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Firstborn Girls by Bernice L. McFadden

Published by Penguin Random House

From award-winning author and creative writing professor at Tulane University comes an intimate and powerful memoir exploring inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters. On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving portrait of a life shaped by family, history, and the drive to be something more.

The Two Finalists for 2025 are:

Finalist & Winner in the Categories of Social Justice, Healing, and Investigative Research:

They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir by Tim Z. Hernandez

The University of Arizona Press

Hernandez continues his search for the twenty-eight Mexican farm labor deportees who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.

Finalist & Winner in the Categories of Identity, Environment, and LGBTQ+:

Good Soil by Jeff Chu

Penguin Random House

A profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm. Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to one another at a time when we seem drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more fulfilling life, this book is a tribute to friendship, to the sacredness of our bond with the natural world, and to how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.

Category Winners:

Category: FOOD

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

Chantha Nguon

Hachette Book Group

An inspiring testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee’s connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.

Categories: LGBTQ+, Family, Resilience

Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found

Nikkya Hargrove

Hachette Book Group

Spent a good portion of her childhood in prison visiting rooms. When her mother—addicted to cocaine and just out of prison—had a son and then died only a few months later. Although she had just graduated from college, she decided to fight for custody of her half-brother, Jonathan.

Category Winner: Literary Prose

Revisiting the Mines: Essays and Excavations

Amit Shah

Paper Lantern Books

A collection of essays reflecting on the past and the lessons and refractions for the present moment. “A love letter to the transportive power of memory, incandescent with hard-earned truths and undeniable prose.”

Categories: Family, Immigrants, American Dream

The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir

Susan Lieu

MacMillan/ Celadon Publishers

An emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream, a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery.

Categories Won: LGBTQ+, Identity, Self-Realization

Frighten the Horses

Oliver Radclyffe

Roxane Gay Books

A trans man’s brave and personal story of self-realization, about a housewife and mother who renegotiates an utterly conventional life that simply doesn’t fit, first to come out as lesbian, then to face the question of his gender identity, and ultimately to become the man he is supposed to be.

Categories: History and Culture

A China Story: Growing Up in Mao’s Cultural Revolution

Ying Qian

Opening Line Publishing

A first-hand account of Mao’s deadly Cultural Revolution and shares her emotional journey of uncovering the truth of the murder of her father, a renowned nuclear weapons expert, by the Chinese military during that period.

Category Winner: Reconciliation

My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir

Adam Gussow

Simon & Schuster

An inspiring memoir about the author’s lifelong quest for racial reconciliation, the love that sustains his interracial family in contemporary Mississippi, and the “Yes we can!” hope for American renewal that fades after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the despair-driven rise of Black Lives Matter.

Category: Healing

Cold in Mississippi: A Memoir of Doctoring, Make Do, and Meaning

Dwaine Rieves

An Unpublished Manuscript

A gay physician explores how fear and the power of science erased the human soul from medicine—and how grief and love led him to reclaim its meaning. Framed by his experiences of growing up in 1960s Mississippi, the author navigates the spiritual costs of caregiving, the private toll of parental loss, and the mystery of how we heal.

Category Winner: Religion

We Carry Smoke and Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion

Melody S. Gee

University of Iowa Press

In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion’s grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises.

Category: Culture

Beloved Strangers

Maria Chaudhuri

Bloomsbury Publishing

Chaudhuri reflects on her experiences as a girl child, a foreign student in the U.S. and later, a young woman, navigating the complexities of home, culture, and the ties that bind as well as release us - from family and friends.

Category Winner: Cultural Identity, African Diaspora

Bush Meat, Polygamy, and Coup D’etats

Joanne Godley

An Unpublished Manuscript

A compilation of lyric essays that chronicle her experiences residing in Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa while working as the Peace Corps’ regional medical director. A national identity crisis in Cote D’Ivoire sparks several military coup d’états and mirrors her own identity exploration as an African American emigree in Africa. Her marriage implodes when she discovers her African-born, American husband is a polygamist, and she learns that skin color alone does not bind one to a continent.

Categories: Memory, Representation, Survival, LGBTQ+, and Queer Identity

What We Remember, What We Forget

Siobhan Harvey

An Unpublished Manuscript

A testament to how, in memory, representation and survival, we endure, evolve, challenge others’ expectations, and overcome personal adversity.

Categories: Racial Reckoning, Identity, Culture

Just Another Native Son

Stone Mims

An Unpublished Manuscript

hybrid work containing, speculative nonfiction, personal essay, journalism, and interviews, Just Another Native Son is a fiery rebuttal to the American post racial myth.

Categories: Identity, Adoption, LGBTQ+ Culture, Race, Reinvention,

Somewhere Else

Dan Cho

An Unpublished Manuscript

A deeply personal and unflinchingly honest memoir about longing, identity, and the search for home. Growing up as one of the only Korean kids in a small Washington town, Dan always felt like he existed on the fringes—never quite invisible, but never fully seen. Under the weight of his father’s relentless expectations and the quiet ache of a life that didn’t quite fit, he dreamed of escape, of reinvention, of somewhere else.

Categories: Recovery, Spirituality, Religion, Trauma

You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir

Dr. Jamie Marich

Penguin Random House

explores the schisms that erupt when faith is weaponized, when abuse collides with the push-and-pull of a mixed religious upbringing that tells you: no matter which path you choose—no matter what you know in your heart to be true—you’re probably damned.

Category: Travel

Writer’s Postcards

Dipika Mukherjee

Penguin Random House

Part travelogue, part memoir, and part commentary, Writer’s Postcards is a collection of essays that examine imagination and culture through the lens of geography.

Category: LGBTQ+ Identity

Encounters With Men

Bob Ostertag

Nomadic Press/Black Lawrence Press

Bob Ostertag writes of the men he has known in stories shot through with deep love and deep violence, sex often at the core. Here, we encounter the worst of the AIDS epidemic and the best of human behavior.

Category: Mothers & Daughters

May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers

Minelle Mahtani

Penguin Random House

Minelle Mahtani had taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she’d moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating news: her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.

Categories: Refugee, Adversity, Coming of Age

The Mango Chronicle

Ricardo Jose Gonzalez-Rothi

RIZE

This is a bittersweet, coming-of-age story about a kid whose Cuban Huck—Finn-childhood is upended by a nuclear crisis, lands him in a place where he feels unwelcome, then he becomes a “Good American” by living in two souls, later seeking his roots by remembering the branches of the mango tree that framed his childhood.

Category: Craft

Imagine a Door: A Writer’s Guide to Unlocking Your Story, Choosing a Publishing Path, and Honoring the Creative Journey

Laura Stanfill

Forest Avenue Press

A writer’s guide that offers a more equitable and empowering prize: information delivered with gentleness.

Honorable Mentions:

Melted Away: A Memoir of Climate Change and Caregiving in Peru

Barbara Drake-Vera

Candid, poignant, and deeply researched, Melted Away is the true story of how a writer at midlife reclaims her agency, and an ardent plea to care for the planet by embracing collectivism and mutual aid.

Model Home

Michelle Polizzi

offers an intimate portrait of the housing crisis in rural Appalachia. Through the first-person perspective of the protagonist, who loses her home to foreclosure at seventeen, readers are challenged to rethink stereotypes of homelessness and poverty in America.

The Belle of Belfast

Anne Marie Foster

Escape from The Troubles in 1970’s & It’s also a remarkable true love story spanning 50 yrs and several continents

No One Crosses the Wolf: a memoir

Lisa Nikolidakis

A powerful memoir about the traumas of a perilous childhood, a shattering murder-suicide, and a healing journey from escape to survival to recovery.

Fi

Alexandra Fuller

a career-defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child.

The Fine Art of Grieving

Jane Edberg

This lyrical, original, beautifully written story is about how, after the tragic death of her adored nineteen-year-old son, she rediscovers the power of art to create an unconventional pathway through grief.

Speak Her Name

Mary Jumbelic

a memoir of pain and triumph. For 25 years, Dr. Mary Jumbelic has encounted female bodies violated, battered, and stabbed.These stories are of the women she has met and the woman she became. They are a source of education, safety, and awareness for everyone.

Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage

Kelly Foster Lundquist

The straight woman who unwittingly marries a gay man is either a laughingstock or a fool—or both—in the popular imagination. reckons honestly with the harm done to both husband and wife by churches that required rigid performances of gender and sexuality.

A Song for Olaf: A Memoir of Sibling Love at the Dawn of the HIV-AIDS Pandemic

Jennifer Boulanger

In this expansive memoir steeped in historicity, author Jennifer Boulanger gifts readers with a moving story about truth and lies, societal upheaval and families in crises, as seen through the lens of a loving sister and insightful chronicler.

Unsexed: Memoirs of a Prostitute’s Daughter

Marina DelVecchio

examines the role that sex plays in the life of one woman with two mothers who introduce her to polarized frameworks of female sexuality.

The Angle of Flickering Light

Gina Troisi

She found solace in restlessness—drinking hallucinogenic mushroom tea and inhaling crushed pills and powders—perching herself on the periphery of danger again and again. Gina finally glimpsed a better life for herself when her grandfather, a man who was a surrogate father to her, became terminally ill. She fell in love with John, a stranger who was utterly familiar, but who was addicted to heroin.

INDELIBLE: A MEMOIR

Deanne Ames

The story of the death of a parent, followed by sexual abuse and emotional neglect, betrayal, and denial; but it’s also a story of how the bonds of love and loyalty among siblings can serve as a guiding light down the path to adulthood, offering comfort and hope when all seems lost.

You’re Too Young to Understand

Liz Fiedorow Sjaastad

Shedding light on the complexities of parental mental health and generational trauma, Liz shares the story of a life led despite the fears of “becoming her parents,” and how she showed up for her parents - and herself - when it was needed most.

I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: Essays

Karen Salyer McElmurray

At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, McElmurray probes her personal history from the stance of different places, perspectives, and vulnerabilities as she tenderly and fiercely searches for acceptance and a place to call home.

Wire Monkeys

Aundria Adams

Nineteen years old and desperate to heal the wounds of an abusive childhood, I was referred to a Jersey City psychologist. Unbeknownst to me, he was a fraudulent con man who, for the next six years, groomed me to surrender familiar relationships for acceptance into his elite cult of patients.

Up From Ashes: The Streets, Prison, and Redemption

Lardell L. Spratt

The life of a young man born into a dysfunctional, single-parent household within the inner city of Detroit. His story is one of resilience in the face of childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, and pain. He eventually found himself on a dark path that led him into “street life.” where he ended up serving nearly two decades of incarceration within the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Your Story Starts Here: A Year on the Brink with Generation Z

Jim Zervanos

An intimate exploration of the challenges, resilience, and unwavering hope of today’s youth in a turbulent world.

Guns Under the Bed; Memories of a Young Revolutionary

Jody A. Forrester

This memoir tells universal truths about seeking a sense of belonging not found in her family with themes of shame, pride, secrecy, self-valuation, and self-acceptance explored in the context of the culture and politics of that volatile period in American history.

Safe Handling

Rebecca Evans

A collection-length poem that weaves family and heartbreak as Rebecca Evans and her disabled son navigate the challenging medical industry, seeking out-of-state heart surgery. Evans, a single mother to three, must leave her other children behind, wrestling motherhood guilt with mother bear fierceness.

We would like to thank everyone who participated and made the contest possible. The 2026 Memoir Prize is now open for submissions. You are welcome to resubmit if your entry did not win this year. A completely independent publication, MemirMagazine is not funded by university endowment or corporate funding. Proceeds from readers and The Memoir Prize funds the magazine’s mission to provide memoir literature free to the public all year.

*Featured Image: “45 DOLLAR MAN” by Alex Nizovsky, Mixed Media: United States One-Dollar Bills x45, Black Acrylic, Canvas. Size: 30″ x 24″ (76 x 61 cm). About: Portrait of 45th President of the United States made from forty five one-dollar bills.

Originally published in Memoir Magazine in Nov 29, 2018 and titled Home. Away From Home, this is the 5-page memoir of Magda, a DREAMer—one of over a million young undocumented immigrants, impacted by DACA and the DREAMAct—who often arrived, at a very young age in circumstances beyond their control. Magda’s story has been masterfully crafted by her friend and Memoir Magazine contributor, (we’ll just call her) Magda X. Their names and locations have been changed to protect the author’s friend, who has received online threats after having mentioned that she is a DACA recipient. Magda is a common enough name, and the X symbolizes the universality of her plight and the fact that she could be just about any DREAMer, anywhere. It is the author’s prayer that Home. Away from Home: Memoir of a DREAMer helps people gain a more in-depth perspective on the lives of immigrants and childhood arrivals in particular.

i. memory

I remember Mexico. I remember drums, trains and what it took to be the cool kid at school. I remember the smells, colors and even the textures of our old house, terra cotta walls, smooth tile floors, bright woven rugs, back when it was the only home I had ever known.

ii. if it helps

If it helps, we can pretend that this is not the case. We can agree that the United States, I mean America, is the only home I can remember.

I was ten, but if it helps you can imagine that I was brought over as an infant, or even a fetus. If the border patrols saw her, would they have shot my mom as she held me in her arms or womb? It’s a lot to ask.

If I was born here, it would change everything. But I wasn’t. All the small hours that make up months and years passed between my birth and when I came here. To my new home.

Before I was born, my mother was mournful of the fact that she’d only had boys. A wise woman told her to conceive in the summer if she wanted to have a girl. It worked.

I was born in Juarez, the city named for my favorite Mexican president. We share a birthday, but that is not why I like him. The deeds, actions and stances of a politician are their only chance at enticement for me. The shared birthday is just a bonus born of coincidence, like anything else.

I started learning about presidents, and most of all Juarez, at the prompting of my dad. It is from him that I learned to measure deeds, actions and stances, including those I was expected to live up to.

My mom and I talk sometimes about the stresses I endure that wouldn’t have been an issue, my fate always in the hands of others. My mind a sea of silent arguments with hordes of voters that take their invisible privileges for granted. An accident of birth in their favor, another coincidence, and I try not to covet them.

All gone, had we stayed. We can only speculate on what I might have faced back in Juarez.

I tell her that I’m glad she moved us here. That if we had stayed, it’s possible I’d be one of those sheltered Mexican girls that didn’t know anything about any other cultures.

I mean it too. Whatever waits for me will not take my experiences away.

At 27, I’ve lived in the States for longer than not. It’s where I had my first kiss, my first period, my quinceanera. If it helps.

iii. mi papa

We would to take the train between our home in Juarez to where my dad worked in Chihuahua. Flowers bloomed out the window. Butterflies committed silent ballets.

My dad was a solitary man, he valued his time to think, but when we got off the train, he would take us in his arms and kiss me on the head. He would hold me and I was home.

iv. fleeing violence

When we came over, he stayed. It was me, my mom and one of my brothers. We were fleeing violence.

I’ve found that those who haven’t experienced it just picture what they’ve seen on the news. Walk outside. Suddenly, bodies in doorways surrounded by slums. Twisted flesh and bone drowning in red puddles. Infinite and heavy. Looking as if landing there was inevitable.

That’s an incorrect perception.

We lived in a nice neighborhood. Jacarandas, joshua trees, lazy ceiling fans and shaded patios through which breezes would meander. One of the things I missed when we came here was our servants.

At first, the violence was over in other areas. Even beyond the slowly changing blocks where the maid and cook traveled from.

To say the drug trade passed through our town lacks specificity. The drug trade was no more in every home in Juarez than human trafficking is in Chicago.

But the bodies crept closer. To the buffer neighborhoods where the servants lived. To the places where we shopped. The violence wasn’t always fatal. Often it was property damage. It could be explained as an anomaly.

Really, it was like the beginning of a cold. Or when one of four lightbulbs in a fixture goes out. Then two.

When collateral damage becomes acceptable, the room dims. The brokenness of the world is no longer the problem of others.

A body down the street makes it apparent whose town it is. Coyotes and runners. Side effects of trafficking, drugs and humans flow on rivers of blood.

I didn’t see the body, but I did see the red runoff of the sidewalk being hosed down. I recognized that the blood could have been my own. That it was us against the world.

Despite the distance mi madre put between us and the bodies, it hasn’t changed that it remains us against the world. It is a borderless truth.

v. fair trade

Mexico is the third largest trade partner of the United States. Volkswagens come from Mexico, as do electronics such as flat screen T.V.s and computer monitors. Medical equipment comes from Mexico.

All of this could be made anywhere. As long as there are workers willing to make it and employers willing to make it worth the worker’s time.

vi. in mexico

In Mexico, the smart kids were the cool kids. So, when we lived there, I studied hard every night. That’s what it took to keep up.

One of the things they taught us was national pride. Once a week we would all go outside and raise the flag while preforming the national anthem. Like The Star Spangled Banner, it’s a war anthem. Mexicanos, al grito de guerra. I was the drummer, but I sang too.

Un soldado en cada hijo te dio!

My brother is a teacher in Mexico. The one who stayed. Even though I’ve lived in the States for more than half my life, his English is less accented than mine.

I have terrible allergies. I didn’t in Mexico.

There I ate local, organic food, although we didn’t call it that and it wasn’t cool. It was just food. It was what was available.

vii. in america

We crossed into Texas, but lived first in Nuevo Mexico, I mean, New Mexico, then Colorado. Everywhere the schools were lacking.

It wasn’t just that ESL programs at the time focused on English too much and other learning too little, it was that even after I was fluent, when I got into regular classes, the kids that slacked off and mouthed off were the ones to emulate.

Being cool got easier just like that. Very relaxing.

viii. labor practices

Throughout most of the year it’s impossible to find a tomato in the grocery store that wasn’t grown in Mexico. That’s for the produce section as well as everywhere else. Cans, salsas and frozen.

Raspberries aren’t difficult to grow in the States. Even still, most of the ones sold in the grocery stores here were grown in Mexico.

Picking fruit is exhausting work and most Americans don’t want to do it. It’s the same for slaughtering animals, which is dangerous as well as being tiresome.

Even those who yell most loudly that we should get out, go home, back to Mexico, don’t back it up with their dollars. And even if they never think about it, they wouldn’t want their kids to take these jobs.

Those ballot-handed shadows, a river separates them, and me, from my unrealized twin. The girl I didn’t become. They are blind to this. So sure of who and what occupies their ever familiar surroundings. Us against the world.

For the record, I don’t work as a maid. I don’t make tacos or any other kind of food, nor do I pick or process it. My brother who lives here isn’t a gardener and he doesn’t work in construction.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these jobs, someone needs to do them. We just found something better. And our mothers don’t really want their kids to take these jobs either. Even if it will be frequently assumed that we have. He is a social worker.

I work for Centura Health, taking calls. Some of my coworkers have college degrees, even if they are in English or the arts.

And I make more than they do because si,habla espanol. But not much. I’m cheaper than the translation services.

ix. dream on

After the election I posted something on social media about being a dreamer. People responded that I should go home. Get the fuck out of their country. They wrote that they were going to send ICE to my house.

My mom and brother live here. To go to any city other than Denver would be to learn a new place. Even if I do remember Mexico, it’s more of a feeling. Since it is of childhood, it is not one returned to.

x. trade relations

Most of the avocados consumed in the United States were grown in California, although in the winter, that’s not true. The climate won’t let them grow all year long in California, unlike Mexico. Growing water costs threaten California avocado production.

Mexico lets the United States store some of the water allotted to them by the Colorado River Compact in Lake Mead. Our water contributes to the weight that makes the turbines beneath the surface spin, illuminating the cities in Arizona, on the west coast and Las Vegas. It’s like banking, but water is the currency.

xi. everywhere you want to be

My work visas are for two years. I can never take renewal for granted, especially this year. I am so nervous that when I am at the consulate reapplying, I forget the Spanish word for identification.

It’s identificacion. The woman processing my paperwork looks at me like I’m an idiot. Not like I’m floating on my back down the Rio Grande, languid between languages, struck by how similar the sky looks on both sides.

While I wait for the paperwork to be processed, my life is headed in two directions. It’s a lot like if your life is headed in no direction at all, but with much more day to day responsibility.

Some days it’s okay. I am going to get to stay in the States with my cat, my boyfriend and my hot Cheetos. Other days I spend rehearsing my deportation.

I brush up on my Spanish, learn more about Juarez, the city and the man, and practice making myself small, just in case I will be living with my father in a house that he had filled up with himself. In that case, it will be okay once I find a job. If I can find a job in Mexico.

Every day I am ready for it to be over. One way or the other.

After I have reapplied for my visa, but before the application is accepted, when there is only two weeks left on it, I talk to my manager about it. I ask her if I should give my notice.

Instead we wait it out. I email all the right people in the company about it.

They don’t want to have to replace me. For my job, the training takes a month, but it takes a year to get good at it. Not everyone who works here ever does.

xii. chief experience officer

My visa is renewed. I have to show it to the CXO. I ask her if I should scan it and email her a copy. She says no, to come on down to the administration building where she works, we’ll take care of it there. Her request leads me to believe that she is not a bus rider.

She takes the new visa from me. Looks at it, front and back. Her eyes move up and down from me to the document several times, comparing my face to the picture. I almost expect her to ask for mein ausweispapiere.

I have nothing to worry about. The visa is mine and it is good. She just wants to make me sweat.

She asks why I got it done in such a timely manner. There were still two good weeks on the old one, this document she’ll never have to produce for herself.

So many people want to make me sweat, I must have magical excretions.

She says it looks good. And tells me that I don’t have to send so many emails next time. If my visa had expired, they would have found out. Magical.

She shakes my hand and walks away.

They hadn’t found out with the last dreamer. When her visa expired it took them weeks to find out. Anyway, what she doesn’t understand is that I hadn’t done it for her or my gracious employers.

I did it for me. To have a record of those emails. In case I needed to use them, if things had gone differently.

xiii. death

My mom calls me in the middle of the night. My dad has died in Mexico.

I get on the phone with the consulate. I need to go to the funeral. They tell me that if I leave the States at all, I won’t be able to return for ten years, to my mom, my job, my life.

My brother, the teacher, gives me as many details as he can about the funeral over the phone. We don’t act like it’s the same as my being there.

If I have to go back in two more years, at least I will be eligible for voluntary departure. Even then, I’ll have to wait ten years to return to my home, I mean, America.

My mom will help with the travel arrangements. My brother will greet me when I get off the train. He may even kiss my head.

We will visit mi papa’s grave. I will think about him and look at places I used to know. I will try to see us there, to find something within myself. I will try to find home.

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Contributors:

AMX

Author Magda X

Magda X is an artist and author of Home. Away from Home, we call it Memoir of a DREAMer, about her friend's harrowing experience and uncertain future as an immigrant and childhood arrival to the USA. Magda X is two women who (for the purpose of this project) share one name in order to protect the privacy of the DACA recipient and focus readers on the universal cause: Immigration Rights for Children. For this is the story of many a brethren, walking a long, cold, and rocky road, far from home tonight, existing somewhere in the in-between. They are all Magda X. And they all matter.

You can find out more here: 7 Noteworthy Organizations Defending DACA That You Can Throw Your Support Behind and here: 5 Things You Can Do to Fight For Immigrant Families. Media inquiries may be directed to the editor of Memoir Magazine and we will forward your request to Magda X.

Artist Alex Nizovsky

Artist, designer, and biologist Alex Nizovsky is passionately focused on the stunning variety and beauty of living organisms. His art expresses the inspiration he finds through photographing and observing insects in their natural habitat. His art project WWW.BUGSUR.COM is devoted to the creation of fantastic worlds of surrealistic creatures based on natural forms. Alex lives and works in Sausalito, California.

Featured artwork by Danielle Hark

The practice of medicine is based on the physician’s ability to gather story from the patient. Our story is our human identity and our humanity. It is also the gateway through which we enter into a relationship with our physician and how be begin the journey to healing ourselves. Appalachia is a birthplace of storytelling through music, through preaching, through food, through craft. Centuries of melancholia and darkness linger over these mountains and the Appalachia I know is a dangerous place for women. The people of the counties I serve have the shortest life expectancy in the nation. No where is there greater need for my skills and knowledge as a physician.

The lives of my patients are completely different from my own. I have never been physically abused or sexually assaulted. Most of these women grew up in chaotic, dysfunctional families in deep hollers with neighbors who weren’t within yelling distance. My patients cannot imagine living in a duplex house in a town like I did growing up. The very idea of living that close to the neighbors triggers their nerves. Many of the women in my practice never graduated from high school. Most have never worked outside the home or traveled more than an hour or two from where they were born. They are intensely curious about my life and experiences I share with them when it feels appropriate to me. In exchange, I ask about childhoods spent running in the woods, about life without indoor plumbing and about families whose brothers, daddies and papaws spent their lives working in darkness of the coal mines. Through storytelling, I can make a visceral connection to my patients that transcends our differences.

I’ve only ever wanted to be a rural, old fashioned, one-stop-shop doc who treated everyone and everything regardless of their ability to pay my bill. I was willing to work for firewood, homemade pie and fresh eggs and couldn’t wait to start making house calls. Now, seventeen years after graduating from medical school, I’ve built a life and practice on those principles. My practice changed me too, and in an unexpected and fundamental way. My patients’ lives – their stories, the chaos, the deprivation – no longer shock me. Brutality and cruelty are woven into the fabric of my patients’ daily lives and so they are in mine too. I am dismayed by the level of turpitude, bizarreness or depravity it takes just to raise my eyebrows. Violence is so pervasive that when I share my experiences with colleagues in practice anywhere else, I realize just how distorted my lenses have become.

I am not cynical or hardened to the pervasive cruelty or the shameful and demeaning treatment of women, but rather, I’ve become accustomed to it. I still can’t control my temper when I learn how or who in the legal or welfare safety net failed one of my patients. I send emails to disinterested politicians and write letters to bureaucrats that never get read. I lobby Frankfort and I vote in every election. I am never without empathy, grief or compassion for my patients and their experiences, I just long ago stopped being shocked by them. I wish I knew when or how I transformed from an ingenuous bookworm, to a veteran doctor with a finely tuned bullshit meter and a journeyman’s knowledge of the Kentucky legal and welfare systems. But there was no sentinel event. It has been an insidious evolution born from years of long days listening to patients tell their stories and my need to make sense of it all.

Knowing patients like these women has fundamentally changed the way I view and practice medicine. Seventeen years ago, when I was just starting my career, I thought being a doctor meant making diagnoses, writing prescriptions, setting broken bones and sewing up split lips. To a certain extent it is, and I do all of those things every day. Those are the mechanics of medicine: teachable skills learned in school and honed by practice. Care of these patients, and hundreds more like them, taught me the art of healing. A patient once told me, “No one ever asked me about my life before. I guess no one thought I was important enough to ask.” Her story included a childhood robbed by years of incest and rape. When I met her as a young adult she was selling or trading sex for drugs. She wanted a different life, but didn’t know where to begin. Telling her story for the first time started the process.

I have a deep and abiding empathy, respect and affection for the women represented in this essay. They are all survivors and they all fought back in their own way. Today, they are in recovery: from the abuse, from the drugs they used so they could forget the abuse, and from a lifetime of deprivation and isolation. They want a better future for themselves and for their children. It is a privilege to know these women and to play a role, no matter how small, in bringing them back from the abyss.

###

Roberta

Roberta stumbled into my clinic, filthy, barefoot and bleeding. She’d been tied to a chair, and beaten and raped by her boyfriend during a drug-fueled fugue. When he finally collapsed, she managed to free herself , then walked two miles to our office, the only medical facility in the county. I delicately examined her bruises and abrasions. Roberta had at least a dozen cigarette burns on her trunk and she was dehydrated. I spoke to her in hushed tones and touched her as gently as I could. No, she had no place to go. No, there was no one to call. No, she wasn’t on any birth control. Yes, I could call the police. Yes, she’d like something to eat. I didn’t ask her if she was all right, because I knew she wasn’t.

When I finished my examination, I walked down to the break room where many of the staff were on their lunch hour. I got out my debit card and tried to ask if someone would be willing to go to the Dollar General to buy toiletries and clean clothes for Roberta. But try as I might, no words came out of my mouth. All I could do was sob.

Over the next couple of hours, we got Roberta fed, hydrated, clean and clothed. I treated her for every sexually transmitted infection I could, gave her emergency contraception and hugged her gently. I handed her an envelope with just over a hundred dollars in it. It was as much as we could collect on short notice. Then I left her in the hands of the sheriff’s office and the social worker from the women’s shelter.

I never saw Roberta again.

###

Wanda

I saw Wanda a few months after her husband Roger died. I asked her how she was coping. “You know, he made me stronger by being mean,” she said. “From the get go, Roger taught me to hang my head. But I decided a long time ago to lift my head up anyways, stop cryin’, and look him straight in the eye. If I didn’t, I couldn’t see the gun comin’ and I couldn’t save myself. Now, I’m strong,” she said pointing to her heart. “I’m strong. I make eye contact at everyone and I smile. I have no fear. I won’t hang my head or cry no more. No ma’am. No ma’am, not me.”

I asked her what she was doing now. “It’s like steppin’ out of prison,” Wanda said. “These days, there’s not a soul between me and the door and the car. So I go. I go even if it’s ten o’clock at night. If I want to go, even if it’s to get a pop or a pack of cigarettes, just because I can, I go.”

With great trepidation and curiosity, Wanda started dating. Through church and the local dance hall, she met and dated several sweet and well-mannered widowers. A man’s kindness was a strange and giddy sensation. She never allowed herself to get intoxicated on affection though, so she wouldn’t be ‘a damn fool’ and marry again. In the last part of her life, Wanda discovered the fun of dating and falling in love. This sixty year-old woman gushed and acted like a teenager during her visits with me. I listened and giggled and pumped her for more details like her sixteen year-old best friend. I could have burst with happiness for her.

But, for all of Wanda’s strength and courage, she never did get used to a man pulling out her chair or opening her door or sitting near her on the sofa. Wanda flinched reflexively every time she saw a man in her peripheral vision.

Thirty years of muscle memory could not be erased.

###

Alma

Alma’s daddy, Vernon, taught her how to shoot heroin when she was twelve. When he’d tired of hustling copper and pawning stolen electronics for dope money, Vernon hustled his strung-out teenage daughter in exchange for Roxie 30s and heroin.

“You wouldn’t believe how many dirty old men there are out there,” Alma whispered to me. A drug deal gone bad left Vernon dead, a vehicle on fire and Alma with a bullet through her left flank. Vernon’s toxic legacy lived on through the Hepatitis C he passed to Alma through the needles they shared to inject dope.

I met Alma, a forty-two year old woman, bereft. Her mother and brother had both died from liver cancer, choosing to forgo treatment at the university medical center two hours away for a couple of quiet months at home, smoking cigarettes, weed and dope until their last days. Alma sat in my office, arms wrapped around her knees, rocking, back and forth, back and forth. There was no bitterness, no self-pity, just grief and loss. She was alone in this world and had no idea what to do next. We talked about her worthiness, about her intrinsic value as a human being. I asked her to think about something that might soothe her. I gave her a few examples, including going for a walk, taking a long bath, coloring or praying. She thought for a few moments, lips puckered, eyes closed.

“I ain’t never had a lay-down tub bath,” she declared, eyes popping wide open. “I ain’t got a water hook-up at the trailer most of the time, and I ain’t got no bathroom no how. I take me a bucket bath on the stove.” She paused, suddenly lost in a daydream. Then she let out a bark of laughter. “I’d be so clean I’d squeak,” she grinned.

Her delight at this absurd and extravagant fantasy made my day.

###

Geneva

Geneva was in a physically and emotionally abusive marriage for 31 years. “My husband would come up behind me with a gun and threaten to shoot me when I went out on my porch to smoke,” she said. Her husband would also wake her from sleep by rubbing the barrel of a gun up and down her body and then rape her with the pistol pointed at her head. He called her a dyke any time he saw her having a conversation with another woman.

“I thought a man was supposed to beat his wife until I started watching Sally Jesse Raphael. She tore my world apart,” Geneva recalled. It was too painful to watch Oprah, she said, because she didn’t dare have that much optimism or hope. Geneva, finally, literally, walked away from her marriage eleven years ago. She filled a laundry basket with the family Bible, a few photos, one of the pistols from under their mattress and four clean outfits. She walked out the door and down the road to freedom. “I lost everything I worked for in thirty-one years,” she told me without regret.

She hadn’t lost everything though. Geneva was hypersensitive to noises, light and unexpected sounds. She suffered flashbacks, nightmares and disturbing thoughts that stole her sleep. She never could turn the lights off in her bedroom after dark. “I’m at war with myself all the time. I don’t ever have no peace.”

Despite my best efforts, I never could bring her a good nights’ rest.

###

Paula

Three weeks into her marriage, Paula wanted to die. Her husband, Dennis, taped the outside of the doors and windows when he went to work, so if she left the house, he’d know she’d gone out. He had cameras installed around the periphery of the house and the property. When Paula was allowed to run errands, she had a time limit in which to pay bills and grocery shop. She was beaten and harassed if she was late. “In three lives I couldn’t do everything that man accused me of,” she said. From time to time, Dennis would accuse her of stepping out with another man instead of running errands, then use it as an excuse to punish her. He would choose one of the family’s dogs and then torture and kill it in front of her.

“It’s queer though,” she said, “when he took the cancer, I took care o’him right up until he got the death rattle. I took care o’him like he was my one and only. I didn’t think nothin’ of it.” She paused and shook her head in disbelief. “Even when he was layin’ there, moaning and fussin’ and waitin’ on Jesus, he couldn’t spare a kindness.” She paused again. “He’ll’ve answered for it though. No doubt in my mind. I ain’t gonna be lookin’ around real hard for him when it come my time to meet Jesus.”

###

Sherry

Sherry was thirteen and living with an aunt because both of her parents were in prison. Sherry’s aunt had a friend who took a liking to Sherry. Each month he paid her aunt to rent Sherry and Sherry’s bedroom. Within a few months, Sherry was withdrawn from school and she had three children with him before she was seventeen. When the man tired of her, Sherry fell in love with a man almost thirty years her senior. She had three more children with him. She was twenty-five when this man left the house one morning and didn’t come back.

Sherry struggled to be a good mother. She struggled to make her way in life without depending on a predator. She wanted a better life for her children than she had, but she had no idea how to give it to them. I asked her if she’d ever considered getting a GED.

“I ain’t smart enough,” she said. “I did real bad in school, and I only went to part of the sixth grade.”

“You ARE smart enough,” I replied.

“You really think I’m smart?” she asked, just like a little kid. “Ain’t nobody ever said that to me before. Ain’t nobody ever said they thought I could do anythin’ other than fuck.”

I sat there a moment, in silence, imagining this woman’s horrific life. Such a simple encouraging statement, a never heard before compliment, and there was the little girl who never learned to read.

“Yes,” I said softly. “I think you’re smart and you have a lot of potential to be whatever you want to be.” I paused. “Sherry, do you understand that it was wrong for your aunt and that man to do what they did? You were a child, Sherry. Your aunt should have been protecting you from men like him, not selling you to him.”

“Oh, he didn’t try to sell me nothin’. We just stayed there in the house. He wasn’t really mean to me or nothin’. He bought me presents and he never hit me none. He was real nice.”

“Do you understand that what he did was against the law? That you were a child when he had sex with you?”

“Kinda. I mean, I know I don’t want my girls to have babies so young, I want them to finish school first.”

“I think that’s a great goal,” I said kindly.

###

Patsy

“Dr. Zook, there’s someone here to see you.”

I saw a man who was probably only in his late fifties, but a lifetime of working in the sun and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes gave his skin deep lines and the burnished color of weathered pine that made him look at least ten years older. He wore bib overalls and a clean shirt and his hair was still slick from the shower. I saw he’d left his work boots at home and put on his polished leather Sunday-going-to-church shoes. His jacket had ‘Roy’ embroidered on the pocket.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Zook. May I help you?” I said, smiling and trying to put him at ease.

“I know who you are ma’am,” he said, with no disrespect. “My name’s Roy Eckert, ma’am. My girl, Patsy? Ma’am, she’s your patient. She’s told me and my wife all about you and about how much you helped her.” He paused and sniffed a bit. “She said you was the one talked her into leavin’ that piece a shit.’

I raised my eyebrows at him.

’Scuse my language ma’am, but there ain’t no other word for him.”

“No worries. But I didn’t talk her into anything; she made up her own mind.”

“Well, she said you fixed her up more than once after that bastard beat the shit outta her and she was too dumb to leave.” He paused, the twitching muscles along his jaw betraying his anger. “Pardon me, ma’am.”

I silently waved a pardon.

“You was the one that got her glasses fixed when he broke ‘em and got her thinkin’ ‘bout goin’ back to school.”

“It took a lot of courage for her to leave. She was terrified. We were both worried she might die, that he might hunt her down. She didn’t want you to worry about her.”

“She don’t never have to worry about him comin’ after her, I’ll see to that.” He shifted his weight and looked down at the floor. “Patsy says you got a youngin’, ma’am. A boy.”

“I do,” I said, smiling. “His name is Sam.”

He bent down, picked up a small wooden bench and handed it to me. “This is for your boy. I got a little wood shop in my garage.” The bench was maple, planed, sanded and varnished so that it felt like satin as I ran my hand along its length. The finished piece was more a work of art than a tinker’s project. “Ma’am, it ain’t much, but, I sure am grateful to you for helpin’ my girl.”

“You’re welcome and thank you,” I said and gave a nod at the bench. “It’s beautiful and Sam will love it.”

“You ever need anythin’, ma’am, you call me. I’m in your debt.”

“Yessir, I will.”

And with a bob of his head, he turned and walked out of the clinic.

###

There is no medicine or surgery that will make these women whole again. I cannot suture their souls, patch up their hearts, or surgically cut out their memories. But I can help restore their dignity and self-esteem. I can help them work through their shame and guilt. I can tell them what remarkable strength and courage they have. I also have resources to share: a shelter, legal aid, psychotherapy, parenting classes. Sometimes I have just what they need in the moment: food, a box of tissues and a quiet space.

I am angry at the perpetrators, the legal system and the families for hiding in shame. I am disgusted by the culture of violence and discrimination and the depraved indifference of so many stakeholders. I am frustrated by the learned helplessness that is so deeply ingrained in these mountains from generations of poverty.

But, I can’t dwell on what I can’t control.

So I will continue to listen to my patient’s stories without interruption or judgement. And I will do more. I will write stories that bring these terrible truths to light. Perhaps one day, through the transformative power of storytelling, my patients will live in fear no more.

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Contributors:

Dr. Melissa Zook

Melissa Zook is a family physician at a rural health clinic in southeastern Kentucky. Her daily medical practice in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky is as complex, varied and mercurial as the topography of the land itself. Writing helps her process what she sees and hears daily as a physician practicing in what The New York Times calls ‘the hardest place in America to live.’ Dr. Zook writes about how she and her patients change each other and about the things that never change. She writes about the poverty, abuse, neglect, violence, addiction, prejudice, ignorance, love, kindness, loneliness and loss. Dr. Zook graduated from Gettysburg College and the Penn State College of Medicine. She is triple board certified in family medicine, HIV medicine and addiction medicine. Dr. Zook has treated over a thousand patients with substance use disorders and is the single largest provider of care to persons living with HIV in Southeast Kentucky. She is married and has two sons.

Artist Danielle Hark

Danielle Hark is a writer and artist who lives with PTSD and bipolar disorder. Her photography and mixed-media work come from her lived experience with mental illness and trauma, including sexual assault, childhood sexual abuse, and the loss of her father to ALS. She is the founder of the non-profit Broken Light Collective that empowers people with mental health challenges using photography. Danielle lives and creates in New Jersey with her husband, two sassy young daughters, two and a half ukuleles, a Samoyed pup, a Scottish Fold cat, and a typewriter named Cori Blue. Her website is: www.daniellehark.com

*Featured Artwork: “Nereide” By Matteo Bona

My newly developed curves seemed to give me a dangerous power over my father and other men, which troubled me because I couldn’t seem to discern its appropriate use.

When I was 16, my father and his third wife split up. By then, she’d been my stepmother for three years. After she moved out, my already abnormally close relationship with my father became even stranger. As a teenager, I felt lucky that my father was the “cool” permissive dad in town. I even counted him as one of my best friends. Putting up with the embarrassing overtly sexual jokes he made when he was drunk seemed a reasonable trade-off for his allowing my friends and me to drink and smoke pot in the house.

Now that he was single again, my father regularly confided in me about the details of his multiple romantic relationships and sought my opinions about his love life. His watchful eye on my developing body grew more piercing and his previously occasional comments on my weight and shape became frequent. The son of a prominent exercise physiologist, my father was a fitness fanatic long before it was trendy, a college gymnast and wrestler. Gymnastics was a passion of mine too, and my father often reminded me of the athletic benefit for gymnasts of staying slim.

“Those jeans are getting a little tight on you,” he said one afternoon during the high school gymnastics season. I winced, remembering that I had skipped a long afternoon run the day before, in order to finish the first draft of my college application essay.

“You don’t want that extra weight during competition season. Let me tell you how I used to drop a few pounds quickly before wrestling matches.”

My ears perked up. By this point, my secret late night food binges were becoming a regular occurrence, especially on those nights after my boyfriend, Mike and I had sex. My solution to the problem of the extra calories was to starve myself and run for hours the next day. But the pattern was getting harder to control.

So that afternoon, when my father described his program of severe calorie restriction, I didn’t tell him that it was very similar to what I was already doing on the days following my post-coital night time gorging. I just thanked him for the tips, relieved that maybe my extreme eating habits weren’t as shameful as I thought, since he shared them, and I resolved to drop the few extra pounds he’d noticed.

A few days later, on the morning of a gymnastics meet, I stopped by his shop office in the converted barn at the end of our driveway–-headquarters for his contracting business. I passed the workmen gathered in the main room and entered his small office at the back of the building. He looked surprised. “What are you doing out here this morning?”

“I wanted to let you know I have a meet today. Last week you said you’d like to see me do my back tuck sometime. I stuck it in practice yesterday, so I’m gonna throw it in my floor routine today. It’s a home meet at 4:00.”

“Oh, Jeez. I’ll try, but you know my afternoons can get pretty crazy. What time will you be up on floor?”

“We don’t find out our competition order until just before the meet starts, but it’s going to be sometime between 4:00 and 6:00.”

“Two hours is long time for me to sit around there waiting for one trick, hon. The business doesn’t run itself, you know. Don’t count on me, but good luck.”

Then, as if seeing me for the first time he said, “Wow, you’re lookin’ really fantastic today.”

I figured he was just trying to cushion the blow of his rejection with a rare compliment. “Thanks, Dad.”

“No. Really. I’m serious. You’ve dropped a few pounds since I saw you earlier in the week, haven’t you?” He looked me up and down. “And that’s a really nice outfit you have on there. Spin around for me.”

I obeyed. “Mmm hmmm. You’re looking really sharp this morning.”

A strange, murky sense that something was off kilter in his attention lurked in my mind but slipped away before I could identify it. Expression of approval of any sort from him was so unusual that I just basked in the glow of this one.

“Hey, guys,” he called out to the men who were standing around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, waiting for their assignments. “Look at my baby daughter here, all grown up. Isn’t she a sight for sore eyes?”

A few of the men voiced their agreement with the boss, carefully straddling the line between leering at the boss’s daughter and agreeing with him about her attractiveness.

My father didn’t show up for the gymnastics meet that afternoon, and he didn’t ask how it went, which turned out to be a relief. My unfueled muscles barely got me off the ground and I crashed to the floor on my hands and knees when I tried the back tuck. When I saw him a few days later, Dad seemed to have completely forgotten about the meet, though he clearly remembered my visit to his office.

“Your visit the other morning before you left for school was a real bright spot in my day,” he said.

“I didn’t stick my back tuck that day, by the way, so you didn’t miss anything.”

“Tsss-tsss-tsss.” He shook his head side to side slowly, pressing his tongue behind his upper teeth, making the familiar sound that meant he was disappointed in me. “Keep working at it. And please, come on out to the office, whenever you feel like saying good morning to your old man. That visit was such a nice surprise.”

So I began to make regular appearances in the shop each weekday morning, putting more effort and thought into my appearance. His comments grew increasingly suggestive.

As I left his office and headed across the main floor of the shop after giving him a peck on the cheek at his desk, he said, “She’s got some shape, doesn’t she, Jim?” He seemed to enjoy watching his employees squirm in discomfort, unsure how to respond.

“Looks like she’s 19, not 16, Mr. B.” old Jim Johnson, whom I’d known since I was a toddler, replied. I enjoyed that compliment, relieved at his deft attempt to muffle my father’s sexual overtones.

“I bet you wish she was….” one of the younger guys mumbled, and they all laughed uproariously, including my father. As my cheeks flushed, I quickened my step out the front door of the shop and hurried down the driveway. Though this new ritual made me vaguely uncomfortable, I craved the daily injection of strange joy that came with having finally found a way to please my father. Though the euphoria felt somehow dangerous and forbidden, I was hooked.

My already elaborate grooming routine grew more obsessive. With a researcher’s vigor, I analyzed and catalogued in my mind every comment that each outfit elicited from my father and his workers. Then I used the data to plan and fine-tune future outfits. My goal was to look sexy but not slutty. Sweaters just tight enough. Necklines just low enough. A demure little ribbon around my neck indicating “preppy good girl” to offset the tight pants and high heels.

I never acknowledged the workmen as they made their comments at my father’s behest. Sauntering across the paint-splattered floor, through the benzene air, and stepping up into the small office where he sat orchestrating the day’s business, I silently feigned confidence I didn’t feel, just like I did in my gymnastics routines. This was a performance I was putting on for my father, simply because it pleased him.

Relishing the pride and pleasure in his eyes as he looked me over each morning, I dismissed the vague shame I felt as some unnecessary adolescent shyness about my body. Why should I feel weird greeting my father in the mornings? Yet, I couldn’t deny the complete disconnection from my body that I felt, as if I was pushing along a cart of beautiful fresh flowers of which I was quite proud. The comments, by these men, many of whom I’d known since childhood, were for the cart of flowers, not for me who happened to be pushing it along.

I’m not sure how long this morning ritual went on for – maybe several weeks or a few months. It finally ended though after my brother, who was three years older and worked for my father, brought it up one Friday night while we drank together before meeting up with our respective crews.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why do you come out to the shop and parade by all the guys every morning? You know they’re all hot for you, right?” My face glowed with shame, but I denied being aware of any such thing.

“Dad likes me to go out and say good morning to him before I go to school.”

“Yeah, well, it’s weird. He’s just showing you off to his men.” All the unsavory awareness I’d been trying to ignore shot through me like an electric jolt.

I changed the subject abruptly, but never again visited the shop in the morning. When my father asked a few days later where I’d been in recent mornings, I tried to answer as honestly as I could. “I feel kind of weird, like all the men are gawking at me.”

“You’re a very pretty girl, so that’s par for the course. Men like to look at girls with nice shapes like yours. You might as well learn to enjoy it.”

“Well, I’ve been getting to my first class late too much. I need to make it on time from now on so I don’t lose points from my average.”

His face formed an exaggerated childish pout that doused me in guilt. “I’ll come out again when I have time. It’s just…school is intense right now, and I need to get there a little early.” His sad nod sent a familiar blend of relief, guilt and anger into my solar plexus, but it registered in my mind only as that “yucky” feeling.

My newly developed curves seemed to give me a dangerous power over my father and other men, which troubled me because I couldn’t seem to discern its appropriate use. Was I an exhibitionist? A slut? Was what he had said about me needing to get used to men ogling me true, or was that just his odd perspective? These questions would continue to puzzle me for decades.

My simmering confusion about sex and my body was further stoked by my father’s probing into my love life with a level of interest and enthusiasm that I knew was not normal in a father-daughter relationship. At first, eager to please, I ignored my instincts and forced myself to give him snippets of the details I knew he wanted. What’s the harm? I thought, having never been taught about healthy boundaries. The answer to that question became humiliatingly clear to me, at our New Year’s Eve party, ringing in 1980, which also happened to be the one year anniversary of when Mike and I started dating.

“Hey, kid,” Uncle Lloyd said with an affectionate tap on my arm. “Your father tells me that you and this strapping young man here have been dating for a year now. Sounds like it’s getting serious.”

Mike looked down, grinning shyly. I shrugged, smiling too, feeling proud and grown up.

My father, eyes glassy, leaned over to Mike, jabbed him softly with an elbow and mumbled conspiratorially, “After a year, you must be getting some by now, huh, Mike?”

At first, I assumed I must have misheard my father, but Mike turned bright red and laughed awkwardly.

“Come on, tell us…Does she give good head?” he asked under his breath, again just loud enough for me and the others in our circle to overhear. Mike covered his face with one hand, shaking his head from side to side, tongue-tied and clearly discomfited.

“Sherry, dear!” Aunt Margaret said loudly, mercifully redirecting everyone’s attention. “Tell us about school and gymnastics. I hear you’re a straight A student!”

Ten years later, when I was 26, the flashback of my father trying to teach me how to give him a blow job when I was nine, would leave me doubled over and gasping for breath on a crowded NYC street. Soon after that, the memory of his quizzing my high school boyfriend about my fellatio skills would take on a whole new level of meaning. But at 16, I wrote it off as just another stupid thing my party animal father said when he was drunk.

That flashback was one of a torrent of repressed memories of sexual abuse by my father that began plaguing me during graduate school. At that point, I’d finally achieved financial independence from my father and against his wishes I’d begun to see a therapist about my increasingly self-destructive tendencies, unhealthy relationships with men and inability to focus on schoolwork. It wasn’t until I started therapy, as I attempted to answer the psychologist’s questions about the key events of my childhood, that I discovered an almost complete absence of memories from the ages of 8 through 11. Soon the flashbacks began spewing clues to fill in the mysterious void. The grueling process of sorting through the wasteland for bits and pieces of myself that I’d previously discarded ensued.

Apparently, the abuse stopped and my awareness of it was completely repressed by the time I was 12, because that’s when the normal fabric of memory picks up for me. Three years into treatment, I gathered the courage to confront my father with my memories and after initially denying it, he later admitted that yes, in fact, he had sexually abused me during that time. He agreed to joint therapy, promised to contribute financially toward my therapy and we began working to heal our relationship. But within a few months he recanted his admission and abandoned all efforts and aid with therapy, which led to my decision to sue him and his decision to disown me. My case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations but the process of taking legal action, and telling my story publically was empowering and helped shift my healing into high gear. Decades later, when he believed he was near death, my father would once again admit to his crimes. By then, years of intensive therapy, endless self-help and spiritual work, and the unconditional love and support of a good man with whom I created a new, healthier family of my own, had all combined to help me become whole again.

For a long time, even after I recovered my memories of his sexual abuse, and even after all the years of struggle to recover from my resulting PTSD, I felt a deep shame about my participation in my own objectification, harassment and abuse. Eventually, though, I came to see how skillfully my father had manipulated and groomed me as his victim, and gradually, I’ve forgiven myself.

Nowadays, the daily headlines about prominent men being accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple victims make it impossible for me to look away as others struggle with the same issues. Why didn’t I stand up for myself and speak out sooner? If boys are steeped in a toxic masculinity that normalizes misogyny, aren’t girls also socialized to accept and even embrace our own objectification and disempowerment?

The constant bombardment of triggering news stories is especially challenging for those of us who’ve endured and survived sexual violence. It can be hard to keep the stories in perspective and not read more into them than is really there. Of course, sometimes sexual harassment is just what it seems to be and nothing more: a person wielding their power over someone weaker in a sexually inappropriate way in order to maintain and grow that power. But every time I see another one of these stories in the news, I can’t help but wonder if the nastiness that’s being revealed isn’t actually just the tip of the iceberg. How many more stories are there about this alleged perpetrator that aren’t being told? And are the details of the offenses we’re hearing about really the worst of what occurred?

Three out of my father’s four marriages were to women who had children from previous unions. I was one of nine children, 14 or younger, that he was father or step-father to at some point. To my knowledge, I am the only one who speaks publically about his abuse. Does that mean he didn’t abuse any of the others, or is my story just one of several?

The fact that we live in a rape culture becomes more and more inescapable with every news cycle. I don’t claim to know how or even if we will ever heal as a society. What I do know for sure, is that just as with the process of healing from my own personal sexual abuse traumas, speaking out and sharing our stories is an essential prerequisite to any meaningful, positive change for us as a culture. Hopefully, the #metoo movement is just the tip of that iceberg.

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Contributors:

Author Sheryl Burpee Dluginski

Sheryl holds an MA in Journalism and a Certificate in Science Reporting from New York University. An attendee of the Yale Writers Conference and the Millay Colony for the Arts, she has been a regular contributor at DNAinfo and her essay about grief and loss was included in an anthology called 'Just a Little More Time'. More information about her work and writing is at www.sherylburpeedluginski.com.

Artist Matteo Bona

Matteo Bona was born on January 1st, 1997, in Asti (Piedmont, Italy). He studies Foreign Languages and Modern Literatures at the Università del Piemonte Orientale. He published his first poem's collection “Beyond the Poetry” in 2015 and “Nothingness Sense” in 2017. In 2016, he received the Roma 3 Academic Prize “Apollo Dionisiaco” for poetry and the “Cesare Beccaria” Prize for Figurative Art, which was then published in the Garfield Lake Review.

Now in its 6th year, the Annual Memoir Prize awards Memoir and Creative Nonfiction book-length works of exceptional traditionally, self-published, and previously unpublished prose.

• Categories: Traditionally published, Self-published works, and Unpublished Manuscripts

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Submit your full-length memoir for the Memoir Prize and a chance to win cash, a feature in Memoir Magazine, and a year’s worth of free advertising. The only contest of its kind dedicated exclusively to the Memoir genre. This is a real opportunity for outstanding traditional, independent, and self-published memoir authors to get the recognition they deserve. Unpublished manuscripts will have the remarkable chance to present a prize-winning manuscript for consideration by agents and publishers.

You may submit a full-length book of Memoir, Narrative, or Creative Nonfiction, an Essay Collection, or a Graphic Narrative as a single entry.

There are no restrictions on subject matter, page count, age of the author, type of publisher, year of publication, or number of authors.

Entries will be judged in three rounds: the first by experienced Memoir Magazine readers and staff, and the final two rounds by a select group of the previous year’s Memoir Prize Winners.

The MEMOIR MAG team truly loves discovering and promoting a variety of new books and authors throughout the year, and your entry fee supports all the good work we do at our literary magazine. This Contest allows us to offer free creative nonfiction content for the public. It guarantees authors’ works will always be discovered by new readers and students who rely on our archive of first-person narratives.

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A death investigator (yeah, like BONES!) talks to a young deceased man) in this exceptional, one-of-a-kind, haunting and evocative memoir. While also being awesome, this essay discusses suicide and body decomposition in some detail. So, if these topics disturb you, be careful or skip this essay.

dead weight /noun/ˌded ˈweɪt/

1. the heaviness of a person or object that cannot or does not move by itself.

2. a heavy or oppressive burden.

With my arms wrapped around your shins, I lift, releasing the slack on the noose you looped around the branch late last night. The firefighter, stretching from his ladder perch, now has enough room to work, and furiously saws the nylon rope with a knife. I grip your legs tightly, knowing when the last thread is severed I’ll be the only thing preventing you from thudding to the ground. I know it won’t hurt, but you’ve been through enough today already.

Your family is only a few hundred meters away, their view of our work obscured by this patch of suburban forest, thick with its summer leaves. Your father lives in this neighborhood. I parked in front of his house, a modest single-story home, a few addresses over from this wooded band which separates the neighborhood from the noisy commercial street on the other side. I bet you knew these woods well, exploring them as a boy as you hunted for bugs and old bottles.

It was your father that found you. When he awoke around nine this morning, your car was parked in the driveway, yet he couldn’t find you inside the house. Confused, he pinged your phone, as he’s done before when he’s worried about your whereabouts, as fathers are wont to do. Except this time, it led him here, to this quiet spot in the woods. Wearing a well-worn Washington Nationals T-shirt stretched thin around his expanding belly, now he stands, stoic, awaiting instructions, at the edge of his neatly kept yard. He seems reluctant to step a foot off his property, as if it’s an island of normalcy in an ocean of chaos and heartbreak rising from just beyond his rose bushes.

Your family knows you’re dead, but I feel their anxiety. As if now that the professionals are here, we might see something they overlooked. A pulse. A twitch. Something. We don’t. The stiffness in your limbs says you’ve been dead for hours.

Of course, my job as a death investigator is to make these observations. Rigor mortis, latin for “the stiffening of death,” is the chemical change that occurs after death resulting in the rigidity of muscles. Although highly dependent on the temperature in the surrounding environment, the presence or absence of rigor mortis can provide an estimate as to how long a person has been deceased—the postmortem interval or PMI, as it’s referred to by us in the business.

The first time I encountered rigor mortis I was seven. Tucked in my bed one night, I awoke to hear my pet hamster unleashing mayhem in his cage. Weary of this disturbed rodent’s nightly dramas, I clamped my hands over my ears and willed myself back to sleep. The next morning, I was horrified to discover that he’d hung himself in his cage. For reasons unknown, he’d climbed to the top of his prison and worked his head through the bars. His cheeks still packed with seeds, he wasn’t able to free himself—greed, his ultimate undoing. I reached into the cage, hoping for any signs of life. Beneath the soft blonde fur, his tiny body felt as if it was carved from stone. Leaping back like I’d received an electric shock, I ran wailing to my mother. It was she who wrestled the lifeless creature from the cage, while I, thanks to my early Catholic training, suffered my guilty conscience at school. Was he depressed, I wondered. Or was he trying to escape me?

Looking away from the gathering crowd, my eyes trace the shapes made by fallen trees deeper into the woods. Birds chatter in the canopy overhead and I make out the faint hum of a lawnmower nearby. If it wasn’t for the fact that we’re gathered here today to cut you down from a limb, it’s a peaceful July morning. A car’s honk reminds me that thousands of vehicles have driven past in the time you’ve been here, the occupants oblivious to you, silently waiting for me.

In a few hours, I’ll be right there with them, crawling towards home at 20 mph, frustrations rising. Given my line of work, I should know that the dishes in the sink and whatever weight the scale reported that morning do not matter. But I worry about that shit constantly. Thank you for reminding me that I shouldn’t.

I’ve been to thousands of death scenes. I knew what your family would say even before they found you. I know you’re the third suicide that this firefighter has seen this week. I know that your actions up until your death will seem normal, more or less. Last night, you stopped by your sister’s house. She was surprised but happy to see you. Then you went to Walmart, where you purchased the nylon dockline currently suspending you, as well as a single bottle of water. That bottle is still mostly full, balancing on the stump next to your phone.

The firefighter is almost done. Before I worked in forensics, I never realized how often firefighters attend scenes that have nothing to do with an actual fire. With their ladders and fancy saws, their assistance is often requested at crime scenes. The firefighters radiate their own energy, far different to the cynical swagger of the detectives, or the wide-eyed eagerness of patrol officers. They seem to radiate a light of warriors passed, lit from within by a confidence that only comes from realizing your true purpose in life. Lucky bastards.

“Here we go!”

I brace. Hugging your stiff body to mine, I struggle to keep you upright while a detective, wearing the blue latex gloves I loaned him, reaches for your armpits. You only weigh about 160 lbs but it’s true what they say about dead weight. Considering my petite frame, any heavier I wouldn’t have been able to hold you.

I’m reminded of a similar scene from several years ago. He was also in his twenties, and just like you, he chose to hang himself in the woods behind his parents’ house. However, their property was on a slope, a pleasant suburban two-story home that sat above a wooded gully below. As we’ve established, dead bodies are extremely heavy, and to carry one a few hundred yards up the embankment would take the strength of three or four men. Someone called for an ATV, which arrived with a rescue sled, not unlike one you’d see ski patrol towing when a broken leg has cut someone’s weekend at the slopes short.

With his body strapped onto a gurney, and then to the sled, the driver began to gingerly make his way back up towards the house. A patrol officer and I stood on the ridge watching, our own bodies conveniently creating a screen between the family on the driveway and the activity below. Everything was going as planned, until the ATV hit a steep section and had to make a sharp maneuver, tipping the sled over and the body to the ground. The officer and I side-eyed each other, but our faces remained otherwise frozen, as to not betray our colleagues now quickly trying to remedy the situation before anyone else notices. You will suffer no such indignities today, I promise.

Together, the detective and I lay you down on the body bag. He’s gentle as he helps me adjust your position so I can photograph your eyes, your neck, your palms, chest and finally your back. You could be brothers, you and him—both slim but muscular, with blue eyes and straight teeth that look even whiter against your summer tans. You are 21 years old to his 30, and wear sneakers, khaki drawstring pants, and a navy t-shirt, while he’s predictably in his uniform of a dark suit, white shirt, blue tie. In one ear, you wear a stud that sparkles as I remove it, turning it over to the detective. Not to get sentimental but I always wonder, when you dressed this morning, did you know this was the last time you’d tie your shoes?

With my examination complete, I return to your family to get their side of your story.

Did he drink? Or smoke? I’ll ask. And what medications was he taking?

Your family will be surprisingly calm, considering. They’ll focus on my questions, trying to get their answers exactly right. He has a history of depression, they’ll say. He’s on medication—Wellbutrin. Has he tried anything like this before? Emphatically, they say no. But do they know? Your sister repeats that she found it odd that you came by her house last night. But you seemed well, and she went to bed unconcerned for your welfare.

Why didn’t you leave a note? I think your family will obsess about this oversight.

The body removal company arrives. I smile, because I like this driver. Damon’s not much older than you. He’s here to take you to Baltimore, specifically to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME).

A handful of body removal companies contract with the State of Maryland for this purpose. Owned and staffed mostly by Black men who’ve found their niche transporting the deceased to their next port of call, whether the funeral home or OCME, they arrive at each scene well-dressed and well-spoken. Seemingly unaffected by death’s gruesome realities and much more reliable than squeamish patrol officers, they’re often my only willing partners to lift and photograph the body when we encounter maggots and other hazards of the job.

However, as we exchange paperwork, Damon doesn’t seem like himself. He’s sweating through his white collared shirt. Before I can ask if he’s OK, he ducks behind a police cruiser and retches in a neighbor’s grass. Squatting down between him and the officers milling around, I pretend to organize my equipment bag, blocking their view of Damon’s heaving shoulders. I don’t want the officers to see him vomit—I know it’s not because of the death scene. Yesterday, he and I wrestled a decomposing alcoholic out of a basement, the type of scene where the flies cover the windows and the thick, sickly smell of death clings to your hair, clothes, and the inside of your nose for the rest of the day.

I offer Damon my water bottle, and he grabs it, sucking down the tepid liquid. Before he finishes the bottle, he pauses, locking eyes with me to ask, Cool? I nod. After his nausea passes, we strap you into the gurney and lift you into your spot in the van. There are already two body bags neatly tucked inside, so you’ll have company. This makes me happy.

“Girl, I better go before the traffic on 95 heats up.” Damon flashes me a quick smile before jumping into the driver’s seat. I make a face, scrunching up my nose. You’ve all got a long drive up to Baltimore, and getting trapped in D.C. rush hour in a van along with multiple bodies is best avoided, especially if one happens to be a decomp[1], but I think you’re safe today.

“Feel better,” I call after him. After Damon drops you off, he’ll drive back towards D.C. He might even do another run up to Baltimore, depending on how busy it gets today. You’ll stay in Baltimore, because in the morning, you’ll have your autopsy. Don’t worry—the technicians who run the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner are characters. I expect the Motown will be blasting, while they laugh, teasing each other, getting you and the others ready in the morning. And the new building’s beautiful—there’s even stadium seating where students and visitors might watch the medical examiner untangle your body’s secrets from behind an elevated wall of glass.

Back at my car, I peel off my gloves and root around the backseat for something to drink. I select an opened bottle of lemon-flavored sparkling water from my stash. It’ll do. Years prior, I worked in the Bosnian countryside excavating the unmarked graves of civilians killed in the Balkan Wars. One brutally hot day, one in which I also happened to be marvelously hungover (thanks to the previous evening’s host insistence on sharing his homemade šljivovica[2]), I made a miscalculation, and ran out of water. Too ashamed to beg for rations from the Bosnian work crew, I suffered, willing my body the stamina to avoid passing out before we made it back to town.

Now, I never run out of water.

Your family is still here, watching, waiting for you to go. I decide it never gets less weird to meet people on the very worst day of their life. Your sister is crouched in the street, as if the strength it takes to stand has abandoned her. You were at her house last evening, she keeps repeating. You seemed fine. But the Walmart receipt in your pocket proves you purchased the rope around midnight, after you left her house. I expect she’ll wonder why for the rest of her life.

Sipping my water, I remember that along with the rope, the Walmart receipt documenting your last purchase included that single 12 oz. bottle of Dasani water. No candy, no beer, and not a “whelp, may as well” bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

Were you just thirsty? It seems odd that you’d acknowledge the need to soothe your body’s thirst while simultaneously preparing to end your life. Or were you playing games with the Walmart check-out clerk? Sort of like while underage, I’d add a few extra purchases—mints, ooh, and maybe an iced coffee—trying to distract the cashier from carding me as he rings up my two packs of Camel Lights.

My stomach growls, reminding me that it’s now long past lunchtime. Before I can consider which drive-thru is speaking to me, my phone rings. Oh no. I flip it over to see the screen flash “Communications.” Another incident call, this time a car accident, which means no time for lunch. The scene is 20 miles away, and it would take me an hour to get there without even factoring in the extra snarl caused by the very accident I’ve been assigned to work.

When I get home tonight, I’ll peel off most of my clothes on the front porch, my version of passing through Pluto’s Gate, shedding the fumes of the underworld so I can return to the land of the living. I’ll walk through the house in my bra and underwear, greet my prancing dogs, and shove the clothes in the washer plus a triple dose of detergent. I’ll hear the husband’s keys clicking on his keyboard down the hall from his office.

As I shower, I’ll have the depressing realization that for my contributions today, I’ll earn $200, and even worse, after taxes and expenses, only take home half that. Not that I’m in it for the money, but still. Unfortunately, I also can’t imagine doing anything else.

Replaying the scenes of the day, I wince when I get to the car accident’s witness statement. The look on his face. With blank eyes, he described trying to help the other driver, but couldn’t—she was trapped and frozen in shock—and he backed away, and helplessly watched as the car disappeared into flames.

The hot water pummels my shoulders, and I rest my head against the glass block shower the husband built himself. I concede that I am still alive. And although it doesn’t feel like I do, that must mean I still have choices.

It’s a human failing it seems, to not realize the power we have over our own lives. I don’t even know it yet, but a few days from now, I’ll attend my last death scene. And a few days after that, I’ll drink my last drink. A pair of identity-defining behaviors, so entrenched over the last 15 years, without them, I’m scared I might cease to exist at all.

But tonight, after I feed my dogs, and do those dishes in the sink, I’ll write the day’s case reports, then upload them along with my photographs into the OCME’s record system. Only then will I allow myself to pour a third of a bottle into an enormous wine glass, which I’ll refill until the bottle is gone.

When it’s your turn tomorrow, your assigned medical examiner will have context on how and where you were found, your injuries and your health history. They’ll issue a death certificate, and when your family has made the arrangements with a funeral home, they’ll take it from there. And that’s it. This is where I leave you.

I hope you enjoy the Motown.

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***

[1] Decomp, or a body in late stages of decomposition, is often characterized by skin slippage, bloating, the presence of maggots and the kind of smell that makes even seasoned pros gag.

[2]Actually, my research has shown there is no amount of šljivovica–or Bosnian bathtub plum brandy–that does not cause a hangover.

***

“Dead Weight” won the 2020 Hippocampus Magazine grand prize for Creative Nonfiction, the 2021 ASJA writing award in the Personal Essay category, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Dead Weight” is part of her larger project, “Tomorrow, We Might Wake Up Dead,” about her career in human identification.

If you or someone you know is in an emergency, call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or call 911 immediately. Find out more at: https://www.nami.org/get-involved/awareness-events/mental-illness-awareness-week

Contributors:

Author Claire O'Brien

Claire O'Brien spent 15 years as a human identification expert, holding positions at the International Commission on Missing Persons (Bosnia) and the Smithsonian, among others. In 2017, she retired her forensic gear to write. Claire's creative writing has received numerous awards, including a nomination for a Pushcart Prize, first prize in the ASJA's Annual Writing Awards in the Personal Essay category, and the grand prize of the Hippocampus Creative Nonfiction 2020 contest. She lives in Costa Rica with her husband and six rescue dogs, where she is working on her first book

Artist Ann Calandro

Ann's collages are made of paper, colored pencil, marker, ink, pastel, paint, chalk, fabric, and photographs that she takes and sometimes digitally manipulates. She creates these collages on matboard and, sometimes, on reclaimed furniture such as end tables, small dressers, and stools. She calls her art style enchanted realism, the intersection between the real and the imaginary, the possible and the impossible, and memories and dreams. You can find more of her work at: ann-calandro.pixels.com

*with Featured Artwork: “Childless Madonna” by Fierce Sonia

In my first memory of her, Peggy is tickling me. I see her face hovering above me: deep-set blue eyes and a wide smile. She pokes me in the belly three times with a long slender finger.

Deet deet deet! she says. Her pokes are delicate, like the imprint of an insect’s legs on a leaf. I hardly feel her touch, yet scream in delight and terror. She is my aunt — my godmother too — and has held me before, perhaps tickled me before, but it is this moment that is sealed in my consciousness.

#

I am eight. Christmas dinner is over and the three sisters — Peggy, my mother, Kathleen, and their oldest sister Philomena — linger over dessert, telling what I think of as their out-in-the-fields stories from their childhood in County Mayo, Ireland. The time they threw pebbles on the corrugated tin roof of Eddie Kennedy’s milking parlor to spook the cows, the time they tied a balloon to the pig’s tail and it leaped around like a mad thing, the time they threw buckets of water at Tony Dunleavy’s window, then dashed into the house and warned him there was a terrible rainstorm. The time when poor Tony was staying with them because he was dying, and Peggy climbed into a trunk and moaned, “Tony! Tooonnnny! There’s a ghoossst in the hoouuse!”

The badder they’d been, the harder Peggy laughs. She lets out surprised-sounding yelps and doubles over, clutching the edge of the table for support. She shrieks and snorts. No other adult I know laughs with such whole-bodied abandon.

God, we were wild! she says when she can speak again. Weren’t we awful?

#

I am in fourth grade. I’ve come to Peggy and her husband Alan’s for a sleepover. They live in Manhattan, on West End Avenue. Peggy has a city job and wears sophisticated clothing and chunky gold jewelry. The one-bedroom apartment is decorated with the brightly colored paintings, masks, and quilts that she makes herself. Alan is not home and they don’t own a television and we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

Why don’t we make you a skirt? Peggy asks. We’ll run it up on the sewing machine.

She brings out a length of pale blue material and wraps it around my waist to see how much we’ll need. God, you’re tiny! she says, and laughs.

We sit next to each other at the table and she helps me push the material through the gobbling mouth of the sewing machine. Waistband, hem, seam: three times we run it through. When I glance up at Peggy’s face, her dark brows are drawn together in concentration, which means that she wants the skirt to turn out well, which means she wants me to be happy, which means she loves me.

#

I am 10. Peggy can’t come for Easter, my mother says.

Why?

She’s very upset. She and Alan are getting a divorce.

Upset? I repeat, confused. I have only ever seen her happy and playful.

Yes, my mother says. She’s sick in bed, crying.

When I’m older, mom tells me that Alan had become controlling, calling Peggy at work multiple times a day, following her.

#

I’m about to turn 12. Peggy and I are driving to my aunt Philomena’s summer house in Cape Cod. She is silent for much of the drive. I watch her pale, long-boned hands on the steering wheel, on the gear shift. We stop at a gas station rest stop and she buys me a sandwich. We sit across from each other at a small table.

Is your sandwich good? she asks.

Yes, I lie. She sips her coffee and gazes past me. Her mouth, usually so mobile, goes still, and her alert blue eyes turn blank, unseeing. I am filled with the uncomfortable awareness that her thoughts do not involve me.

#

It is the summer before I leave for college. Peggy is telling me about a man she met.

He says I’m a natural healer! I’m going to visit Sedona, this fantastic place in Arizona, she says. It’s a great center for energy, for healing.

Within weeks or months, she holds a sale of her belongings in the hallway of her apartment on West End Avenue and moves to Sedona.

#

My mother reads aloud a letter from Peggy. She’s been making dreamcatchers and joined a drumming circle. She took a hike in the rocky landscape of Sedona, where she had a revelation.

From Spirit, she says.

My true name is Sarafina Raphael! she writes. That is the name I will now answer to.

To my friends, I tell the story as a joke. If Sarafina comes up in conversation, she — who bought me a beautiful pink tutu when I was nine and gave me beads and clasps to make my own jewelry when I was 14 and took me to Birdland to hear jazz when I was 19 — is now cast as an eccentric. She is my crazy aunt, the one who changed her name.

#

Peggy’s new name and lifestyle elicit revelations within the family.

We used to find her lying on the ground, staring, my mother says. She’d bless herself over and over.

She was sent to a psychiatric hospital when she was 14 years old, Philomena says. They brought her back to the house for my going-away party when I left for America. So the neighbors wouldn’t know.

Why was she in the hospital?

She took blue stone.

What’s that?

A pesticide.

Why?

To end her life.

#

It’s 2003. I’m divorced with two young children. I write to Sarafina and ask her to send me one of her paintings to brighten the wall of my apartment, and that I will pay for it. She had to leave Sedona because she couldn’t afford the rent and now lives in the less-desirable Cottonwood. I ask my mother what she does for money.

She gets disability for her bad back. Or for being bipolar. I’m not sure which.

Bipolar? She was diagnosed?

Oh, I don’t know. Once she told me our dead mother appeared to her and flew around her bedroom ceiling. Utter nonsense. I don’t know what she has.

Sarafina sends me a long-petaled flower rendered in slashing brushstrokes of bright red and yellow. Thank you for liking my art and trusting me to send you a piece, her note reads. I haven’t been ready to part with it until now…I call it my Monet…I am a bit tired of what I’ve been doing and am looking forward to expressing my art in new ways.

#

Five years pass. Sarafina no longer flies from Arizona for Christmas. She finds air travel confusing and stressful. Phil has been getting phone calls from Sarafina’s friends. She’s become forgetful. Once she was housesitting and locked herself out of the house and was found wandering outside, distraught. The burden of caring for her has become too much for her friends. She will have to leave the place where she has been so happy and move back to New York. She is only 60.

#

It is 2010. My parents bring Sarafina to my house for Thanksgiving dinner. She and her cat

Tooperina live with my parents now, and it is causing strain.

She embraces my eight-year-old son from behind and leans down to his ear.

Do you have tickles? I bet you do.

He squirms uncomfortably as she pokes his stomach. Ten minutes later she does it again, and he looks at me for help. I take him aside and explain that Sarafina has a kind of sickness where she doesn’t remember things. She doesn’t remember tickling him the first time.

Around this time, Sarafina gives me a typed manuscript of a book she’d been writing for years. It’s called Shakins ‘O the Bag. A yellow sticky note is attached. Here are some stories I wrote. Maybe you will have some use for them.

I skim the pages, looking for revelations about taking the blue stone and her year in the psychiatric hospital, for she has never spoken of them to me, and the time when I could have asked her about it is now past. The answers aren’t in the manuscript, but I learn other things.

Young Peggy experiences compulsive behaviors (crossing herself again and again, avoiding cracks in the sidewalk) and is often conflicted and unhappy. She resents her mother, Mam, for not understanding her and yearns for her affection. She helps deliver a young calf; watches her father, Daddy, slaughter a hog; covets a skipping rope with pink handles; waits for her sisters to walk up the road from school; rides a bike that’s too big for her past a barn where a man committed suicide. She cuts turf with her father and sisters and visits an aunt, a nun who’s been cloistered in Kylemore Abbey for 40 years. There’s a list of the sayings she grew up with:

I’ll gee you a puck in the mouth. It’s hard to kill a bad thing. Hair like the cats were sucking it.

Silence in the courthouse, the cat is having pishings. Thick as a double ditch.

#

October 2011. Sarafina and I are chatting on the flagstones outside my front door. She wears bright red pants and a red shirt with a long Aran sweater coat over them. Her hair is slightly greasy. Alzheimer’s is entrenched now and conversations must be negotiated carefully. She masks any difficulty in her comprehension by keeping her answers good-natured and vague:

That’s always the way, isn’t it? Yes, I think so too! Isn’t that funny?

I adhere to safe topics like Tooperina and the people she knew in Ireland long ago. She remembers them the best. I tease her about an old boyfriend and she enjoys this. She shakes her head at memories of her young self, at the pair of them. She and Tommy had been engaged at one time, but that all ended when she moved to America.

My mother says that at home, away from people, Sarafina becomes despondent. She often says, I wish I was dead.

Then my mother tells me something else.

Sarafina once told me she was raped as a child.

Raped? By who? What did you say to her?

I said she was jumping on the bandwagon, my mother says. You know, all the stories were in the news. About the Catholic Church and priests.

So it was a priest who did it? Did you know him? Was he respected in town?

I knew him. He was…an outcast.

That’s not a bandwagon anyone would want to jump on. Why didn’t you believe her when she told you? Or at least talk about it more?

I don’t know, my mother says, looking troubled. I remind myself that she was raised in the same stunted home as Sarafina.

#

A year passes, then two. Sarafina attends a day program at the Y, where they are good to her. When they have a party, she dances to the music. She often wanders my parents’ neighborhood, gets lost, and is returned by good Samaritans or the EMS. Eventually, she has a bad fall and is taken to the hospital.

When I arrive at her hospital room, Sarafina is lying on her side, thin white arms folded to her chest. She stares sightlessly ahead. Her expression is blank, yet conveys such absolute desolation that her thoughts seem written in the air. She knows that her mind is fading, that she is not the person she was, that things will only grow worse. She is thinking that she would rather be dead.

I learn back from the doorway for a moment and turn my head away, then step back into the room.

Hi Sarafina! I say, and lean down to kiss her.

She is slow to respond, then rearranges herself in the bed. Hello, she finally says.

I tell her my name. I’m your niece.

She lets out an irritated huff. I know that.

Here, I brought you a book I thought you’d like. Annie Leibowitz. You like her, don’t you? Here’s John and Yoko in bed. Remember them?

Sarafina bends over the book and stares at the black and white picture of two figures, one clothed, one naked.

Oh my. That’s nice.

Together, we bend over the book. Her depth perception is poor, so I help her turn the pages. Sarafina traces the images with her long index finger. She once complained to my mother that no one ever touches her, so I rub her back with my hand. Always spare, she has grown reedthin. Under her hospital gown, I can feel the outline of her ribs, her vertebrae. When I leave, she is still gazing at the book in her lap.

#

By 2013, Sarafina is living in a nursing home. Younger and more able-bodied than the other dementia patients on her floor, she walks the floors at night. I imagine her striding through the empty corridors, quiet as a wraith. Sometimes when the aides try to bathe her, she becomes frightened and runs naked down the hallway.

#

September 2015. Sarafina falls while walking the halls of the nursing home in the middle of the night, breaking her hip. Within days of her surgery, she has pneumonia, then MRSA.

When I get to the hospital, my parents and Phil are already there. Sarafina lies on the hospital bed, sedated, breathing through an oxygen mask. Her chest rises and falls effortfully.

Her eyes, always so deep-set, have sunken deeper into her skull. Her skin is smooth and unwrinkled. I take her hand but she winces as if my touch causes pain, and I quickly release it.

My mother tells us that when Sarafina woke up after her surgery, she and my father were standing by the bed. Sarafina looked at them, eyes clear and lucid, and spoke.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Later that afternoon, Sarafina regains consciousness, or something close to it. She moans in distress and pushes her upper body off the pillows, then raises her arm and begins striking her thigh rhythmically. She opens her eyes momentarily, a flash of blue, before closing them again. I take her hand, and she curls her fingers around mine in a strong grip, continuing to beat her thigh with the other hand.

Sarafina, my mother says. Phil strokes her forehead, which still glistens with oil from where a priest anointed her.

I visit two days later, but Sarafina’s condition has worsened. When I take her hand, it lies slack in my grasp. She dies that night.

#

Sometimes when I’m alone, driving to work or walking the dog, I talk to her. I tell her that I’m sorry that I never visited her in Arizona, sorry that I laughed at her life there, and that I dismissed her choices, rather than wondering why she made them. I tell her that I wish she’d gotten the love she sought as a child, instead of rape at 4 and electroshock at 14. But most of the time, the only words I can summon for the aunt I knew and remember — leaning intently over the sewing machine, painting her Monet, snorting with laughter — are Sarafina’s last: I love you. I love you.

I love you.

Cuckoo Flying

I fled the kitchen and off behind the garden. I knew my secret hiding place was waiting for me. I gave a quick look around before I entered, making sure no one saw me. And then I entered. t-Ir na n-Og.

With my hands, I carefully pushed aside the briars (BRIAR AVENUE); next came a layer of thistles; then the nettles and finally the buholans. They all snapped back behind me, swallowing me into their thorney, stringey, colorful hole. I was safe now. No one could touch me. The earth was black here, not the usual brownish. And I knew this was specially for me. It was different, like me. They didn’t care about anything in here. Everything was happy to see me. We had a secret conspiracy going on amongst us. And only we knew or would ever know. I pulled out my sitting stone, cleaning off the dirt, before sitting on it. It was cold. And I liked that. It cooled me off. And soon, with the bootrys covering my sky, the dirt under me, and all my stinging, thorney friends, this was a good world for me. I began to breathe slowly, and then rolled off my stone onto the dirt, my face shining up at the trees; and breathing in the shining sun way way off; but close too. It shimmered on and between the leaves; shimmering, playfully–I’m gonna get you — as it twinkled in and out through the trees. I rolled over on my stomach, crossing my arms and resting my head on them. It got quiet. I could hear the cuckoo high up, and far away.

–Peggy Egan/Sarafina Raphael

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Contributors:

Author Cecilia Donohoe

Cecilia Donohoe has spent the past 20 years as a writer and editor for higher education. The mother of two grown children, she draws inspiration for her personal writing from her Bronx childhood, her Irish-American family, experiences living abroad, conversations with strangers, and the natural world. She earned an MFA in memoir from Hunter College, and her writing has been published in Vine Leaves Press and Irish America. She lives in New York State and is working on a memoir.

Artist Fierce Sonia

Fierce Sonia is a mixed media artist. She builds a substrate with acrylic paint and collage. A narrative is constructed by the tension between the lush layers moving to dreamy feminine mindscapes with a brighter palette. If you listen closely her work has a soundtrack, a rhythm, a pulse that will give you a magic carpet ride to a fairytale that restates your own heartbeat. She has a public studio at Torpedo Factory: 105 North Union Street, studio 5 Alexandria, VA 22303

*Featured Art: “Abstract Woman” by Angela Lam

As we said our goodbyes on that sunny, late summer day, I think we both knew they would be our last. The light breeze was stark in contrast to my heavy heart, and the afternoon visit – while pleasant – had been bittersweet. He was weary. I was thirty-one. When it was time to go, I hugged him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. But before I could turn away, he grabbed my arm and pulled me close, and I couldn’t help but smile.

My Grandpa, Rollin, suffered a massive stroke in his early fifties when I was just four. It left him completely paralyzed on the right side and severely impaired his ability to speak. For someone who loved to talk as much as he did, the resulting aphasia (the technical term for his language loss) was even more debilitating than the paralysis. I grew up using a mixture of charades and twenty questions to communicate with Grandpa, which never seemed all that strange. I instinctively picked up on his vocal inflection and non-verbal cues without realizing that, for most, these are learned listening skills.

It would be easy to use that one awful event to categorize Grandpa’s life – pre- and post-stroke – because, in a sense, everything changed. His beloved tools grew rusty in the garage, and his stock holdings – that were heavily invested in typewriters and asbestos – remained unchanged. His personality, though, didn’t belong in the past tense; the stroke didn’t change who he was, it just changed our ability to understand him.

As the oldest of six grandchildren, I am the only one who has any memory of Grandpa before his stroke. I’m not sure whether they are actually my memories, or if I’ve pieced them together from the stories I’ve heard about the way Grandpa “used to be”. Grandpa was charming and could talk to anybody. He was a flirt; the ladies loved him, and he loved the ladies, especially those who kept their hair short and their wardrobe sharp, like my grandma. And he was strong. These things I know because I was told, and because he gave one-armed bear hugs with a near bone-crushing zeal.

I do remember going to visit shortly after the stroke. As a preschooler, and through no great accomplishment of my own, I was suddenly more articulate than the patriarch of my family; even at that age, the unfairness of this role reversal was not lost on me. Perched atop the tan leather ottoman that matched the overstuffed chair in which Grandpa liked to sit, I tried reading to him while the grownups talked in the kitchen. Sounding out the words I knew, I asked if he could say things like “dog” and “apple”. He smiled but sat silently, shaking his head with the patience that only a grandparent can muster.

The only name Grandpa was able to recover was that of my grandmother, Betty. He used her name to address everyone, regardless of gender. He could count aloud up to three or four and retained some basic phrases – like “you, too” or “it’s alright” – that require little forethought when used in casual conversation. While he sometimes managed to say other words here and there, they were often garbled and rarely repeated. He suddenly favored the letter “b”, and this phoneme preceded words that it never had before.

After a fair amount of trial-and-error, conversations with Grandpa began to resemble the format of TV’s best primetime dramas: formulaic, but with enough twists and variables to keep us guessing until the very end, when all the clues and subtle references introduced at the start suddenly became clear.

To get our attention, he would address whoever was nearest to him: “Betty?” followed by his default phrase, “bide de bide de bide”, which replaced the words that just wouldn’t form on his tongue. He would repeat the “de bide” portion until he was satisfied with his explanation; whether this phrase was a statement or question was always our first clue. Sometimes he elaborated by pointing, gesturing, or counting.

Unlike those made-for-TV dramas, the conclusions didn’t always come as readily as we hoped. The answers – while sometimes obvious – were usually elusive. When even our best guesses fell short, frustrations ran high, and occasionally tempers flared. There was no “To Be Continued” or commercial break to provide us respite; we couldn’t even change the channel when we’d had our fill. Grandpa was persnickety, persuasive, and persistent, and we had no choice but to persevere.

Because traveling was difficult, Grandpa came for extended visits, and he sometimes had the house to himself during the day. In middle school, I was often the first to get home, which meant I “had to guess stuff” without assistance. I got off easy most days, quickly determining what he wanted or needed by using questions from the now-standard repertoire: “Are you cold?” “Are you hungry?” “Do you want a magazine?” Other times, his default phrase was nothing more than a “Hi. How was your day?”

I came home one afternoon to find Grandpa quite agitated. He was on the couch, pointing toward the back of the house. I asked all the usual questions, including some others that seemed pertinent. As each of my queries was shot down with increasing urgency – “Betty, no!” – I started to panic. How should I know what he needed? Couldn’t he wait and tell a grown-up? Didn’t he know I couldn’t understand him?

When I ran out of guesses, I asked, somewhat hopefully, “Do you want me to go to my room?”

“NO!” he roared.

I was near tears, but Grandpa was relentless. The exchange continued until I finally saw the object of his fury. A little black bug, no bigger than the tip of a pen, was slowly making its way up the living room wall. I had no idea how he could even see it! If it bothered him that much, why didn’t he kill it, instead of waiting for me to come home? That would have required much less effort, at least on my part.

When I asked if he wanted me to kill it, I got such a resounding “yes!” that, shaking, I made my way over to the insect intruder and folded it into a tissue. Once I had thrown it away, Grandpa was all praises and gratitude, blowing kisses and gesturing for a hug, but I wanted no part of it. Still trembling, I ran to my room and slammed the door.

Like most aphasics, Grandpa could answer simple “yes” or “no” questions. He also answered compound questions definitively, but to us, his response always sounded the same – “bide”. These factors, combined with his difficulties communicating over background noise, turned dinners out into a stressful ordeal.

We almost always had an over-attentive (though well-intentioned) waitress, and in the rush to help Grandpa choose an entrée, we abandoned our tried-and-true system. Once questions entered unfamiliar territory, the conversation quickly devolved:

“Do you want milk or Coke?”

“Bide.”

“Well, which is it? And do you want spaghetti or lasagna?”

“Yes… and no!”

“What do you want!?!”

“I DON’T KNOW, GOD DAMNIT!”

That’s usually when the cursing began. While the higher-functioning cerebral cortex regulates everyday language, the brain’s limbic system (that controls baser functions such as instinct and emotion) handles profanities. I guess that even the stroke-causing clot knew better than to mess with Grandpa’s ability to swear.

The waitress had usually returned by this point, pen poised in midair, with an uncertain smile frozen on her face that never quite masked the look of horror in her eyes. The dining room would fall silent as people turned to observe the sudden commotion, and I would sink into the vinyl-covered chair, willing myself to disappear.

They say that Grandpa never met a stranger. Yet even with his magnetic personality, people occasionally reacted to his language limitations like he was a deaf foreigner, slowly shouting over-enunciated words as if it would somehow enable him to respond in kind. He UNDERSTANDS you! I’d want to scream, but Grandpa came to recognize their discomfort and learned to respond graciously: “I know it. It’s all right.”

Mostly though, he was warmly received by friends and strangers alike. Upon learning that he couldn’t speak, Millie, a wise housemate he met in his later years replied, “What’s that? You can’t talk? Well, I can’t hear. So how ‘bout I do the talking and you do the listening?” She pondered this arrangement, deciding that: “Yep. You and I are gonna get along just fine.”

Grandpa moved to an assisted living facility in my hometown just before my senior year in college. Some of our best times together were in the years that followed. At my mother’s suggestion, I took him out for ice cream one summer afternoon. However, she failed to mention which of the 31 flavors was his favorite. So, we sat in the parking lot, car idling, air blasting, while I asked:

“Do you like vanilla?”

“No.”

“What about chocolate?”

“No”.

“Mint?”

“Nooooo.”

We finally settled on strawberry.

Shortly after the move, I dragged Grandpa to his building’s Bingo event. “I don’t know…” he protested, but I insisted. A room full of sour-faced women, hunched protectively over their Bingo cards, eyed us suspiciously as we walked in late. “Oh, boy”, Grandpa groaned, looking over at me and rolling his eyes. I was thinking the same but said nothing. I sat him down and collected two cards from the caller.

Less than 10 minutes later, Grandpa had a Bingo. “Oh, boy!” he exclaimed loudly, causing everyone in the room to crack a smile. Before I knew it, the Bingo Betties had crowded around him, congratulating him on his “big win” and fighting for the chance to make his acquaintance. He graciously let me keep his winnings that day – all 50 cents worth.

As the residual effects of the stroke joined forces with the onset of old age, Grandpa became less insistent about talking and more content to just listen. Because he was more easily fatigued, and because I was not blessed with his (former) gift of gab, my one-on-one visits with him became shorter.

One afternoon, after I had recounted my recent life events, put away his laundry, and made sure his remote and tissues were within reach, he stopped me as I turned to leave. “Betty?” he started slowly. “Bide de bide… de bide?” I paused, eyebrows raised, and waited for the clarifier which – when it came – may as well have been spoken in perfect English.

“Bun”, he said, pointing at my sister’s wedding photo.

“Two”, he continued, pointing at a picture from my cousin’s honeymoon.

Then he pointed at me and shrugged. I couldn’t believe it! I told him, “I’ll get married just as soon as I find the right guy!” He laughed at that then settled back in his chair and focused once again on the television overhead.

After the fall that landed Grandpa in the hospital for the final time, doctors diagnosed him with a host of illnesses and infections on top of his injuries. An alert mind trapped in a failing body, he was still cognizant of his situation and his surroundings, yet after more than a quarter century, the stroke had finally won, and he lost the strength to surface above his physical limitations. The booming voice, charming antics, and infectious laugh would remain forever submerged within the shell of the man tucked neatly under a sterile hospital blanket.

I didn’t go to see Grandpa in the hospital; we said our goodbyes on a sunny, late summer day a few weeks before. I took him for a stroll outside, then found a bench in the shade. As we sat, a light breeze rustled the leaves overhead. I talked and he smiled, content to visit until the need for sleep overcame him.

When it was time to go, I bent down and gave him a one-armed hug, bracing my weight against the back of the wheelchair so as not to jostle his frail body, and kissed his cheek. As I stood back up, he grabbed my arm and pulled me close. I couldn’t help but smile because – for once – I knew exactly what he was going to say. And so, I waited as he slowly articulated the only words he still made a regular effort to say aloud: “I. Love. You.”

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Author Allison Wehrle

Allison Wehrle is a former editor, professional oboist, and aspiring essay writer. She was an associate editor at The Instrumentalist Magazine before becoming a full-time freelance musician. As a writer, Allison is particularly drawn to essay and creative nonfiction. She lives in Chicago with her husband and their two small children.

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Tomislav Silepeter

The winner of the rector's award for excellence in 2013, in 2014 Tomislav Silepeter graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Igor Rončević-Painting Department. In 2015 he became a member of HDLU. In addition to many group exhibitions, he had several solo exhibitions in Croatia as well as in other countries. Themes in his work vary from solitude and isolation to the human existence in a society that condemns, and the total preoccupation of getting out of the "boxes" of institution.

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Nathan Holic

Nathan Holic teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as the Graphic Narrative Editor at The Florida Review. He is the author of "Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City", a not-so-medium-sized novel from Burrow Press. He is also the author of "The Things I Don’t See" (a tiny but awesome novella, from Main Street Rag), and "American Fraternity Man", (a big big (yet equally awesome) novel, from Beating Windward Press). His traditional-text fiction has been published in The Portland Review, Iron Horse, and The Apalachee Review, but he also creates comics, some of which have been published in Booth, Saw Palm, Bridge Eight, and Redivider.

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Contributors:

Leanne Grabel

Leanne Grabel is a writer, illustrator & retired special education teacher who is in love with mixing genres and turning the hard topics of life into entertainment. She has written & produced numerous multi-media shows, including “The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression” and “Anger: The Musical.” Grabel's graphic memoir, Brontosaurus Illustrated, was published by The Opiate Books in 2022, and shortlisted for the Memoir Prize in 2024. My Husband's Eyebrows, a collection of illustrated prose poems, was published by Poetry Box in 2022. Grabel is the 2020 recipient of the Bread & Roses Award for contributions to women's literature in the Pacific Northwest. Grabel was also a member of ArtLab 2023 [https://colabpdx.org/artlab/] for which she developed an illustrated comic monologue, chapbook and humorous postcards on aging “Old with Jokes.” All the books are available from Grabel’s website or various online booksellers. Find her at:

http://leannegrabel.com

The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a tragic chapter in China’s history. Its devastating effects reached countless individuals, including myself, my family, and many other innocent people. As a child, I witnessed the brutal torture and beatings that my mother, a teacher, endured at the hands of a gang of violent students, the Red Guards. The images of her half-shaved hair, a urine pot hanging from her neck, a high paper hat on her head, and the scars on her face, are forever ingrained in my memory. They also looted our home, confiscated our all possessions, and expelled us from our home to a remote countryside as “class enemies.” During the over one thousand miles journey, my mother was forced to kneel between train seats, with a female Red Guard stepping on her head the entire time.

What lay ahead of us was even tougher. We were forced to live in a rundown pigsty in a small and poor village, where we had to work hard in the fields to survive, suffering torture, bullying, and beatings.

1. After a long and humiliating journey by train, we arrived in our hometown Wharf City, a place I had never been before. As “class enemies” were not permitted to reside in cities, on the same day of our arrival, we were taken away by truck to the next place.

I had no idea where the truck was headed. In the late afternoon, the Red Guards unloaded our family from the truck in an open field. I saw a large yard by a pond in front of us. To the left of the entrance, there was a long wooden sign that read “Revolution Committee of Flower Town People Commune,” and a pair of stone lions flanked the gate. I learned later these mansions used to belong to my family and were confiscated by the Communist Party. The Red Guards transferred us to the local police station before departing on their “revolutionary tours” to Beijing, where they would pay homage to Chairman Mao.

After spending several nights sleeping on the floor at the Detention Center, two officials escorted us out of the town. The older of the two, named Lu, reassured us, “We have found you a lovely three-room house facing south, not far from here. Go with us.” At the time, we were all taken in by Lu’s words.

Walking along the winding village road, passing over one bridge and three villages, the two cadres didn’t show any signs of stopping, instead, they urged us to quicken our pace. My mother asked the cadres where our destination was as we couldn’t move any further. The cadres only responded with “almost there.” Finally, we heard someone shout “They’re coming!” from a crowd under a big tree at the crossroads in the front. As we approached, a terrible odor hit us, with flies buzzing around us. A large dung pit was right by the roadside.

Just then, a tall man with dark skin rushed over to the commune cadres, shaking their hands overzealously. Later, I found out he was one of the two village heads, nicknamed Lao-wai. The cadres had arranged the transfer and were eager to complete their task. After a brief conversation, Cadre Lu pointed to a shed behind the manure pit and declared, “That’s your new home.”

As I surveyed the scene, disbelief washed over me. The structure that was supposed to be my new home was a small grass shed, divided into three sections by earthen walls. The southern side was completely open, exposing its interior to the outside. Its overall size from east to west was less than 20 feet, and no windows or doors were in sight. Also, the shed was so low that even my little brother had to duck to enter. “Is this shed meant for human occupancy?” “Does the village have dwarves similar to those in the fairy tale ‘Snow White’?” My confusion sparked.

Meanwhile, my mother asked, “What is this shed for?” An older man with a brown face replied, “During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, the People’s Commune wanted us to raise pigs collectively. But when the shed was built, the big three-year famine struck and many villagers starved to death, leaving us with nothing to feed the pigs.” The man seemed eager to talk but was interrupted by a dry cough from Lao-wai. The old man immediately changed his tone and said,

“Oh! We’ve never raised pigs in it!”

Pigsty!? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Tears streamed down my face. The cadre Lu saw me crying and sneered, “Ha! What are you crying about? Do you really think you can still live in your great-grandmother’s mansion? That’s just a pipe dream!” The group of young people around us erupted in laughter. My anger and frustration welled up inside of me. I wanted nothing more than to hide from their mocking gazes, but there was nowhere to turn. I ran to the small grass shed – pigsty as a refuge.

The pigsty did not have any typical scent of pigs. I grumbled to myself, “So the old man was telling the truth after all.” The ceiling, constructed from crop stalks, was covered in a thick layer of dust and spider webs. Some of the stalks had started to fall apart and disintegrate. As I brushed my hand against the earthen wall, dry earth crumbled under my touch, making a rustling sound like gentle rain. At that moment, I was still young, barely reaching five feet in height. The roof’s peak was less than a foot above my head, making me hunch over as I walked under the sloping incline. I couldn’t help but worry, “How will my taller mother and second brother manage to stand up in here?”

There were four holes in the north-facing wall, meant for ventilation. I thought with frustration, “This may be suitable for pigs, but we are human beings.” Bending over, I peered out through one of the holes and saw that the area outside was overgrown with weeds.

At that moment, I heard the old cadre outside, warning my mother. “You should be grateful to the villagers for providing you and your family with a place to live,” he said. “You should embrace the education from the peasants and seriously reform your thoughts to repay the Party’s kindness and leniency towards you.” I sighed, “What a great ‘merc’ this is for us!”

That night, five of us lay side by side on the hay in the pigsty. The village had no electricity, and we hadn’t got an oil lamp yet. I lay down beside my mother in the dark, our heads resting against the north wall, and our feet pointing towards the outside in the south. Mosquitoes were buzzing around my head; it was their turn at night. I was exhausted and quickly fell asleep. If someone had walked by that day, they would have seen five pairs of feet belonging to humans of varying sizes protruding from the pigsty.

2. During the difficult days, my mother used this phrase to encourage us: “Amidst barren peaks and rivers dry, A glimmer of hope appears nearby.” She said, “Since this is so, let’s take it easy.” She led us to remake the pigsty livable. On the east side, the largest section of the pigsty was designated as our bedroom. We partially removed the earthen wall to create a door that connected to the other sheds. We constructed a wall on the southern side of the room using mudbricks from the interior walls and left an opening at the top for a window. The frame was created by inserting tree sticks into the opening, and we utilized a piece of broken glass we had gathered from the street as the windowpane so that light could enter and provide a view.

We also transformed the west shed into a storage room, leaving a smaller window facing the south. The middle shed became our “living room” and main entrance. My mother requested two cardboard boxes from a local grocery store, and my second brother fashioned a doorframe using bamboo poles and created a cardboard door. The villagers marveled at our ingenuity, praising we changed the pigsty to “a three-room house with a south-facing door and windows on sides.”

My mother’s hair, which had been forcibly shaved by the Red Guards, had grown back, but remained short and spiky, easily becoming matted with dirt when she leaned against the adobe walls. To remedy this, we mixed dried wheat straw, hair, and mud together to create a paste. Using a kitchen knife and cooking spatula as tools, we applied the mixture to the inside walls of the pigsty, layer by layer, until it was thick enough to prevent further deterioration and wind.

However, raising the height of the pigsty was impossible. Consequently, we had to bend in and out of it many times a day. Over time, all of us, except my grandma, became accustomed to the low entrance, and our backs became flexible. Unfortunately, my grandma often forgot to duck and hit her head, resulting in many large and small bumps on her head, as well as tiny wooden splinters piercing her forehead. I would often assist her in removing these splinters.

One year later, my uncle came to visit us. This was my first encounter with my mother’s family, as she had not seen them since I was born. When my mother left her family, my uncle was still a teenager, but by this time, he had matured into a strong man, towering over 6 feet tall.

Being cramped within the small confines of the pigsty, he appeared even larger.

The day after his arrival, he used a shovel to dig down the ground of the pigsty by more than a foot. Not only was my uncle able to stand up, but we all had more room to move around. He also intentionally left a two-foot-wide section against the wall. This created a small earthen platform as a bed. My entire family praised him for his creativity.

The earthen bed quickly became my favorite spot. However, the good times did not last long as a severe rainstorm caused the water level to rise. One morning, I woke up to find that my shoes were floating in the water. We filled the dug area with sand and soil, leaving the earthen platform about half a foot above the ground. I continued to sleep on it until I left the village.

3. The grass roof of the pigsty had been worn down over the years by rain and wind and leaked profusely. On rainy days, big rain was outside and small rain inside. Even after the rain stopped falling outside, the drips inside the pigsty would persist. We had to place all of our pots, pans, and bowls, large and small, throughout the pigsty to catch the raindrops. Despite the challenges, my mother used the opportunity to teach me a poem by Du Fu, a famous poet of the Tang dynasty in China: “Roof ceaselessly leaks, nowhere dry on bed, Rain taps incessant, thread of unbroken thread.”

One night, after a long day of work, I was tired and fell asleep. Suddenly, I was jolted awake by a loud noise. The sounds were coming from the roof and making the dirt shake as the roof fluttered. I sat up and peered through the hole in the back wall, a group of young men tossing something onto the roof. My mother went out to chase them. She was only one step away from catching them, but she stopped. When she came back, I asked her why she let them go. My mother replied, “What can we do even if I caught them? It’s enough that they got scared.”

The following day, a villager noticed that all of the grits she had collected to lay the foundation for her new house behind the pigsty were missing and became angry, shouting, “Who took all my grits? Who raised these lazy donkeys?” My mother calmly informed her, “Your grits are all on the roof of the pigsty.”

The pigsty leaked even more after their mischief. We couldn’t stay there if the issue wasn’t fixed. So, we purchased the necessary materials and hired three people to replace the roof.

We spent all of our savings, and finally, the new wheat straw roof was installed.

Despite the pretty appearance, the new roof did not meet our expectations. A severe storm hit soon after, with thunder rumbling in the distance and strong winds tossing the golden straw on the roof. Fearing that all of our hard work would be for nothing, our family bravely faced the downpour and used our bodies to press down on the eaves of the pigsty. After the rain subsided, we applied a thick layer of mud around the straw on the eaves and used thin iron wire to secure the straw from one end of the roof to the other. We felt released that we got it done.

4. To our surprise, the village head Qi-jun demanded that we pay rent for the pigsty. He counted the rent starting from the first day of our stay in 1966, which came to a total of forty-eight yuan. This was a huge amount considering a full day labor of an adult male could only earn 20 cents at that time. My mother argued with him, “Why is the broken pigsty worth so much money? It was our effort to repair it.” Qi-jun did not listen and ordered four men to move our stuff outside, spitting out, “You can’t move in without paying rent.” To escalate the situation, he refused to distribute food rations to us and banned us from leaving the village. With no place to go, we had to stay outside of the pigsty.

Unluckily, it began to rain heavily the day after we were driven out, drenching all of our belongings, and leaving our family soaked to the bone like chickens. Despite the compassion of several individuals in the village, they were hesitant to challenge Qi-jun’s orders. However, two elder villagers stepped in as peacemakers and said, “Why don’t you pay thirty yuan first?” My mother replied, “We spent all our money replacing the roof. We don’t have any money on hand.”

The old men then glanced at the pig tied up at our doorstep, suggesting, “Sell your pig.”

Pigs were often seen as a “cornucopia” by the local peasants. To supplement earnings from the fields, we started to raise pigs as other peasants for extra income. Our pig was thriving and growing rapidly, adding over half a pound per day. Our goal was to sell it once it reached 200 pounds so that we would have money to cover our regular expenses.

Under relentless pressure, we finally made the difficult decision to sell the pig. However, the day before the planned sale, the pig suddenly became ill, refusing to eat or even walk steadily. I tried tempting it with its favorite green vegetable leaves but to no avail. The pig wouldn’t even touch them, and I couldn’t tell if its vision was blurry or if it simply had no appetite.

Desperate for a solution, we took the pig to a veterinarian in town. By this point, the pig was unable to walk on its own, so we placed it in a large basket and carried it using a shoulder pole. The pig let out a loud grunt and initially struggled, but gradually stopped moving. Its voice grew softer and then faded.

While taking a quick break by the road in a village, a few people came to see our pig. One man identified the pig’s illness as Hoop Eye and quickly punctured its eyelid with a sewing needle. The pig bled dark blood, the man shook his head and sighed, “It’s too late.” Hoop Eye is a common illness among rural free-range pigs, which can be fatal if left untreated. We learned that the treatment is to release a small amount of blood from the pig’s eye and sprinkle salt on the cut. Unfortunately, we didn’t know this beforehand.

Our pig stretched out its legs and died in front of us. I couldn’t help but sob loudly, with tears and snot streaming down my face. My mother and second brother were also grieving. The people around us gave us advice, “Drain the blood quickly! You can still sell the pork.” A few warm-hearted people helped us slaughter the pig, and one brought a scale and a bag. We sold some in this village and traveled to nearby villages. For those who didn’t have cash, we exchanged pork for soybeans. We traded it for a large bag of beans and returned in the late evening.

Before we finished dinner, two young men arrived and forcibly took my mother away.

Soon after, Qi-jun angry voice could be heard, accusing my mother of attempting to deceive him. He demanded that she kneel down and ordered others to assault her. I was tearful and felt heartache hearing my mother’s cries of pain but was helpless to stop it. The beating continued until late into the night, with four men standing guard to prevent my mother from taking her own life.

The following morning, the soybeans we obtained were taken from us. We moved back to the pigsty, but it took my mother a week to fully recover from her injuries sustained during the beating.

My mother said, “To die is easier than to live on. Many times, people thought I might choose to end my life, but that is not who I am. Though life has not been easy for me, I refuse to give up on myself, my children, and my family. I have too much respect for life and will not let my difficulties define me. I will continue to live and see what the future has in store.”

*

We lived in the pigsty for six years until 1972, when my mother was reassigned to a fruit tree farm to continue her labor reform, and we were finally able to leave. When the Cultural Revolution ended, I was able to attend college, and in 1992, I came to the U.S. to pursue further education. After completing graduate school in Massachusetts, I moved to Washington, D.C., where I worked in a nonprofit organization, conducting occupational safety and health research until my retirement two years ago. At present, I live in Maryland with my husband, enjoying a happy and peaceful life. The nightmare of my childhood is now behind me, and I sincerely hope that such suffering never happens again, anywhere, and to anyone.

*This is an excerpt from the memoir with the same title, which won the Best Category (Survival) Memoir award in the 2023 Memoir Book Competition

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Contributors:

Author Sue Tong

Sue Tong is a public health researcher who has dedicated three decades to the field and authored numerous academic articles. She currently resides in Maryland with her husband.

*featured Image: Souce of Beauty by Mara Lefebvre

I. The epoch of resuscitation. The epoch of meeting during our first months sober. Of learning you through screens, worlds shrunk to a single room. The epoch of promises, of text message poetry, the endless beauty that rests in the potential of who someone could be. Of looking in your eyes for the first time and knowing one of us has to disappoint the other in the end. The epoch of seeing and being seen. Of knowing I could never be the one to let you go. Of a leg yet untouched by your fingertips.

II. The epoch of waiting for you to say I love you first. Of your red shirt seared in my memory, dogs in a shaded driveway, two breaths lost to the massive expanse of cosmic space and time suspended in a single moment. The epoch of planets shifting axes. Of the splintering center. The epoch of calluses, of elation, of holding hands in an AA meeting. The epoch of floating, of joined solitudes, of a universe built between two palms.

III. The epoch of the intimacy of sharing a closet. The epoch of static, of gentleness, a loose eyelash on your cheek. Of three doves on a windowsill, leather jackets, pale blue tiles, my heart beating in your hands. The epoch of too many cigarettes. Of eight stories of concrete. Of gathering light, of learning the same thing can be so easy and so hard at the same time. The epoch of first tattoos. Of board games. Of shattering. Of forgiveness.

IV. The epoch of tiramisu in bed on a Saturday morning. Of sharing soap, of rituals, what it means to live a thousand lifetimes within a year, knowing your mother will never love me and pretending it won’t matter someday. The epoch of organizing socks. Of grocery lists, of intricacy. The epoch of lavender sheets, of you coming home to me, the way everything else feels so small. Of sleep talking, post-it notes in a lunch bag, back porch thunderstorms, letting in the rain. The epoch of choosing to stay. Of dancing in the kitchen and meaning it. Of quitting the cigarettes, inexhaustible devotion, your hands an inch from mine every night. The epoch of blooming, of the soundtrack of your laughter, of holding you in nightmares, of permanence.

V. The epoch of the last time we’ll ever sleep together. The epoch of paralysis. Of wishing I could hear you snore again. Of the last time we kissed feeling exactly like the first, of the immeasurable distance between two halves of a world torn apart. The epoch of a heart falling out of a chest. The epoch of overwatering, of claw marks, entrenchment, sedation, knowing nothing will feel like this again. The epoch of tracing veins. Of bargaining. Of knowing I could never hate you if I tried. The epoch of an empty apartment with your laundry in the basket. The epoch of remembering there was love in other places before you. The epoch of wanting to forget.

VI. The epoch of growing skin cells you’ll never touch. Of lasting grief, dying flowers on the kitchen table, the solace of alternate timelines, of wishing it could have been this one. The epoch of eternal tightness in my chest. The epoch of fleeting, of stuttering, of blanket forts, of entropy, of sacrifice. The epoch of wishing love could have been enough. The epoch of realizing it never is.

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Contributors:

Author Amanda St Claire

Amanda St. Claire is a creative nonfiction writer living in Richmond, Virginia with her soul cat, Bowie. A proposal writer by day, she spends her free time with friends, immersed in music, and collecting antique postcards and ephemera. Her writing has been published in Furrow Literary Magazine.

AML

Artist Mara Lefebvre

Mara Lefebvre is a writer, visual artist, and retreat junkie with an appreciation of beauty, excellence, and good design in all things. Her studio is in upstate New York in a ranch house with a red door on a dead-end street. See more of her art at www.maralefebvre.weebly.com.

*featured art by Elisa Peterson

“You’re aaalways defending the underdog,” our Social Studies teacher said to me in a heavy, sliding voice that older women often used in those days. The tone conveyed righteousness and authority. “First it was Communists and now it’s Negroes. What will happen when the underdog is on top?”

Three black boys were sitting in the back of the room. One said quietly but clearly,

“An underdog will defend her.”

It was 1952. My school, PS 138, was in an ethnically mixed, Brooklyn, New York neighborhood. We had been discussing civil rights efforts taking place at the time. Though we didn’t know it, they would soon lead up to the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit that ultimately desegregated southern schools. Our teacher had said she thought the Negroes were going too far. I had raised my hand and disagreed.

“Too far from what?” I had asked.

I think there may have been a teacher shortage because more than one abusive teacher showed up at times – usually for only a semester. This teacher had her own problems.

“Did I hear the underbelly of a dog say it would defend her?” she asked the air, looking in the direction of the boy in the back.

I had just reached puberty, and I’ve since heard that girls could be quite explosive at that time of life.

I burst out, “How dare you say that to him?!”

She turned to me. “How dare you say that to me?! Do you want to go to the principal’s office?”

Puberty took over. “Send me to the principal’s office!” I said. “I’ll tell him how you slapped that other boy in the hall. You wouldn’t have done it if he had been white!”

A hush followed.

‘Put your head down!” At that time teachers used to make us put our heads down on the desks if they thought we were misbehaving.

“I’ll be glad to put my head down!” I said. “Because this is making me nauseous!”

I was surprised when another girl said, “I’m nauseous too,” and put her head down as well. Although I often took part in class discussions, I was shy with other children. I hadn’t expected the support. Others followed suit. I don’t recall whether any of them were black.

The teacher was saved by the bell. It rang to tell us to change periods while we were resting.

Later that day we were in Library class. The children often got to classes ahead of the teachers, who had only the intervals between them to take quick breaks. The three boys who’d been at the back of the room were seated at a table, drumming on it as they often did. A couple of other girls and I sat down at the same table. The boy who had spoken up touched another with his elbow, and they stopped drumming.

“Would you like to go out?” he asked me.

For a moment I thought he was talking about leaving class; then he said,

“On a date.” A fleeting image of a sweet date came to mind.

“For a coke?” I asked.

He said, putting out his chest, “Maybe to start with.”

I hadn’t even been out for a coke with a boy. Something didn’t seem right. I said I didn’t think I could.

He turned away sharply.

“They’re all the same,” he said.

His friend leaned toward him. “Just because a girl stands up for you, it doesn’t mean she has to lie down with you to prove she’s sincere.”

It was a moment worth remembering.

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Contributors:

Author Edna Garte

Edna Garte has been juggling writing, art, and music for most of her life. She is currently retired from teaching cross-cultural introductions to the arts at Oakland Community College in Auburn Hills, MI. Previous publication venues include Lone Star Legacy: African American History in Texas, Water Music: The Great Lakes Poetry Society Anthology, Journal of American Indian Education, Gazette des Beaux Arts, and Jewish Quarterly Review. Her e-book on Anishinaabe arts is hosted on the Iron Range Historical Society Website.

Artist Elisa Peterson

Website

Elisa Peterson is a maker, memoir essayist, illustrator, and recycle artist. Her mixed media art has been published in Prometheus Dreaming and her writing has been featured at Creative Colloquy in Tacoma WA. Kings Books carries two of her illustrated chapbooks and her charming graphic zine collections "Ask Your Grandma" and others are available through Etsy.

*featured artwork “The 2020s” by Madari Pendas

“You must have sweet blood,” my grandmother told me once when I was a little girl. I supposed she must have been right because every summer my scrawny, freckled arms and legs would be covered in mosquito bites—swollen red mounds like a constellation of stars scattered on my skin.

I would ignore the advice of the adults around me and scratch them incessantly until they would turn into scabs. And without fail, I would pick at them. “You’re going to have scars that will never go away,” my older sisters warned me over and over but the pull to pick was too great.

It was not an itch the picking satisfied but a release I didn’t understand but couldn’t resist. There was something inside me that felt wrong and for that split second when I tucked my nail under the dried brown patch, felt a sharp prick of pain, and watched the ruby red bloom out, some of that wrongness was released.

###

I was 11 the first time I smoked a cigarette. Sitting cross legged on the floor, I held it the way I’d seen women in the movies do. I wanted to be one of them, outside of the little life I was living. No longer the daughter of a deadbeat father. No longer shy and insecure. No longer the girl who was “too emotional.” No longer the one in the class with the learning disability that couldn’t keep up.

I didn’t inhale the first few puffs because I didn’t know I was supposed to. “You’re doing it wrong,” my friend sitting beside me, who knew more about these kinds of things, said. “You have to take it in like a breath.”

I was embarrassed by my ignorance but determined to get it right. I brought the cigarette to my mouth and sucked, swallowing the smoke down. It came out in uncontrollable coughs and my head felt suddenly disconnected, like it was floating in another space above my body.

“Whoa,” I said, laughing.

“You’re having a head rush,” my friend explained.

I didn’t care so much what it was called but I did care that with each inhale, I began to feel like someone else. Not a movie star I had imagined but another thing that felt somehow right. I thought about the dirty smoke coating the pink inside me. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be but I did know I wasn’t supposed to be a girl with pink inside. Now, I could make my body what my mind already believed it should be—tarnished.

And in the years that followed, I would do it again with other things. Things that always felt simultaneously wrong but somehow right.

###

When I was 19, I lived with a boyfriend who abused me. The first time it happened, he gripped my wrists so tight, it left bruises that encircled them like two bracelets. After, I sat in a bathtub and lathered soap on each one with the vague notion that maybe I could wash what happened away. But, over and over, as I dipped my soapy arms into the water, a cloud would burst from each and reveal the deep purple truth.

The last time he hurt me, we were parked in a car on the side of a mountain road arguing about which direction to go in. I remember the map in my hand. I remember the familiar flash of anger that passed over his face. I remember saying, “I’m sorry. Please don’t!” I remember his fist hitting me. I remember putting my hand up to shield myself before the next one. I remember him grabbing that hand and bringing it to his mouth. I remember knowing his teeth had broken the skin. I remember the contrast of the blood seeping out from the fresh lesions on my knuckles—bright crimson against the white of my skin. I remember in that moment that, for the first time, I was tired of being tarnished; I wanted to be pink inside again. And I remember knowing that I was going to leave him soon and never return.

###

Six months later, I sat next to the man who, in seven more years, would become my husband and told him the story of what had happened on the side of the mountain road.

“And you didn’t tell anyone?” he asked.

“No,” I said, the shame washing over me. The feeling that I had done something wrong. That maybe even if I didn’t want to be tarnished anymore, it was too late and I could never really change.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I shook my head; I didn’t have an answer. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m glad you told me now.”

Then he took my hand in his and I watched his eyes go to the small scars on my knuckles—the ones no one knew about but me until then. He ran his fingers gently over them, brought them to his lips, and kissed them. And as he did, I knew it was the beginning of something new. From then on, when I saw the scars, I would remember this moment and not how they got there to begin with.

###

I was in my 30s when I started running. I liked the solitude, the way the streets were empty in the early morning, waiting for the day to begin. The air so frigid it stung with each breath or so hot my clothes would turn damp with sweat. I liked the way my muscles burned. The way my mind would clear, forget about the past or the future, and just be there in that moment for a little while.

Some days, I could still feel that wrongness brewing inside me but I had different names for it by then. Anxiety. Depression. Trauma. And on those days, it felt like each time my feet hit the pavement, a little of that wrongness went with it and some kind of new strength began to grow.

And in the years that followed, I would continue doing things that made my body feel stronger and the more I did, the better I felt.

###

When I was 46, I found a cancerous lump in my breast. I asked the doctor, “But how did it get there? What did I do wrong?”

He said, “You may have done nothing wrong. Sometimes these things just happen.”

After surgery and treatments, scans showed the cancer was gone but the same questions cycled through my thoughts again and again. Where did the cancer come from? What had caused it to grow? What would stop it from coming back? Why did my body betray me? I had been treating it right for so many years now.

I grew angry at my body.

One day, I woke up from a restless sleep to find my arms covered in scratches, the sheets stained in blood. It looked as if I’d spent the night wrestling a rabid cat. But I knew there was no cat. I knew I had done this to myself unconsciously as I slept.

Every day after that one, more scratches appeared.

When I showered, I would look at my arms and think about the little girl with the mosquito bites on her skin. More than 40 years later, the constellation had returned but this time it was chaotic mess of lines, some red and some an opaque white. I could hear my sisters saying, “You’re going to have scars that will never go away.”

###

At 47, I sat looking at a therapist. “I’m not doing very well,” I told her and she nodded, then silently waited the way they always do. I thought to tell her about the cancer because that seemed to be what started all this again.

Instead, I began to tell her about the little girl. Week after week, I walked my way through the years—the girl, the young woman, the middle-aged me—and as I did the scratches began to heal and new ones stopped appearing.

I thought about that wrongness I had believed was inside me. When I was little, it felt like a monster, trying to fight its way out. But now I knew there was never any monster; there was always just a little girl with pink inside trying to hold in all the feelings that she didn’t know how to.

“I’’ll take care of you,” I told her. “I’m sorry I haven’t always done that before but I know how to now.”

###

I’m 50 and my body has scars that will never go away. There are the ones on the inside that no one can see. There are the ones on my knuckles, so faint now they can only be found if you know where to look. There is the one on the side of my breast, a perfect symmetrical slice. There are ones on my arms, translucent lines like ghosts whispering secrets from the past. Each one tells a story. I used to think they were the stories of what made me weak. But the more I listen, the more I understand they are the marks of the times I needed to be the bravest. They show when I had to struggle through something, when I had to walk away, when I had to fight, and when I had to heal. They are my body and they are me.

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Contributors:

Author Darcey Gohring

Darcey Gohring is a full-time freelance writer and editor based in the New York City area. As a writing instructor, she specializes in personal narrative and memoir. Her essays have appeared in dozens of publications including HuffPost, Writers Read, Newsweek, Scary Mommy, Insider, among others. She was a contributing author for the anthology, Corona City: Voices From an Epicenter, where she shared her experience being diagnosed with breast cancer just as the pandemic hit the United States. Darceyhas served as a speaker for writing events all over the United States. To learn more, visit darceygohring.com.

Artist Madari Pendas

Madari Pendas is a Cuban-American writer and visual artist. She received her MFA from Florida International University, where she was a Lawrence Sanders Fellow. Her work has appeared in Craft, The Masters Review, PANK Magazine, and more. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (2021).

*Featured Image of poet Lucille Clifton as a child. Photographer unknown.

As I drove further away from downtown, the houses and sidewalks became progressively neglected. Like forgotten memories in an old attic. Like the unloved pages of an old dusty photo album, some complete, yet frayed–overflowing with used-up cheer. Others, abandoned, with only the peculiar unblinking gaze of an unnamed child–questioning and accusing all at once—staring out from among dubious, brown, square-shaped stains, the only proof that there was more to the story; that more had once existed. Proof that here was once a happy, bustling, productive community. A thoroughfare of dreams, once cherished and kept tidy and neat, to proudly display the depth of love, the fullness of life, of one family. One community. With its empty lots between every other house and its broken sidewalks and time-tested aluminum fences dislocated by century-old oak trees, Columbia’s North Main Street was such a forgotten piece of history.

I remember late spring mornings in the 1970s, when milk bottles waited by screen doors on front porches lined with rocking chairs and a profusion of flower pots bursting with a multitude of bright, colorful southern promises; virtual assurances of lazy summer days ahead, of shiny new opportunities sure to come to those who worked hard and kept their heads down; I remember the brawny men in suspenders and wide-brim hats, with five-o’clock shadows, booming laughter, and infectious grins, proudly clutching their paychecks, coming home at dusk to the smell of fried chicken, okra, and candied yams. The dreams, the laughter, and the promises; all gone now. And in their place lay crackheads on cracked sidewalks, empty-looking, like haunting brown squares in a dusty old photo album abandoned in an attic.

What changed everything? What changed a once-vibrant thoroughfare into half-abandoned rot and ruin? After twelve years abroad, I return to live in the United States and am faced with this need to know.

I worry about what this says about me. How I come from here but have changed–I’d like to think–into a better version of myself. After living abroad in cities barely altered through centuries of pestilence and conquest, I am ashamed that the place I come from is such a broken shell, apparently devoid of the spirit to renew or reinvent itself.

I ask my eighty-year-old grandmother about this and she says that crack cocaine is to blame. I ask my uncle and he patiently explains that the Prison Industrial Complex, minimum mandatories, and the War on Drugs are the reason. I ask an older cousin on her way from church who waves a dog-eared bible in the air and exclaims it’s “all on account of the loose morals and lack of faith in God!”

I even ask the nun who runs the oldest women’s shelter in Columbia, South Carolina, the nun who I am going to visit that day to offer my services for volunteer work with displaced women. She responds coolly, “These women do not need positive thinking or self-esteem workshops. They are just drug addicts and all they care about is their next fix. We keep them here for a couple of days until they move on. They don’t want to change anything.”

She says this to me after looking me up and down through the locked screen door and skeptically asking, “Mary? Mary for the appointment? The volunteer life coach is you?”

Ouch! I am not sure how I was supposed to be looking—No, wait. That’s not true, I do know. I was supposed to be looking white.

Now, I could be wrong. She could have had all kinds of rocks in her shoe that day, or simply been the rare unpleasant non-profit director with poor communication skills. But I expected a nun and representative of a charity to at least have an open mind. So even if I had shown up with sixteen heroine needles sticking out of my arm, her crestfallen response still would have made me think her a racist. Because that is always what a black person thinks when a white person is rude for no apparent reason. We can’t help it. The way an abused woman might flinch when someone next to her raises their hand unexpectedly or a veteran with PTSD ducks when they hear a sudden clang of a garbage pail cover falling to the ground. To a hammer everything is a nail. And we? We are the hammer.

I thought, so much for my idea to volunteer as a way to learn about and try to help this situation, before judging. The person (yes, one person, as in, there is just one women’s shelter in the capital of South Carolina, and seventeen in the state) entrusted with helping seems to consider herself a gate-keeper of misery. Only there to make sure these women suffer in peace.

***

Many neighborhoods across the US that were vibrant in the 70s and 80s now look like they have been through war. Half-abandoned, worn-out streets, stripped of children and life.

My family has suffered a similar decline.

We all live twenty miles outside of town on the overgrown haphazardly sub-divided remnants of my great-great grandfather’s 200-acre farm. Five years ago, at the age of fifty-six, my mother died of a ruptured ulcer. She was home alone and her body lay there for three days until one of her three sisters (who live within sixty feet) came in to check on her and found her lying in a pool of her own vomit on the floor by the foot of her bed. Her sisters say she must have gotten up to make it to the bathroom. I am dismayed that her body lay there alone for days. I think my family unloving but, in fairness, she was mentally ill and often told them to stay away. Mercifully, the coroner says she was dead before she hit the ground. I decided to write about her so her tortuous young life would not be forgotten. This is why I moved into the three-bedroom luxury trailer I bought her years earlier on our family’s land. I figured it would also be my chance to do some aquaponics projects I’ve been wanting to do. The government paid my grandfather to stop farming the land years before. I secretly believed this was the impetus for our decline and this was a chance to bring back the purpose to this place and to myself.

My fancy European and New York fashion friends would never approve, though. They would say incredulously, “You are now living in a TRAILER? As in a trailer park?” No. Not as in a trailer park. As in, my family has lived here on this land for over 200 years and when seven southern siblings reach adulthood and don’t want to leave home, they simply buy a movable residence–I prefer to call it a mobile home–and place it next door, on said family land.

But I don’t say that, instead I will say that I’m going to build a Tiny House, and ditch the double-wide. That way they will be awed by my quirky ingenuousness, and believe I want to live here. Not that I have to live here because I am broken, by promises and their men, profound overwhelming sadness and disappointment, and the relentless strivings of city life. Besides, I own this unsellable land. I have nowhere else to belong. Its hard barren dirt is in my blood.

And they don’t know anything about our complicated tenancy-in-common land ownerships or that black people come in hillbilly too. That some black people even owned slaves. I don’t know why that comes as such a surprise to some. The real story of the American South has more plot holes than an episode of the Dukes of Hazard. With astounding frequency here blacks and whites are related by blood, yet no one can really get ahead. Everyone is stuck, working hard to maintain a distance that, no matter how polite, simply isn’t there By what magic could black people, living in the same spot for 150+ years, possibly develop green eyes, red hair, and Scottish last names? Not since the Great Migration has anyone ever moved away—except to die in all major world wars. You do the math.

My fancy friends also don’t know that, like whites, all black people are not created equal. Poor and rich, city and country folks, the educated and uneducated are often worlds apart. Let me put it this way: You could grow up in Philly and become a filmmaker, or perhaps a judge, and end up in Bel Air, and your sister still lives in Philly and sends you her son when he gets in trouble on the inner-city basketball court. Or your cleaning business could boom and you and your family could move from the ghetto up to the east side. But that’s all city blacks. We are more like Queen Sugar after the farm died. Small town children of generations of farmers, we are not particularly ambitious, criminal, or even street-smart. But they wouldn’t know that, because there are so few media representations of rural African-Americans. My family isn’t poor or desperate, nor are we wealthy and cultured. We are just country and mean and squabbling and vindictive. We keep valuable cars on cement blocks until they rot right before our eyes, like our unsupported dreams.

Our intentions are on blocks too.

We marry our third cousins and we hold grudges for decades with other parts of the family down the road or through the woods. And when someone dies, we sneak in the back door and steal their photo albums and hide them until our sisters stop asking about them—even if that takes years. We are jealous. We’re superstitious. Selfish.

Long ago, before cellphones and credit cards, we milked cows, gathered eggs, planted okra and squash, and ate rabbits, possums and squirrels, raccoons, and deer. Now we are strictly Mountain Dew and drive-thru windows. But more than ever, we are the big C. Christians, more Christian now than we were thirty years ago when we were merely “good people” and our few white cousins that didn’t try to burn our house down or run us off the road for fun were “good wat folks.” My pre-teen first-cousins have $600 cell phones and the lights are often out at their house because after driving up and down the road all month, eating fast food, and buying more extravagant clothes to wear nowhere, there is never anything left over to pay the electricity bill—the only actual bill they’ve got, since their trailer is paid for and their water comes from the well out back. I expect they charge their cell phones in the car. Laptop? What laptop? That was either stolen by another cousin long ago or destroyed by some destructive child and no one has ever bothered to get it repaired. Why? Well, that’s just not something we do. Repair stuff. Their mother, my aunt Lettie Mae, has designer furniture, and bags and bags of dirty clothes stacked in her bedroom closet. Instead of fixing her laundry machine, she buys new clothes and buys new cell phones for her children.

Presumably, this will make them better Christians. My aunt used to be a vibrant fun girl, with big ideas and laughter quickly bubbling from her lips, but now she is someone important in the family church, riddled with disease and only smiles at gossip. She calls me “devil child” behind my back and won’t speak directly to me since the day I told her I was a Buddhist and I didn’t agree that God was sending her sister, my aunt Zee, to hell because she married the Pakistani Muslim guy from the Sizzle Spot gas station. Buddhism, according to her, is the work of the devil and merits the coldest of shoulders.

My aunt Zee’s car breaks down frequently because she only fills the gas tank $2 at a time. Someone’s got to go get her with a can of gas. It has to be me, I won’t lend anyone my car. I’m the only woman at home during the day (all others work twenty miles away in town) and the men can’t drive, they’ve all lost their licenses. The women drive them everywhere, until the day the men get drunk or find another love interest, and then they steal the women’s cars and get arrested for driving drunk or without a license—country boys think driving drunk and without a license is their God-given right. And then the women defend them, bail them out and the whole mess starts all over again.

***

My cousin, Eli, is the pit bull whisperer and he appears from the woods at all hours and drinks little airplane bottles of liquor in my backyard at the tree line. I know because he is the only person who could do this—my aunt Alfie’s pit bulls nor any other dog in the region dares bark at his arrival. One day, he has a huge argument with my grandmother and I try to restore order. He replies that he is a gangster. As if that means he can fly. I say, Sure, all gangsters live with their grandmothers and have to beg them for gas money.

I realize then that he is severely mentally ill, not like cousin Gaddy with the three purple hearts and plate in his skull who walks the country roads in alternating states of agitation or inebriation, but ill, like my cousin Andy, my aunts Lacey, Roberta, Zee, and Lettie Mae. Like my grandmother, my grandfather, and my mother—the only one to actually seek the psychiatrist’s couch, which only got her drugged up, ridiculed, and estranged. Were they always ill?

Generally, we Southerners, and Black people, don’t look kindly on the mental health professions—like they aren’t really jobs or maybe life has taught us that talking to strangers in confidence is something deadly, outrageous, and unthinkable. So, people stay sick– but no one recognizes it or calls it that–unless they’re to the point of mumbling incoherently. Instead, mental illness is chalked up as personality quirks or something that can be prayed away in church. I see the same symptoms all across the south and I wonder if that’s what made North Main Street and similar communities decline or did the illness come with the decline of the communities? That it was never just the crack, the prison industrial complex or the war on drugs. Not the loose morals or the lack of faith in God. These are all just symptoms of a collective madness that grips us.

*A previous version of this essay was published in The Nervous Breakdown.

*names have been changed, because the truth hurts

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Contributors:

Author Mary McBeth

Mary McBeth is a writer, editor, Reiki master, metaphysical counselor, and Sexual Assault Awareness advocate. The founding editor of Memoir Magazine, and the creator of The #MeToo Essay Award, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Argot Magazine, Cobalt, The Nervous Breakdown, *82 Review, Awakened Voices, and others. Mary speaks 4 languages and has lived and worked in more than 23 countries. She spent 12 years in Italy as a fashion model, the subject of her current memoir-in-process, entitled, "Perfect." Find her at www.MaryMcBeth.com

*Artwork “Caffeine” by Carol Rizzo

I don’t drink tea very often. I prefer the taste of other beverages. Even if I liked tea more, I rarely have the mental energy for it. There are too many decisions.

How long to steep?

Re-use the teabag or throw it away?

What to add: Milk, honey, lemon?

What flavor?

My mother used to save her used tea bags in a small glass cup. I don’t think that she ever used one twice. Having grown up during the Great Depression, the thought of throwing the bag away after only one use was probably disturbing to her—much too extravagant. I watched the saved tea bags dry, shrink, curl, turn brown, and stick to the bottom of the cup—a monument to good intentions.

When I do drink tea, I usually choose Chamomile and add honey. Honey comes in many varieties. I like it somewhat unrefined—cloudy, not clear, with some particles, hints of the beehive still present. It soothes my throat and I feel connected with nature.

I think of my mother when I remove the teabag from the teacup. I wind the attached white string around the bag and spoon, and pull the string tightly in order not to waste any of the residual tea inside. I carefully put the tea bag in the glass cup that most closely resembles the one that my mother used to use. I won’t use the bag again, but I won’t waste it. I will watch it dry, shrink, curl, turn brown, and stick to the bottom.

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Contributors:

ADM

Author David Margolin

David Margolin lives, works, and writes in Portland, Oregon. During his career as a Neurologist he has done a lot of medical/scientific writing. Now he is enjoying the relative freedom of creative writing. He has published in Friday Flash Fiction and R U Joking?

ACR

Artist Carol Rizzo

Carol Rizzo works from a barn located north of N.Y. on the Hudson River where she illustrates editorial, advertising, and children's stories.

Featured Artwork: “Working the Line” by Kristina Moriconi

Memoir is about absence, emptiness; it’s about crossing divides–of time, space, language, and that ultimate divide between the living and the dead. It’s standing at the edge of the void, your body in the grip of a vertiginous urge. Memoir is about finding your bearings so that you can walk with one foot in the present and the other in the past. There, you have become the stateless citizen of multiple countries; you hold a passport for time travel.

As an immigrant writer, I know what it means to inhabit physical spaces where you belong but also do not–ever, never again. These spaces exist in time and outside time. I am a ghost in the place that made me and an impostor in that other place I sometimes call home–and almost mean it.

The stories of bodies are born in places, and their mnemonic traces travel from one place to another, back and forth, until the boundaries between past and present become porous, and you do not know where you are, when you are, who you are. You split, fragment, multiply.

July 2021, Jones Beach. A tidal surge drags me down into the cold, murky waters of the Atlantic. My feet cannot find firm ground in the sinking sand. Terrified, I return to a September day of two years earlier, the last time I was in Sicily, when I surrendered to the warm waters of that impossibly blue Mediterranean I stubbornly claim as mine–as did distant ancestors from Africa, Greece, Spain. I carry their bones in my pockets.

Surreally flat, deceptively serene, the Mediterranean covers me that September day. I float, my head barely above water. Fai il morto, my brother told when we were kids. I almost drowned in that sea. It was stormy then and I believed I would die.

I let myself go, arms and legs wide open, eyes closed. The tidal surge of the Atlantic retrieves, acquiescent. A wave carries me to shore.

Geography is also and always history.

Every ocean, every sea is a graveyard, even my Mediterranean–fishermen who never returned home; refugees whose rescued sparse personal effects I watch on a slideshow at an academic conference—is it respectful or obscene? A boy-fish holds up Sicily off the coast of Messina, where Odysseus braved the girl monsters.

Monsters have their own stories. Monsters reveal what’s hidden. Unrecognizable to myself, I collect recipes for the journey back.

On August 23, 1984, an Alitalia plane lifts me up and away from my island a few hundred miles away from the North African coast and takes me three thousand miles away. Four decades earlier, the Husky Operation had been launched from North African waters. A couple of decades after the Sicilian campaign that led to the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler, someone would take a photograph of me and my older sister in flowered bathing suits, barefoot on that very sand where the boots of General Patton left their imprint on July 10, 1943. That July morning a nine-year-old girl cries out from the balcony, “Mamà, u mari un c’è cchiù!” Her sea has disappeared under a blanket of war ships.

I am the daughter of that girl and I carry her memories in the curvature of my spine, nestled between each vertebra.

Forty-one summers later, as I cross invisible sky borders on my way to becoming an immigrant, I think of the route my maternal grandfather followed in 1924 when, barely twenty, he emigrated to another America. I remember his stories of Buenos Aires and señoritas and yo, yo, yo soy italiano and his engagement to a thirteen-year-old girl he has seen only from a distance. From Sicily, the girl copies onto paper love letters her convent-educated mother writes for the fiancée in Argentina. The girl doesn’t pay attention, eager to escape that tedious task and return to her games. She cries when she makes a mistake and Mother says, “You have to do it all over again.” No scribbles allowed in these letters sprinkled with the ornate language of the romance novels read secretly in the convent and still remembered. And who is the girl? The daughter or the mother?

In four years, the young man will cross the Atlantic to marry the girl in the house her father had built for her in his Sicilian town–my town, our town, the town where we stay even after we leave, where we make memories and tuck them into suitcases.

I am a passenger on the ship sailing to Buenos Aires with the twenty-year-old immigrant. I sit in a Sicilian salotto next to his thirteen-year-old fiancée. I rest my hand on the girl’s shoulder, then walk to the balcony to admire the view of the Mediterranean right in front of us. I stare at the disappeared sea with the nine-year-old girl who will survive a war and lose two daughters to migration, to the country of the soldiers who traded powdered milk for flasks of local wine.

Migration makes ghosts of the people we once were, and those ghosts are the shadows behind and ahead of us.

Susan Sontag says that a photograph is a token of absence. And so is memoir. The memoir writer sits patiently in the dark room and waits–for outlines to emerge, for contours to fill. The creator of the image is bound to be surprised, even shocked when the past comes to light. Once revealed, it is made present. There’s the shape of my grandmother’s arms, deep in fleshy dough, speckles of flour across the watery surface of the image.

Who am I?

I am the American woman separated from family and friends in the first year of Covid-19, quarantined in a town in Northern New Jersey named Teaneck. Teaneck is a Native American name, and in that house built on Lenape land I make sourdough starter. My son calls it Mother Doom. I knead dough, and the ancient smell of bread fills the house. I am a four-year-old standing on a small wooden stool in the kitchen of an apartment on the first floor of Largo Cadore No. 9 in a Sicilian coastal town named Gela. Nonna hands me a piece of dough so I can make bread with her, but the doll-shaped loaf never returns from the baker, and I think of all the lost little girls of our family, rocked to sleep by the bones of their grandmothers in shared graves.

Where will my ashes be scattered?

I am the hands of a child and the hands of a woman, and we work the dough. Pull, stretch, fold. I am the glass jar of sourdough starter, and each bubble is an ancestor. I am the blue tape on the lid that says “Edi Lievito Madre June 2020” that becomes so faded I regretfully replace it a year and a half later. Don’t worry, Nonna’s ghost whispers. Nothing gets lost forever. Even when you’d rather it would.

In whose stories will I return?

The past is a country. Plentiful. Stingy. Not innocent. Seductive. It indicts. It redeems. It calls you and you’d better be ready for the journey.

I hold fistfuls of flour, of sand, of ashes.

What will I take with me when I go? What will I leave behind? What I will bring back?

Careful–pomegranate seeds doom you to live with the dead.

What will I gain? What will I lose?

Pay your ticket–and I’ll tell you.

Step away from the edge. Fall into that void.

Let’s cross.

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Contributors:

Author Edvige Giunta

Edvige Giunta is the author of "Writing with an Accent" and coeditor of several
anthologies, including "Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory Fire" (2022). Her writing appears in many anthologies and in
magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, Mutha Magazine, Jellyfish Review, December,
Pithead Chapel, Ocean State Review, and Paris Lit Up. Find her at: www.edvigegiunta.com

Artist Kristina Moriconi

Kristina Moriconi is a poet, essayist, and visual artist whose work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and magazines including Brevity, Cobalt Review, Lumina, as well as many others. Learn more about her work at: www.kristinamoriconi.com

*with Featured Art: “Esperanza” By Fierce Sonia

My mom lost her looks in a Shreveport hair salon in 1990. I was thirteen; she was forty.

She’d been gorgeous—to me at least—with a round face, plump lips, crystal eyes, and long brown hair that stretched scrunchies to their limits, though by this time white hairs had sprouted from her temples and her chin was on a slow but inevitable slide into her neck.

The stylist—a leather-clad man who looked more like a musician than anyone who’d ever cut my hair—recounted a ribald story over the roar of hairdryers, as my mom’s dark tresses wafted to the floor. She laughed, oblivious to the violence being done to her. But I saw. Catching her attention in the mirror, I shook my head in warning, which she ignored.

Thirty minutes later, her hair formed a blonde-streaked bulb, gelled spikes creeping into her face like stalactites. I shuffled behind her to the counter, humiliated, trying not to cry as she wrote a check.

“You look great!” The receptionist smiled.

“Thanks, I love it.”

Surely the niceties had gone too far. Or was my mom willfully unaware? Once she realized the severity of the situation, she’d be more upset than I was. How could I break it to her? I waited until we were seated in her Geo Metro. As soon as both doors closed, I sobbed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Your hair! It looks bad.” There, I’d said it. She needed to know. Now we could strategize ways to hide her head. Maybe hats, scarves. She’d know best.

Instead, she laughed, a condescending chuckle probably meant to sound more confident than it really was—not unlike this failed attempt at a modern hairdo. “I like it.”

“Have you seen it? Look from the side!” I turned the rearview mirror toward her.

“Stop! This is the haircut I wanted. This is how women wear their hair these days. Women who live in cities, not podunk little towns.”

I averted my eyes, knowing but not saying that those women had stronger chins.

At the K-12 school I attended—where my mom worked—the fallout was immediate.

“Your mama’s done ruined herself.”

I knelt to adjust the roll in my stone-washed jeans. The boy was handsome and funny, wild in the way good-looking teenagers always were. Around kids like him, I bumbled, so busy watching myself I could only respond in slow motion.

“Don’t do anything like that to your hair,” he said. “Okay, Stick?”

Stick. I hated the name. The past two years I’d grown six inches, until I looked like I’d been assembled with too many parts. Nothing fit together the way it was supposed to. Until then in my horrific puberty, I’d at least had my mother’s looks as a silent promise that one day I’d be released from my transitional hell. I’d shed my awkwardness like old skin and emerge lovely like her. Now that promise had been broken.

My mom and I lived with my grandma. Just the three of us. No siblings, no cousins, no aunts or uncles. Everyone I knew was one of our ages: adolescent, middle-aged, or elderly. No in-between. Thus, at thirteen, I was certain I’d soon be in midlife. From there, it’d be a quick bounce to old age, like a skipping stone toward death. Every day I stared in the mirror, checking the profile of my chin, horrified by the lines on my neck.

It didn’t help that people often confused the three of us. There was never an outing to Wal-Mart when a shopper didn’t approach me, yelling, “Rachel!” I answered to my mother’s name as easily as to my own, so I’d turn and say hello. The speaker, if she noticed her mistake, would stutter in confusion, as though feeling the weight of the years. “You’re Rachel’s daughter. Sorry.” There was no need to apologize. My mom also responded to my grandmother’s name. We were used to it. I only pitied the other party. How shocking it must be to turn down the cosmetics aisle and find yourself face-to-face with an old friend still in the bloom of youth—gangly as she might be.

My mother’s appearance continued to morph in odd and unpredictable ways. Her hair grew into a droopy perm. She wore flowy dresses, beaded jewelry, dangly earrings, and oversized bracelets. Gone was the sweet-faced gifted-and-talented teacher. In her place was some Woodstock attendee, twenty years too late, jangling as she paraded her over-tanned body down the halls.

Even more disconcerting, my mother was more popular than I was. As the yearbook sponsor, she recruited anyone she suspected of promise. During those long school periods, everyone talked—in front of my mother and to her—making her privy to the secret lives, ambitions, romances, and family dramas of her students. Seniors dropped by our house unannounced for advice. She drove basketball players to the movies—for some, the first time they’d ever been in a theater. She helped students with their college applications, even drove them to tour universities. To them, she was a mythical hero, an adult who actually cared, oblivious to poverty and race.

I entered her classroom one afternoon to find a trio of popular girls dancing on the table like a coven of drunk witches. They’d just finished a lesson on Buddhism, which overflowed into a general discussion of religion and life. They laughed, babbling to my mother and to each other, their bodies leaking exuberance. When the final bell rang, they jumped down, yelling goodbyes as they ran into the corridor.

“What are they so happy about?” I mumbled.

“Stacy’s going to boarding school. She’s getting out of this town.” My mother gazed out the window at the buses below, as the footsteps in the hall slowly subsided. “I wish I could.”

“Why?”
She was quiet for a moment. “The teachers got a retirement gift for Ms. Lewis today. An Aunt Jemima lawn ornament. I was the only one who wouldn’t sign off on it.” She shook her permed head. “Even Ms. Adams signed her name. But how must that have made her feel?”

“Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

“Before I turned forty, I would have signed it just to get along. But I won’t live the rest of my life doing the wrong things just to get other people’s approval.”

It would be six more years before she died of pneumonia—died because she lived too far from a doctor. The last time I saw my mom was over the holidays, my junior year of college.

“Your mother’s beautiful,” my boyfriend said when we returned from dinner.

It was true. She’d settled into a distinguished age, losing ten pounds and regaining a bit of her lost chin. Her straight, shoulder-length hair framed her features in a pleasing way. Maybe we’d both finished our awkward transitions and adjusted to new stages of life.

Twelve days later, when the mortician said her neck was too swollen to look like her photo, I was furious. “That picture’s only two months old!”

“It’s okay.” My mom’s friend patted my shoulder. “We’ll tie a scarf around her. She’ll look pretty. Don’t worry.”

Then we put her into the ground.

Her forty-seven-year-old body would never parade through the house naked again. She’d never experiment with a new hairstyle or buy another piece of clothing. She’d applied her last lipstick, snapped on her last bracelet, fretted for the last time over the fat content of my grandmother’s cooking. And I would never see her again, never know how the story of her face was meant to end.

Now I’m her age. I made it, though not as fast as I thought. When I look at old pictures, my mom’s hair doesn’t look so bad. It was nice. It made her eyes pop. If I could, I’d explain to my teenage self that age brings confidence. But I know she wouldn’t believe me.

My mother got stuck in a town, a job, a life she didn’t want. She had every tool to get out. Yet she stayed, caring for my grandmother and me and launching her students to better starts than she ever had. They message me sometimes. “I miss her terribly,” the captain of that basketball team wrote at 1am, on the morning that would have been her seventy-second birthday.

He still remembers.

The truth is, there’s more than one way to be stuck. My mom felt trapped. But, in another way, she freed herself. Those last seven years, she decided who to be, no longer limited by the boundaries of other people’s expectations. That haircut was the starting gunshot of a new life, one she was just beginning to live.

And, like her, it was beautiful.

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Contributors:

Author Jenelle Boucher

Jenelle Boucher is a science-fiction/fantasy author and a producer of narrative games. Her writing has been published in TulipTree Review and Gumbo Magazine, and her debut novel, Vita Eterna, placed top-five in The Gutsy Great Novelist Page One Prize. You can find her online at JenelleBoucher.com.

Artist Fierce Sonia

Fierce Sonia is a mixed media artist. She builds a substrate with acrylic paint and collage. A narrative is constructed by the tension between the lush layers moving to dreamy feminine mindscapes with a brighter palette. If you listen closely her work has a soundtrack, a rhythm, a pulse that will give you a magic carpet ride to a fairytale that restates your own heartbeat. She has a public studio at Torpedo Factory: 105 North Union Street, studio 5 Alexandria, VA 22303