It’s been said that you are only as happy as your most unhappy child, and I believe there is some truth to that. Lately, I am all about my twenty-six-year-old daughter, Phoebe, who keeps veering into crisis like a motorist drifting into oncoming traffic on a highway. For instance, Phoebe and I recently visited the Emergency Room. This was on the after-hours advice of the doctor on call with our GP. Phoebe had told him that she was having trouble breathing, she was dizzy, she couldn’t feel her hands and her legs didn’t work right. She told him she hurt all over.

At the admitting desk, a flamboyant young man and an even younger woman with a volunteer tag asked Phoebe what issue brought her to the ER. “A broken heart?” Phoebe suggested. A nine-year relationship had ended.  Phoebe was entered in the system and we were sent around the corner to the noncontagious area to wait for someone to see her. I sat next to a guy about thirty years old in a ball cap with a gauze bandage on his left thumb that gave it the dimensions of an ear of corn. Volunteer Girl came in and began to quiz Phoebe. Pain in the left arm? A crushing feeling? No, no. I told her. Nothing like angina or anything like that. No need to get the paddles and clear. A broken heart. Volunteer Girl seemed relieved she would not have to write up an incident report and she returned to the front desk. Phoebe turned to me. “That’s a real thing, you know. Broken Heart Syndrome.” I did know. She went back to tapping on her iPhone.

I’ve always thought of love as a verb. Full of energy and action and visible (if subtle) display. It’s come to me today that no one tells you how much waiting is required of deep love. How much sitting is necessary. How very much boredom you must be willing to embrace. A good training ground for demonstrating that level of devotion is the Emergency Room. “Emergency” is a relative term, and the person who brings what they consider an urgent illness or injury to the room is likely to find that the staff on duty don’t consider their condition time-sensitive at all. It is they, who are the professionals, who will determine what is an emergency. Your emergency may have no more value to them than the Canadian quarter the lobby drink machine won’t accept.

Given five minutes warning, I know how to wait in an Emergency Room. It’s always cold, bring a sweatshirt. It’s incredibly tedious even with five TVs bolted near the ceiling. Bring a paperback or two. Bring your cell phone and the charger. Bring cash for sodas, Nabs, whatever. I bring earplugs. ChapStick. Come with the knowledge that you will wait. A long time. And the long time will seem much longer than if you were at home. When you get home, you’ll want to take a shower.

If you are accompanying someone you love to the Emergency Room and find yourself remembering random bits of poetry, keep it to yourself.

You have to be sure the other people in the ER are open to conversation. Read their body language. The young man with the gauze-wrapped thumb in the chair next to me looked relaxed. He was wearing a Nationals T-shirt.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I sliced off the end of my thumb, chopping onions. It’s just a little scrap of skin holding it on.”

I gave an appreciative whistle. He lowered his arm.

“How long you been waiting?”

He looked at the clock on the wall. “About an hour and fifteen minutes.”

I thought about a Robert Frost poem, “Out, Out,” about a kid who cuts his finger or hand or something off and bleeds to death. And they, since they were not the one dead, returned to their affairs.

“You could’ve bled to death by now,” I remarked.

He nodded yes, shook his head in disbelief. His phone went off with a musical ring tone I didn’t recognize and he shifted his attention to it. Phoebe was texting someone with her own thumbs.

I thought about a Sylvia Plath poem, in which the speaker accidentally cuts herself instead of the onion. What a thrill… a hinge of skin, a flap like a hat. A disturbing and beautiful and playful poem. If you are accompanying someone you love to the Emergency Room and find yourself remembering random bits of poetry, keep it to yourself. Tuck your poetry fragments away for later in the way you would save a cookie. The chances that the person you are with will know or care about the fragments is no more likely than that they will be seen by a doctor right away unless they have a gunshot wound. Still, poetry can help you wait.

*     *     *

After the trip to the Emergency Room, I waited with Phoebe in her bedroom for several days. Phoebe lives with us while she works part time and finishes a second degree in horticulture. She has a king size bed that she shares with her laptop, notebook, phone, and other detritus. She has a TV on a long table opposite the bed. A cat or two and the dog will often settle in for a nap or to be petted. I sat in the blue chair off to the side by the door. I know how to sit in Phoebe’s room with her, too. I had on sweats and a T-shirt, sock feet. A glass of water or juice or wine. I had a book. I had my phone. “What can I do for you, Phee?” I’d say. “What do you need?” It wasn’t until several days had passed that Phoebe would ask for a Powerade or a piece of toast. She lost six pounds in four days.

She said, “Will you stay with me?”

“Of course,” I said.

She slept or watched The Munsters or Frasier on YouTube. She texted. She went to the bathroom. She slept some more. I stayed. Just as I had when she was younger and sick. Just as when she was a kid and throwing up, there really wasn’t much for me to do, except wipe her face with a cold wet cloth and hold her hand.

“Will you spend the night in here with me?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

I got her a cold wet cloth, more to make her feel cared for than to bring down a fever, although she did have a little one.

Phoebe burrowed into the covers. I sat and read and waited. Sometimes, I got on the other side of her king size bed and slept, too. She’d rise up in the night like a sea creature breeching the surface, see that I was there—awake, because she was—and she’d drop back into her blankets.

*     *     *

After a week or so Phoebe returned to work. Phoebe has been cautioned about being too cheerful and friendly with the customers. They asked her not to laugh so much, until they realized that engaging with her customers didn’t slow down her checkout speed. The day Phoebe went back to work, the store manager sent her home after one hour.

At Phoebe’s request, I drove her and her broken heart to a therapist, Susan, who’s helped me off and on over the years. Susan and Phoebe hit it off right away. Susan prescribed Xanax and breathing exercises and set up more appointments. Phoebe had sessions with Susan two or three times a week. Since Phoebe has never needed a driver’s license to go to work or to school, I ended up taking her to therapy.

Here’s another skill deep love requires. Shutting up. The ability to know when to shut up and to actually do it is closely tied to waiting.

The therapy practice Susan belongs to has a waiting room of slick, stain-resistant upholstered chairs and loveseats, and side tables with copies of WebMD Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Arthritis Today, Time, and Golf Digest. Three times a week I waited for Phoebe and listened to dreary music and read the magazines. By the end of Phoebe’s third fifty-minute hour with Susan, I’d gone through all the magazines, including Golf Digest, which might as well be titled A Guide to Mind Crushing Ennui as far as I’m concerned. So, for entertainment, I observed the people who came and sat near me, trying to determine who was a patient and who was a waiter like me. What issues brought them to this room of boring music, bad art, and dim lighting? I tried to read their posture, clothes, gestures, and conversation with the receptionists. I eavesdropped on the dialogue of people who were obviously there together. They frequently ignored each other and tapped on their smart phones, a sound like muffled telegraph keys. The etiquette of therapy waiting rooms is different than the ER. You do not make small talk in a room in which mental illness, emotional distress, and trauma cling to everyone like sweat. It’s bad form. Should you run into these same people in the organic produce section of the Harris Teeter, you do not acknowledge that you’ve ever seen them before.

*     *     *

Phoebe began to leave sessions with Susan in wary optimism. Things might work out. A plan of action and even a Plan B were possibilities. Within a couple of weeks, on a late Sunday afternoon, I went looking for Phoebe to ask her a question and found her pacing in the backyard. She was clutching her cell, waiting on a phone call. Her breathing was rapid and she was shaking a little. She was on the cusp of a panic attack.

“Talk to me,” I said, sitting down and watching her stride to and fro like an agitated animal. “What’s happened?”

Phoebe filled me in as she continued to walk laps. I brought her some juice. I thought stopping to drink and swallow might interrupt the advance of hyperventilating. It worked for a little while. I asked a few more questions and Phoebe answered.

Here’s another skill deep love requires. Shutting up. The ability to know when to shut up and to actually do it is closely tied to waiting. This ability doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m still struggling with it. Timing can be so important.

This late Sunday afternoon I lost the struggle. I had shut up for a long time. I had been careful not to push, not to judge. I had been waiting for the crisis to pass. Until this sultry August evening. This time I said I was angry and frustrated. I told Phoebe what I’d like to do and say if I hadn’t been raised with good manners. I called someone she cares about a pussy. I called other people insane. I also asked her forgiveness. I told her that I felt like I was watching her bleed and that I felt I could do nothing to stop the bleeding. It was not her my anger and frustration were directed at, but at the sources of her profound unhappiness. “Forgive me for not being diplomatic,” I said. “Please.”

She stopped pacing and looked me in the face for the first time. “It’s okay,” she said. Her cell phone rang and I went inside to give her privacy. Later, she sought me out and told me things were better. She was, in fact, happy. Everything would be fine and resolved in September.

“What’s changed?” I asked.

She shrugged. It didn’t matter. She was happy, that was enough. This time instead of asking more questions, I shut up.

Because I remembered that years ago when Phoebe was in preschool, she and her friends were playing while a couple of other mothers and I sat and watched.

“Phoebe is just your Mini Me,” Jessie said.

“We share the same soul,” I told her.

Phoebe looked up from drawing a mandala in the sand. She’s always been an artist.

“I want my own soul,” she insisted.

I laughed. “Okay.”

And I remembered that when she was a little older, Phoebe and I were playing outside on another late sunny summer afternoon. Our shadows were long and sharply defined on the sand around the swings.

“Let’s share shadows!” Phoebe said.

So, I stood behind her as she sat in the swing and we became one shadow with many moving parts. Then I pushed her and our shadows separated soundlessly only to merge again briefly and leave once more.

Phoebe told me a couple of days ago, “It’s hard to wait until the end of September.”

“It must be,” I said. “It must feel like forever.”

What I think, is Phoebe is waiting for September and it is hard. Learning how to wait is very hard. She has regained her optimism and works to hold on to it. I am waiting with her for September, without optimism, but not without hope. I hope the end of September will be worth the wait. And I will try to shut up, try remember that Phoebe’s soul belongs to her, but that I may, from time to time, be invited to share shadows.

 

Jane Andrews has a BA in creative writing from NC State University. Andrews teaches writing and poetry courses through Duke continuing education and is a writing coach at Central Carolina Community College She is nonfiction editor at Glint Literary Journal and a poetry editor at 3 Elements Review. She has earned awards in memoir, personal essay, and poetry. Andrews’ fiction, essays, memoir, and poetry have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Red Clay Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Verdad, Kindred, The News & Observer, and other publications. She is a past board member of Carolina Wren Press and the NC Poetry Society. Andrews is a freelance writing instructor, workshop facilitator, and book editor.

I’ve been looking for myths about gulls, and found only ravens. Raven, the trickster, who eats Raccoon’s young. Raven, with his head stuck in a bison skull and bumbling tree to tree to river. Raven led by stomach. I want a story to frame my own. But I did not grow up with ravens. They are too beautiful, with feathers that whisper danger and a name shaped like the hard point of their beak.

Gulls with no pretty name. Gulls with red-rimmed eyes, feet that look neither wet nor dry. Gulls fanning to the horizon, a lens-flare photograph of someone’s beach home.

My father would leave us in the car as he folded newspapers in the distribution center: our bodies cocooned in mothy blankets, our legs tangled together. I’d stay awake as long as I could, watching the window fog with our breath, icing out the world. I worried the lock would come unstuck. I worried that my father was ashamed of us, this job meant for children, paperboys, that he had only taken because all of his money went to our mother. Sometimes I woke to smokers clustered outside our windows, peering in on us foundling children, a nest of lumps waiting to crack open.

When my father loaded the car with each wrapped reminder of the world’s disasters, I pretended to sleep. The car rocked with the weight of hundreds of pages of newsprint wrapped in plastic casings. He’d fill the wells under our feet with bundles, row on row that slid into us on curves.

*     *     *

The fairy tales I loved were daughters bought and sold, from Gretel’s father leading her to the forest, to Cinderella’s father giving her to the ashes. I loved Beauty and the Beast most of all: I too loved books and lived in small towns. I too was strange and had a father prone to distraction. I wanted castles with libraries that stretched to heaven and horizon. I longed for dark forests or lighthouses with an attic bedroom. Instead, I had the Shore.

In the winter, the ocean was larger. The beaches were quiet. People did not come to the Shore. There was nothing there.

*     *     *

For a few winters, we lived in other people’s summer homes: pre-furnished with beds and toys, pots and pans, a view of the ocean, and a walk to the beach. They’d leave behind their curled paper tickets from Jenkinson’s Arcade, rolls of points buried in closets and under beds. I loved running them through my fingers, imagining buying all the candy I could hold, pencils with pop stars’ faces, notebooks or games. It wasn’t cheating. We had found them, fair and square.

My father would leave us in the car as he folded newspapers in the distribution center: our bodies cocooned in mothy blankets, our legs tangled together.

These houses, winter houses, were nice houses, nicer than the tiny apartments my father usually rented with a strip of kitchen and walls soft enough to splinter under a fist, where we—my brother, sister, and myself—took turns sleeping on the futon or the floor. Those apartments came with big, hairy neighbors: the kind of men who’d invite us over to watch wrestling specials and eat nachos; the kind of men with tarantulas and snakes; the kind of men who broke beer bottles late at night; the kind of men who knew a guy who was remodeling Joe Pesci’s place, and so one Sunday after delivering newspapers, we were let in to Joe’s Shore house and walked his cool tile floors, tracking mud.

I wondered if this was what my father did when we were with our mother: drank cheap beers and watched men hit each other with chairs, committed petty trespassing. What did he say about us in front of those tropical glass tanks, where the dead-eyed snakes uncurled slowly so not to scare the mice, their jaws had already unhinged to eat. Did he say anything about us at all?

In winter, lawns receded back to sand and hard dirt, gray and dried like feathers crushed by tires in the street. When we delivered newspapers to houses with strips of expensive sod rolled out like lasagna sheets, I stepped on the new grass. I wanted the marks of my feet to be discovered, like some alien crop circle, a gift from the fairies.

*     *     *

Gull young are precocial: they crack free and their eyes are open. Their bodies are covered in downy feathers. Their beaks are designed to peck at their parent for regurgitated dinner.

We ate fine—frozen dinners, cheese in cellophane—but it was never anything I wanted. My father ate mostly meat—sausages and steak and lettuce—from some diet that taught your body to eat itself.

When we returned to my mother’s house, she would ask us what we did. How did we eat? Did he buy us school clothes, winter jackets, or books? Sometimes, I wondered if she eyed our pockets, hoping he had stuffed them full of twenties.

Sometimes we would come back in wild excitement, for some grand adventure we’d been promised for the next weekend. Some treat or toy or trick. As time went on, she learned to tell us not to be disappointed. Still, we would believe him.

*     *     *

One house was only a few blocks from the ocean. Gulls cried out, I’m here, I’m here, at all hours, as they swooped ten, twenty feet above my head, or roosted on the shingles.

We’d walk the sand on nicer weekends, daring each other to go deeper into the tide until one of us would be soaked from the waist on a large wave. Our father would no longer laugh, egging us on, but be suddenly furious that we’d soaked our underwear and would track sand into the house. It was a rental, he’d remind us. It wasn’t ours. Anything we broke, he’d have to pay for. I knew that this was another step closer to the brink, closer to him pulling the mythical car over and we could all walk home.

We knew we couldn’t afford better. All of our father’s money went to our mother to support us. Our mother told us differently, cried on phone calls when she asked her sisters for money to pay our bills. What was true was the story told by the parent we were with.

We were loved, but it was a possessive love, a jealous love. A commodity. I wondered constantly if I was still worthy of such a love, and how I could earn more.

I learned to read the signs. Gulls became the smoke twisting in the sacrificial fires, the entrails poured onto the earth. I was the Oracle, trying to make sense of their message. What are you trying to tell me? Do his shoulders hunch like that because he is more or as-angry as usual? Do I find a funny story from school, or a memory of our old life? Do I pretend not to see? Should I be extra careful when I clean tonight, scraping the fork tins for grease and lining up the cups in the dishwasher like puzzle pieces? When his anger erupted, where was the best place to hide away? What should I clean, how do I be of use so that he is reminded that we were worth having, worth loving?

*     *     *

In the winter homes, I imagined the summer folks. It was a fairy existence. Who could possibly live here? What did it mean to have two houses, and not one for each parent?

In the summers, the stoplights were turned back on and the stop signs unhinged to warn lines of traffic. Panties or vomit dotted the sidewalk and the beach was always full of bodies pinking or leathering under the sun.

Were we the poltergeists, haunting their homes when they returned? I made sure to rub my greasy fingers into the walls. I wanted to leave a sign that I had lived there, that their home wasn’t fully their own. And yet we were always the ones to leave.

*     *     *

Sometimes we would see a dog scatter the gulls on the beach, churning through wet sand. Sometimes there would be people dressed in Lycra, running along the shore. Mostly though, it was just us, writing our names with our fingers in the sand and watching the tide wash the letters away. Or we trudged on, knowing the water would wash our names away eventually.

We were winter children. We had nothing better to do.

*     *     *

Part of what brings Beauty and her Beast together is their shared love of books. In the Disney telling, the library seems to stretch for days. More than the dresses or the talking cutlery, this was my favorite part. I had taught myself to read when I was three. Quickly, I learned to hide in books. I could become so lost in the world of letters that I wouldn’t hear the world around me. During car rides, I could block out the sound of traffic or my father’s rages. The threats to crash the car, the promise to leave us behind.

Books were a doorway: a way to open and close. When I needed to hide, books. When I felt lost, books connected me. The best stories were the ones that lived in my breast. The best stories were the ones I could imagine myself into.

If I wasn’t reading, I wrote. I filled composition books with poems and stories and journal entries. Often, my characters were orphans. It seemed natural to kill off the parents.

When I was a teenager, I began to win awards for my writing. I attended luncheons and national conferences. My father is also a writer. In my teens, I worried he resented my success. If only he hadn’t had to work, he would say occasionally. If only he could have followed his writing. I always felt a bit ashamed for making him need to work, to provide food and clothing.

But then, for anything we really needed, we asked our mother.

*     *     *

Once, Beauty’s father was rich and could spoil his children. But by the time he stumbles into the Beast’s kindness, he is impoverished. His daughters have demanded gowns and his sons, swords. Only Beauty asks for a rose. And so he steals.

Books were a doorway: a way to open and close. When I needed to hide, books. When I felt lost, books connected me. The best stories were the ones that lived in my breast.

Did my father love me as much as that?

When the Beast threatens to lock that father away, he begs for the chance to tell his children goodbye. Beauty offers to stand in his place and the rest—well. You know the story.

How does her father let her go? He must, of course, but how does he leave that castle covered in vines? What is the shape of his spine as he journeys away, back to his other children?

What lesson could I take from this story but that love is duty.

Love is ballast-named but a crucible, all the same.

*     *     *

Beauty’s dresses turn to rags when her sisters try them on, her jewels to dust when they adorn their bodies. What do they make of their old gowns and bracelets, what they had exchanged for their sister?

I thought myself Beauty when I was younger, convinced that one day I’d be taken away, bedecked. I assumed emancipation needed to be given by a hand other than my own.

*     *     *

Eventually my father moved into the town where my mother lived. He rented a loft apartment where we took turns rotating between the floor and an exercise mat when we spent weekday nights and alternating weekends there. At first, he talked about buying beds or sleeping bags, but we adjusted to blankets and the floor.

We ate pizza from the restaurant downstairs sitting around the coffee table in front of a television. What we loved best was wrestling: my brother and I against my sister and father. Soon, it would devolve into the three of us piled on top of our father, trying to hold him down. For a moment, we could puppet his body. But again and again, he rose or one of us would catch an elbow in the soft of our belly, a knee in the back and cry. I was already a bit relieved when the wrestling ended. Fearful, I was sure someone could get really hurt. I worried I loved kneeling on his back, pressing bone to kidney, too much.

*     *     *

Gulls mob strangers: other birds, people, anything that might threaten their nests. The flock unite to form a golem, terrifying children and Bennys alike. But their allegiances fracture easily: over food, a nesting spot. Gulls tear scraps between them, wrestling for the biggest crumb.

*     *     *

As I grew beyond childhood, I or my siblings would ask my father about moments from childhood: remember this? Remember that? No, he would tell us. No, it didn’t happen like that. No, you’re remembering it wrong.

Who gets to decide?

If I remember my father’s anger, if I remember sleeping on the floor, then do I have a right to say it? It wasn’t all bad. But it wasn’t all good. And sure, that is childhood. But I knew other children weren’t itinerant like my siblings and me. I had dreaded someone seeing me help my father fling newspapers. I worried my shame would bleed out of me.

I love my father. But I no longer feel I can let him into my life. When I last confronted him, over email, his response asked me if I hadn’t thought about how he would feel. Don’t you know all the ways you’ve hurt me? he asked.

You’re remembering it wrong, he told me.

*     *     *

A gull is also a term for one who is fooled or deceived. Perhaps this comes from the word gullet, meaning “the throat” but also “to swallow.” Perhaps it is not that uncommon to be fooled by your parent and to still hope that they have changed. Say fooled instead of failed; say trickster instead of father. Perhaps we should expect our parents to devour us, like Kreon. Perhaps I need to find in me a way to slit his stomach open and see what piles forth. Perhaps I need to open my own gut, spill what I’ve ingested in hopes that he might change.

My father has asked me to forgive much of him: cancelling trips after I purchased plane tickets; skipping graduations and Thanksgivings at the last minute; taking out loans in my name that went to collection agencies that led to me weeping on the phone in public spaces, trying to explain that I didn’t know about the loans and had never seen the money.

But my father is always the aggrieved, the hero of his stories. Even the stories I tell about him must follow this pattern. Still, I wonder, what could I have done differently?

*     *     *

Gulls exist in the liminal space: they eat both meat and vegetation. In some myths, birds carry the souls of the dead to heaven or the underworld.

This is not to say that gulls are honest, but that they are what they are.

I used to believe that gulls could fly across oceans, that they could sleep on the water with their heads tucked under a wing. But they don’t—usually. They stay close to the coast, feeding off scraps or what they hunt for themselves. They’re opportunistic and bold: I’ve watched them steal pizza crusts inches from someone’s hand. They’ve been seen landing on live whales to peck away strips of their flesh.

This is not to say that gulls are honest, but that they are what they are. At least, as far as I can tell. The appearance of honesty counts for a lot, to so many.

I’ve believed my father is capable of changing. Perhaps I must believe that I am.

*     *     *

I used to play a game. Would my father give me five hundred dollars? I imagine the phone call: I’m in a bad spot, Dad; I’ve made a bad decision, Dad; Dad, they’re holding me for ransom, and I’ve scrounged everything but the last five hundred.

I imagine us tied to train tracks, a game of William Tell, a room slowly filling with water. Would my father give me part of his liver? I try to imagine us wheeled into surgery, our hands clasped until the swinging doors wrench us apart. But then I see him turning to the nurse wheeling his gurney, smiling a bit sadly, and saying, “You know, I don’t think I can do this right now.” He’d really want to, of course, but the timing. The timing would just be terrible.

*     *     *

The only class trip I remember my father chaperoning was to the Trenton War Memorial. We learned about bayonets, specifically their three points, so designed to create wounds that couldn’t close.

*     *     *

Recently a friend asked me how my father died. He’s still alive, I explained. We just don’t speak. Divorcing your parent is an unnatural act. Children are meant to be cared for; we are then meant to care, to nurture. Rejecting this had left me unmoored. Each of my siblings has handled this situation differently. My sister has refused to speak to my father for years. My brother maintains an uneasy relationship. I worry that by not missing him, I’m a bad person. I worry that this means I’m not made to love. Loving me must be a burden.

Beauty forgets her father. She and the Beast create a world without a past, despite decades spent trapped in forms beyond their natural, beautiful shape. Furniture reverts back to flesh, uncracked. What magic was this, what lesson was I meant to learn?

*     *     *

I was a square child. I knew I wasn’t beautiful, but I imagined I might be strong or fierce. Able to pick up cars pinning smaller children. An Atlas for a tired world. Once, I bragged I could carry my father, and in that parking lot he let me try. I bent, braced shoulder to thigh and lifted. I stumbled a few steps before he returned to the ground, surprised and laughing.

It must be time to put him down now.

 

Brynn Downing served as the thirty-fourth writer-in-residence at St. Albans School for boys in Washington, DC, where she also taught literature and creative writing. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and BA in global studies, focusing on masculinity and nationalism in the former Yugoslavia, from the College of William and Mary. She currently volunteers with Four Way Review. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Post Road Magazine, The James Franco Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. You can find her online at: brynndowning.info.

Mami used to tell people that I was a very delicate boy.

My parents instilled in me to do right and to avoid hurting others. I took it to heart. I always assumed that if I treated people the way I wanted to be treated, people around me would do likewise. It was the golden rule.

The golden rule. Little did I know that this moral imperative would be seriously challenged within a few short years of exposure to other kids in my barrio, especially in unsupervised settings, like on the alleys and empty lots off Medio, Guachinango, and San Gabriel Streets. I was the youngest of a group of boys that wandered about the calles in my neighborhood. This was our playground.

Henry, Oscar, Félix, Vento, Pupi, Armando, Generoso, and Helio were at least three or four years older than me. They attended the same public school in our neighborhood. I took the bus to Irene Toland School, a private school run by the Presbiterianos in the Simpson neighborhood, on the outskirts of Matanzas. At Irene Toland most of the kids were paired in classes with the same-age kids and supervised by gentle but discipline-inclined teachers. I had some run-ins with other kids from time to time at school, but short of name-calling and a shove here and there, I rarely encountered kids who didn’t share consensus in the golden rule.

In my barrio of Matanzas Oeste, things were different. I soon learned that finding my place among a group of kids in the neighborhood came with a complex set of herd behaviors. To say that I was beyond naïve was a gross understatement. I was drawn into fights I didn’t provoke, pushed into puddles I didn’t intend to step in, blamed for stealing or breaking things I neither stole nor broke. Because I was younger, I became the by-default recipient of most nefarious happenings in the neighborhood. Whenever there was need to blame someone for something gone wrong, I became the designated perpetrator.

I was the youngest of a group of boys that wandered about the calles in my neighborhood. This was our playground.

It didn’t help that my father was a well-respected businessman in the neighborhood who had no tolerance for me being out of line, even in unprovoked situations where I might have been trying to defend myself. My father embraced a “customer is always right” and “turn the other cheek” philosophy, which I suspect served him well with his customers. He was a polite, albeit big and muscular man, who exuded and demanded respect, and who actively avoided altercations. What this meant for me was that if I ever took a swing at any of the neighborhood kids, even in self-defense, and a parent ever came to complain about me to my father, it didn’t matter who did what, or when. I was always in the wrong.

It was under such tenuous circumstances that my childhood socialization and coping mechanisms soon imploded. The boys in the neighborhood nicknamed me “Lagrimitas” (“little tears” in Spanish). And so it was, that whenever my face became the target of a flying fist or my knee the substrate for an asphalt confrontation from an ill-intentioned shove, I had to suck it up: Don’t fight back, turn the other cheek, succumb to the misery of passivity and walk off quietly, hold back the sobs, try to hide the anger, pain, and frustration that comes from humiliation and helplessness. That was it. But holding back tears was contrary to the physiology of the moment.

It also didn’t help that I was not a meat eater. According to my mother I was “anémico and asténico” because of this. I was what some would describe as a wimpy, scrawny kid. I used to faint at the sight of blood, and was known to collapse when overheated. In contrast, the rest of the kids in the barrio were tough, street-hardened kids. Félix was the most macho and Pupi, at age thirteen, looked and smelled like Kid Gavilán, the legendary Cuban welterweight champion. Pupi had glistening blue-black skin and well-developed muscles on his arms and torso. He even had bulging muscles on his forehead and neck and hair in his underarms.

Despite being skinny, I was a good technical boxer and I could outrun any kid in Matanzas Oeste, except for Armando, who was fifteen and already had facial hair. Abuelo taught me to punch well, but the accuracy of my punches was consistently undermined by the lack of impact-force behind them. And so it was: if I was to coexist in the barrio, I had no choice but to have hope for the golden rule. But just in case, as I perfected the art of turning the other cheek, I learned to run fast whenever I had to.

Then there was Helio. A habitual brawler, Helio would put my golden rule to the test on several occasions. A head of curly black hair topped his greasy forehead, and tufts of unruly eyebrows rimmed a pair of beady, menacing eyes. When he spoke, a stench of rotting meat seeped out between and around a mouth busied by thick lips and several missing teeth. He was short and stocky and rolled his sleeves over his biceps.

Helio was an only child. His father was a bricklayer who drank aguardiente on a regular basis. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Helio’s father beat him regularly, sometimes for no obvious reason. I overheard Mami talk with neighbors about Helio’s mother not being a very motherly woman. I think Helio had no one in his family to teach him about the golden rule or the importance of cheek-turning. But I lacked the intellectual maturity to rationalize this at the time, so I couldn’t help but dislike him intensely.

I don’t know, but Helio was an angry person whose purpose in life, it seemed, was about stealing fruit from La Plaza market or skipping school or even beating up people like me who could not defend themselves. Most of the other neighborhood kids tolerated him but no one ever sought him out to play.

They say that every person has his day of reckoning. My uncle was greatly instrumental in allowing my day of reckoning to materialize. He knew that I was being bullied by someone in the neighborhood. Uncle Yayo sensed that I had withdrawn for several days. I came home from school and found excuses not to play outside. He asked me if something was wrong, and although I tried to avoid the topic, the lagrimitas on my face would ultimately betray me.

Uncle Yayo told me that as a child he had been bullied. He told me that his uncle Luis gave him a solution to the problem and that although he knew my father wouldn’t approve of it, he felt it was time for him to intervene on my behalf. I was mortified. I didn’t want my uncle to embarrass me in front of the neighborhood kids by trying to defend me.

The next day when I stopped to see Tio Yayo, he said he had something for me. From the glove compartment of his Chevrolet he pulled an object which was wrapped in brown paper, and tied neatly with twine. It was about four inches-by-one and triangle-shaped. When he handed it to me, it felt dense. I suspected it was a rock wrapped in paper. Indeed, it was a chunk of heavy, white marble.

“Keep this in your back pocket at all times,” he said. “The next time anyone does something really bad to you, you just quietly stand up, take a step back, slide your fingers into your back pocket and smile.”

“Smile for what?” I said.

“You smile to make him think you are not angry. At the same time, you are gripping your rock tightly in your hand and you are positioning yourself just far enough not to be reached by the bully, but not too far to miss your target,” Yayo said.

“You mean, you expect me to throw the rock at him? Is that what you mean?”

“No, not exactly. I want him to catch the rock that you will be pitching to him as fast and as hard as you can throw it. If he is not quick enough to catch it, then it becomes his problem. Then you apologize politely and walk away.”  That is what Uncle Yayo said to do.

I was totally confused. I could not believe my uncle, a highly respected teacher, was telling me to do this. Urging me to deliberately hurt someone went counter to everything Mami, Papi, and Abuela ever taught me. At the same time, however, I was desperate. I felt trapped in my own anemic, asthenic, and scrawny body. I had had it with hiding from Helio when I got home from school. The taunts and shouts of “Here comes Lagrimitas, crying down the street… Are you going to hide under your mami’s blusa?” were more than I could take. Now that I was almost ten, I didn’t like the idea that girls in the neighborhood would see me crying and running away—especially Catia.

I put the rock in my back pocket and headed home. That night I hid it under my pillow so Mami wouldn’t see it. The next morning, I hid it under the mattress and when I came home from school and changed into my play clothes, I placed the rock in my right rear pocket.

As I went outside that day, I felt different somehow. I knew I wouldn’t likely do what my uncle suggested, for it was not my nature to be violent, but I felt more secure knowing, just in case that I had protection. I noticed I began to walk differently. I looked up instead of at the ground. I swung my arms with confianza y seguridad, instead of letting them dangle by my side.

Several weeks went by. There were no confrontations, no taunts from the kids. I began to think there was something special about my rock, that perhaps it was a talisman and that it protected me from the taunts and the bullying while still letting me apply the golden rule and avoid becoming the neighborhood pincushion. I had to get new paper to rewrap the rock every two or three days, as the sweat from my body and the friction from playing frayed the wrapping.

I began to think there was something special about my rock, that perhaps it was a talisman and that it protected me from the taunts and the bullying while still letting me apply the golden rule and avoid becoming the neighborhood pincushion.

One day, several of the kids had been talking and bragging about birds they had trapped in the fields. We called these small finch-like birds tomeguínes (grassquits). Prized for their beautiful song, many people in Matanzas trapped and kept these little birds as pets in homemade cages and aviaries.

Uncle Yayo, who built bird cages out of river reeds, helped me build my trap cage. This cage had a center compartment, in which a male bird would be placed as decoy. Tomeguínes are very territorial, and a singing male would attract other birds. On the side compartments of the trap cage there were rocking trap doors onto whose edges I glued thistle seeds. Birds attracted by the decoy’s song would land on the cage, hop towards the rocker panels in search of the seed. Upon landing on the rockers, their own body weight would push the rocker doors and they would fall through to the bottom of the trap, unharmed, but unable to flee.

Others in the neighborhood had similar traps. We would go out to the sugarcane fields early on weekends to trap the prized songbirds. By day’s end it was common to return to find ten or twenty tomeguines in our cages. We traded, sold, or kept the best birds, and let the others go.

I brought out my cage to show the kids a tomeguín I had trapped two days earlier at Juanito’s father’s farm. Uncle Yayo said he was an unusually fine bird, with the loudest and sweetest song he had ever heard. I placed the cage on the edge of the sidewalk at the base of the steps of the butcher’s shop. My little tomeguín with the olive-green body, fiery yellow breast and shiny black beak hopped to and fro in the cage. I knelt against the curb, with the cage in front of me. Henry and Oscar and Félix and Helio were sitting on the steps, with Helio nearest to the sidewalk.

As I began to tell them where I had trapped this bird, the little tomeguín started to chirp excitedly, then went into a singing flurry. The boys were amazed, as was I, at how loud, crisp, and clear this little bird’s song was. That is, all except Helio. He looked down with disdain at the cage, and as he uncurled his legs out from under him, he puckered up and spit on my cage. He then kicked the cage off the sidewalk with his right leg. I fell back onto the street, trying to catch the tipping cage.

I eased the cage onto the curb, then stood up slowly. Helio glared at me.

“Don’t you start to cry, now, Lagrimitas… You can just take your little tomeguín and shove it up your…” Helio seethed. He was shouting so close to me that I could smell his foul spittle as it sprayed my face.

I stepped back, smiled, and reached with my hand around to my back pocket, just like Tio Yayo said. In one single, smooth motion I put my left foot forward, leaned back slightly as I unsheathed the rock. All I can remember was an uncontrollable fury unfurling inside. In a blur I swung my arm forward with a strength I never before experienced. I flung the rock at Helio. His groin got in the way.

In utter disbelief, Helio looked at me and tried to lunge. His fists were curled, his rotten teeth showing, eyes glaring. But as he tried to get to his feet, his eyes rolled upwards in a most unusual way, like a doll’s eyes. He grunted, exhaled, fell to his knees, and then face-down onto the concrete sidewalk. His arms lay curled below his hips. Helio lay there, limp, like an abandoned marionette.

They all thought I had killed him. He wasn’t moving. A man across the street ran towards us, lifted Helio up, and put him in a car with the help of a woman passerby. They took him away.

The other three boys stood silent, arms at their sides, looking like they’d just seen a ghost.

I knew what I had done. I thought of my father. I thought I would go to jail. Then I thought I would go to Hell for having killed Helio and that God would never forgive me.

I ran up the street to Abuela’s house and slammed the front door shut, panting heavily. My heart raced. I felt flushed. My chest was tight and my fingers tingled. This time there were no tears. Leaning behind the closed front door, I felt an ugly calm inside. I had left my trap cage and my little bird by the curb. But I felt like the whole neighborhood knew what a terrible thing I had done. I could not go back out in the street.

I stayed at Abuela’s house until it was dark and then scrambled to the apartment behind Papi’s grocery. I didn’t eat my dinner that night. Luckily, Papi had been at a Chamber of Commerce meeting since earlier that afternoon, so he didn’t come home until after I was in bed and he didn’t know about Helio. Mami also did not know what had happened because Abuela had not told her. I buried my face in a comic book after draping my mosquito net over the posts on the bed when Mami came to kiss me good night. She must have assumed I was asleep, turned out the light, and closed the door. I lay awake in the darkness for most of the night. No tears.

The next morning, I left for school. No news of Helio. The police had not come to arrest me yet. I prayed at the Irene Toland Chapel, but I felt no remorse. All I could feel in my heart was an empty, emotionless dark space.

When I got off the bus from Irene Toland School that afternoon, my father was standing at the corner, waiting for me. Helio’s father was there, as was Helio’s mother. There were several neighbors around them, including Oscar and Henry and Felix. None of them could look me straight in the face. I scanned for the familiar drab, tan uniform of Matanzas policemen, but there were none in sight.

My father said nothing. He twisted my ear in front of all those people and dragged me inside the grocery store. He slid off his leather belt as he pulled me into my bedroom.

I felt no pain. The sound of the leather snapping midair before it struck was welcomed. I deserved punishment. I realized then, as I lay face-down on my bed, accepting my father’s anger and feeling the sting of the leather on my buttocks that Helio must not have died. Still no tears. Ugly calm inside.

I realized then, as I lay face-down on my bed, accepting my father’s anger and feeling the sting of the leather on my buttocks that Helio must not have died.

I would find out later that night from my parents that Helio went to the hospital, that the neighborhood kids who were there explained to Helio’s mother and father what had happened. My father implored Helio’s parents not to call the police. They didn’t. Papi promised them I would be punished by being confined to my room for a month and that this would never happen again.

The month went by. My father did not speak to me for the whole time. I would come home from school, change into my play clothes, and sit on my bed. I read comic books and drew cartoons to ward off the boredom. I thought many times about escaping out the window and running to Abuela’s. I thought about running away from home altogether. Twice I packed some clothing, a penknife and some candy, and fashioned a bundle with a shirt whose long sleeves I knotted together and looped as a handle. I was ready to escape, but I didn’t. I was afraid.

I didn’t know what happened to my tomeguín or my trap cage after the incident. I was not allowed to visit or talk to Abuela or Abuelo, or to my Uncle Yayo, or to play with my dog, Yuti. My mother would never talk about the incident, but somehow I wished she could know how I felt.

After the month of home imprisonment ended, I felt both relieved and scared to be free. I didn’t know what would happen. Would Helio be waiting to ambush me? Had he been plotting to kill me? What would the neighborhood kids do?

They were all playing hide-and-go-seek on the early evening of my release. I walked down the street eating shaved ice with coconut syrup from a paper cone. I sat on the curb near where Félix was counting. The other boys ran off to find places to hide. Félix looked over his shoulder towards me. “Ocho, nueve y diéz… Here I come.” He nodded. I looked down and away towards my snow cone. I bit into the sugary slush.

One by one all but Henry ran to home base without being tagged. Félix tagged Henry and they walked towards me. Félix then patted me on the shoulder, bending down slightly to meet my eyes.

“Wanna play?” he asked.

 

An academic physician for over three decades with a primary emphasis in scientific writing, Ricardo Jose Gonzalez-Rothi is a relative newcomer to creative writing. He has had his fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry featured in Acentos Review, Heal Literary Magazine, Gainesville Magazine, Foliate Oak, bioStories, and the journal Chest.

Here is how they disappear:

Slowly, and then completely. The phone calls go from once a week to once a month, then a text message here or there; a string of emails at two in the morning full of drunk poems and questions like: How am I supposed to stop shooting dope when the asshole guard who raped me at the county jail likes all the Facebook pictures of my four-year-old daughter?

I return the emails when I wake up, I try to take the phone calls, try to remember to extend invitations to come to literary readings, send links for free counseling, always sign the correspondence with love, or you got this, or I am proud of you. My writing students from jails and prisons and rehab centers—even though they are disappearing, they keep writing their stories down, as if the ink will provide evidence once they’ve gone.

*     *     *

Here is how they disappear:

Mostly to heroin, but also to handguns. I have come to see these things not as different, but as two sides of the same Buffalo nickel, hot and sweaty in all our palms, burning holes in our pockets until they find the perfect time to detonate.

I look up statistics as if numbers will give me solace or prove me wrong. 47,000 hand gun deaths a year; 52,000 heroin overdoses, to say nothing of the other ways drugs and drug cocktails kill us.

*     *     *

Here is how they disappear:

My writing students from jails and prisons and rehab centers—even though they are disappearing, they keep writing their stories down, as if the ink will provide evidence once they’ve gone.

First, to themselves. Microscopically, imperceptibly. Only later do they disappear to those around them. The people who love us manage to find ways to glimpse the familiar even as our eyes become strangers in the mirror. No, first we disappear to ourselves.

Like Terra, who, when I met her, had never even visited a city. Who had never been outside rural Western Pennsylvania. When I met her at the county jail, she wrote pieces about not fitting into her housing unit. How all the other girls were talking about drugs—she’d smoked pot once in high school; it made her sick. In class, she rarely spoke in volumes above a whisper, and when she did she inevitably broke down in tears about how much she missed her children and her dog.

She stayed at county for two years. The last time I saw Terra she told me she’d married a man through a toilet bowl. I’d heard about this from staff—how the plumbing in the building allowed for makeshift telephones to the cells directly above and below one another; drain the water from the toilet bowl and thrust your head toward the bottom; project your voice. Or whisper. Make a love connection. Terra, in her new white-girl braids, told me proudly she’d found a new man who treated her like a queen. Her speech was full of Hilltop slang; she’d gotten a shitty tattoo of a rose and crossbones on her wrist. She bragged about making the best jail juice in the whole place.

There she was: disappeared.

When I use the bathrooms at the jail, at the prison, the mirrors are foggy, made of something other than glass. I assume for safety—something unbreakable, something that can’t splinter into shards. Looking into the distorted, gray, non-reflection, I imagine it might be easy to forget what I look like. To slowly become convinced that I am not full of specific detail—the new wrinkle I grimace at on my forehead. To forget the particular shade of hazel that names my eyes. Without truth staring back at me, I could so easily begin reflecting the faces around me instead of my own.

*     *     *

Here is how they disappear:

Into un-medicated freedom. Freedom that does not provide psychiatric care or follow-up visits or counseling. Freedom that depends on self-advocacy that is almost impossible.

Like Will. Will wrote poems about love. Long, winding, curlicue poems that professed the kind of love even fairy tales don’t claim is real.

And he wrote poems about a smashing kind of violence. Rip your teeth out violence. No one will recognize your face again violence.

Will was the teacher’s pet. Especially for an unexperienced teacher who often fumbled over her words, explained complicated ideas with even more confounding examples. I was a teacher who was grateful for the student who always had an answer, a comment, who raised his hand, always did the homework. Will never stopped smiling.

Once he asked me, “Is it possible to write something happy?”

I shrugged. “It must be,” I said, “but I don’t know how to do it.”

The next week I brought him the Romantics—the Byron and Blake poems that pontificated on the value of love above all else.

Will devoured them.

When he got out of county, he came to every literary event, attended each and every workshop we offered on campus, took the mic at all the readings. He brought his girlfriend, Precious. One night the love poem he recited was so amorous the audience thought he’d propose right then and there.

They broke up a few months later, and Will wrote about that, too. He asked me out on dates, and I said politely and firmly: no, no, another no, one more no.

The last time I heard from Will he sent me an email with a poem about broken promises and one more entreaty: “I could keep you warm,” he wrote. “Don’t keep yourself cold all winter.”

The truth is, if I’d met Will anywhere outside the county jail, I probably would have taken him up on his offer. He was handsome, and charming, and talented, and had strong shoulders. The truth is, I often changed clothes two or three times before I went to class when he was my student. I wanted to look nice. I wanted to stay within the dress code, but just within it. As the years went by, my strategies changed on this front, but in those first classes with Will, my body was a strategy that I was willing to employ as quick as a rubric or a great anthology. On so many nights, it seemed like all I had.

A week after that last email, Will took Precious into the woods behind her house and shot her. Then he drove to a cousin’s house and shot himself.

Will told me once that he knew it was wrong, but he was most stable in prison. “My psych meds are expensive, Sarah,” he’d said. “It’s not cheap to have psychosis.” He laughed when he told me this. Will was always in a good mood.

I only knew Will in jail, on those expensive, stabilizing psych meds that let his brain smile and write poetry and read all of William Blake.

I am glad those are my memories of Will, glad I will always know the side of him that wanted proof that poets, too, could be happy. That we do not only put pen to paper in despair. And I am glad that I did not know Precious, as selfish or blind as that might seem. Because it is easier that my affection for Will not be complicated by affection for his dead girlfriend, for her children, for the violent ends.

And then, just like that: disappeared.

*     *     *

And here is how they disappear:

In the mail.

Every few weeks, I get letters with “Department of Corrections” return addresses. The letters are dated six months, nine months previous. They are about events long since passed, requests now expired and thought to have been ignored.

I imagine the letters in a giant bin of mail, fading with their expensive stamps and standard-issue paper. What is a letter to do if it can’t be sent? It sits, becoming unlike itself, disconnecting its purpose from its physical presence—disappearing.

*     *     *

And here is how they disappear:

Out in the street, broad daylight, begging for change for a get-well bag.

Lisa jumps in and out of my life, mostly when she needs something. When I move out of my apartment, she comes in a borrowed truck for a twin mattress and some bookshelves.

I only knew Will in jail, on those expensive, stabilizing psych meds that let his brain smile and write poetry and read all of William Blake.

I see her on Liberty Avenue twice: once, she tells me she’s got a new waitressing job at Thai Cuisine. The next time, she says she’s staying under the Bloomfield Bridge, but she’s gonna get to a methadone clinic soon.

I see her at the Sunoco, catty-corner to the hipster bar, both of us buying cigarettes. She says she’s with her Pap, but when she jumps into the Chevy idling at a pump, he doesn’t look like anyone’s Pap I’ve ever met.

And then she texts, and says, “I fly a sign on the corner of Penn and Fifth Avenue most days. It’s a few blocks from Chatham. I always imagine I’ll see you drive by.”

Lisa was a full-time art teacher at the ritzy all-girls private school five years ago. She was married. Had two kids, then a third. But her baby was born with a rare genetic heart condition. Long QT Syndrome. When she tells the story at the rehab center where I meet her teaching a creative writing class, I gasp.

She looks up from her paper. “I know,” she says, “it’s sad.”

“It is,” I say. “But I know Long QT.”

Lisa looks back, shocked, because most people, most doctors even, don’t know about Long QT. “How?” she asks.

I tell the story of my boyfriend who died next to me in a movie theater, almost twenty years ago now. Long QT, we found out, a year later.

After her baby died, suddenly and in the crib, she started taking pain killers. Five years later, she’s on a street corner two blocks from her old teaching job, begging for change to pay her dope dealer.

She looks like a dead person.

When I see her, after the text, I drive her home. She’s still managed to keep the little house she bought in Larimer before the divorce and the drugs and the looking like a dead person. How she’s held onto it, I don’t know. Maybe a mom, some generous aunt, maybe her ex-husband keeps paying the mortgage. I buy us Thai food—green curry and thick noodles with syrupy brown gravy that I know she is too sick to eat. Her house is immaculately clean. Her paintings hang on every square inch of wall space. But it smells like dope seeping out of sick skin—a smell I wonder if I’ll ever really know how to find the precise words for.

I called my boyfriend before I went to pick her up. “I’m not going to give her money,” I said.

“Try to find something specific you can help her with,” he told me. “Ask her if she has an ID. She needs a current ID to get into a clinic.”

It turns out she does need an ID, but more than that, she needs dope, because we both know she’s not going to drag herself to the DMV or Public Health sick. I give her $60.

I know it’s probably wrong, but sometimes, I justify to myself, people just need someone to be kind to them even when they’re doing the wrong thing. Sometimes you need someone to help you get well without judging you for being sick. I remember all the times I was dope-sick. How humongous the kindness of strangers seemed, how powerful, when everyone crossed the street to avoid me coming. I still remember a woman who gave me her Yoplait at a bus stop; the nurse who quietly brought me a pencil during detox so I could write on the scraps of paper I’d found; the generous regulars at the bar who could look at me and tell I hadn’t had my medicine for the day, would just slip me a $20 before they’d even finished their first beer. These people live in an outsized glory in my memory. They are the heroes who saw me as human.

And so, $60.

The next night I get a text message that Lisa has overdosed in the parking lot of the Onala Club during a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

There. Disappeared.

When I went to Lisa’s house, I could feel the insides of my own body slowly and serenely disappearing. I was still a body, but where my person was, I don’t know. I was leaving my present-Sarah, and replacing her with five, six, seven different versions of me. I was a college administrator—responding phenomenally poorly to what was, in some sense, a work situation. And I was a woman in recovery, who wasn’t going to flinch at a little dope-sickness and desperation. I was a writer—and yes, now it’s material. And I was a teacher, and I was also a junkie.

What percentage of me went to Lisa’s house because I knew it was a place where maybe I, too, could get high? What percentage of me wanted to save the day, and get credit for it? And what percentage of me wanted to gaze at the disaster of a woman disappearing in front of me, and be grateful that I had somehow been spared? Gotten out almost scot-free.

Some of me was fifteen, and some of me was twenty-eight, and some of me was thirty-five, but at Lisa’s house, I remembered why, in some part, I keep going back to these places and meeting the people who share their stories with me. I felt it. I felt the draw of being a disappeared person, the syrupy allure of fading into a square of wax paper, a thumbprint of black tar. The seduction, the power to say: Here I am, but now, watch me, I’m gone. I am my own magic trick. Done disappeared.

 

Sarah Shotland is the author of the novel Junkette, and a playwright whose work has been widely produced. She is cofounder of Words Without Walls, which brings creative writing classes to jails, prisons, and rehab centers in Pittsburgh. She is a 2017-2018 fellow at Santa Fe Art Institute’s Social Justice initiative, and teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University.