us do, through language or training. She learned it through proximity to me. What changed over time wasn’t her comfort with my body, but her awareness of how others saw me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t protect Jessie from ableism. Nor did I teach her to ignore prejudice, the way my parents taught me. Jessie’s awareness isn’t passive. She speaks up. She corrects people. She expects better.

And still, I wish she didn’t have to so much. I never wake up in the morning and think, “I have cerebral palsy and I’m going to be an activist today.” I’m usually preoccupied with mundane errands or the vet appointment I need to schedule. Likewise, I’m certain that as a college student, my daughter has more pressing concerns than her advocacy. Sometimes my daily routine is interrupted; attitudinal or architectural barriers prohibit me from accomplishing a goal. In these instances, advocacy is my only option.

Jessie and I are both advocates. But it’s a role we’d happily give up. And at times we do, but only when surrounded by people who accept disability as an ordinary human experience. They understand that my shakes do not affect the person I am on the inside.

I want people to think, “Jessie’s mommy shakes. So what.”

Julie Weissman is a Las Vegas writer and mother who happens to have cerebral palsy. She serves on Nevada’s Statewide Independent Living Council. Raised in New York, Julie was the first physically disabled student to attend her local high school. Julie’s forthcoming memoir is entitled A Splendid Kind of Normal. Find Julie at: https://www.instagram.com/memoirist_with_a_mission/

There was a shrewdness to Sebastian that I couldn’t detect back in 1988. I wanted to be the perfect seminarian and meet all my obligations. What I didn’t realize was that I was being slowly seduced. I was far from being a naïve, sexually unaware young man. I chose the church because I wanted something different, something I felt drawn to, something fulfilling and beautiful. I missed the sly glare in his eyes when he took me to lunch at the country club—watching me eat my pizza as he poured me another beer on Saturday nights when I spent the night in the rectory before reading for 7:00 a.m. Sunday Mass.

Fr. Sebastian was confident, assertive, and smart. He knew what he wanted and took his time with me. The rectory was on the parish grounds, the same as the seminary house in which I lived—a former convent next to the school playground. I also played the bass with the church music group for the noon Mass as part of my seminarian ministry. I couldn’t get enough; all the while Sebastian courted me, taking me to dinner and making me feel special with plenty of compliments on my readings and how well I played with the music group. It was endless attention that my twenty-two-year-old self welcomed. I didn’t see anything unusual.

There were two other priests in the rectory. One was a mentor of mine in high school five years prior, Fr. Kevin. It was a comfort knowing a household of men could live in harmony in a community. I was grateful to be surrounded by these friars in this North Hollywood Catholic parish, especially since my father had recently been diagnosed with cancer and had only months to live. I loved everything about this group and was grateful for the experience.

Fr. Sebastian was a tall, fat man with gray hair and glasses. I might even have dated him in another ten years, but at that moment, I was pure in my intention. He was funny, charming, and spoke on a variety of subjects. I had heard that he had an interest in the occult. He could communicate with the deceased, so I was told, and that during a séance, tables would lift off the ground. That he would do so as a Carmelite friar was fascinating and bizarre.

I could never understand the relationship with his two assistants. They weren’t in the seminary. They didn’t seem like typical playboys or even gay. And they weren’t particularly attractive. Looking back now, they seemed to help Sebastian lure his victims into a false sense of safety. They were always there, hanging around the rectory, sometimes joining Sebastian and me for lunch or dinner. Except for that night when Sebastian said goodnight in the rectory hallway by the guest room. That night, he embraced me tightly, slid his hand into my sweatpants, squeezed my ass, and kissed me deeply.

I was blindsided.

Confusing thoughts flashed through my mind as I tried to pull away and compose myself. He wouldn’t let me go.

“Come to my room in ten minutes,” Sebastian ordered.

I tried to think of something to say, beyond screaming any number of obscenities. His embrace grew tighter.

“What about Fr. Kevin and Fr. Cyprian?” I blurted, trying to delay, unable to wiggle free of his hold.

“Don’t worry about them. Ten minutes,” he said again, kissing me a second time.

I’m not a petite man, and I wasn’t afraid for my life. But at that moment, I felt insignificant and powerless. I was robbed of any agency I had. I politely declined and went to the guest room and locked the door. I cried myself to sleep thinking I must have done something wrong, that I must have flirted with him and given him some reason to think I was interested in him. I hadn’t even considered he might be gay. My last thought before I fell asleep was that my sexuality was once again causing a disruption in my life. All I wanted was to be a good seminarian. And somehow I tempted this man of God.

I called a friend after the 7:00 a.m. Mass and asked them to meet me for breakfast. I could barely speak. I felt violated in a way that I had never known. When my friend asked how I was doing, I broke down in tears, unable to speak. I needed to talk with Sebastian and find out what I had done to cause this situation. So I made a formal appointment and met with him the following week in his rectory office. At least others would be around.

This first follow-up visit ended in the same way as that dreadful night. But this time I wore jeans and a belt so he couldn’t slip his hands inside my pants so easily. He tried. Maybe he thought I wanted him the same way he clearly wanted me. I only wanted to speak with him, process what happened, and explain how it affected me. I wanted to be angry, but he didn’t give me the chance. I left abruptly, disgusted that all he wanted was my ass.

I was unwilling to accept his action and insisted that I had something I needed to tell him. So I made a second appointment to speak with him.

I thought this time he would act differently. Maybe he’d want to talk, finally, and discuss things. I’m a perpetual optimist. As I started to speak, Sebastian tried to kiss me while removing my jacket. I had enough sense to give him an emphatic “no” and excused myself, once again.

I began to hear rumors that Sebastian had been accused of touching children in the most inappropriate ways in the parish school. It had occurred multiple times.

At that point, I ceased my ministry with the parish. And I wrote a letter to the order explaining my situation in detail. I needed to let someone know what was happening and that it should be addressed.

I was invited to an official inquest with two order officials—one was the area “Provincial.” It was a relief to know that there might be action taken. To my surprise, I was met with outright unkindness. The two priests asked what I wore to entice Fr. Sebastian to make such moves. Was I drinking, smiling, flirting with him? How much did I make him drink? Did I stare at him longingly to make him think I wanted to pursue a romantic time together? I was more surprised by their response than Sebastian’s move.

I learned that the order did speak with Sebastian about my complaint. His only comment was, “I wished Philip had come to speak with me.”

I left the seminary not long after this experience. I couldn’t make a lifelong commitment to a group of men who allowed members with a lack of integrity among their ranks. If the order was unwilling to address such an insidious and predatory act, I refused to become part of it.

Most of the priests I know are good, honest men, true leaders. It’s the institution that twists some of these individuals into rapacious creatures that prey on unsuspecting youth. What I do know is that the order moved Fr. Sebastian to my old high school and then finally to a church in Northern California where he recently passed away. I had thought about paying him a visit at his last parish, but I couldn’t gather the energy to expend on an old issue that gets harder to recall with every passing year.

I left the Catholic church the following year. I learned a lot about the institution that I once found so much joy and meaning. Ultimately, I learned that it is only a human organization filled with ordinary men and women. There are a lot of good, pious men and women, and a fair share of bad actors. I don’t paint the Church with a broad brush, but I choose not to be part of an institution that creates an environment of protection for those bad actors within their ranks. I found a secular world that provided plenty of opportunities to make an impact on society.

A priest friend of mine asked if I forgave Sebastian. I forgive him genuinely. Thirty-eight years have passed, and I have released any feelings of anger from that era. I only wished we could have had a last conversation. Maybe his need for human connection was so strong that he was unable to make healthy decisions. The priests that I’ve met who admitted to having active sexual relationships were the most normal and sane individuals. Many of those who maintained their vows of celibacy ended up twisted and unwell. Perhaps when our desires get plugged up unnaturally, they ferment and distort. Although that is no excuse for his behavior, I have let it go and am free of that unresolved angst from decades ago.

Philip C. Barragan II is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in 2011. His debut novel, Fatizen 24602, was published by Branch Hill Publications in 2015. Philip lives in Long Beach, California where he publishes graphic novels under his Embonpoint Publishing imprint.

It’s barely seven a.m. I watch the students filter in. Some stand in pairs or small groups, talking quietly. Others stay by themselves, absorbed in their phones.

Every teacher has an extra duty. Mine is to stand in the small room that is the entrance to our school—the “vestibule”—and supervise students. The vestibule is open before school when the rest of the building is closed. Students dropped off early are allowed in this little room until the rest of the school is opened at ten after. It’s a boring duty, which is perfect. Kids are mostly half asleep. Occasionally I have to ask somebody to move so as to not block the door, but that’s about it. Some of the time I stand quietly and daydream, other times I’m busy in my head making calculations.

Calculations such as: if someone comes in with a gun, what do I do? Do I lunge at them? Do I throw my water bottle at them and then lunge? Do I try to unlock the second set of doors leading to the school so students aren’t trapped in this room? Will that cause more injuries? Do I sacrifice these kids to keep the school safe? Do I sacrifice myself? My trolley car problem involves me and a room full of kids versus a school. Whom do I let die?

Part of my brain says don’t be silly; there is a laughably small chance I’ll need these calculations. But that chance was even smaller back in the late nineties when one of my seventh-grade students went into the bathroom and shot herself in the head. She had blond hair and a face that was still plump with baby fat. She could have easily killed me or her fellow students, instead of just herself. Instead of her blood tracked around the school by the paramedics, it could have been the blood of many students. It could have been mine.

So I continue to make my calculations. Like, if the shooter hasn’t started shooting, do I try to talk to them? Do I try to distract them? Do I tell them I know this world is fucked up, let’s talk about it? Will I say something that makes them snap or something that makes them stop? I’ve never had hostage negotiation training; how do I know the right thing to say?

The heater blows hot air from the ceiling, and I try to shift position to get some warmth. The sun is starting to rise—streams of sunlight bounce off the new snow outside. I squint against it. Cars stop and go, kids jump out and hustle to the door. Cold air blasts me as they come in. I am trying to will the door closed when I notice a black truck in the drop-off area. It isn’t moving. That is odd because generally vehicles stop briefly to let kids out, then move on. This truck sits still while the other vehicles zoom around it. One car beeps at the truck. As I wonder about this truck, I suddenly notice the hot air blowing on my face, and I start to sweat. My breathing gets faster and shallow as I realize this truck could be a threat. It’s not acting normal. My heart is beating faster. I know I’m probably overreacting, but my body doesn’t agree.

I don’t know exactly when the truck got here. I look at the clock now to keep track. It is 7:02 a.m. Five minutes later, the black truck is still there. I’m annoyed because there are so many parents dropping off kids, and that truck is causing traffic problems that are both inconvenient and dangerous. And I’m apprehensive because I now have new calculations: is this person a threat? Why aren’t they moving? Should I go talk to them? Do I tell the office? How long is reasonable for them to stay there?

It’s 7:07, and the truck is still there. I am fully paying attention to it now. Over the two years of being in this little room every morning, no vehicle has ever parked there for more than a minute.

New calculations: If someone gets out of the driver’s side, do I lock the front door? No, that’s stupid. But what if that isn’t stupid? How can I tell anything about someone in the ten seconds it will take them to go from their truck to the door? I’m trying to decide if my thoughts are rational even as my chest tightens and my heart beats a little faster.

Calculations continue. When the bell rings, I’ll unlock the main entrance to the school. But with the truck still there, should I? The kids will push towards the door expecting me to open it. If there is a shooter in that truck, with all the kids packed tightly, this room would be carnage. But if there is a shooter in that truck, opening the door might also be a bad idea. Images of scattered phones and backpacks and limp bodies in pools of blood flash in my head and my mouth goes dry. The cool wall I’m leaning against feels like a prison wall. I want to push it down and open up this impossibly small room that now feels smaller. I want my mind to stop racing, let my stomach stop hurting. I want my heart to slow down and my cheeks to stop burning.

Of course I will open the door. Can you imagine me trying to explain to the administration that I didn’t open the door because a truck was parked in front of the school? But if there is a shooting, can you imagine me trying to explain to the administration that I opened the door with a truck parked in front of the school?

It’s impossible. And ridiculous. Ridiculous that I’m seriously considering whether a rude parent in a truck might actually be a shooter getting up the nerve to come in and start killing. At the same time, I know it is not ridiculous, and I know having some idea of how to react could save me and these kids. So I have to stand here, and feel tiny trickles of sweat on my neck and face, and feel my jaw tighten and my head start to hurt, and try to come up with a plan to help us live. I have to solve the problem of our survival.

I’m still thinking through all these thoughts when the passenger door opens and a student I recognize gets out and walks towards the entrance. He has no gun and is acting perfectly normal. He comes in and starts talking with his friends.

My heart slows down. I’m embarrassed at just how rapidly it had been beating. I hate that my job as a teacher now routinely includes looking at a room full of kids and wondering how I can keep them from getting shot, that my job as a teacher includes worrying about a truck that has been parked too long. I hate that I am some kind of pseudo cop, that I look at parents dropping off kids as potential murderers, that I look at a room full of students as potential murder victims—and also potential shooters.

And I’m mad that I now have a job where I’m asked to put my life at risk. Here’s a calculation: do I prioritize my safety? My family has been through a lot—my kids need me. They’ve lost their brother to suicide and their mother to mental illness. Should they be asked to lose their father too? I never agreed to give my life for my students, yet it seems tacitly expected. It’s somehow been decided that this is an accepted variable in the equation. But are my kids less deserving than these kids around me? Do my sons deserve to be left alone so that the students in this vestibule are safe?

So every morning I do this math.

The chance of a shooting might be statistically low, probably less than one percent—but it doesn’t feel that way.

Sometimes it feels inevitable.

A.L. Gordon is an emerging writer and high school teacher in Central Wisconsin. Gordon is the winner of Cleaver Magazine’s 2024 Emerging Artist Award. In addition to Cleaver Magazine, his creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines including The Rappahannock Review, Waccamaw, and Ellipsis Zine, among others.

“Do you think I’m dying?” my wife asked me.

I gulped. Not a question I had ever imagined her asking. I tearfully gazed into her beautiful eyes, the same ones I had fallen deeply in love with years before, and I could see the fear. She was coming to terms with the day we never wanted to see. She was looking to me for hope, for rescue, not for confirmation. This question still tears at the fabric of my soul.

I remember the paralysis I felt. In the years before, we had been through nightmare after nightmare on this cancer journey. How was I supposed to answer this question? I quivered. My ears got hot. There was no way I was saying yes—not a chance. I had chosen to hope a long time ago. I sat there internally panicking, seeing the writing on the wall, but I didn’t dare say it. I simply would not give up the idea that she would pull through.

It feels like yesterday when we first met on that pristine bluff in Santa Monica, California. The towering palm trees, the perfect sunsets, the ocean breeze—and this incredible woman walked up to my fitness class. I knew immediately something was different about her. Her eyes captured me. I had butterflies, and we hadn’t even spoken. She held an unmistakable joy within her. I learned her name was Raffi, and when I walked her to her car, my heart sank at the sight of a child seat in the back. She was obviously married or in a serious relationship. But I had to ask about the car seat. She knew what I was really asking, and she told me it was her daughter’s. Apparently, my face went white, and in that moment, everything changed. I was blushing and smitten. She had confirmation I was interested, and within months we were dating, never looking back. It turns out the car seat belonged to her niece.

You should have seen her—she was so powerful and full of grace. She had grown up sprinting and would run with a lean that would make any track coach take a second look. I was constantly mesmerized by her dancing and simply by how she moved in the world. She brought a depth of love and joy into every room she entered. You could feel the temperature change when she walked in. If you were blessed enough for her to aim that love in your direction, there was nowhere else you’d rather be.

She was also not a person to cross. I always laughed when we first had our daughters, because someone might see our family of four and be afraid of me because of my size (6′ 3″ and 275 pounds). She was the one to worry about. When we first started dating, we were in her car, and I reached into her glove-box for something, felt a sharp poke, and pulled out a wooden-handled steak knife. This was one of three in her car. I asked her about them, and she just shrugged and said, “Ya never know.” After all, we did live in Venice, CA at the time. She was quite at home holding her ground, and I loved that about her.

We were in an ice cream shop when the girls were six and seven, and there was this group of teenagers who were clearly drunk, making fools of themselves, cursing and just being disruptive. Raff locked eyes with one of the girls and said, “We all know what’s in your water bottles—you’re not fooling anyone. Stop being so rude.” The whole place stopped. The teenagers snapped back into mannerly behavior. And I just marveled at her ability to cut right through all the noise. Not only was she protecting our girls, but she was protecting all the other kids in the place.

She gave birth to both of our daughters assisted by a midwife without any drugs. With our first daughter, there was a moment I saw Raffi leave her body, and the roar that came out of her during her last push was something I can only equate to a lioness roaring. It was primal and deep, and the room shook. It was startling and awe-inspiring.

When our kids were young, we decided to sell everything we owned, buy an RV, and travel. We left the dream of LA for another dream. There’s a real beauty in camping seaside with everything you own and the sizzling of steaks on the grill. I specifically remember crying at the grill, my heart bursting with gratitude for our life. Waking up to lapping waves and dolphins in central California is hard to beat. We traveled the western part of the United States and ended up in Kansas, which is where my family is located. We lived in that RV for a year and then moved onto a ranch. Raff homeschooled our girls while I managed the ranch. Life was really humming along. We had a herd of alpacas, some ponies, a cow, and a bunch of other animals. We had built a coffee trailer business, and we were loving life.

Then Raff found a growth on her vulva. A nervous trip to the doctor landed her in surgery the next week. I remember waiting nervously in that cold, desolate waiting room. My stomach churned the whole time. After the surgery, the doctor informed me the mass was cancerous, and that I had to tell my wife. Hearing those words made my stomach drop. I almost vomited.

Later that night, Raff woke up at home from the anesthesia. Her whole family had come into town for this and was milling around the house waiting for her to get up. I had been carrying this bomb—the cancer diagnosis—since about 2 p.m. at the hospital. No one except me knew. I couldn’t bear to tell anyone before I told Raff. I was paralyzed at the thought of this conversation. And then, with a sleepy look on her face, she asked, “What did the doctor say?” It still breaks me to this day to think of that moment. Tears burst from my eyes. I just sat down beside her on the bed and said, “It’s cancer.” She was coming to me for rescue, for support, for hope, and all I had to give her was this dagger. I was crushed, and so was she.

Our life exploded.

And then we lost our beloved alpaca, Coffee Bean. She developed a condition common to alpacas, and I found her dead in the barn within weeks of Raff’s diagnosis. This almost broke me. I remember walking back to the house from the barn. I was staggering and gasping for air. How do I tell my wife after this diagnosis? How do I tell my three- and four-year-old daughters? This was the first of a string of goodbyes to some major dreams. We sold the herd of alpacas, the coffee business, and the RV over the course of the next months. We were unknowingly preparing for a firestorm that would take everything from us.

The cancer surged back. What was a small Tic Tac–sized mass in her inguinal crease, where your leg meets your torso, exploded in growth. It was growing by the day, along with our panic. Before we knew it, it was the size of a grapefruit, and it tore through her skin. Raff didn’t want to pursue conventional treatments. Remember the lioness. Well, I sat across from her on our living room floor insisting that she look to chemo and radiation because we were losing the battle. She would not budge.

This moment was one of the biggest turning points in our relationship.

I decided to lay down my sword, my solution-focused perspective, and come alongside her. I could not make her choices. We chose to look at this problem from the same side of the table, and as a result, our marriage became bulletproof. It was about to be catastrophically tested in the coming years. She did eventually decide to pursue conventional treatment, but it was on her terms. And what I learned was that it was very important that we approached cancer as a team, not as adversaries.

We were able to find treatment in Tulsa at a cancer center. Nine weeks of chemo and radiation later, the tumor was gone. We were planning for a major plastic surgery in the coming month when we got notice that the cancer center where the surgery was scheduled was closing. We were scrambling to find a solution for the wreckage that was her hip. Thankfully we were able to find a center in Atlanta that would take over her care.

It was here that Dr. Durden, the plastic surgeon, stopped us in our tracks. He was looking at the wound site from where the tumor had been. He said, “Let’s give it six months. I think it will heal.” Raff and I laughed. Three weeks before, we had been fully on board with a surgery. And now, this man said it was going to heal.

And heal it did. We met back with him after six months, and his comment was, “That’s all God.”

We cried.

I’d been working at the ranch for a few years at this point, and I was fired out of the blue, which left us with no income and no house. My wife was recovering from multiple surgeries, and we had two little daughters whom we homeschooled. We needed to downsize immediately. We ended up throwing everything that would burn onto a bonfire in the backyard because we had nowhere to take it. We had to leave.

Amazingly, the day after our bonfire when we were wondering what would happen to us, an acquaintance gave us a fifth-wheel camper, and another friend called to say they had an RV spot on their property. We could bring our camper, our two dogs, and our kids and live with them for a while. We lived like this for five years—our life constantly up in the air. Everything we held onto for security was stripped away from us repeatedly. We lost a house, jobs, money, people, pets, and things. We were so clearly not in control. But someone was.

We turned to God for hope. We prayed and we asked for help. And an army of people came to our aid. During those years we put up three GoFundMe’s for hundreds of thousands of dollars in care. Whenever we needed help, it came to us in ways we never imagined. The one link to all of them was God in such an undeniable way.

Somewhere along the way Raff commented about how all this beauty had shown up in our lives, and the only attributable reason was cancer. And she was right. I had never thought of a terminal illness as something that could yield something beautiful, but our story showed the best parts of humanity. Yes, it was framed by cancer, but that was so far from the full tale. This is one reason I decided to write our book. Many people will be touched by cancer, and our experience showed me that there were so many blessings along our journey. Raff and I felt that our story was important to share.

Talking about death in your thirties and forties is not something I thought was on my bingo card. But this conversation led to a freedom I never imagined. When Raff and I first talked about this, I was sweaty—so nervous, so uncomfortable. Then we had the talk, and afterward I found I was free to love her now, and I was more focused on my contribution to the present moments in our life. It revealed a beauty that wasn’t so obvious before. Raff came to terms with her mortality, and it freed us to enjoy the moments we had left.

Then everything took a turn, and the writing was really on the wall. This was the end. They say for every day that you are lying in bed with an illness, it takes eighteen days to return to some semblance of normalcy. At this point Raff had been in bed for at least two years. The daily hurdles of this period in our life were treacherous. I would not wish them on anyone. According to the math above, a comeback was going to be thirty-six years in the making. We were too far down the path to return, and that was obvious.

I remember walking back into the room to be with Raff, considering how much longer we had. I was assessing how many days were left. To walk in and spend time with the love of your life when you both know it’s the end has some real teeth. There’s no talking about the weather; the elephant in the room doesn’t leave much space for anything else. In looking back, I realize there is no more sacred calling than walking someone you love home. But it’s gutting beyond belief.

I dreaded the hospice conversation. I remember pacing in my garage for at least a month, daily, running it through in my head. I would go stand out in the garage and cry and pray. I’ve never been so terrified. I couldn’t imagine giving Raff the slightest hint that I had given up on her. It still makes me nauseous to think about it even today. She was getting so weak, and I was so fearful that if she fell, she would spend her remaining days in the hospital—which she was adamantly against.

And then on a Tuesday, I brought it up. And her response still shakes me to this day. I sat down next to her in our living room. “Babe, I need help. I don’t know what to do if you fall.” And she answered with concern for me. She graciously replied, “Babe, I’m concerned about you. I want you to get some rest and have help.” How does this dying woman, in excruciating pain every day for over 1,500 days, focus on me? I still feel the love today. I can’t even talk about it without crying like a baby. I am so blessed to have married such a woman.

She fell that Thursday and passed the following Thursday. This story is much bigger, and together we tell it in our book. We always wanted to write one; we just never got there. After she passed, I paired her words with mine so we could finally tell our story.

I’m no longer afraid of death. I’ve seen love carry on beyond death. I’ve seen joy explode out of my children that came from their mother. I’ve seen God show up in ways I couldn’t even imagine. I’ve seen light come straight out of the darkness. And once you’ve seen that, you can’t keep it to yourself.

Danny Lesslie is an international award-winning author, keynote speaker, widower, and proud girl dad. His book, Thank You, Cancer, received the International Impact Award in Memoirs and weaves together his own reflections, his wife’s journal from her cancer journey, and the divine moments that shaped their story.

Every mother remembers the moment the world stops.

Mine came on an ordinary day that had no idea it was about to become unforgettable. A beautiful fall day in Wisconsin. The air was quiet, the kind of stillness that settles over a house when nothing seems urgent. I remember the sound of gravel beneath tires, a vehicle door closing with deliberate weight, and the crunch of gravel that followed, firm, measured, unmistakably official. When I opened the door, two United States Marines stood before me. Their uniforms were flawless. Their eyes were heavy, determined, and sad.

In that suspended moment before they spoke, something inside me already understood: the life I had carefully built, the version of strength I believed in, and the woman I thought I was, were about to collapse under the weight of a single sentence. Before that day, I believed I understood strength.

I had spent decades building a life around it. I was the senior executive people relied on when problems needed solving, when systems needed structure, when chaos required calm leadership. My identity had been carefully constructed around competence, composure, and control. Strength meant holding everything together. Strength meant pushing forward. Strength meant being the person who did not fall apart.

Then my son died. And everything I thought I knew about strength unraveled.

My son, Conner, was a United States Marine. Like many young men drawn to service, he carried a quiet intensity about him, a sense of duty that ran deeper than words. But he also carried laughter, mischievous wit, and the kind of stubborn independence that made him both infuriating and extraordinary. When Conner was young, he had a habit of laughing in the middle of serious conversations, not out of disrespect but because joy seemed to sneak up on him unexpectedly. Once, when he was a teenager, we were arguing about something small, probably curfew or homework, and he suddenly grinned and said, “Mom, if the Marines can survive boot camp, I think I can survive your rules.”

He always had that mix of defiance and heart. Even then, there was something about him that suggested he would choose a life bigger than comfort. He believed in purpose. He believed in protecting others. He believed that some things in life were worth standing up for. He carried this spirit into battles I could not see.

When a child dies, the world becomes unrecognizable. Grief is not a single emotion. It is a landscape, jagged, shifting, unpredictable. It arrives without warning and lingers longer than anyone tells you it will. Some days it is quiet, almost gentle. Other days it crashes over you with a force that leaves you breathless. In the weeks after his death, ordinary objects became unbearable. His name still appeared in my phone. His childhood photos stared back at me from shelves I had walked past a thousand times without noticing. I remember standing in the grocery store one afternoon, staring aimlessly at the produce section, suddenly unable to remember why I was there. The world had continued moving forward. Mine had stopped. In the early months after Conner died, I discovered something deeply uncomfortable about the version of strength I had spent my entire career cultivating.

It didn’t work anymore.

The identity I had built, the capable leader who could manage any crisis, was suddenly powerless against the weight of loss. You cannot schedule grief. You cannot organize it into a project plan. You cannot lead your way out of heartbreak. Still, I tried.

Like many high achievers, my instinct was to move. Movement felt safer than stillness. I buried myself in responsibilities, meetings, deadlines, and obligations. I went back to school, started a benefit honoring my son, and took on more clients. Work gave structure to days that otherwise felt hollow. Productivity created the illusion of progress. But grief has a way of insisting on honesty.

Eventually, the exhaustion of pretending became heavier than the grief itself. And so, slowly, reluctantly, I stopped running. In the quiet that followed, I began asking questions that leadership books rarely address.

Who am I when I cannot show strength?
What does resilience look like when control disappears?
How do you lead when life has brought you to your knees?

These questions did not arrive with quick answers. They arrived through long walks where the wind carried my thoughts. Through sleepless nights where memories surfaced uninvited. Through conversations with people who had also survived heartbreaking loss and were still standing.

What I began to understand was something both humbling and powerful. The strongest leaders are not the ones who never break. They are the ones who grow roots deep enough to survive the storm. Nature teaches this lesson quietly. In the Midwest, storms are not gentle. Winds tear across open land with startling force. Winter buries everything beneath ice and snow. Branches snap. Leaves scatter. Entire landscapes change overnight. Yet the trees remain.

Not because they are immune to storms, but because of something unseen: their roots. Roots do not prevent hardship. They anchor life through it. One afternoon during a walk, I stopped beneath a row of old trees that had clearly endured decades of Midwest storms. Their branches were uneven, some scarred, some broken long ago. Yet they stood. Steady, grounded, unmoved by the wind that tugged at their leaves. I looked up and realized something painfully obvious. For years, I had built a life focused on the branches—titles, achievements, responsibilities, accomplishments. The things that were visible. I had never truly considered the depth of my roots. Grief forced me to.

It stripped away the illusion that leadership is about control and replaced it with something far more meaningful: grounding. I began to call this realization Rooted Leadership. A type of leadership built on a foundation of “roots.”

For me, developing my “roots” meant turning inward, asking hard questions and being willing to sit with the answers: What am I actually feeling? What am I avoiding? Where am I overextending to prove my worth? It meant identifying where I had tied my identity to achievement, validation, or being needed, and slowly untangling that.

It also meant getting clear on my values, not the ones I thought I should have, but the ones that were actually guiding my decisions. I had to define what mattered most, and then begin aligning my actions with that, even when it was uncomfortable. It also meant saying no when I would have said yes. Protecting my energy instead of explaining it. Letting go of roles, expectations, and even relationships that were rooted in who I used to be, not who I was becoming. And just as important, it meant learning to regulate myself. To pause and consider instead of just reacting. How I showed up as a leader became intentional, not reactive.

Before Conner died, I believed vulnerability was something leaders had to manage carefully. After his death, I realized vulnerability was often the doorway to genuine connection. People did not need a polished executive version of me. They needed the human one. The grieving mother. The woman learning, painfully and imperfectly, that strength and vulnerability can be partners.

We whisper about mental health. We whisper about suicide. We need to stop whispering. In that whisper, we unintentionally send a message that these stories are too uncomfortable, too shameful, too much. But they are not. My son, Conner, took his own life. I refuse to let his story be spoken in hushed tones or hidden behind discomfort. His life mattered. His story matters. And so do the lives of so many others we’ve lost. It is time to be louder than the silence.

When I began sharing my story openly, something unexpected happened. Other people began sharing theirs. Veterans who carried invisible wounds long after returning home. Parents who had buried children and felt alone in their grief. Leaders who quietly held pain while still showing up for their teams every day. Stories surfaced that had been hidden beneath professional masks.

Being rooted means having a strong foundation. It means you are no longer leading from performance or protection, but from an understanding of your own truth. I came to understand that I had to be in touch with my own vulnerability. I realized that vulnerability is not separate from being rooted; it is evidence of it. When you are grounded in who you are, you no longer need to hide behind titles, roles, or expectations. You are steady enough in yourself to be seen.

Rooted leaders create space. Not by having all the answers, but by modeling what it looks like to be real. When I spoke openly about grief, I wasn’t just sharing my story. I was signaling to others that their stories were safe, too. That they didn’t have to carry them alone. This is the power of being rooted: you become a place others can land. Because when a leader is grounded, people connect with them in a real way.

Conner’s death also awakened a deeper responsibility within me. When loss reshapes your world, it forces you to reconsider how you spend your time, your energy, and your voice. I returned to school to study military psychology because I needed understanding. I wanted language for the silent battles so many service members face when the war follows them home. The more I learned, the clearer it became that silence can be dangerous.

In military culture, strength is often equated with endurance, pushing through pain, carrying burdens quietly, never appearing weak. But without support, that silence can become isolation. And isolation can lead to tragedy.

So, I began speaking—at conferences, on stages, and on radio shows. In rooms where conversations about mental health had once felt uncomfortable. I began sharing Conner’s story, not simply as a grieving mother, but as someone determined to honor his life and to say words people are afraid to say—mental health, depression, suicide, grief—with honesty and without apology. Because here’s what I had come to understand: silence is not neutral. Silence protects stigma.

Stories create bridges where statistics cannot. When people hear a story, they see themselves in it. After I began speaking publicly, veterans started approaching me quietly after events. One man waited until the room had nearly emptied before walking up. He shook my hand and said, “I lost two friends after we got home. We never talked about it. We were supposed to be strong.” He paused, then added, “Thank you for being louder than the silence, for speaking up.” And in those moments, something powerful unfolded. Connection. Leadership, at its core, is about reminding people they matter.

We whisper about mental health. We lower our voices, change the subject, or offer surface-level check-ins: “I’m fine,” “just tired,” “busy,” because going deeper feels risky. And when suicide enters the conversation, the silence often becomes even heavier. People don’t know what to say, so they say nothing. They avoid the topic. They shift in their seats. They retreat into discomfort rather than step toward connection.

But in that silence, people suffer alone.

For me, rooted leadership meant telling the truth, even when it made people uncomfortable, because discomfort is often where awareness begins. This type of leadership requires courage. It asks us to stand firmly enough in our purpose that we are willing to disrupt silence, to challenge stigma, and to create spaces where real conversations can happen. Because when one person speaks, it gives others permission to do the same. And that is how silence begins to lose its power.

Great leaders are the ones who show up, fully, honestly, imperfectly, even when life is difficult. After Conner died, there were days when getting out of bed required courage I never knew I possessed. There were moments when grief arrived unexpectedly, triggered by a photograph, a memory, or a date on the calendar. But slowly, something else began growing alongside the pain. Perspective. Purpose. Roots. Through living my life to honor his legacy and to help others be seen, heard, and know they are not alone. The storms had not disappeared. But they no longer defined me. They deepened me.

Today, when I speak to leaders, I tell them their greatest leadership lessons will rarely come from success. They will come from the moments that break you open. From failures that humble you. From losses that force you to confront what truly matters. Those experiences are not detours from leadership.

I still miss my son every single day. Grief does not end. It evolves. Some days it is heavy. Other days it is quiet. Occasionally it arrives as something unexpected, gratitude for the time we had, pride in the man he became, determination to carry forward the impact of his life. Conner’s story continues to shape mine. Through advocacy work. Through leadership conversations. Through every space I create where people feel safe enough to share their stories.

And sometimes I still think back to that moment at the door. Two United States Marines standing with quiet precision. The woman who opened that door once believed strength was about staying intact, holding everything together no matter the weight. She thought leadership meant being unshaken, composed, untouched by the storm. I learned that strength isn’t about appearing unbroken; it’s about what anchors you. Being rooted didn’t remove the grief; it reshaped it. It gave it somewhere to go. Instead of something I had to contain or hide, grief became something I could hold, something that deepened my awareness, my compassion, and my presence.

Rooted Leadership does not promise that storms will disappear. Life guarantees they will not. But it teaches something equally powerful: how to remain standing. Because real strength isn’t what people see on the surface. It’s what’s growing beneath it.

It grows in the moments when life breaks us open and we choose, slowly and imperfectly, to stand again. It grows in the courage to speak when silence would be easier. It grows in the quiet decision to turn pain into purpose. Like the roots of a tree, it forms where no one else can see it. And once those roots take hold, even the fiercest storms cannot take them away.

Erica Gifford Mills is an award-winning author, speaker, and founder of Balanced Symmetree and the International Women Speaker Summit. As the creator of Rooted Leadership, she champions resilience and authentic leadership, amplifying voices and advocating for military mental health after the loss of her son, U.S. Marine Sgt. Conner Mills.

“Carole!” a woman calls as I’m watching my youngest child play in the sandpit. I smile reflexively while I rack my brain trying to figure out who she is. She has a round, pleasant face I don’t recognize, and she has an earth-mother vibe with her cotton peasant skirt, long brown hair, and infant sidekick. I look at her baby, the way mothers do, and compliment him. I have absolutely no idea how I know her, but she acts as though our acquaintanceship is well established.

After a while, she jogs my memory. “We met at the birth class, years ago,” she says. “At the hospital.” Clearly I am not good at faking that I remember her.

We make idle small talk, the way parents do when they are killing time, waiting for their kids to get fussy or bored. It’s a warm, sunny day in San Francisco, so I’m in no rush to leave the playground.

It’s more than a little weird for me to be hanging out with someone from the birth class I took four years earlier. I was the pariah of this natural childbirth class or, as I came to refer to it, “the stupid frickin’ shlamaze class.”

Initially, I was excited about the class. Most of my friends were avowedly child-free, I was the first person in my friend group to get pregnant, and I dearly wanted to make friends with other pregnant women. I imagined us texting each other when we went into labor, dropping off postpartum casseroles, and forming a playgroup with our cherubic infants. None of that happened, at least not for me.

I want you to know that I am outgoing, and it’s easy for me to talk to strangers. With a background in journalism before I went to law school, I was taught to find common ground with people I’d just met to put them at ease. I don’t normally fail socially as spectacularly as I did at that childbirth class.

At the first meeting of the class, our instructor, a gray-haired, chubby nurse, beamed at us all and said, “Let’s go around, and I’d like to have all the pregnant women introduce themselves and their partners. Let us know how your pregnancy is going for you!” One after another, the pregnant women introduced themselves and the father of their baby. I was surprised that there were no same-sex couples in the class of over twenty pregnant women filling a huge basement meeting room at the hospital. The one underaged mother-to-be, a skinny young teen, was accompanied by a parent.

My turn came about a third of the way through the circle. I was honest. “I’m having a really rough pregnancy,” I said. “I had really severe morning sickness, way into the second trimester, and now that’s finally getting better, the baby kicking my bladder is driving me insane. I have to pee all the time.”

In my defense, hyperemesis gravidarum is no joke. I lost over ten pounds at a time when I should have been gaining weight and had to go on medication to control my nausea. Pregnancy hormones also triggered a storm of migraines, leaving me spending many days lying motionless in a dark room. Additionally, I was having painful contractions every day. These went beyond the normal early contractions pregnant women endure, called Braxton-Hicks, which tone the uterus and prepare it for labor. My unpleasant contractions earned me the diagnosis of “irritable uterus,” which was extremely apt. Everything about my body felt irritable from my swollen ankles to my puffy, bleeding gums, which had developed what my dentist called “gestational gingivitis.” Eventually my uterus and I got so irritable that we were put on strict bedrest for months until my baby reached viability. During that lonely time, I got deeply depressed and took to passing the time by calling my husband at work to talk about how I thought I was going to die in childbirth.

Although the instructor said she wanted the pregnant women to do the introductions, one frizzy-haired man who looked to be barely out of his teens stood up and introduced himself and his very young pregnant wife. He explained, “In our religion, I am the head of the household, so I speak for us.” After he’d talked for some time about how grateful they were that “God is giving us a child” and informed us repeatedly that “our child is from God, because we waited for marriage,” he granted his pregnant wife permission to speak. She was seated at a strange angle from me, so it took some effort for her to position herself so she could stare at me pointedly while she said, “When my baby kicks, I praise God for letting me know my baby is healthy” in an icy voice.

Ouch.

I thought that if I shared honestly how I was doing, others might feel empowered to say that well, actually they were also struggling. I was mistaken. No one else had a single issue, at least not one they were going to mention. It was all rainbows, sunshine, and problem-free pregnancies for everyone else. I was the only one bothered by severe morning sickness, an irritable uterus, premature labor worries, or anything, really, at all.

The only complaint anyone else made over the six weeks of our course came from the pregnant high school student, an athlete. She was having a rough time emotionally with having to sit out the season. “My teams are playing without me,” she said unhappily from behind her burgeoning stomach.

Things did not improve in that class for me. Although I smiled at everyone and did my best to choke down my skepticism about how effective breathing in a “hut-hut-hoo” pattern would be at controlling pain, it was abundantly clear that the other expectant mothers did not want to associate with me.

My attitude didn’t improve. After we were required to watch a very graphic video of a natural childbirth, I told my husband, “I want to get off this roller coaster; I want off!” I told my friends that “my child is from Satan” after telling them about the judgy religious couple who kept stressing every week how “their baby was from God.”

I took to leaving the class during the weekly guided meditation. We were being trained to use a particular set of prompts as a substitute for pain meds, but I found my blood pressure skyrocketing when I was instructed to “visualize golden light bathing your eyeballs.” I said to anyone I knew outside of the class who would listen, “No one would tell a man to visualize golden light bathing his eyeballs instead of getting anesthesia for a vasectomy.” As soon as our instructor invoked that golden light, I’d sneak out to a tiny hole-in-the-wall cafe across the street with excellent falafel. The timing was perfect for me to rejoin the class, tasty sandwich in hand, just as they ended their meditation.

Given that I was the outcast of UCSF’s childbirth course, you can imagine I was surprised to have someone from the class approach me years later and be friendly. “So...” this woman says, after we’ve been hanging out for some time idly chatting. She takes a breath and makes significant eye contact with me. Whatever’s coming next, she wants me to hear. I wait expectantly. There’s a pause.

Then all at once she says, “When we were in that class, I was pregnant. I had the baby, and we were still in the hospital the next day, and she died.”

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I stammer.

She is composed. Clearly this is a painful subject which she is used to talking about. “It was out of the blue. The baby was fine, and then she just died.”

It’s a sunny California afternoon, and the playground is filled with life while this woman tells me about the death of her child. She tells me in detail about how she and her husband were resting in the maternity ward, happy and exhausted, and then they realized their baby wasn’t just asleep. She was dead. There was nothing wrong with the baby according to the doctors at UCSF—a world-famous hospital. Just a case of sudden infant death syndrome. Inexplicable but commonplace.

She continues. “So then afterward... I saw you pushing a stroller. And I recognized you from the class. I used to see you around all the time.” Her voice gets slower now, more tentative. “And you had a girl. My baby was a girl. So every time I saw you, I’d see how big my baby would be. I’d think about how unfair it was you had your baby and I didn’t.”

“Oh my God,” I say. I can feel my face contorting awkwardly.

She nods. “Yeah. I really hated you. I thought you didn’t deserve your baby.” She tells me more about how she spent a lot of time thinking dark, angry thoughts about me.

We sit there for a while. I have nothing to say. I had no idea that while just going about my life, I was unwittingly inflicting pain on this poor woman. It was surreal that I didn’t even remember this woman’s name or face, but for literally years she was obsessed with me. She was tortured by the unfairness of the awful woman who complained about being pregnant having a baby while she, who deserved one, did not.

“I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time,” she says. She says that after she got pregnant again and had a second baby, she stopped hating me. Letting go of her obsessive hatred towards me was a recent milestone in her healing.

“I’m so glad,” I say inadequately.

“You’re so much nicer than I thought,” she says, surprised.

“I felt so awful, all the time, that whole pregnancy, and I was so crabby,” I explain. “I’m much nicer when I’m not pregnant.”

She smiles supportively as I recap my pregnancy-from-hell. It lands much differently when I tell it to her now rather than back in that class. By now we have been talking for a long time, and I have to leave to pick my older daughter up at preschool. This is awkward. I can’t help but think that if her daughter had lived, maybe she’d be picking her daughter up from preschool also. The woman nods graciously at my clumsiness. “It’s okay,” she says.

I look at her baby again. I appreciate his round, baby-solemn face, and I think of the baby that was born and lost before him. I feel like I’ve been hollowed out by our conversation, emotionally and physically. His chubby face is something I can cling to, an anchor in this moment. Our conversation has been a weird ceremony, where I have been formally forgiven for sins I did not realize I committed.

“I’m so glad you have him,” I say to the woman, and I mean it with every fiber of my being.

“I know,” she says, with warmth and generosity in her voice, and she smiles at me.

Carole Morrell is the author of The Drunken Housewife, a blog The Wall Street Journal called “a darkly funny take on parenting.” A former attorney, she writes both fiction and non-fiction. Her work can be found at The Manifest-Station and in Eldritch Humor. She lives in San Francisco.

My first job was working in my family’s funeral home. I began when I was eight and worked through high school, answering phones, making photo memory boards, creating files for clients, and of course vacuuming, dusting, and arranging flowers. The funeral home eventually moved to a massive building with better parking. The new building had three visitation rooms, a designated chapel, a lounge, and a huge casket display room on the second floor. I worked at the funeral home regularly, sometimes alone and sometimes with others.

Kids would always ask if our funeral home was haunted, and I’d always say ‘no.’ But funeral homes have a history of being built from old Victorian houses, and in the case of our funeral home, it was a former restaurant with a long history. It wasn’t unusual to hear my name called while vacuuming in one of the far reaches of the building, only to walk the loop of rooms to discover that I was alone. It was also common for the door sensor to ring an alert when no one was there. We’d step out of the office to greet the person entering only to find the lobby empty.

During my senior year, my dad yelled to me from halfway up our stairs. He was curious to know if I had drawn something behind the clock at work. It was after school and work, and everyone in my family was home. I answered “no” and he promptly returned downstairs, leaving me to chase after him. In our living room, I discovered he had everyone gathered. He instructed us all to get in the car because he had to show us something at the funeral home immediately.

When we arrived, he explained that he had changed the time on the analog clock hanging in the entryway for daylight savings the previous month. Then, during a funeral a few days prior, he noticed that the clock had stopped working. He decided to remove the clock from the wall until he could replace the battery. We all gathered around while my dad removed the clock in a theatrical presentation. What we saw on the wall was less of a drawing and more of what looked like a burn of a woman’s face: hair stringy and set in a bun; eyes hollow and sunken. She had a defined jawline with a small, pressed mouth. If the image had been made with any artistic tools, it would have been charcoal. My mom touched the wall and tried to figure out a logical reason for the image, but we had none.

***

Twenty years later, in the middle of the pandemic, when podcasts were how I kept track of what day it was, I sent this story to the podcast My Favorite Murder. Within a few days of writing in, my story was read aloud back to me by Karen Kilgariff. The experience of hearing my story read aloud by someone whose voice had become a staple in my everyday life was so surreal it made me feel lightheaded.

But something peculiar happened in the recording. At the end of the story, after wishing the two ladies a Happy Halloween in my email, what sounded like a dull bell could be heard in the recording. Karen tried to shrug it off, but both her co-host and her producer made her go investigate. She made a joke about her porch door being open and took a nail file with her for protection. When she reported back, she said that a bowl in her kitchen had fallen from the counter but hadn’t broken, just spun around, making the ringing noise. I was immediately concerned that I had cursed one of my favorite podcasters with a ghost.

About a year later, my best friend texted urging me to listen to the latest MFM episode. On that week’s episode, a woman wrote in about listening to their podcast throughout her pregnancies and early motherhood. I could relate. I had also dug deep into their vast catalog of episodes because crime procedurals put me at ease. When my children were babies, I would fall back to sleep listening to old episodes of Law & Order SVU.

Her story continued to describe a night when she was listening to the podcast and heard a sound from one of her children’s rooms. She first checked on her two-year-old who was still asleep in bed and then she checked on her ten-month-old. She was shocked to find a blanket wrapped around his face. She rushed her baby to the hospital where he spent three days in the ICU and suffered a cardiac arrest but had happily made a full recovery.

The story was scary and shocking, and all the worst mom nightmares wrapped together, but I still didn’t understand why my friend needed me to listen. The woman recounted that it took her months to start listening to podcasts again and when she resumed, she found the unfinished episode starting in the middle. She rewound the episode to recall what was happening, and that’s when she heard the bell-bowl sound from the episode. She had thought that the sound was coming from one of her children’s rooms, and realized it was occurring inside the podcast. The story I wrote, the haunting that I cursed upon Karen, had led this woman to check on her child and ultimately save his life.

I had to sit down; my brain was crackling. Nothing in my life had ever made me feel like everything was connected like this moment. If I didn’t have this funny ghost story, if the pandemic hadn’t made me fall in love with podcasts, if I hadn’t taken a chance and written in, if I hadn’t accidentally haunted my favorite podcaster, if that woman hadn’t been listening to that episode at that moment, and on and on.

It’s not very often we get to be on the receiving end of the feedback loop of our choices. We send ripples out every day and have no idea where they go, just hoping as much as we can that they are for good. I feel the world crack, splinter, and mend itself every day and most of the time I will never have any idea how things bind back together. In the end, I’m grateful to have experienced all of these pieces reshuffled and sifted to create this mysterious and miraculous moment.

Kelly Nusz is a published author and owner of the independent bookstore Foxing Books in Louisville, KY. Her work is greatly influenced by her decades of experience living and working in her family’s funeral home. She holds a BA in writing from Indiana University, and an MA from Murray State University.

My world is different now. I can feel that truth in my entire being. My friend Melody was murdered, and my life will never be the same. It’s not even my life so much as it is my mind, my worldview, my experiences—the shape of things.

Melody and I first met when we were five years old in a copy room at the University of Georgia, where our mothers both taught English to international students. We found some scary plastic masks on a shelf, played with them together, and became fast friends. Melody was intent on learning and engaging with the world. We became part of a close-knit group of girls from elementary school onward. It seemed every boy had a crush on Melody, and she was every teacher’s favorite. Academically gifted, she was high school valedictorian and student body president and later went on to become student body president at UNC Chapel Hill.

But within our friend group, it wasn’t her looks or academic honors that made us love her. It was her excitement over silly things, her quirkiness and playful attitude.

Once in high school, Melody and I took turns predicting each other’s futures. We made them as adventurous and love-filled as possible. Our lives were deeply interwoven. Birthdays, school dances, game nights, sleepovers, and graduations were all celebrated together. We knew each other’s crushes, secrets, and dreams. As an only child, I saw my friends as family. Melody was like a sister. And I assumed she would be in my life forever.

I am returning to Los Angeles from Georgia after the funeral. My boyfriend Sam picks me up from the airport. His friend is in the car with him, which throws me off. I am feeling tender. Mustering energy to make small talk seems like a lot of work. When Sam drops his friend off, I am relieved. We go to a diner to eat. I am grateful to be in Sam’s presence again. Transitioning from home back to this life is going to be difficult, so I appreciate his company. I spend the night at his apartment, and we fall into our old rhythms.

I am glad to wake up next to Sam. I do not want to be alone in the world with my grief. That morning, I assume he is going to drop me off at my apartment first thing, but he tells me to stay while he goes to work, saying he will take me back to my place when he returns. He leaves and comes back thirty minutes later because his tire blew out. He gets back in bed with me and holds me. I want to disappear into him.

Two days later Sam comes over to my place.

“Hey, I brought your shoes,” he says.

“Oh, I forgot I left those. Thanks. What do you want to do today? It’s really pretty out, maybe we could play frisbee or take a walk?”

“I actually have to go. I have a lot of work to do.”

“Couldn’t you just hang out for a bit?”

“No, I really should get going,” he says, heading towards the door.

“What’s going on? I feel like you’re acting weird.”

“Uhh… I don’t know how to say this, but I’m moving, and we can’t be together.”

“What? You’re moving back to Ohio?”

“No, Orange County. I’m going to live with Charlie. This isn’t going to work.”

“Can you please stay so we can talk about this?”

“I gotta go.”

He leaves and I feel completely alone in the world, unsure of how to proceed. The wind has been knocked out of me. I am devastated by Melody’s death and am so lost. I have nothing to hold on to.

I feel abandoned. Outside of a romance, did we not have a friendship? His coldness shocks me. I have to keep myself from drowning. I must maintain a sense of strength, lest the ocean swallow me whole.

Being back in LA now feels foreign. Walking outside, I see everything differently. Nothing has changed in terms of how the city looks. It’s my eyes. They’ve changed since Melody died. It’s as if an invisible film distorts images I am familiar with so that I can’t quite get my bearings. My eyes feel heavy and dull as if they have weights behind them. Walking home from the grocery store, I don’t recognize a thing. I have walked this route hundreds of times. The sun illuminates the day in an unfamiliar hue. Grief isolates and disorients me.

When people casually ask me how I am, I don’t know what to say. It’s as if I am incapable of partaking in a “normal” conversation. My gut wants to shout, “My friend was just murdered! My childhood friend! My Melody, who was going to be in my life forever. She was murdered!” But I do not say that.

I tell myself not to hole up in my apartment, that I should get out. So I walk around all day, aimless and in a daze. I don’t know where I am going. People keep saying, “It’s all going to work out.” It’s going to work out for me, but it didn’t work out for her? Why should it for me?

I carry my journal with me and find myself writing and crying in random places such as bus benches far from my house or in parks I have never been to before. I just want to walk far enough to outrun my pain.

If I see a young woman from the back with straw-colored hair, I have to check her face to make sure it’s not Melody. Logically, I know it isn’t, but I still must make sure. Suddenly, everything reminds me of her. The song playing in the bookstore? Melody and I loved Ani DiFranco! Sometimes I come across handwriting that has her same urgent, excited lettering, and I have to take a picture of it so I can compare it to letters I have from her. I cannot escape.

In her death, people made her out to be a saint. She was not perfect, and I resented people distorting who she was. Melody was a human being, multifaceted and full of contradictions. I do not want to make a martyr out of someone because they are no longer here on earth with us. I want to remember the real Melody. The one whom I would get upset at, the one who gleefully told me and another friend about her R-rated adventure in the library. The one who gossiped and ate chocolate as if it were a main food group. The one with the messy room and goofy jokes, who also happened to look like a homecoming queen. Melody was admired for her beauty growing up, and I think that can come with a certain onus, making its importance even more pronounced. Her beauty was a kind of currency, but it was a double-sided coin. Once, when we were twenty, she said to me, “I already have wrinkles.” Of course, she didn’t. How I wish she had lived long enough to develop lines in her face.

She would have eventually married and had beautiful babies, and maybe at their birthday parties they would have played flashlight tag outside, just as we had during so many birthdays, but we won’t ever get that. I am flooded with memories of her, and I wish I could call her up and share them. Instead, I file them away in a Melody folder in my brain, wondering what anything means anymore.

The nature of her death haunts me. I try hard to avoid learning details about what happened to Melody that night, because it hurts my heart so badly to think of her scared and suffering. But what happened to her consumes me.

One night, her roommates went out and invited her to go with them, but she stayed home alone to study. Two young men, strangers, entered her house, took her in her own car to an ATM, and withdrew her money. Then they shot her and left her in the street.

I don’t know what to do with my anger. Should I write the killers a letter in prison telling them about the extraordinary person they took from us? Probably not. But my powerlessness adds another layer to my grief. Everything is sharp and scary. I am heartsick for humanity. My faith in the world is beyond shaken. I’m hanging on by barely a thread. My brain hurts. My head pounds. I don’t want there to be hate in my heart, but I hate them. I hate them so much.

Two weeks after being back in Los Angeles, I go for a walk and decide to go to Subway for a sandwich. I stand in line waiting to order when the guy ahead of me turns around.

“Oh, we have the same shoes,” he says to me, smiling.

Caught off guard, I look down to see my black and white Converse chucks.

Everyone has these shoes, I think.

“We do,” I respond.

“What are the chances?”

“Pretty crazy,” I say.

“I’m not even that hungry, but it’s so hot outside I just needed to get into somewhere air-conditioned.”

“I hear you; it is hot out,” I say.

“I’m Jake.”

“I’m Giordana. Nice to meet you.”

When it’s my turn to order, Jake continues talking to me.

“How are you today?”

“I really have to concentrate on telling them what my toppings are, but if you actually want to know, I can tell you when I’m done ordering.”

After I get my sandwich, Jake waves me over to his table.

“Do you want to sit together?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, taking a seat.

I do not know this blue-eyed man with sandy-brown hair. He appears to be a few years older than me. Perhaps he’s in his late twenties. He seems harmless, and nothing makes sense at this juncture in my life, so what difference does it make if I sit with a stranger or not?

“So how are you?”

“Do you really want to know?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he replies.

“Well, my friend was just murdered, and my boyfriend dumped me, so I’m not doing great.”

Jake does not recoil as if I have some contagious disease.

“I’m sorry to hear that. That must be tough.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty horrible.”

We sit in silence for a moment.

“What about you?” I ask. “How’s your life going?”

“Well, I’ve been having a strange day. I’m an artist, and I’ve been calling friends all day asking if anyone can pose nude for some drawings I want to do for this upcoming gallery show I’m in. So far, I haven’t had any takers. I understand people not wanting to do it. It’s an awkward request.”

“I’ll do it,” I say without thinking.

“Really?” he asks.

“Yeah, why not?”

Jake tells me that his sketchbook is in his car and that he can show me some of his work. After we eat, I follow him out to the parking lot. His car is a big brown weathered van. The exact kind of car he would drive if this were a horror movie, and he was the creepy stranger, but he produces his sketchbook filled with beautiful drawings of bodies and hands and mythical creatures. He’s very talented, assuming that this is his art and not an elaborate ruse to throw me in his basement. However, I believe that this is his work, and I trust what he is saying.

He gives me a ride home. When he drops me off, he gives me his number and says if I am serious about posing to give him a call, but if I don’t want to, that is fine, and we could always get together for coffee sometime.

I call him that night when I am hanging out with a friend and tell him that I will pose for him “tomorrow or never,” with the stipulation that the drawing session take place at my apartment. I need to do this before I lose my nerve. He agrees to my conditions, and we settle on two p.m. Then, sheepishly, I go tell my roommates.

“So, I met this artist and he’s coming to draw me nude tomorrow,” I say in one quick breath, hoping they won’t be aghast.

“You what? How do you know this person?” Camilla says. She and I have shared a room for three years at this point. There is nothing going on in either of our lives that the other person doesn’t know.

“I met him today at Subway, and we got to talking,” I explain.

“You didn’t bring me a sandwich?” Camilla seems to be taking this better than I was expecting. My roommate Lara is less cool about it.

“This doesn’t seem like a good idea. You don’t even know him.”

“I think it will be fine,” I say, trying to sound relaxed and not defensive. “I have good instincts about people, and he showed me his art.”

“Well, I have the day off tomorrow, so I will be here all day if he tries any funny business,” Camilla says.

The next day I’m nervous. What am I doing? I’m just going to get naked for this stranger? What does one even wear before they take off their clothes for a stranger in their apartment after they just met the person the day before while standing in line to get a teriyaki chicken sub? I choose a dress with nothing underneath. I don’t put on any makeup because it seems odd to get naked and then have on lipstick.

Jake comes to the door right on time, and I let him in. Immediately, Camilla introduces herself while holding a butcher knife and a phone.

“I’ll be here the whole time with this knife and phone in case I need to call 911.”

Then she goes back to our bedroom.

“Well, that went well,” he says, smiling.

I shrug and make a face as if to say, That’s Camilla.

“She’s just watching out for you. That’s good,” he says.

We stand in the living room. Light pours in from a sliding door that opens to a tiny balcony from which we can see the Griffith Park Observatory in the hills. The room is pretty bare, just a black couch and a TV in the corner. The mostly empty space works out well for our annual Halloween house parties, more room for dancing. However, now I am looking at the room from a different perspective, judging its starkness. I push those thoughts aside. It’s a perfect room to draw in, with natural light and no distractions.

Jake takes out his materials. I ask him to turn around as I remove my dress. When he turns back, all my embarrassment fades. There is something visceral and thrilling, stripped bare in front of a man I do not know. His eyes show wonder and appreciation.

“Wow.” He takes a beat and truly seems to study me.

Something in the way he is looking at me makes me feel alive. I exist. Ever since Melody was murdered, I have been a ghost, floating through life watching people, not grounded in any way that allows me to connect. Being naked in front of this man in my living room with my toes feeling the carpet beneath my feet is real. Seeing him look at me allows me to be here in this moment, as if my spirit had been traveling and has now been sucked back into my body. I have a body, and I am breathing. Finally, I have someone’s undivided attention.

We find a pose that works, and I hold it. My mix CD is playing in the background. Music dispels some of the awkwardness I feel. Listening to upbeat songs is fun and gives my mind something to focus on besides being naked. However, when a Britney Spears track comes on, I am acutely aware of the sexual lyrics and am relieved when the song ends.

Keeping a pose is harder than I would have thought; just standing still in the same position causes my muscles to ache. The solid beige carpet appears to swirl. I have been gazing down at it for so long that images appear from the lights and textures. By the time Jake is finished with his drawing, it has turned to dusk, and both my roommates have joined us in the living room. Lara is trying to convince him to draw her one day.

Sometimes life places you in a moment that propels you to do something you would never have considered before—but that you somehow need. Posing naked for a stranger made me feel beautiful and alive at a time when I felt ugly, lost, and stricken with grief. When tragedy knocks at our door, we don’t know how we’ll respond. We may react in surprising ways, ways we may question later. But instead of casting judgment, I will hold that twenty-one-year-old girl I once was, in all her vulnerability, with the utmost compassion, knowing she was doing the best that she could to survive.

And if I ever forget, I have a drawing to remind me.

Giordana Diaz is a writer, artist, and psychotherapist based in Athens, GA. Prior to obtaining her master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, she studied dramatic arts, visual art, and psychology. Her work explores themes of grief and resilience. This piece is an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, Silver Longings.

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

“Were there any particular dishes your mother was known for?” The priest asks.

He must have a fill-in-the-blank eulogy where he’ll add personal anecdotes, something for the family.

There’s an awkward moment as my brother and sister and I look thoughtful. Then we exchange darting glances out of the corners of our eyes, silently pleading, Say something!

I finally say, “Our mom was a lousy cook.” And we snort with laughter.

The priest scribbles something in his notes.

***

This isn’t quite fair, as my mother had a few dishes that were memorable, mostly from the years before she went back to work. She had time to let the dough rise, let us punch it down, then let it rise again before baking. I remember homemade pizza, American chop suey (whatever the hell that was), iceberg lettuce shining with bottled salad dressing, and Apple Delight, my favorite dessert.

But when I think of my mom cooking, I don’t think of what she made, but how she made it. Stirring a pot with one hand, a book in the other, reading. At the kitchen table, a book in hand, reading. Lying on the sofa as broccoli burned on the stove, a book in hand, reading. I rarely saw her without a book, her glasses perched on her head or carelessly looped through her fingers. She was extremely nearsighted but could read a book without glasses if she held it right up to her face. Then her eyes would become wide and she would hardly blink. When she was reading, you knew the world had disappeared for her: she was gone. To interrupt seemed cruel, but we did it all the time. Maybe we were jealous of the attention—the devotion, even—that she gave those books. Maybe we just missed her.

“Just let me finish this chapter,” she’d say as she turned another page.

I was born with the reading gene, or perhaps I was just imitating my mother the way other little girls played house. She passed words to me like breastmilk. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read. I may have lived in suburban Long Island, but I was equally at home on the Kansas prairie, in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, and on Prince Edward Island. My best friends were Dorothy, Laura, and the other Anne with-an-e. This fascination with books carried me from kindergarten through grad school. I got married, had one baby and then another, and my time became limited, fragmented, my days full of must-do’s. Reading required a purpose. There was a kind of pleasure in reading dusty manuscripts and secondary criticism, but it was in having read them, not in the reading itself. I had lost some of the joy I had first experienced in the small-town library that contained universes.

All this time, my mother and I regularly spoke on the phone and exchanged letters. She used to circulate a family letter that caught everyone up on everyone else’s goings-on, and later, a family email. She would tell me about the books she was reading, and I would tell her about my studies. And sometimes she would chuckle, “You think you’re so smart.” I sent her conference papers to proofread, and imagined her reading them, her glasses looped through her fingers, her eyes wide and unblinking. She always found something: a typo, a grammatical error, an editing mishap. She was my ideal reader.

But something happened so subtly that I hardly noticed. The daily emails became weekly, and then even less frequent. Sometimes my father would respond instead. An engineer in temperament as well as profession, he stuck to simple subject-verb-object sentences: what they did and where they went. Sometimes my mother’s emails didn’t address what I had written to her, and I had to go back to try and understand the miscommunication. She no longer told me about the latest book she’d read or magazine articles, because she’d nearly stopped reading altogether. Sometimes the words just didn’t make sense. Her decline into dementia seems obvious now when I look at our last emails: a back-and-forth about forgetting passwords and missing doctors’ appointments and repeated anecdotes.

Her very last email to me, written about four years before her death, said:

I don’t know what I’m doing. —Mom

I missed her writing, of course. I was surprised, however, to find myself mourning her loss of reading. I had taken this joy of hers for granted. There wasn’t much we could do during those short, but too long years of decline: visit, chat, make her comfortable. How could I listen to someone whose voice seemed to grow fainter and fainter each time I spoke with her? I had already lost my mother.

I could read. I began by seeking out classics that had somehow escaped me back in high school and college: My Ántonia, Anna Karenina, To Kill a Mockingbird. I reread Catcher in the Rye, a book I despised in high school because my friends told me I reminded them of Holden Caulfield. Although I failed to recognize myself in Holden when I was a teen, this time I recognized my children in Holden—he felt like another insightful, wounded, and often infuriating son. Maybe it was because I was reading it as the parent of an adolescent rather than as an adolescent, but when I cried for Holden, maybe I was also crying for his mother, so cold and indifferent. Maybe I cried for the emotional distance that could never be bridged.

My mother was placed on hospice during the last six weeks of her life, ending the revolving-door of hospital visits. She barely spoke, barely registered recognition. Our visits seemed to exhaust her, and my children, newly uncomfortable around grandma, became antsy, so I kept our visits brief. Maybe it wasn’t our presence, but the presence of death that sucked the words out of the room. But on one of our last visits, I mentioned to her that I was reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain for the first time. She lit up in a way I hadn’t seen in months, looked up at me from her wheelchair, and said, “That’s one of my favorite books.”

Going through my parents’ house years later, I came across her cookbooks: Fanny Farmer, The Joy of Cooking, The I Hate to Cook Book. Along with the creases and stains, I found notes and comments in her precise, bookish handwriting. Occasionally she wrote simple punctuation (! or ?) in the margins, and once a Bronx cheer—pbbb!—for what must have been a failure of a dish. She had really read these cookbooks, taken them in, and they became part of her. My mother was a great cook—on the page.

Anne Schuchman is a writer and translator whose nonfiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Saranac Review, and Apricity Press. Her translations have been published in The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The Ilanot Review. Schuchman holds a Ph.D. in Italian from NYU and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickins

As I sat in my truck at the back parking lot of the La Quinta Inn, I looked out across the rugged winter landscape of Butte, Montana. I pressed my head against the driver-side window and felt the cold glass on my cheek. The parking lot lights showed the snow dashing through the air, falling hard onto the asphalt. I lifted my head and peered farther out at Mount Fleecer’s snowy peaks. It was dark outside, and bright stars dotted the sky. It made me wonder how it was snowing so hard without any clouds. I turned to my cat, Zed, who then lifted himself out of his little bed in the passenger seat, where I kept the window cracked for him. Snowflakes were falling through the window slit and melting on the door handle as I blasted the heat in my Tacoma. Zed climbed to the back seat and sank into his blue litter box. I turned back around and looked at the clock. It was 11:15 PM, and I still hadn’t called my dad, as I had promised. But I didn’t plan to call him that night either.

I was using drugs. I was numb, living in my truck, and I was missing both my shoes.

Then I rolled up my window and rested my head lightly against the steering wheel. I started thinking about all the stories my parents would tell me about myself. I used to dress up at preschool every day and surprise my mom with a career and an outfit to match it. I wanted to be an astronaut, a lawyer, a fireman, a businessman—I wanted to have a wife and a son. I wanted a happy life.

I thought about my dad teaching me how to skateboard in Santa Fe. I was only in kindergarten, and I remember the trucks of my skateboard hugging against the railing, with my board planked high into the air. I felt scared and excited, looking down at my dad, who was standing at the bottom of the bowl, cheering me on and waiting to catch me if I fell. That’s when I dropped into the bowl for the first time. He didn’t have to catch me.

I thought about middle school and high school. I stayed up past my bedtime and snuck out of the house with friends. I rode my bike to girls’ houses in the neighborhood and had my first kiss in the woods. I remembered that one morning, I woke up to find my truck parked in my parents’ front yard after a night of partying. Then I thought about lacrosse, when I used to wake up on weekends to healthy breakfasts and a day full of sun and competition. Those were the days when I knew I was the best player on the field, and I could stop any lacrosse shot that came my way as a goalie. I thought about my twin brother, Erik, the long-stick defender who stood in front of me. I remembered when he flew to my aid after that kid from Cheyenne Mountain took a cheap shot at me in the crease, and it started a brawl between both teams. I laughed for a second, thinking about how that guy was so much bigger than Erik, but he didn’t care. He’d fight anyone for me. Then I thought about happiness, and I remembered what smiling felt like before I found Robert dead in his dorm room. I lifted my head and imagined him hanging from the parking lot light right in front of me, his body rocking almost violently in the winter wind, his face as white as the snow surrounding me, with that same gaze he left me with twelve years ago. I winced at the image, closed my eyes, and shook my head until it went away.

I got out of my truck and felt the snow on my Adidas socks. I walked to the back of the truck and opened the topper. I blankly gazed at my sleeping bag, my fishing pole, and my one suitcase.

I climbed into my topper, and I opened the suitcase next to my pillow and sleeping bag. I was looking for the weapon box that housed my Glock 43X. I was crouched on my hands and knees as I opened the gun case, and I stared at the gun for a few seconds, noting that I never kept the key-lock on the trigger. I kept two loaded magazines next to the weapon. I loaded the magazine, shimmied out of the topper, and sat on the tailgate with my wet socks dangling off the edge. Snow started coming down in bigger flakes, and it was hitting my face, so I put my hood up. I hopped down onto the wet, snowy asphalt and got back into my truck.

Zed had returned to his bed in the passenger seat. He was curled in a ball like he always was, but when I came back in the truck, he stood up and put his front paws on the center console and started licking my ear as I settled myself into the driver’s seat. I pushed him off me and patted his bed, hoping he would lie back down.

I opened the weapon case in my lap and stared at the loaded Glock. My adrenaline started coursing through me as I steadily put the gun to my head. I hoped to feel numb, but as I felt the cold iron against my right temple, I felt that similar sense of fear from months before. I massaged my head with the barrel, and I thought about my grandpa, my mom, my dad, my brother, and my funeral. How my casket would be closed so no one could see my final form of addiction, then I wondered how many people would even show up in the first place and what pictures of myself that my family would show at the funeral—surely not a picture from the past four years—maybe a picture of me before I lost everything, when I still had a glint in my eyes. I wasn’t hiding behind a broken smile. I wondered if I should be buried in Butte or back home in Colorado, and then I thought, Why the fuck does it even matter anyway? My face hardened, and I felt my finger lightly toying with the trigger, and then my heart started to beat faster, and I wondered if I could get high in Heaven.

That’s when my phone started buzzing, and I looked at the incoming call on my truck’s monitor.

11:31 PM. It was my dad.

I let the phone ring a few times before I set my gun down between my legs.

Then, I picked up.

It was silent on the other end of the phone. I could hear my dad holding back heavy breathing. I heard him sniffle his nose, and I sat there quietly, waiting for him to say something. We stayed silent. Then he started whispering into the phone.

“…Grant, please…”

I continued staring at his name on the screen.

“Please, Grant. I just… I don’t know why you won’t just talk to me.”

I stayed silent, and he began to cry. I listened to him cry, patiently waiting for his next words. I didn’t know how to react. I wasn’t high anymore, but I was still numb.

“You’re my boy, Grant,” he whispered to me.

He kept whispering to me, trying hard to hold back tears.

“You’re my baby boy, the first twin. I will never forget the day I held you in my arms when you were born, Grant. I held you so tightly. I knew I would love you and protect you forever. I loved you before you were even born. I don’t care about how bad things have gotten; I’m sorry things are the way they are right now. I would do anything for you. I hate that I haven’t been able to protect you from this. If I could take all this away right now and put it on myself, I would…”

He let out a sob, and I felt my heart sink.

“…your addiction, your pain, the memories, everything. I wish I could take it all away from you... But I can’t. And I know I can’t.”

It was getting harder for my dad to speak. He was still trying to whisper.

“You never tell me what’s going on, I never know what’s going on, whether you’re sober or alive or dead or in jail or high. And it’s killing me. It is killing me, Grant. I’m begging you to talk to me. I don’t want to have to bury my son. I love you so much. Please, Son. This doesn’t have to be your story.”

I gripped my steering wheel hard, watching my knuckles turn white, but inside I felt the absence of anger.

All I could think about was the fact that I was numb. I wasn’t high enough. And I was slowly killing my dad. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t.

I removed the magazine from the gun and set it on my floorboard.

G.C. Osterlund earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University, where he started piecing together his addiction memoir. His background in construction engineering, fly fishing, and drug abuse leads to a Pandora’s box of events that can only be told by the writer himself.