Creative Nonfiction Archives

SMIONAGAR by Catherine O’Brien

October 3, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

CW deep griefSmionagar (Irish word meaning shattered fragments or pieces). It is an orchard bathing in fog but you would have described it as a swatch of your life receiving its daily powdered kiss. It is a ramshackle house, your former home, but you would have said it’s where you learned that some parasols don’t always give shade to their own suns. It is the anger that you are gone and that the sunrise doesn’t have the decorum to abandon its rays. It is having no jurisdiction over when and where your unpunctual and formidable smile will thaw the freezing demesne of my grieving mind. It is silly, insignificant things like knowing we pronounce vase and scone the same way. It is the crying shame that not all saw the elegance of your ballerina’s legs as they danced. It is lazy, useless afternoons and the even longer nights that were talked into morning. I never told you that smionagar is my favourite Irish word but only when I’m in a tenebrous mood. It is those conversations we shared that were carbonated by the soda stream of realising we were for all intents and purposes the same. It is those laughs forged by the abstract silhouettes of others’ otherness and our similarities in reverse. It is the free-wheeling anarchy of a concert featuring a violinist on the triangle. It is recognising in hindsight that every moment shared was an occasion. It is all the obsolete joys when the world is devoid of the waterfall of your gentle voice. It is life’s cruelty that refuses to let it scrape its dishes. It is the privilege of calling myself your daughter. It is the defenestration of futures and their gradual replacement with forevers. It is knowing that nothing but love beautified the landscape of your mind as it died.

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SOME BRIGHT FUTURE by Jason Hardung

September 30, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

Ten years, Dad broke his back for the railroad for ten years and they laid him off, leaving him unemployed with a new mortgage and us two boys to raise on his own. My little brother Jeremy and I became the poorest kids of our middle-class neighborhood. The unnurtured ones, the unsupervised ones, the ones who strayed the streets in the middle of the night. Feral beasts snapping at the moon. The ones sent into the store with a book of food stamps while our father waited in the car. And when we objected, because we had pride too, our father would say, “It doesn’t matter to me. You guys are the ones who want to eat. If you don’t want to eat, then fine, don’t use them.” We did want to eat. We were always hungry. This was around the same time I realized something was wrong with my balls. Not every morning, but most, I’d wake up with a dull pain in my gut. Not enough to be debilitating, just enough to be uncomfortable. And sometimes when I walked, I could hear a suction noise coming from down there. That was the worst part. A faint pulling a shoe from the mud-type-sound that I hoped nobody else could hear. At the time I was navigating through the beginning stages of puberty when everything is a bit strange anyway and I hoped this problem was just another symptom of becoming a man, like getting hair in places I never had hair before. But one afternoon I found the courage to bring it up. While getting dressed in the city pool locker room with my friend Ryan, I asked to see his balls. “To compare,” I said. And like a good friend, he obliged. His were both the same size and symmetrical and they were small, barely even there. Totally different from mine. I only had one, one gigantic ball, the size and shape of a mango. Even if I wanted to get it checked, Dad couldn’t afford the doctor, not without the insurance he lost with his job. Medical care was no different than a new pair of Jordans to my brother and me, just another luxury we couldn’t afford. Dad was constantly stressing about all the things we couldn’t afford. It was his version of preventative care. Staving us off with guilt prevented us from asking for things. Besides, what child wants to go to the doctor? My parents, like most, charged hard into the Win-One-for-the-Gipper-Day-Glo-Nuclear-American-Grudge-Fuck of the 1980s. They bought our first home the summer before I began grade school. No more trailers or cramped apartments for us. We were moving on up! As I’m thinking and writing about those early days on Everglade, it’s the smells that return more than anything. Milkweed, sunflowers and sage, the rain, creosote from the railroad tracks, smoke from mom’s Marlboro Lights. Pioneers smelled many of the same things, I imagined. The Oregon Trail crossed less than 100 miles from there. Perhaps the pioneers thought of it as the smell of some bright future, the way we did. We lived on the last street of the sub-division. Beyond our backyard was all prairie. Standing on the back deck, you could see the Great Plains unfold clear into Nebraska. That first summer in our home I saw a tornado back there. The sky turned from blue to black. The rain came down in sheets, then the hail. Just as quickly the rain and hail stopped and it became deathly quiet. A funnel poked out from the clouds. Just a little tail at first, but it kept stretching and reaching until it touched the horizon and it would suck the earth up into it and get bigger and louder until it sounded like a freight train was going to come barreling out of all that dust. Mom’s eyes widened with panic. So wide and blue. I noticed a vulnerability in her I had never seen before, like maybe she didn’t know what to do. This frightened me as much as the tornado. Parents always knew what to do. Dad was out of town cleaning up a derailment somewhere out west. Mom was our only protector. She hurried Jeremy and me under the stairs. She asked what two things we wanted to save in case everything blew away. I wanted my plastic cowboys and Indians. She ran upstairs and got them, along with her Marlboro Lights, a radio and stuffed animals for my brother. We stayed under there until the DJ on the radio said it was safe to come out. Some homes were left with their tops peeled back and some weren’t left at all. People stood in the wet street sobbing. One screamed, “Dear God please!” I wanted to tell him it was God's fault in the first place. How did he not know this? I was just a dumb kid and I knew. It was only a couple of months later when I caught Dad bawling on the back deck. The first time I’d ever seen him cry. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong but deep in the tissue of my heart I felt a sadness, a loss—like things would never be the same. Seeing my dad cry knocked my world off axis. I witnessed a secret world, the adult world, a world I wasn’t meant to see. One where your parents aren’t bulletproof. By that winter, they had split-up, living in different places. Dad took custody of my brother and me. We stayed in the house while Mom moved across town to a small basement apartment.Seventh grade would be starting soon. I’d be in a new school, with new kids and a chance to mold my own reputation. To do that, I needed a pair of parachute pants. My mind was set on them. I had many fantasies of the nylon swish swishing as I walked down the halls of Johnson Junior High. The other students whispering to each other, Is that kid from the big city? I bet he’s a professional break dancer. I begged Dad for weeks for these pants. “For back-to-school clothes,” I said. And I think he saw how important they were to me, because he took me to look for them. We found one pair in all of Cheyenne that were cheap enough for him and small enough to fit my puny waist. Of course, they weren’t the real Bugle Boys, just knock-offs. I didn’t care. Anything not hand-me-down, was designer to me. When I got them home, I found a small rip in the crotch. I was disappointed but I kept my mouth shut. If I told Dad, he’d force me to take them back. Like I said, they were the only pair, anywhere. One day I was just messing around and I pulled my big ball through the rip—a furless rodent squeezing through a quarter-sized hole. A big furless rodent with protruding veins all over it. That’s what it looked like. We’d be walking down the street, or down the aisles of the grocery store and I’d have that one ball hanging out of my parachute pants just waiting for my friends to notice. When they did, I’d pretend I didn’t know it was hanging out, they’d laugh, then I’d laugh even harder and we’d feel better than before, because laughing releases feel-good chemicals in the brain. And I was really hoping one of them would say, “Hey mine looks like yours.” Then I wouldn’t feel so alone. And I guess it worked because one night, my brother confided in me that his balls looked like mine. He showed me, and it was true. They were like mine, only smaller. Which made sense, since he was two years younger. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell anybody and I promised. I felt some relief knowing I wasn’t all alone. It wasn’t one of those “one in a million” deformities. To register for seventh grade, students were required to get a physical. Dad had no choice but to fork out the cash. I’d heard the horror stories from older kids. Tales passed down from generation to generation. A creepy doctor forcing them to pull down their pants and cupping their balls in his long arthritic fingers. “Cough,” the doctor would say. And he’d say it with a cigarette hanging from his lips and the cigarette’s long ash would be about to fall on the floor. And what if when he told me to cough, I got hard? Could penises tell the difference between the hands of a doctor and the hands of a lover? In those days, before the internet, a black and white photo of a woman wearing a bra in a JC Penney catalog would get me hard. But if I got hard when a man touched me, that would mean I was gay. In Wyoming, in the 1980s, gay was not normal, but doctors who smoked were. I don’t believe much has changed. The Urgent Care next door to Kum and Go was running a back-to-school deal on physicals, only $19.99. I cut the coupon out of the paper and Dad drove me over one rainy afternoon in August. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “What about tax?” I asked.“Doctors don’t charge tax,” he said. “And tell them to hurry. I don’t want to be sitting out here all night,” he said. “I’m not going to tell the doctor to hurry,” I said as I got out. Dad sat in the truck and listened to 850 KOA Sports Talk Radio, Home of Your Denver Broncos. My heart was pounding, thinking of every terrible outcome. What if it’s a cancerous tumor? Or a stillborn twin that somehow got trapped in my scrotum? A nurse checked my vitals. She said, “Don’t be nervous honey.” A doctor appeared, almost as ancient as the one I imagined. My balls gurgled. I wondered if he could hear it. He tapped my knees with a small rubber hammer. Held my tongue down with a stick. Put a cold stethoscope on my back. Dumb doctor shit. Then came the words I feared, “Drop your drawers young man.” My face got hot and my hands went numb. It took me a minute while I fumbled with the zipper of my parachute pants. I didn’t have any clean underwear, so I didn’t wear any. As soon as I pulled them down and the doctor saw, he said “Something isn’t right.” I played ignorant. Real sheepish and dumb. I said, “What do you mean?” He palmed my testicle and instructed me to cough. I coughed like this: Ach, ach. He shook his head, pushed the ball up into my stomach and held it there. “Does this hurt?” he asked.The pain knocked the breath right out my lungs. “Yes,” I squeaked. He told me to lay back on the bed. Paper crinkled under my bare ass. He squeezed my ball between his thumb and finger and asked if that hurt. Frantically, I nodded. I wanted to hit the son of a bitch. “Young man, speak up.” “Yes, it fucking hurts. You’re pinching my balls,” I said. He told me to watch my language and called for the nurse and the nurse came and he told her, “Put your hand right here.” She held my ball in place while the doctor poked at my stomach. Don’t get a boner, don’t get a boner, I kept telling myself. She wasn’t as pretty as the girls in the JC Penney catalog, but her hands were soft, she smelled good and she was the first woman to ever touch my bathing suit area. Then I told myself not to fall in love. It just wouldn’t work. We were at different points in our lives. When she bent over, a small silver pendant, a cat, dangled in her cleavage. It seemed so warm and comfortable in there. I wanted to burrow down in there, curl up and take a nap. I had to stop looking before I did get turned on. So I thought of my step-grandaddy instead—his yellow teeth, the hair jutting from his nose and ears and the way his boobs sagged when he’d walk around the house with his shirt unbuttoned. The doctor shook his head, sighing as the examination went on. He seemed annoyed that I had a real medical problem, that I was making him work for his $19.99. He asked where my mother was. I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen her in a month or so.He asked how I got there.I told him about Dad in the parking lot listening to 850 KOA Sports Talk Radio. He had the receptionist fetch him. When Dad came in I was still on the table with my pants down, the nurse resting her hand on my thigh.“This young man has an inguinal hernia. Most likely it’s congenital. When his testicles dropped, the hole in the tissue never closed back up, allowing his intestines to fall through the muscle into his scrotum. It looks like he only has one testicle, but there are two in there. Bottom line, he’s going to need surgery,” the doctor explained.“How much does that cost?” Dad asked. “I have no idea,” the doctor said. “I’m not a surgeon.”“Are you sure he needs surgery though? Could he just grow out of it?”“Into it,” I said. “My ball is big. I’d have to grow into it.” The doctor paused, his eyes straining over the rim of his glasses. “Mr. Hardung, if his intestines tangle and rupture, it would poison his whole body with waste. He could die. He’s lucky it hasn’t happened already. I can’t give him the go ahead to participate in any physical activities until this thing is fixed.”The pain on Dad’s face, I was feeling that way on the inside, and not just from the hernia. He was stressing over money. On the way home I was going to hear about how we didn’t have any. I was angry at my body for putting this burden on us, for making me uglier than I already was. Puberty was hard enough without the Elephant Man dangling between my legs. I was also really scared. I didn’t want to go at this alone.“Jeremy has one too,” I blurted.“That’s not funny,” Dad said.“I saw it,” I said. The doctor told the nurse she wasn’t needed anymore, and she walked out of my life. I kept looking towards the door waiting for her to turn around and say, “Wait, we can make it work,” but she never did. Dad took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Can I pull my pants up now?” I asked. The doctor said, “Why are they still down?” Then he warned me not to participate in any “rough housing,” until six weeks after the surgery and I said I wouldn’t.As soon as we got home Dad confronted Jeremy. “Pull down your pants.”“Why? I didn’t do anything. Are you going to spank me?” Jeremy asked.“I just need to see something.” “See what?” “Are your balls fucked-up like his?”Jeremy glared at me. “You promised. You baby.”“I’m saving your life. That’s what I’m doing,” I said.“If you don’t show me, I will spank you. This is important. Pull down your pants.”Jeremy argued, but he pulled them down. Dad looked. “They seem fine to me,” he said.“Get closer. Look, they’re just like mine,” I said. He bent down for another look. Once he saw that I was right he threw up his hands. “Well, I’m fucked. Why didn’t you guys ever say anything when I still had insurance?”“Four years ago? I was eight and he was five. How were we supposed to know?” I asked. “Well, how am I going to pay for two surgeries?”Jeremy said, “I’m not having surgery. You don’t need to pay for me.”And I said, “Then your guts are going to get tangled and leak shit into your whole body. Your shit is poisonous. You realize this, don’t you? You’ll die. Is that what you want?” “I guess I’ll die then.” Him and Dad went on arguing while I snuck off to go play tackle football with the super religious kid next door who had one shoe with a tall sole and one shoe with a normal sole, on account one leg was shorter than the other. Then the time came to check into the hospital. I’d be missing the first week of junior high. In some ways it was great, because I was scared to start a new, way bigger school and wanted to put it off as long as possible. On the other hand, by the time I started, the cliques would be formed, everybody would know where their classes were, where they sat at lunch, who their teachers were. I’d be so far behind. After all the nerds had already been tormented for a week, here I’d come, a brand-new nerd. I’d be the nerd the other nerds picked-on to make themselves feel less insecure. Jeremy and I shared the same hospital room. They wheeled me off to the operating room first. The anesthesiologist counted down from ten. Six was the last number I remembered. When I came to, I was naked and thirsty in a brilliant, white room. My skin was stained yellow from my belly button to my knees. Iodine, as I later learned. The two pubic hairs I had been growing out were shaved off and a row of ugly stitches ran across my groin. A person in blue scrubs and a mask hovered upside down, above my face. She said, “You’re done,” and stuck a sponge on a stick in my mouth. Three hours had gone by and I couldn’t recall one second of it. As I became more coherent, the more my body hurt. They wheeled Jeremy into surgery as they were wheeling me out. When we were both done and back in our room, an old lady brought us pillows with tiny storks on them. Her old lady group made them for sick babies to make sick babies feel better. But I think it made the old ladies feel better, like they still had something to contribute to the world. Selfish old ladies always thinking of their needs first. Jeremy was already up, waltzing around the room, fucking around and laughing. Me though, I couldn’t get out of the bed, felt like I took a shotgun blast to the groin. Both Mom and Dad were there, on opposite sides of the room, the first time they were in the same place since they divorced six years earlier. The surgeon popped in to explain his procedure. He wasn’t sure who to address, looking back and forth between the two. The resentment they held for one another was pent-up in their faces. And it hit me, the four of us probably would never be in the same room again unless me or Jeremy got married or died and I thought back to the tornado bearing down on us and Mom running upstairs to get our favorite things and how I never questioned if she’d make it back. I knew it would take more than a natural disaster to keep her away then, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. Seeing them still hating each other like that and all the times I heard them talk bad about each other made it apparent that love wasn’t guaranteed to last forever. Love is a pair of parachute pants. Holes form, we grow out of it. And I couldn’t help but wonder, would they stop loving me one day? A nurse came in, lifted my gown and checked on my balls, in front of my parents, my aunt, uncle, cousins. I think my grandma may have been there. They all got to see. Then the nurse asked about the pain, on a scale of one to ten.“Ten,” I said without hesitation. The nurse stepped out for a bit, she came back with a bag of liquid and hooked it to my IV. Morphine Sulfate, I heard her mention to my parents. It went, drip, drip, drip. My blood went from cold to warm. How spilled ink consumes not just the surface of the paper but the fibers inside it. I could feel it enter each cell from one side and push the pain out the other. The fear and worry I usually carried was gone. For the first time since I could remember, I didn’t give a shit. About my clothes, my balls, about who loved me and who didn’t. I was numb. I was a cloud. I wanted to feel this way forever.

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DEALBREAKERS by Rachel Dorn

July 17, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

Would you date a dying girl I type in the message box. My thumb hovers over the send button. I hit delete.What are ur dealbreakers I type instead.

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We don’t say terminal anymore, Janessa, my support group leader, says on one of our monthly Zoom calls. We say incurable. Because, you know, people can live a long time with this now. What doesn’t need to be said is that not all of us will.

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In the months after I find out I have an incurable heart and lung disease, I spend a lot of time thinking about a man. All my journal entries mention him. I spend pages dissecting our FaceTime calls, the look he gives me when I say I have to go, his insistence that I call him right back, trying to mine for proof that he really loves me. That I am still lovable, despite this.

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When I met T, a few months before I got sick, I Googled his name. The first result was a missing person report from several years earlier, accompanied by a thumbnail photo of him smiling in a black sweatshirt. Last seen in the Pine Bluff area on October 31st, the caption said, anyone with information about his whereabouts please contact the Pine Bluff Police Department. I took a screenshot and sent it to my friend: is this a red flag

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The heat in my apartment went out for three days the winter I met him. It was as cold as a Minnesota February gets; I’d been sleeping in my heavy-duty down coat and two pairs of pants, creating a ring of space heaters around my bed. He lived an hour away, across the Wisconsin state line, but he told me he’d come lift my spirits and he did. It was snowing; we ate takeout tacos in bed, drank bubbly from the bottle, curled together under the covers watching The Sopranos on my broken laptop. My bedroom was all windows—nine of them—and I always said it would be the worst place to be if a tornado struck in the night. It was the best place to be when it snowed.

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T made it clear from the start that he was someone who could never be pinned down. The attraction was undeniable, but it was our conversations that thrilled me–a nonstop game of verbal ping pong. I remember thinking I could banter with him for the rest of my life and never get sick of it. At the end of a weekend together, I found a little baggy of mystery pills in the drawer of my nightstand—Valium, maybe, left there by another man—and offered them to him. He swallowed a handful all at once and left. A couple hours later he called me. I’m fucking floatingggg, he said. And that’s how I felt too. Like I was floating.

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T FaceTimes me from a hotel in Los Angeles. He FaceTimes me from a hotel outside of Ruston, Louisiana. He FaceTimes me while driving a Benz through Cherry Hill, New Jersey. In the wake of a breakup with another man, too sick to do much of anything, I’ve moved in with my retired parents. I answer his calls in my childhood bedroom with its teal walls that my sister and I painted when we were kids and our mom never painted back. I live my entire life between these walls now. You gotta get better, he says, so you can run around with me.

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Out of boredom I download a dating app, then delete, then redownload. I’m swiping past people who are doing everything I can’t do; looking for a woman who can be someone I’ll never be again. An adventure partner, a travel buddy, someone to hike the Pacific Crest Trail with. How do I tell them that the most adventurous thing I’ll ever do with them is meet them in person?

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I match with a cardiologist on one of the apps and when he messages me I say I wish my cardiologist looked as good as you and he says lol do you actually have one and I say yeah and he says oh dang do you have an arrhythmia or something and I say nah, pulmonary hypertension and he unmatches me. Relax, I want to say, it’s not contagious.

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I have to call an ambulance one afternoon in July, after the diagnosis but before the meds start working, because my heart is going berserk. 180 beats per minute and I’m struggling to breathe. Four EMTs show up to my parents’ house and one of them is the hottest man I’ve ever seen. In the back of the ambulance I accidentally flash my tits to all four of them while they’re hooking me up to the heart monitor. It’s SVT, one of them says to the others and then the hot one hands me a syringe and tells me to blow into it. We’re gonna go fast, the driver says, turning on the siren as we bolt through the streets of Saint Paul and I’m on a stretcher, blowing into the syringe, over and over, and the hot one tells me I’m doing great and squeezes my hand and I’m thinking am I going to die in the back of this ambulance and I’m thinking this is the most humiliating moment of my entire life and I’m thinking I wonder if he’s single.

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When I tell the men from the apps that I have pulmonary hypertension, after a perfunctory that sucks, I’m sorry their responses depend on whether or not they’ve heard of the disease. If they have, and they know a little bit about it, they invariably ask if I take Viagra (yes, three times a day) and if it you know…does anything (no, not in women). If they don’t know anything and I explain that it’s a pretty debilitating heart disease, they want to know if I can still engage in, um, activities (maybe, not with you).

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I read a New York Times article about dating with chronic illness and then I read all 277 comments. I’m looking for recognition, some confirmation that I’m not alone. In the midst of people proclaiming that essential oils cured their husband’s chronic Lyme and others arguing over the right time to reveal a disability, a woman with a rare blood cancer shares a story about a date she went on. When she mentioned to her date that sex was risky because an infection could kill her, he was convinced she was exaggerating. He told me he felt so sorry for me that sex could prove problematic, but never mentioned that he felt sorry for me because I had terminal cancer...it soon became apparent that he would rather have incurable cancer than not be able to have sex.

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I wonder if it’s best to play my cards up front, to let them know what they’re getting into before we even match. In my bio I write I have a terminal illness, looking for my A Walk To Remember arc. Then I wonder if this defeats the purpose; anyone who's seen it knows that in that movie Mandy Moore’s character doesn’t reveal she has leukemia until the boy has already professed his love for her.

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Over text, T and I reminisce about the bad emo music of our youth. He was a star football player in his small Louisiana town, I was a bookish Catholic school girl, shivering in my uniform skirt through long Midwestern winters, but our short-lived emo phases somehow synced up. Remember this one? He sends me a voice note, serenading me, screeching the words to Your Guardian Angel by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus: I will never let you fall / I’ll stand up with you foreverrr / I’ll be there with you through it allllll

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We all have our baggage, my therapist tells me. I don’t think it makes you undateable. I’ve put on makeup, for the first time in weeks, to meet her in the portal. She starts talking at length about her husband’s struggle with addiction, about how you never really know what you’re getting into with someone anyway, because things change. I look past her, fixating on the unmade bed in the corner of her screen. If you don’t know, you don’t know, but if you do know, you can avoid it, right?

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I ask the girls in my support group what they do about dating. A lot of them are married and I secretly resent them, but a few of them are single. I don’t, K says with a laugh. She’s the one I relate with most: we’re both in our early 30s, both had to move back in with our parents, both got broken up with by our boyfriends when we got too sick. Maybe it’s possible to have a partner that sticks it out with you, if they love you enough, but getting someone to sign up for this, well, it’s just a whole different thing. Everyone agrees.

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T slipped out of my life as quickly as he slid into it, that first winter. By the time I heard from him again I had a new boyfriend and a mystery illness. I told him about both. Our friendship rekindled, but I kept him at an arm’s length, trying to dim the switch on that light that came on inside me whenever we talked. He was moving out east soon and wanted to see me before he left. I said no, I can’t, I’m with someone. When I started to feel the cracks in my relationship deepen, I told him that too. I don’t think he loves me, I said. Well I love you, he replied.

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In the aftermath of my diagnosis, I tell T that it’s been proven that women who become seriously ill are more likely to be left by their male partners than the other way around. That’s bullshit, he says, most divorces are filed by women. Not in this specific scenario, I say. Men don’t like to be caregivers. I sent him a link to an article about it; there's a picture of the baseball player Albert Pujols, who left his wife after she had brain surgery. That doesn’t count because he’s famous, he says. I say okay and send him another article about women with terminal cancer being left by their partners. You don’t have no cancer man, he says.

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Months earlier, while still searching for answers, I read Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, which chronicles her own diagnostic journey with a complex chronic illness. She talked about the shame, as an ill person, of needing other people so much, both in concrete, material ways, and in the need for recognition. I felt a profound sense of betrayal that he did not seem to feel the urgency of my suffering, she wrote of her husband, who rarely accompanied her to doctors’ appointments. It is hard to be the partner of someone ill, at once close to the problem and permanently on the other side of the glass from it. I read these words at night, next to my boyfriend, B, who was trying to understand, but who would always be on the other side of the glass.

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A month and a half before I got diagnosed, when I was too weak to walk up the stairs to my apartment and didn’t know why yet, B dumped me. It sounds bad, to say it like that, because by then I didn’t blame him. It was my idea. I could tell he felt trapped but was afraid to abandon me, so I gave him permission to and he took it. I was already sick when we met a year earlier and had spent a good chunk of our year together searching for answers—in the fluorescent light of dozens of exam rooms, in the test results tab of my MyChart app, in the archives of niche Reddit forums. Our whole relationship felt like a series of things I wanted to do, but couldn’t, while he hung around on the sidelines of my pain feeling helpless. We might have been right for each other if we’d met under different circumstances, if I’d gotten better instead of worse. But we didn’t, I didn’t. I was heartbroken for a week, and then I was too sick to care.

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In the week between when we decided to break up and when he moved all of his things out of my place, we had sex one last time. For closure. The whole time I wondered if it would be the last time I ever would.

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The thing that nobody warns you about having a heart disease is that it makes it impossible to **** ***, I tweet. I consider bringing this up with my cardiologist, but decide I would rather die horny than tell a 75-year-old man what my heart does when I get aroused.

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A popular Instagram fashion brand is advertising a tiny brass pill canister embossed with the word Viagra. The algorithm shows it to me over and over until eventually I buy it. Beautiful women take Viagra has become my little motto, my bit with friends and family whenever I pop one in their presence. If I’m going to be taking it for the rest of my life, I might as well own it.

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T tells me that before we can have sex again he needs to see me run a mile. Or do a power clean. Your choice, he says, but I’d go with the mile. Less blood pressure action. I know he’s joking, but I know there’s a deeper part of him that’s a little serious. Okay coach, I say. I don’t want to tell him that these things still feel so out of reach.

*****************

Maybe, I think, the reason T is so important to me is because he was the last person to meet me when I was still healthy, the last person who would ever get to know the version of me that could pop a bottle of champagne after midnight and drink the rest on a lazy Saturday morning, the version with energy and verve and dreams for the future, that could plan a trip to Palm Springs on a whim, that didn’t have to take supplemental oxygen on the plane, that didn’t have to take pills four times a day just to stay alive. The version that could get high without sending my heart into overdrive, that could fuck without sending my heart into overdrive. That could do a power clean, or run a mile, and not think twice about it.

*****************

By late August, the meds are starting to work. I can go on walks again, slowly, in the sticky heat. Senator Amy Klobuchar tweets a picture of herself at the Minnesota State Fair, posing with four shirtless firefighters. State Fair pro tip: You don’t want to miss the Minnesota firefighters. The post has millions of views. One of the men in the picture is my EMT, the hot one. I send it to my group chat and nobody can agree who the hot one is. I think it’s obvious.

*****************

In the fall, I suggest to T that he visit me. I haven’t seen him in well over a year, but lately we’ve been talking all the time. He hems and haws and eventually gives me a half-hearted excuse about feeling as if I’m only talking to him because I’m bored, because of my situation, and that if my life hadn’t slowed down like this I wouldn’t even look his way anymore. I can see through it, and I press him, until eventually he admits that my lack of mobility isn’t compatible with his lifestyle of spontaneity and constant travel, that we could never be together because of it. I’m gutted, angry, ashamed. Most of all, as much as I want to believe he’s wrong, to change his mind, I know there’s some truth to his words.

*****************

T was there; when I knew I was sick but everyone else was starting to suspect I might just be crazy, he had a plan for me, an investment in my recovery. Stop eating this, start eating this, everything from scratch, spring water only. You don’t have room to slack, he told me. I rolled my eyes. Deep down, though, I was grateful that someone cared enough to want to help, to not just shrug their shoulders like my doctors had been doing for months. And when my MRI report said myocardial fibrosis and right ventricular hypertrophy and I landed in the hospital, when I lied flat on an operating table with a catheter in my heart and saw the grave expressions on my doctors’ faces, when he texted me how did today go lil mama, when he called me immediately after I told him, when he looked like he might cry on my phone screen, I felt it. But there’s a limit, I’m learning, to what some people can bear.

*****************

I long for a love that is not contingent on how well my body is working, one that understands how this illness makes both spontaneity and planning ahead more difficult, that celebrates the wins and grieves the losses alongside me. In one of my pulmonary hypertension groups, a man is posting updates about his wife’s double lung transplant recovery. She’s up walking today! or Well, we had a bit of a setback. I wonder about my future, if I’ll ever need one. I wonder what it would be like to go through it alone.

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WHAT THE BODY WOULD NOT HOLD by Liana Meffert

June 19, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

(Spring)We have to count several times to get the numbers right. There are so many. Superior right buttock, inferior left buttock, and flank, right temple, right chest, left lower leg, and thigh. And when the counts agree, we sit down to call his mother, who doesn't answer, but calls back several minutes later. Whether she believes us or not is beside the point; she hangs up. I hate this. Wouldn't you? We call the medical examiner and the organ donation center, who will in turn call her, and then she will begin to believe, or won't. There isn't a checkbox for grief we don't have time to summon. We move on: ten calls to five numbers that don't pick up and voicemails to call us back, soon. He's dead, he's dead, he's dead. Say it with me now. The heart will flop like a waterless fish in my hands, appendages dangle like fins, going nowhere. The lungs, when full, will balloon from their cage, their smooth surface shining like the back of a whale breaking the ocean surface. You will never forget this. I stop living in my body and become another's. The man crumpled beneath a 300-ton tractor whose heart we cajole for hours, with blood, electricity, and the weight of our own hands backed by whatever it is we have left. And when we had failed, or rather, the odds against us too great, we wear a family's thick suit of grief that chafes in the halls and leaves us breathless climbing stairs. I pass them with my lunch for a hunger that is no one's. I want to say, if I stopped eating every time someone died, I would never eat at all. My death, that is not my death, watches his son lean against a wall in the waiting room and finger the blinds while he calls more family. My death drinks orange juice, tastes the salt of a potato chip, then licks it clean. There is so much I lose track. I stop writing it down and that is my first error, though not my last. It feels like one long sleep, a feverish night, the sweat caked to the back of my old high school T-shirt where a Viking (our mascot) lays plastered to my chest, cracked from laundering and soaked in solidarity. I lose touch again, and again. Where am I? It is afternoon, then evening, then early morning again, and I am asleep, or awake, or going to sleep, or rising to meet the failing sun. The body lives on like a broken rearview window, glittering pieces stuck whole. (Summer) A hot summer day in the deep end of a swimming pool. A canister of baby formula. The aqua blue settling in his lungs. Gaze of a dead man. The best way to deliver news is the same way we all want to die—quickly. The baby kicks its chubby legs from the car seat in the corner. The grandson in his swim trunks. I was thinking about how we put up walls to survive and now are squeezed between these four that echo heat like a black asphalt street. The stamp of a wet backside on the chair. Excuse yourself. Shut the door and let them scream a hot yowl of grief. It's not the mind that grief goes to first, but the body (like a single nerve grief traverses) that sinks to the floor. The baby screams. A weather barometer sensing tension in the room. No, it's not your fault, no. Say it again for the people in the back. No one moves to quiet the baby. In the corner in the car seat. I was thinking about the four walls that hold a body like water in a pool. The deep blue of a deep end. Another summer day. I never had a journal when I was kid. That's a lie, though; I had tons, having received multiple every birthday from the time I could write until I was fifteen and maybe a few scattered thereafter. I meant I never had a journal I wrote in. Maybe it had to do with the implication of the gift, that my thoughts could be written down and kept safe with a lock and plastic key I could dangle from a wrist or neck—whatever. I never wanted my thoughts to be safe in that way. Outside in the park a group of men are playing basketball, and when I can't discriminate between their yells to pass it here and hey man, you can't fucking block me like that, I cross the street to walk away. Somewhere between 14 holes in a body and a courtside argument under this quiet sun lies the truth, and on this particular Sunday afternoon, I realize I've lost the ability to discriminate between the two. A child tumbles down the slide, two friends (lovers?) sleep side by side on a picnic blanket with twin bags of produce at their feet. A dog barks at something, and the community garden flowers grow taller, droop over the fence like tired smiles, all of them. Eyes still find a summer day cross-legged on the linoleum floor where we drank beer not because there weren't tables, but because we needed something bigger. There were a lot of ideas back then, and they were fragile. We couldn’t let them fall or look too close. (Fall) A patient is brought in for self-immolation and what has been billed as second-degree burns to his chest with third-degree encircling his neck. (In reality, the burns around his neck cut off just below his ears. These details matter quite a bit; a third-degree burn turns skin into a tourniquet of leather, like a noose around the neck). The man looks resigned in his tattered white Hanes T-shirt. He looks like a man who wanted to die and thought better of it ten seconds too late. He smells of my teenage summer nights. Bonfires on the shore and bad beer you drank just to prove you could be someone else. I was always someone else. The first to plunge into the pitch-black ocean, the white moon winking, cold as ever. "I'm fine," he says, when someone asks. He wants to be someone else. He shivers, his clothes damp with the water he used to put out the fire.My dreams flash big billboard messages, and I wake up wondering what I have missed. Annoyed that I’ve been abandoned to my consciousness. Another catalyst with no plan. My bank accounts are sucked dry; I am 20 weeks pregnant, feeling the surreal swell of my abdomen like a bloated fruit. We are blowing up a circus tent. And anyway, in real life, a loaded pistol slips from the backside of a pocket for the second time this week, and if that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.Time stands still, or rather, it slips through the slats of my fingers. I play with the digital numbers looming over the trauma bay. Crouch down and the 8 loses its horizontal hat, becoming a 4. Close one eye and the 18 becomes a 4. You can take minutes off a life like this. I miss the bakeries back home that shut their doors at 4 pm and run out of the best pastries before noon. They are adamant about the passage of time. Their darkened cafes and belly-up chairs pin me to the ground like a wild animal.I keep telling myself I have to stop running red lights. I will be a better person. I will be nice and smile. I will remember birthdays. I will forgive. I will forget. I won't relive or perseverate on others’ wrongdoings—or my own. I will live a better life. The one I always wanted. The one where I make small talk with the checkout person and learn the name of our mail carrier. I will learn my neighbor's names and remember more than just their dogs. Recycle. To do: Become a person who does not want for so much. A clean kitchen counter. Fresh pair of underwear. A day someone does not die.I fall in love with a man who drives his motorized wheelchair up the center of my street. Two lanes that should be one. No matter, the cars will wait. He has speakers tucked in the undercarriage of his throne that play perennial upbeat 80s music as he hums along and hands out well-wishes like candy. One for you, and you, and you. Sometimes he pulls his friend who gets around on a two-handed engine. The friend hangs on the back with just a few fingers, looking real casual, real cool. They bump to the music, grinning like they stole fun, and let the cars line up behind them, spotlit by headlights. (Winter)Two buildings up from me, it starts with an asbestos inspection. Weeks later, a second sign appears for a new building permit. It's then I realize the windows have been dark for weeks and the children that played outside in the planter boxes haven't been out to play. Even while telling myself it's because of the rain. Counterevidence mounts. The weather spares the sun occasionally to glance mounds of discarded belongings in the alleyway that spill into the sidewalk. Playsets, a trowel, several pairs of jeans, an overturned ironing board projecting an X into the air, a yellow jumper, bloated white garbage bags: their contents poking through like a cartoon where a creature fights to get out. Overnight it snows, and the belongings are covered with a white sheet the way a body is when you can’t wish anymore. When a lung looks like snow packed in the chest it’s called a “complete whiteout.” A chest is quiet without air, a snowstorm silently brewing. The other lung is collapsed: air has become trapped between his lung and chest wall, and it is collecting, pushing his lung towards his heart, and preventing it from expanding when he breathes.I only see this image after he's been dead for some time. It's early morning and we have called Jennifer, the presumed daughter, whose voicemail is alarmingly cheery like she’s warding off people like me leaving messages like this. I'm glad I hang up when I do because another patient has started smoking in 26B, and security is moving slowly to escort her out as she screams and struggles. Nursing shift changes at 7 am, so the department is at maximum capacity with twice the nurses, half of them carrying warm mugs of coffee, and smelling of freshly washed hair or at least the essence of freshness that reminds me of the staleness on my tongue. They line up in parallel so she can be escorted through, and it's like a sort of sendoff, the woman struggling and yelling that she can walk herself out. Other things I forgot until now: how the patient in the bed in the hallway hiked her gown up to her knees with an air of calculated insouciance to urinate in the highly trafficked thoroughfare. Snow, heavy overnight. The wheelchair that goes by, leaving parallel tracks of urine as if to guide future travelers. Environmental Services—one of my favorite hospital euphemisms—called overhead and orange cones set around her bed like a minor traffic accident. The white spell of silence that hangs when the world holds its breath. How she sat back on the bed, her face indecipherable. ( ) There's having a bad day, and then there's getting hit by an oncoming truck on your way to see your daughter, who is getting taken off life support. I pick out pieces of glass lodged into your bloodied scalp. The water meant to dislodge the pieces too fine to see drips into your eyes, and you let it run in rivulets down your face. There's I'm so sorry and there is silence, which this is. It's 2 am, and I've been in the hospital for nearly 24 hours. This isn't about me, but I don't know if the sun ever rose yesterday, if the moon became the promise of a waxing gibbous. I'm tethered only by nursing shift changes (always at 7) and the cafeteria, which opens and closes. The smell of brewed coffee from the adjacent cafe with mockingly limited hours, and the omnipresent aroma of Subway—the only 24-hour food option—not quite food, but not quite something else, that wafts inexplicably strongest around 3 am. The hospital is not unlike an airport in this way: it contorts time as you fumble to replace sky-dwelling anchors, pace the halls when it goes quiet, and finger an artificial bonsai with longing. It seems you are the only thing living here, and the connection is tenuous. I stitch up the open wounds still bleeding. You're not on life support, but that fact is far from a consolation prize. Several hours later, when you have moved up to the floor, a code comes overhead, and I run up three flights of stairs to find you silent again. I call your sister who is on her way to your daughter. The line goes quiet until she asks—no, wonders—aloud: "Should I turn around?" And finally, your body breaks.

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OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES by Brittany Thomas

May 29, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

We drove to Dorset to be alone, not to hunt fossils. We drove south to sit in silence, to read books by bayed windows, to feed a tiny wood stove pieces of the year. We let ourselves be washed by the shoreline, our sore city spirits cleansed like frail Victorians suffering hysteria. What more can anyone ask of an English October? Here the Fossil Wardens beg your help: please take what you find. You see, our fossils make their way out of 66 million years of mud and clay to the Jurassic Coast only to fall on the beach and be re-claimed by the tide. Something calls them forward, calls them home to the sea. And here we interrupt them and call it hunting. Once called snakestones, now called souvenirs. I took home a palm-sized coiled ammonite, but not one I picked up on the beach. I bought this later, for myself, from the museum gift shop after failing my short stint as a fossil hunter. You were better; I complained that the sun was in my eyes at every turn. My ammonite is ribbed like a snail and curls deep into herself as though holding her secrets tightly in her core. She’s an ancient sculpture - geologically ancient - pulled out of deep time. And now she lives with me on my bookshelf, poor thing. I almost want to drive back to Dorset and set her free. She still smells like salt and sand, like the hundreds of shoals she swam through in her heyday. She was born in a tiny shell which she outgrew by stages, building her new rooms and sealing off old chambers as she went. How nice, to grow in one direction and never haunt your old life. Or how doomed – to carry it on your back forever. The mightiest ammonite laden and lordly as Zeus himself. Maybe I hoped there would be answers if we bent close to the sand and stones and spent the afternoon searching for petrified molluscs. Maybe we could exchange shame or sadness or loneliness for something as solid as rock. Part of the beach is taken up by the Victorian rubbish dump where you can find broken glass and buttons and bicycle spokes. The ghosts of other lives, just the suggestion of someone’s hedonism. I was good at collecting trash even if I was bad at collecting fossils. The woman in the gift shop was kind. The Fossil Wardens polish their ammonites before sale. The gift shop sign says which speaks to you and how do you want to be, later. Unpolished, erudite, chosen. We take these things home.

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A LIFE IN PIECES by Jacque Gorelick

April 30, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

A LIFE IN PIECES by Jacque Gorelick

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THE GLOW OF TUNGSTEN by Michael Ward

April 4, 2024 · Creative Nonfiction

Just as there will be a day when I pick up my daughter for the last time, there was an evening when a lamplighter lit his last lamp.

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IMAGINE THE SECOND COMING by Stevie Trujillo

January 25, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

Silencio, our guide whispered.

Just then, we were ambushed by hundreds of orange bursts, swirling and darting in every direction, while thousands more blossomed in the pine branches overhead. The sound of their powder-thin wings fluttering so close to my ears tickled the back of my neck, like angel whispers. I raised my shoulders and giggled.

Adult Monarchs normally live three to four weeks, but the ones that migrate south are part of a special generation born towards the end of summer, called the Methuselah. They live seven or eight months—about nine times longer than the average lifetime.

Imagine living for 700 years.

The butterflies, like us, had started their 3,000-mile journey from the United States to Mexico four months prior. In my mind, we were an inter-species diaspora, escaping harsh conditions. Unlike us, however, the Monarchs would only stay until March when they and their progeny returned north, whereas Tree and I would continue onward in our van to Patagonia. We’d lost nearly everything in the Recession—my fancy sales job, Tree’s investment property, our ability to pay rent and stay solvent. Forced to live in our van to make ends meet, we decided to head south of the border where our dollars would go further, and there was less shame in being poor.

Standing in that storm of endangered butterflies ten years ago, Tree and I felt alone in our failures. But the truth is, we were legion; a whole generation in distress. And, now, I’ve read that researchers at Pew are already wondering whether the coronavirus pandemic will become to Gen Z—our daughter’s generation—what the Great Recession was to us, by which they mean a festering wound that hobbles their start in a ruthless race.

Yet, isn’t what’s coming so much more devastating than that?

On March 14th, we suddenly found ourselves locked-down with our seven-year old daughter in an apartment on Tenerife, a small Spanish island off the coast of Africa. Within days, she began experiencing night terrors—anxious manifestations from not being allowed outside.

“Mama! Mama!” she shrieked, night after night, thrashing wildly with her eyes open. I rushed into her room to help, to hold her, to tell her it was all going to be alright but, stuck in liminal consciousness, she couldn’t hear or see me. She kicked and screamed and choked, her voice strangled in the fight against an unseen monster.

Even now, on our walks through the city, the invisible boogieman hides on hard surfaces and floats in the air.

“Stop touching your mask,” I gently scold.

Unbeknownst to my daughter, the baby of Gen Z, a million people worldwide have already died of the virus while the U.N. warns that the number of people dying from hunger could double this year from the financial fallout of confinement. The boogeyman has presented grownups with a horrifying dilemma: keep the economy open at the risk of spreading disease or keep the economy closed at the risk of mass starvation.

Again, I’m reminded of the Monarchs.

Like the Methuselah who journey far to breed in the sanctuaries of the south, my husband and I are raising our daughter abroad where we can afford to give her a better start in life. Geographic arbitrage, it’s called. And, yet, the Monarch’s path has been overbuilt, sprayed with Roundup and stripped of milkweed, just as my daughter’s path has been paved with crisis. There is no escape; fancy terms be damned. In fact, if we could take the long-view of the biblical Methuselah who lived 969 years, we’d see that this current rupture of our “normal” lives is only a preamble for the Second Coming, Yeats' infamous “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem to be born: the global food shortages, the mass migrations, the devil that scientists under the current administration are forbidden to name. We talk of “flattening the curve” while the Keeling Curve, the graph that shows the ongoing change in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, continues to rise.

As the Earth gets hotter, conditions favor the spread of infectious disease and the start of new pandemics.

Imagine going extinct.

Over the past 20 years, there’s been an 80 percent total decline in the North American Monarch population. As they teeter on the edge of an extinction tipping point—in which numbers drop too low for the species to recover—scientists warn that habitat loss and human-caused climate change are to blame. In fact, as many as three-quarters of animal species could be extinct within several human lifetimes, imperiling the very systems that keep people alive.

Holding these thoughts fills me with dread. Like my child, I, too, wake terrorized in the middle of the night, strangled by an invisible monster. If this pandemic has laid bare one thing, it’s that we’ve yoked our survival to the survival of the economy—and this economy will kill us all. How will we Houdini our way out of this existential double-bind?

To anyone paying attention, the answer is obvious: we need systemic change. Super-size-me, carbon-based capitalism isn’t working. So, maybe what I mean to ask is, by what sorcery will we extricate ourselves from this corporate chokehold to do what’s necessary and right by our children before it’s too fucking late?

The curve is rising.

In the mornings, before we begin our new normal of homeschool and Zoom calls, my daughter sits on her bedroom floor, surrounded by sticks, an empty wine box, and a hot glue gun. When lockdown began, she started mining our recycling bin daily to create something—a three-foot tall sled-dog, an extended family of dragons, a pregnant fairy with a peg leg (the obvious favorite)—from our waste. An alchemist in her underwear, she turns what was base and broken into gold.

“What are you making this time?” I ask.

“A birdhouse. I’m going to put it on the balcony so I can adopt a little bird but not put her inside a cage, because that makes me sad. Birds should be free,” she explains, without a hint of irony.

Imagine a sustainable future.

x-r-a-y magazine

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? by Allie Zenwirth

January 20, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

A

I used to get these pangs of want, filled with unnamable desires. You would find me jumping. You would find me erratic. I want to make something. I want to dance with somebody… I want to feel the heat with somebody… yeah... With somebody who loves me. Я хочу. I want… I want… I want… I don’t know… I want… If you were that stranger at the bar you would ask me, “How do you have so much energy?” and I would say, “I don’t know,” and then jeté away.

Now I’m drained, all my juice is gone. Instead of yelling at people to, “Wake up!” I’m alone in a desert of darkness, amputated, stuck on scalding asphalt, bleeding as I push myself forward by my stumps one inch at a time into a never-ending nightmare. Nobody’s home inside me. My voice is deeper and flatter, allowing my new apartment-mate to clock me as trans:

New Apartment Mate: Can I ask you a question?

Allie Zenwirth: Sure

New Apartment mate: Your voice is very thick

Allie Zenwirth:

New Apartment Mate: (winks, gives thumbs up)

I am in a manhole of wanting to die. The lid standing between me and the street weighs 249 lbs (as manhole covers are wont).

My therapist points out that my suicidality is reasonable.* That makes me feel better.

*he phrases it differently.

B

In the beginning of 2020, Corona Time, New York was the epicenter. I stayed with my Russian professor in Yonkers for a month, and during one particular dinner, as I talked everyone’s heads off about the Community, I got a text.

Father: How are you feeling?

I announced: “Guess who just texted me?” I consumed everyone. “That’s a weird text, right? The first time in months: ‘How are you feeling?’ How should I respond?”

From my father’s perspective, a concern regarding my health was reasonable. About half of the Chasidic community was infected by the virus. He was. My mom was. His brothers were. My mom’s siblings were.

I had a follow up call with my father who said he’ll call me back, but he never did. However, the virus gave my mom an excuse to talk with me again. We hadn’t spoken in a year.

C

For a while, her disembodied voice was a grounding presence. She was someone to talk to when I moved back to my room in Jersey City. A windowless basement room in which I couldn’t stand upright, without A/C, and infested with both cockroaches and ants. Housing-wise, things improved when I paid the extra $150 and moved up to the second floor. I was still unemployed, alone, without many friends.

D

Throughout my years at Sarah Lawrence College, I would be on the verge of homelessness during the winter breaks when the campus closed, relying on the kindness of strangers. During the break my senior year, January of 2019, I called my mother, asking her if she wanted to get together. Just like the year before, she asked if she could think about it and call me back. After three days, she decided she would be down to meet, but just like the year before, it would need to be in secret. We discussed our options and my mom determined it would be as if we were to have an affair. We would book a hotel room.

The following Wednesday morning, after eating two egg and cheese English Muffins I had gotten from Dunkin’ the night before, I looked out the window of a room in Hotel Le Blu and watched as a woman approached the hotel. She had gained weight. As usual she was wearing body-covering dark-colored clothing and false hair.

My mother entered the hotel and came up the elevator. I found her in the hallway, looking lost. I hugged her as if she were a pillow. Going into the room she put down her bags of Greek yogurt for herself and homemade cookies for me and we sat down on chairs facing each other. She got straight down to what she wanted to tell me.

Mom: I love you.

Me: I love you too.

Mom: I like talking with you on the phone.

Me: I like talking with you too.

Mom: I know you are well intentioned, but you writing a memoir has been incredibly hurtful to me. I know you think you’re doing it for the right reasons, but I don’t think it’s ok that you expect me to keep talking with you.

Me: Is it because I am writing about you? I could use a pseudonym.

Mom: Being written about is part of it. You know I’m a private person.

Me: (nods unsure)

Mom: But...

The real problem? I would be writing negatively about the Community.

E

Talking with my mother in the bowels of my basement room was not all bliss. We would argue in almost hour-long bursts. Strangers would look at me strangely as I broke the silence of the night, making laps around my neighborhood, raising my voice in vehemence. She argued that I wasn’t Paul Revere rousing the colonials, that my memoir was not whistleblowing, that I was sharing with the world a warped version of the Chasidic Community, one driven by hatred and personal grievance.

I argued that the Chasidic Community was a place where human rights were being violated.

In August of 2020, when my mother recruited an aunt and an uncle to help refute my claims, when three people telling me that my experience in the Community was my own fault* became too much, I told my mother so. I told her we could continue to speak but I will not be gaslighted. She stopped calling me.

*My mother will laugh. How predictable: another conversation that I warp and misconstrue. What else is new?

F

So now here I am in September of 2020, isolated, with a deadness all too familiar. My feelings blend with those of my still-in-Community-self, the mirage of pain I left behind in 2016, when I escaped. An experience I hoped would never return.

G

In 2011, when I was thirteen, I would sit beside Halberstam, a rabbi who was also a therapist, in the uncomfortable chair besides his desk, waiting. The darkness that had surrounded me since the age of five had turned into a throbbing pain. I was waiting for Halberstam to tell me why. To prescribe me some Advil.

Like a pediatrician walking into a room saying, “Hi, how are you doing?” who would hear a few symptoms then confidently declare, “So here is what I’m going to do,” Halberstam found the problem: it was my parents. They had been putting “interjections” in my brain, programming me to believe that I deserved to be miserable. He implied that I was abused. I had never liked my parents, but I never realized their terribleness. “Oh boy, poor me.”

Halberstam’s abuse theory was not based on anything I said. I found out later that my mother had been seeing him as a patient as well. He must have based it on what my mother told him during her therapy. Something real. Unwilling and unable to tell me the truth, he turned it into something vague, which turned into “my parents are abusing me.” He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was my lived experience. He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was what made me unable to see anything but bleakness.

H

In 2014, after my second hospitalization in a psych ward, at sixteen, my mother and I became friends. Prison inmates. My mother shared that she never wanted me to be born. I was grateful she told me as it meant I wasn’t making things up. For a while, that was all that was mentioned of it. Then, in 2020, during the few months we resumed talking, my mother added that she didn’t want to get married either. She described her increasing dread as the wedding date had drawn nearer.

I

In 2020, when we would be on the phone, I argued that the Community was to blame for her marriage and my birth. The Community made her get married to someone she didn’t know at 18, and made her pump out one kid after the other. But in her mind the fault was her own. She could have decided not to get married and be ostracized. She chose to get married because deep down she wanted to. “We all need connection.” She could have gone on birth control even though she wasn’t allowed to without permission from a judge. She chose to have kids to prove to the world that you can have kids and not love them.

J

Sister Cathleen (Margaret Qualley) is a novice in training at a nunnery in Novitiate (2017). She is intimacy repressed to the extent that she can’t bear hearing the object of her desire, Sister Emmanuelle (Rebecca Dyan), read the bible. One night, Sister Emmanuelle wakes up to a knock on her door. She opens it a crack.

Sister Emmanuelle: (whispers) You can’t be here

Sister Cathleen: (inaudible pleading)

Sister Emmanuelle: Okay

They both sit down on the bed nervous. LONG pause.

Sister Cathleen: Do you remember… Do you remember when you asked what I was starving for? I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me… please… please will you just… please will you just… please I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me... Please… Please… Please… Please will you just comfort me… Please will you just comfort me…

Unable to shut up until she is held, kissed, smothered, and eaten.

I feel that.

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THE COLLAPSE OF A STAR by Jamie Etheridge

January 15, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

We sit in the van parked on the railroad tracks not knowing if the train is coming, or if you are going. You want to die. You said so and we believe you. Momma cries out, “Bill, please,” over and over and we wait, inhale then hold, for you to decide.

It was always like that. Random moments of drama; life or death, on the side of the road. That time in Texas in the middle of the worst blizzard in thirty years. The truck’s engine exploded and we were stuck, freezing, as semis whooshed past on the highway and the truck rocked in the aftertow. ‘Bill, please,” she pleaded as the baby cried in her lap and we huddled in the back of the cab, fingers crackling in the cold.

The FBI mailed out wanted posters. Later, when I finally got the files: thick black lines redacting my childhood alongside the names of the agents who’d tracked you. I found facsimiles of your face, eyes front, turned to the left, turned to the right, and your aliases, pages and pages of them. You were always a good storyteller, a natural whipsaw with a lie.

There were pills and booze and cons. And days when you could hardly get out of the bed in whatever cheap motel and whatever cheap town we’d drifted to, and Momma had to scratch out breakfast, lunch and dinner for us on the $10 she had hidden in her wallet.

There were joys. You driving us through the looming hush of the redwoods of northern California, explaining how the dinosaurs scratched their bellies against the Cretaceous bark. Or the sound of your cowboy boots crunching on the gravel as we followed you to the edge of a cliff in the Cherokee National Forest, your smile wide as the vista over the valley below.

The melancholy of Willie Nelson singing about angels flying too close and your voice, melodic and on key, despondent as a star in an empty universe.

I can still smell the smoke from your Winston King trailing out the open window as we children slept folded against each other like paper bags. The infinite hours, days, weeks, months and years we cruised I-10, each mile bringing us closer to, or taking us further away from, what you couldn’t face.

Then the time in Vegas when you disappeared for two or maybe three days, I can’t remember. We ate cereal and milk and watched endless episodes of Knight Rider and Three’s Company on the small, staticky TV in the motel room. We knew you’d come back. We hoped you’d come back rich or at least with enough money to buy food.

You almost died in Arkansas.

Why do they call it that? I always think of the ark of the Covenant and the followers of Moses. Here are some rules to follow: Never tell anyone your real name (I didn’t know mine until I was nine years old.) Help your mother take care of the little ones. Always stay close in case we have to leave in a hurry. Don’t sass your father or you’ll get a slap. One day when I’m gone, you’ll be sorry.

I’m sorry, Daddy.

The heart attack came on so swiftly that your face turned blue with the pain, and your eyes, already bulging, bugged out and scared us all. The nitroglycerin pills weren’t working and Momma called the ambulance and they took forever to come. Seven children left behind in the motel room, too terrified to talk, hungry and squabbling over the television because at least that was something we could control. They airlifted you to Tulsa and Momma said there would be an operation. They would slit open your heart, chip away at the blockages the way miners dig for gold.

But in the night you stripped the IV from your arm, ripped out the catheter, painting the ICU floor and walls with your blood until they called security and Momma, and she flew to the hospital with your clothes and boots. We woke up in the morning with you in the bed, in the motel room, smoking, your skin like drain water after a fierce storm. We knew nothing and yet understood that everything, everything, was wrong.

You said you dreamed you would die on that table, an open heart at 5am and so you kept it closed. The doctor yelled after you that you wouldn’t live to see tomorrow. 365 tomorrows are what you got instead.

After that you wouldn’t leave the South but circled in a meandering loop between Florida, Georgia and Alabama, between your parents, her parents and other relatives. Life being relative, we knew by then. We stayed close to ‘home’ in case something happened.

Only you were our home, the blazing, burning sun of our universe and when you collapsed finally, sinking in upon yourself, the morphine dimming the light in your eyes, the doctor shaking his head slowly from the doorway, our world went dark. And like planets long orbiting a dying star, we were freed to float away, off into the silent, empty universe, or to collapse ourselves into the hole at the center of the world.

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