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"Baby Ättestupa"

from Folktales for the Diseased Individual, p. 20

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"Spinning Under Flowers"

from Folktales for the Diseased Individual, p. 22

Inspired by Midsommar (2019) and first published in The Daily Drunk's A Drunken Midsommar Anthology

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"That Part Where He Straightens the Cross" in The Daily Drunk's Wikerpedia Anthology:

after The Wicker Man (1973) That was me, fifteen; the cross on my nightstand moved every night, and if it neared a Satanic sign, I’d read prayers to Mary’s statue to lull myself. From the window across from mine, the neighbours could have also watched, through the sliver underneath my curtains. When they smiled at me, that could have been what they were thinking. Like that, they made me masturbate in the closet.

I still thought about the crack between the door and the wall. A hyper-sensitive telescope could theoretically penetrate that, and the window first. I was never alone, without the ghost of my shame. Strangers were always touching me, touching me, always through the walls—and I would always keep going, keep pleasuring, keep burning up under their watch.

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"out both of us" in Sledgehammer Lit:

please understand i can’t let out my feelings— they’ll grow a new skin without me

snakes in the grass like red in the face

mouths leap into blood and you’re scared you’re scared all the way in

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"Build-a-Cult" in 3 Moon Magazine, Issue 7 (Growing Malcontent):

listen, i would build a cult around you in a second. i’ve seen the tweets about the documentaries, “i would never be that stupid.” “why’d they worship this man they so believed was a genius?”. they ask it / but i know a genius. i understand the thinking almost as much as you understand the world. let me drink some of it out of you.

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"Friday Night Necking" in Not Deer Magazine:

i want to plant you in my backyard, then watch you grow back

thin, but your fingers thicker; i hope at least one dewy mouth comes in the spring

i’d kiss a graveyard if it promised you

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"Kafka's The Gender Affirming Surgery" in Stone of Madness Press, Issue 15:

Nominated for Best of the Net in 2022; later taken down without warning :(

CW: body horror, gender dysphoria

I didn’t know I was pregnant—didn’t think beyond the fact that I was just femme, and kind of sharp-boned, anyway, for any reason behind my chosen name.

Yet every morning, I was waking up sore and my skin tingly, as if things were shifting. It got so bad I was nauseated—and you know how they say cravings can be a sort-of-hint about your baby’s gender? I should have known, based on the volumes of ice cream I consumed in those months, that I’d soon be birthing a full-grown woman.

I regret that it happened at my sister’s wedding—but, you know, stress can induce childbirth, and I had just been standing there reaching for a cocktail when my mother ‘accidentally’ called me Henry another time. I guess I couldn’t take it. My skin flipped inside out, then and there—and, all the way pre-grown on the other side, a new face and chest and legs and all I hadn’t realized I’d had in me took the foreground.

Everybody was screaming, and I was disowned quickly, but I’ve started to think that all our heads are maybe organs in someone else’s body, too. Maybe, collectively, we’ll soon flip into one, become one person with seven billion of them—and, even then, I don’t think they’d have as many faces as my fake-woke mother, so everything should be okay.

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"The Accident" in Crow & Cross Keys:

content warning: discussion of suicide

It was as he was slumped over the steering wheel that Frederick scratched at his collarbone for the hundredth time that day. The gift he was wearing was too appropriately from his mother; though it looked very warm, he knew how prickly it felt. At home he’d pull it off, ask his wife for her hot apple cider. The day’s burden hadn’t been the conference, really; it was this drive to, now from, the building at the other end of the city. It was a busy hour and he was stuck, yet again, in the slug of traffic.

He was somewhat stuck, too, in his petty grumpiness. He was forgetting that he’d known much greyer days—that if anything, this Tuesday had only been off-white. That was what was showing in the clouds, in the way that the sky seemed to be covered in craft paste: the city was dim, but there had been no rain. Compressed in his small Peugeot, though, Frederick had sweat forming in his underarms.

He cursed when the Volkswagen ahead made a stop, blocking the street unreasonably like a kidney stone. He braked and hit the horn; others also did the same, and the sounds of displeasure built up like grimy pus. The guilty driver stuck his head out of his window, yelling already—but Frederick saw, after a few moments, that he wasn’t at all addressing the street.

He followed the man’s attention towards the park, which faced north, and noticed the clumps of people forming on the thin and pale lawn. The crowd was all at once staring toward the cliff; Frederick focused to see over them and into the horizon, where the sky was finally ripping open. He spotted the man climbing over the fence, and his heart sunk to the brake pedal. 

He had climbed a fence of his own, once. On that awful spring night, almost two decades prior, he’d dangled a foot and his life off of the Hersenkam Bridge, in Antwerp. Thanks to the interference of another, however, his failure to jump had signified the last major failure of his life. He parked his car in the traffic as he thought of the near incident, and he pulled his heart all the way up. He had to be brave, now, or it’d be this poor stranger who’d be sinking. 

The cool breeze shocked his skin as he stepped to the sidewalk. The air was haunted by cigarette smoke; this slum, in particular, smelled most of all like death. It was worse as Frederick entered the park and jogged on the stone. 

“I’ve got it,” he yelled, approaching the cliff. “Somebody ring the police. I’ll keep him at bay.”

The crowd obeyed, stagnant. Sure, they feared death enough to worry for the approacher, but they likely dreaded it too hard to ever approach, themselves.

Frederick wiped the sweat from his cheeks once he’d stopped. The rabid waves below were blasting him with cold air, which felt good on his inflamed face. He leaned over the flat metal and looked over the man on the other side; though they were close, now, the stranger did not acknowledge Frederick. His arms clutching at the black bars behind his back, he stared only forward. He looked to be in his twenties: pale, flushed skin, a raging head of auburn hair. 

“Son? Hello,” Frederick tried. “What’s your name?” 

The boy gathered his tears, and then something else, not quite as identifiable.

 “Ansel,” he groaned.

“Hi, Ansel. I’m Fred,” Frederick spoke again, running his hands atop the cold metal. “I’ll be very simple about this. I don’t want to ask why you’re here, so don’t worry about all that. Okay? I want to tell you why I’m here.”

Ansel shied his head around. His pale blue eyes limped all over Frederick’s face, as if in judgment. Eventually, they fell into his eyes. 

“I can’t not think about it,” he spoke.

“What?” 

“That my life’s nothing.” His face was drooping like a sad sack of blood. “My soul is too tired.”

Ansel’s words weighed further on Frederick. He knew he shouldn’t show it. 

“The soul doesn’t get tired,” he said.

“Huh?” 

“There’s no such thing as a tired soul. An unhappy one,” Frederick’s hands trembled as he thought back to his time in the facility, to the things he’d been told.

“I don’t understand.”

“Souls are made of pure, vibrating joy,” Frederick said. “It’s our souls that make us want to live in the world.” His hands shook with more violence, yet he assured himself it was due to that vibrating power.

“I don’t—”

“The mind is what gets sick. Sick minds cover our souls over with dust and dirt. But that can all be swept away. It just takes some effort.”

Yet his throat turned to ash as Ansel stared back at the water. He probably wouldn’t have believed the words, either, at his deadliest point. These were only words. They were promises from a stranger. A grey, misty truth was now encircling him.

And, before he’d entirely realized it, Frederick was clasping the top of the fence with both hands, which were quivering further under the weight of the decision. He placed a foot on the bottom rung, lifted himself upwards; his heart was heaving. He raised one stiff leg over the top of the fence— another—and it felt like a plummet as he lowered himself. With sweaty hands, he clutched the cold posts now behind him, too. Pieces of his insides were ricocheting all over his body. 

The edge was so close, the water so far down—yet, somehow, the salty taste of the air overwhelmed him already. The glassy blue waves below were curving and sinking, too, like they were trying to grab at him. Frederick felt a crashing chill as he watched them, and yet it was almost thrilling. His heavy, sinking feeling was increasing, but it was filling him whole. A seagull as white as the sky passed over the water, and as it was only as it started to cry that he remembered what he’d meant to do.

“Now, the reason that I’m here,” he coughed, his head sticky with mud. His heart thrashed when he turned to Ansel, again; the boy’s sunken, watery eyes looked too much like the water below. “I was in this position before,” he managed. “At your age.”

“You’re lying,” Ansel said.

“No. I was ready to give up, because I thought that I had nothing left. And it was true. I had nobody.”

Ansel withered.

“But it made me realize that I had nothing to lose if I took another chance,” Frederick continued, feeling sticky in his stomach, now, and in his legs. “I agreed to take just one more. It was at my disposal. Now, I have a nice job. I have a wonderful wife, and two boys. So, this,” he nodded his head towards the water, “it just no longer tempts me.” 

Ansel blinked slowly, at that, and then he turned his gaze back over the fence—which gave Frederick a ring of hope. He looked over too for a moment, then another few: a new crop of people had cultivated on the grass, staring at them with scarecrow eyes. 

“You’re telling the truth?” Ansel muttered, his grip on the fence tightening. His voice was strained, which only meant that something in him was fighting and alive.

“Of course,” Frederick said.

The screeching sirens were approaching harder, too. Ansel’s eyebrows dipped, then curved.

“What are their names?” he asked Frederick.

“Huh?”

“Your family. Tell me about them.”

Frederick understood, finally, and he smiled vigorously. He’d have him, soon. He’d reel him back to land, like fish on a hook.  

It was only a moment later that he felt a hook had entered his own brain, had lobotomised him.

Ansel watched Frederick, with life in his eyes, as he awaited his simple answer—yet Frederick was waiting alongside him. The man was paralyzed, almost—though, internally, he was spastic and grabbing at the air for words that seemed to have evaporated. He became only concerned for himself. Any man would know the name of his wife, of course. Of his own children. He’d remember their faces. 

Heaving the increasingly salty air, Frederick was sure that everything would return to him, within only a few moments—but the moments left with increasing force. Soon, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever had children, or even a wife. He supposed that he didn’t. He’d been mistaken…

“Oh my god,” Ansel’s voice shook Frederick out of his mind, or his lack thereof. The boy’s face had been re-ignited with dread. His eyes had flatlined. “You are lying,” he spat.

“Wait,” Frederick struggled. He was too dizzy.

Ansel’s face screwed downwards, then, and he made the ugliest whimper that Frederick had ever heard. Such a sound could only signify death. 

“Oh, god,” Ansel repeated. 

Frederick was greeted that evening by the smell of burnt chicken, the noises of Nikolas and Emeric throughout the halls. 

“Darling?” Mary called, from the living room.

Frederick let down his briefcase. “Yes,” he said. 

“I’ve been worried.”

Frederick went to her, coming up beside the brown leather couch. She’d been sitting, her wavy black hair draped over a book. She looked up at him and smiled.

In the fourteen years that Frederick had known her, Mary’s smile had never burnt out a touch. Before his death, her father had warned him that many had looked down on her for it; she’d grinned, always, at all of the homeless people on the street, at every rude client or stranger. She was still always joy and giggles, in their home: whenever she played with her children, for instance, or every time she and Frederick tried for another.

Frederick didn’t mind, too much, if people believed Mary was odd, or even if she was. Her smile, as always, brought him a luminous joy—even if no flame would be catching tonight. 

“Work kept me,” he told her.

“You’re starving.” She put her book down on the couch. “Let me—”

“No. I’m tired,��� he said. His mouth and throat were so dry, and every word was a razor blade. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Okay?”

Mary furrowed her brows. She approached him, touched his cheek. 

“You’re pale,” she told him. “I hope you’re not sick.”

He grunted, backing away from her and going to the stairs.

“Say good night to your boys,” she called. 

He did, but their faces hurt him harder.

Frederick and his family had been, for a long time now, the twinkle in the eye of all of their social circles: the literature club, Mary’s relatives, the church, their colleagues. They were the guiding star, the goal that everyone else was set to reach. It was always, remember Fred and Mary’s wedding? Fred and Mary are so in love. Aren’t their sons so beautiful? Most importantly, Frederick’s family was the light of his own spirit: the gaslight that had kept it alive.

The events of that afternoon had ruined him, now, had overturned all of the heavens in his mind.

In official terms, Frederick had always been an atheist. He’d participated in the church only because it pleased his wife, and pleasing his wife had been his only real religion. Yet things were changing, tonight: the turbulence inside of him was knocking down all of his sturdiest beliefs. He was certain that his amnesia on the cliff, that afternoon, had represented a grand act of God. There was no other real explanation to the fact. There had been the pressure of the moment to speak, yes, but that wouldn’t have been enough to crush his memory completely. What had happened to Frederick had been more than an idiot accident. This truth was as clear to him as the lake water, now: he’d been punished. 

And as he lay in his bed, that night, the guilt was growing in his mind like a sickly itch. He spent the night with his fingers in his hair, pulling at his scalp, trying to distract from his bursting pain.

It wasn’t long before he concluded that he should have gone and killed himself, all of those years ago in Antwerp. He’d been shown, today, what it was like to not know his own family—and for the very simple reason that he never should have come to know them. If he’d rightfully jumped off the Hersenkam, he wouldn’t have lived to later take Ansel’s life.

The boy, after all, had chosen to climb the fence during the day, when the park had been thickly populated. That was the behaviour of someone who needed attention. His acts had been but a cry for help, which Frederick had violently gagged. He’d decided that he needed to be the one, out of the crowd, to take control, to help the boy off of the edge. In consequence, he’d coaxed him off of the wrong end.

The rash sizzled in Frederick’s mind when the sun reached his eyes. His hands hadn’t left his scalp; clumps of brown hair had gathered by his head. There was no worse agony, he’d come to find, than an itch underneath the skin, one that couldn’t ever be scratched. It felt like a taunt, a Godly mockery. He wanted to dig his way into his brain, to pull it apart. 

The static pain also reminded him, strangely, of what it felt like to have a limb burst from its sleep. It could only signify that his brain, for the first time in two decades, was awake.

“Fred? Are you alright?” Mary gasped, in response to the groaning that he could no longer cage. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re in pain?”

Frederick clamped his eyelids shut. Mary’s voice was stomping on his brain, as would definitely her face.

“I’m fine,” he croaked. 

Still, he felt her approach. The bones on the back of her hand were knives to his forehead. 

“You’re sweating,” she tried. “I need—”

“No,” Frederick growled. He grabbed at her wrist, threw it to the pillow.

There was a pause. A cold silence came over Mary as she backed away off of the bed, then toward the door. 

“I’ll call your work, and mine,” she said, in a single breath. 

As she stepped out to the hallway, Frederick vomited.

Mary left him alone, after that, save but to clean up after him and to bring him food. He didn’t need to leave the bed to plan his death, after all—and he’d decided that he’d jump off of the same cliff as Ansel had. It’d be only right. And while he’d never before tasted this flavour of pain, Frederick and his previous self still agreed on one thing. Jumping to one’s death—jumping, hence, literally into death—was the most dutiful way to go. 

He decided that he’d drive to the cliff when it was dark, when there was no more audience. The cliff would be an open crime scene for another day, or maybe two. He couldn’t take the public’s attention away from Ansel; he’d already stolen too much from the young man. 

Frederick stayed in place for his two waiting days, but he also still didn’t sleep. Even once he had decided his fate, the shame in his mind kept growing like prickly bark on a tree. As much as he begged for sleep, the pain was much too grating. Now that his mind was truly awake, it wouldn’t let Frederick forget again—not even for a moment—that he was meant to die.

He never hungered, either. He didn’t thirst. Sustenance was for survival, and survival was no longer Frederick’s purpose. And so he hid all of Mary’s cooking under their shared bed. She’d be alerted to it when it began to rot, of course—but the smells were masked, for now, by his lingering vomit.

There was nothing left that Frederick wanted to taste except sleep. He thought of nothing but sleep. He lusted for it: for its curves, the ups and downs, the vivid feeling of it, of being inside of it. On his final morning, as he watched Mary change out of her nightgown, he felt even more sickness cooking in his throat. He didn’t know how he’d ever been attracted to that custard-like flesh; nothing at all was erotic to him, now, but the perfect softness of slumber. This was true, of course, because he was meant to have the best kind, the ultimate coma: the kind in which he’d soon plunge the deepest and never have to leave. 

Frederick woke the next morning in a bed that was not his own. Even his body didn’t feel like his own. He was swollen and smothered with pain; he moaned as he opened his eyelids.

He hadn’t thought that Hell would have tile ceilings.

“Sir?” a woman’s voice scraped at his mental wall. Frederick turned his head, with some expanding pain. Yet he noticed that the pain on the inside had cleared, and that the world was no longer turning. As he looked to the young lady, he saw her hair was in a tight bun that pulled at her skin, making white lines. She was wearing all white, too. Yet there was no way that Frederick had been sent to heaven. He looked down, next, to himself: above the blue cover, his arms were draped in yet even more white. His legs felt fatter. 

This is a hospital, he thought. Alright, alright, that makes some more sense.

“Do you remember what happened to you?” the nurse asked while Frederick squinted. With some distant nausea, he passed his eyes over her nametag: DANICA. 

“You were in an accident,” she informed him. “You fell asleep at the wheel.” 

Frederick looked back to the ceiling. 

“You’re lucky to have survived,” she told him, and she dampened her voice. “Can you remember your name, sir?”

“Was anyone else hurt?” he asked. Reality draped over him, a coarse blanket.

“No,” she told him. “Your name, please.”

 “Frederick Ivey,” he spoke. It was difficult. He felt as if he were breathing in smoke, again.

“Your wife?”

“Mary Ivey.” Ignoring the clawed rip of pain, he sat up as much as he could. “Where is she? My—”

“Your family’s waiting. They’ll be very relieved,” Danica smiled down at him. “Just a few more questions, first. Do you remember where you were going?”

“The park.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know the name. It was by the lake, after highway E12.”

Danica’s face looked, in the next moment, to have jumped and drowned for him. “Oh,” she said.

Frederick felt a pull in his stomach. “What?” he said.

“You haven’t heard about…”

“I have, I have. Someone died there just the other day.”

“Many people have.” 

“What?” His patience was trickling.

She went to a large grey bin near the door, leaning down and fiddling through. 

“There.” She returned to him, presenting him with a page in a newspaper. The headline was, Hetistil District Shaken by a Self-Killing—Again. She pointed to the third paragraph. “Now. Your family,” she said, and she went to the door. 

Frederick took the news between his rough hands.

“My brother had precious things in his life. He had so many people and things that he loved. He was going to teach primary. We were meeting for lunch to discuss it,” Remi told us. “Above all things, he was terrified of heights. So, I simply can’t believe he would ever do this…  thing willingly.” When we asked him if he believed in the cliff’s supposed curse, however, he presented no pointed answer. “I’ve heard so much in this past day,” he admitted. “People insist Ansel touched the fence for too long and that it convinced him, somehow, in some way, to climb over. They say my brother probably didn’t know that he shouldn’t ever touch it. But I still have trouble believing that whole myth.”

“It’s no myth,” one superstitious local had insisted, earlier in the day. “Many of us call that fence Hell’s Gate, and it’s not just a funny nickname.”

Frederick’s confusion was a whirlpool in his chest.

“I am a bit offended by the speculation,” Remi had added. “But I’m glad that that man came to the fence when no one else would dare go near. I would have thanked him, too, if he hadn’t run.”

When asked what exactly this curse could be doing to convince healthy minds to jump—and to convince them so quickly—the local became flustered. 

“Well, I can’t know that,” he claimed. “That, you might want to ask the runaway man, if you can find him. He’s the only one, after all, who has ever climbed over that fence and then climbed back. Maybe he was too focused on the other fellow.”

Frederick’s confusion turned to realization, then, and then repugnance, and finally a widening relief.

It flooded his throat.

an earlier version of this story was previously published in New Reader Magazine, Issue 5 (March 2019)

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"Baby Fever" in The Writing Disorder, Summer 2018:

“We need an ambulance! My friend’s been stabbed and she’s pregnant! Uh … uh … four months!” someone’s cry pierced through my dizzy fog. That’s when I noticed everyone in the kitchen and that they were staring at me. Overwhelmed, I looked down, still clutching my burning belly. My hands were red. Oh.

#

TWO MONTHS EARLIER

“How far along are you?” asked Trish, looking up again from across the table. Her gaze pushed into me like a bulldozer. I leaned back into my chair, insecure about my answer.

“Eight weeks,” I said.

The three women attacked their notepads with their pencils.

Their names were Olive, and Kate (I think), and, in the middle, leading the interview, sat Trish Barton. That woman was all I’d heard her to be. She was blonde, with great skin, and so petite; you could have never guessed that she’d had two children. Nor that they’d been home births. Her kids (a boy and a girl) would probably grow up to be as small as her, too, since she was raising them vegetarian. Basically, she was everything that every Elk Creek mother wanted to be. Already she intimidated me, and she was five years my junior.

“And you’re married?” she asked, with a smile as perfectly tight as the rest of her face. I’d been expecting to be asked a lot about my living situation.

“Yes,” I answered. “As of recently, uh, his name is James.”

“Oh, congrats. How did you meet?”

“Four years ago,” I said. “He… was at a bar where we were having a company party. I didn’t- uh, I don’t usually go out, and he could tell. He stole me away”. I thought of it, of that image of James in his striped button-up. He’d pulled his sleeves up as he’d approached me, as if telling me he was determined to seduce me–though he’d probably just wanted to show off his arms. I still couldn’t believe I’d fallen for that overgrown frat boy. I chuckled to myself, thinking about it. When I looked back at Trish, though, her face hadn’t moved.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“Uh, I was an accountant for a car company,” I said. “I’m looking for a replacement.”

“And your husband?”

“Yes. He got a job at a hospital in the city, um-”

“Oh. Nice.”

“He’s a doctor.”

Her mouth opened the tiniest bit before she went back to her notepad. I tried to peek.

“And where are you living now?” she smiled up at me.

“It’s a house on Collingwood Street,” I said.

“Oh, so you’re the new owner,” Her high-pitched voice flapped its wings excitedly. Her face had opened up now. A little weird. “Well, lovely, lovely. Will you have transportation?”

“Yes, we have a car.”

“Okay. And how are you liking Elk Creek?”

“We love it,” I said. “We wanted to go somewhere family-oriented. And this was worth leaving, like, everything behind in Michigan.”

“So you understand the purpose of Elk Creek Mothers’ Association?”

I nodded. “Keep the community safe and organize events for moms and kids,” I said.

“And what will you contribute, if you’re chosen?”

I paused, massaging my hands together. Secretly, I hated questions like this; the job hunt was going to be a pain.

“Well, I love children more than-” I started. I was about to say anyone, then I realized that that might not be the best idea, considering who was interviewing me, “-anything. More than anything, I’ve always known I’ve wanted to be a mom, and…” I realized that I probably shouldn’t focus on myself, but on the benefits for the kids.

Trish and her vice-presidents wrote as I spoke. I couldn’t, despite trying, read their notes or their faces.

I told James all about it over dinner. We sat across the width of the dining room table, as the other way might have required us to cup our mouths and yell. I didn’t know why he’d gotten us such a big table, but I supposed that the room allowed for it.

“I’m not gonna get it,” I said, twirling my spaghetti on my fork, then sticking a load into my mouth.

“Of course you are,” he said. “It’s a volunteer position.” He stabbed into a meatball.

“One that everyone wants,” I mumbled, covering my chewing with my hand. “Why do you think I had to do an interview?”

“Is it really this elite thing?” he asked, chuckling and looking up at me. James had blue/green eyes; their color shifted like the tides. In this light, now, they looked a pale, consuming green. He was still so handsome to me with his short, curly brown hair; his thick eyelashes; the quirky asymmetrical-ness of his rectangle face. “But it’s called Ec-ma. Ec-ma,” he continued. “They couldn’t have a prettier name? Makes me think of eczema.”

I laughed until my phone started vibrating on the kitchen counter. I jumped upward, gulped down my noodles and jogged to it.

“Pregnant,” James reminded me.

I ignored him. “Hello?” I answered, in a semi-strangled voice.

“Hi. Lillian? This is Trish, from ECMA,” she said. “I’m calling to offer you membership to our group.”

“No way! Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much!” I exclaimed, looking back at James. He did a double thumbs-up.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Do you accept?”

“Yes, for sure.”

“Great. Are you available this Thursday at 7:30 PM for our monthly public safety meeting?”

James would be back from work by then. I’d have the car in time.

“Yes, that’s fine,” I told her.

“It’s at the police station. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” I lied. I’d figure it out.

“Perfect. See you then,” she said. “Bring a notebook.” And she hung up.

“Told you you’d get it,” James said as I put the phone down. “They loved you.”

I strode back toward him, grinning.

“I admit, I got you something to celebrate,” he said, opening the glass door to the liquor cabinet. I squinted at him as he took out a bottle. “Non-alcoholic cider.” He pointed at the label.

I came closer and kissed him. He kissed me back, grabbing at my arm. He tasted like tomato sauce, and his stubble scratched at my face, but the moment was still nice.

We each had a glass and then we had sex.

When I got up the next morning for the bathroom, I found some blood in my underwear, which James had said was normal for pregnant women after sex. I filled the sink to soak them and then also drew myself a bath. I was nervous for my meeting that evening and I wanted to relax (also, the big tub, with jets, was one of my favourite features of the new house). I sat for a while in the hot, bubbling water and thought of baby name ideas. I’d been thinking of suggesting Madeline if it was a girl, which I was sort of hoping would be the case. Madeline sounded like a girl who’d laugh fervently, who’d love hugs and who would have her father’s eyes.

The meeting went fine, though I was exhausted by the time it ended. I wasn’t surprised; wanting to impress the group was probably piling onto my recent moving stress and crushing me. I went to bed before James that night, but still woke up late the next morning. When I went to the bathroom, I found more blood. Bleeding was normal at this stage, I assured myself. So was the pain in my abdomen. It had happened before.

Unfortunately, both symptoms continued sporadically for the next week, and pretty much non-stop the week after that. The exhaustion was the same.

“Would you be able to get me an ultrasound? For, like, as soon as possible?” I called James on his break the day I decided this was a problem. We hadn’t yet managed to procure a new family doctor, so he would have to play that role for now. I was grateful to have him.

“Of course. How you feeling today?” he asked. I could hear him close a door.

“The same,” I said. I hadn’t left the bed. “I officially think I’m gonna miscarry.” I was going to cry. Neither of us had yet said that word.

“Please don’t worry yet,” he told me in his most caressing voice. “It’s probably stress.”

“It hasn’t been that bad,” I argued, turning onto my side and sliding further under the covers.

“Yeah, but this started as soon as you joined the group,” he said. “That can’t be a coincidence. And…”

“…Yes?”

“I don’t know. Something about that group just kinda weirds me out,” he admitted.

“What do you mean?”

“Like… come on. Everyone here just worships those women. Plus, they’re making you do their bidding, for free, just for the honour of it?” I tried to intervene, but he continued, “You sure you haven’t accidentally joined some sort of cult?”

“In small-town Wisconsin?” I scoffed. Fuck, it hurt to do that. I rolled onto my back, holding myself. “Everything’s normal. Come on. It’s for the community.”

“The way you describe them, they just sound creepy. Are they not?”

“It’s not that bad,” I repeated.

“Really? You sure you’re not hurting and bleeding ‘cause they turned our baby into a demon baby or something? Rosemary’s Babied you up-”

“Stop,” I held back my laugher by the belly. Laughing wasn’t a good idea, either.

“Okay, but admit it. You’re taken by the elitism,” he said, his voice now dipping a little, like a frown. “And that’s what’s weird to me, ‘cause you’ve never seemed to care about that kind of thing.”

“I’m just trying to make new friends here, James. Mom friends. I’m bored and I’m lonely.”

“I get it. But you can do that without this Trish woman, can’t you? How old is she, again?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Right,” he said. I realized that she was a full decade under him.

“I guess I want my kid to have a good social standing,” I finally admitted. “You know I was bullied.”

James took in a harsh breath. “I understand,” he said. “And I think that’s great that you’re trying to give that to our children, but I think maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself. On top of looking for a job-”

My insides fell. “Are you asking me to quit the group?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, quickly. “Actually… eh, I was wondering…”

They hit the ground. “If I shouldn’t get a job?”

“You’ll be on mat leave soon enough, anyway,” he finally said. “And you know I can support us both.”

I didn’t answer. I only swivelled my jaw.

“Then, maybe later, we can reconsider if you wanna work or not,” he said. “I don’t know. Think about it?”

“Fine,” I said. “But, please, get me that ultrasound.”

James was able to schedule me one for five days later–a Saturday. Unfortunately, I felt exponentially worse by the day. By Friday morning, it was like I had a hole tearing through me. The demon baby theory didn’t seem so implausible anymore.

I wept on the bed, leaving phone messages for James. I took my usual (maximum) dose of Tylenol, and then upped it a bit, but still, not much changed. When I finally struggled my way out of bed, I noticed that I’d left a bloodstain. I went to the bathroom and took off my clothes. I felt so weak and vulnerable, even nauseous, so it took a while. I ripped the pad off of my underwear–which, along with my pajama pants, had been stained, nonetheless–and threw it out. At least none of the blood seemed clotted.

I managed to make myself a hot bath, with jets. Once I got in, it helped the pain, a bit, but it worsened the nausea and the exhaustion. When I got out and checked my phone, it was still only nine o’clock. I had no idea if James would get my messages before his break.

I went back to the bed, in my bathrobe, to sit and try to think of what to do. If we’d been back home, I would have called a cab to the hospital, but there were none in this puny town. I could call an ambulance, as it’d come faster than a cab would from the city, but that seemed excessive. I would just have to make it a few hours. There was no way I was contacting ECMA, either; they couldn’t know that this was happening. I had just been accepted. I’d already forced a smile and gone to the last two meetings.

I changed into new underwear with a new pad, and new pajamas, then lay back down. Just a few hours.

It was easier thought than done, though. I held myself on the bed and cried for about thirty minutes until I gave in and lugged myself to the dining room.

“Forgive me,” I rasped, pulling out a bottle of scotch and a glass from the liquor cabinet. But she was probably already dead. I poured myself a glass then the contents down my throat. The burning it caused distracted from the burning in my abdomen. I poured another.

I was disoriented when I heard James yell, “What the fuck is this?!”

I lugged my head up from my arms, wiping my mouth. I looked at my hand. My saliva was brown. I looked to my right. James was standing next to me. I was still sitting at the dining table. I’d fallen asleep. I’d never fallen asleep at a table like this.

“Is this why this is happening? Is this what you’ve been doing during the day?!” he continued. I looked up at him. He was sneering, his eyes burning hell into me. I’d thought that I’d already seen him at his angriest, but apparently I hadn’t even seen him close. “What kind of mother are you?!”

“No,” I groaned. “Have… you found me like this before?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, leaning down further into me. “You’ve been really emotional-”

“Because I’m in fucking pain and I’m fucking losing my baby,” I said. I strained myself up straighter, but my head was spinning. “I need the hospital.”

He stared into me for a few seconds. His eyes had gone paler, colder. “No,” he said.

My heart jump-started. “What the f-” I tried.

“You’re not going anywhere. They can’t see you like this. Even if you’re not a drunk, they’ll think you are.”

“It’s… not… optional.”

“Sure it is,” he said. “Didn’t you want a home birth so bad? Like what’s-her-face? Have a home miscarriage.”

Then, he passed me for the kitchen. I put my head back on the table and cried again.

The pain woke me up before James the next morning. I heaved myself over to the bathroom–a ritual now–and the usual blood was there. I started to undress when I was taken by nausea.

I sensed James walk in behind me puking.

“Hungover?” he snarked.

“Please,” I whimpered.

I got changed, and he drove me, in silence, to the hospital. It was in the car seat that I started to really feel the bleeding. Feel it get thicker.

After the painfully long drive, I was given away to a Dr. Schuster, a middle-aged black woman with black ponytailed braids. She helped me put on a hospital gown, and she set me down on the plastic bed. I was shivering. I covered my eyes as she checked me. I felt her clean me. It was cold. But there was no colder feeling than the one in my belly–and, though I knew that it was just fear, it also felt an awful lot like a dead baby.

“I’m so sorry. You did have a miscarriage,” she said, standing over me, dropping each word down gentler than the last.

But it doesn’t matter how gently you drop a child’s corpse onto her mother’s face.

She might as well have dropped a boulder on me, I thought. And, in that moment, I wondered what my daughter looked like. She’d probably resembled red, thick lava when she’d been ejected from the center of my core–but now I was a volcano with no purpose left, and now both of us were cold.

“I’m gonna give you an ultrasound to make sure there are no further complications and that you’re safe,” Dr. Schuster said, and I grimaced. I was grateful, at least, to have her instead of James.

“It still hurts,” I grumbled, lips dry.

She had me open the front of my gown. She put the ultrasound gel on my belly then felt across it with the stick.

“Is it all out?” I muttered.

“Actually…” she said, her voice shaking now, “I’m going to have to put you into surgery.”

“Why?” I rasped, sitting up quickly and wincing.

“You’ve had an ectopic pregnancy.”

I hadn’t heard of that before, which wasn’t a good sign.

“Your egg failed to travel through your fallopian tube,” she explained. “Your foetus has been growing in there, and now it’s burst it. You’re bleeding internally and… your other tube might have been damaged, too. I’m going to have to go in to try to save it.”

Everything, then, felt like it was spinning and shifting. Probably because everything was. I erupted, again, this time with tears.

When I woke up in a hospital bed, I tried to shoot up straight. My abdomen cried out in pain, and so did I. I remembered that I’d had surgery. A nurse called for Dr. Schuster, who entered shortly after.

“Can I have kids?” I mumbled.

“I’m so sorry, Lillian,” she said, her face struggling to stay adrift. “It’s not likely you’ll be able to conceive. Your tube was badly ruptured, and your other one was…”

I tuned her out, then. I retreated all the way under the covers and closed my eyes.

When I was more awake, she gave me and James the instructions for my care.

“No working for eight weeks,” she said. “And absolutely no sex.” Her expression had finally given up and died now. So had mine. It had gone down with my baby.

My baby had died and taken the rest of my insides with her.

James took my hand in his. It was stiff. I looked up at him. He was pale and frozen over. Definitely also dead.

“Again, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Dr. Schuster said to us. “Take your time to grieve, but remember that-”

“Thank you,” James snapped, which made me cringe a little.

And the drive home felt like the one there.

“I called Trish,” he said, breaking the silence, keeping his eyes on the dark road ahead. “Begged her to keep you in the group.”

“Of course she’s not gonna keep me in the group,” I grimaced, picking at a cuticle. “It’s a mothers’ association, and I’m no longer a mother.”

“Well, she said they’d discuss it.”

“I could have done it myself,” I argued, pausing to clamp my teeth together. “It could’ve waited.”

“I thought you might be embarrassed.”

Something about that rubbed me the wrong way. It even struck me.

“Why would I be embarrassed?” I asked, then, in a weakened voice. “…Because it’s my fault?”

He didn’t answer.

“For drinking?” I pushed. “Or for putting too much stress on myself? Daring to look for a job?”

James let out a dense exhale. “I didn’t say that, Lil,” he muttered.

It wasn’t a denial that he believed it, though.

“I can’t believe you think that.” My voice was shaking. “You did this to me, not me.”

At that, he pulled the car over and turned to look into my eyes. But he kept his grip on the wheel. “Excuse me?” he growled.

“You’re a doctor. You know what an ectopic pregnancy is, James. You know it was failed from the beginning. When your sperm entered me and ripped me up slowly from the inside.”

I watched the anger bubble up inside him, then. “You don’t mean that,” it finally escaped as a chuckle. “You still have those hormones going.”

“Hormones?! I just lost my purpose in life.”

“So did I!”

“But you’re not the one who had to just go through that,” I screamed, the hairs on my arms rising with my voice. “Have some humanity! I just want my husband to comfort me right now, not fucking attack me!”

But all he did was turn back toward the wheel. He stared again at the black nothingness ahead, and it reflected in his eyes. We sat there, listening to our own hard breaths, until he finally spoke again.

“Humanity is defined by the ability to reproduce, isn’t it?” he said, and he turned the car back into the road.

I was too stunned to even respond. Had he just implied what I thought? Had my husband just diagnosed me with not being human anymore?

I was taken by rage. He had done this to me.

The continuing, torturous silence was shaken, thankfully, when my phone vibrated at my feet. I struggled, aching in every sense of the word, to pick up my purse and retrieve it.

“Hello?” I groaned.

“Lillian? This is Trish,” came Trish’s glossy voice from the other side. But she also sounded a bit more genuine, more normal now. “I wanted to say that I’m so, so sorry to hear about what happened. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

I know you can’t, I thought.

“Thank you, Trish,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

“Do you need some time to yourself or do you have it in you-”

“Just lay it on me.”

“Okay. Well… we talked about it for a long time. It was difficult. Because we could really feel how passionate you are about the association, and we’ve appreciated having you so far. So… we actually came up with a possible compromise, if you’ll accept it.”

I felt the littlest fragment of life return to me.

“What kind?” I asked, leaning against the window.

“So, we have an official Facebook page, you might know. I like to keep it active, to attract attention. Like, post some content a couple times a day. But I wouldn’t mind that job being taken off me, if you want it,” she said. “It seems perfect for your… situation. You’re homebound, correct?”

“Right.”

“Well, since it’s online,” she said, “You won’t have to leave home to do it. And… since you’ll be behind a computer, and no one can tell who’s posting, anyway, no one will tell that you’re…”

“Not pregnant,” I said. It was such a pity offer, but I still appreciated it. I couldn’t believe that Head Mom Trish Barton was being more forgiving than my husband. “So… I just have to post as if I were pregnant? Or a mom?”

“Uh, exactly.”

“Well, okay,” I said, and then took in a cold breath. “Thank you… so much.”

“No problem. I’ll e-mail you more details in the morning, and you can let me know when you’re ready to start. For now, get some rest and feel better.”

“Thanks.”

The next morning, I went to the office computer and indeed found an email from her.

Hi Lillian, it said,

If you go to Facebook you’ll see I made you an admin for our page. That means you’ll be able to post to it under our name. Take a look at the past content, if you haven’t already, to get an idea of what kind of stuff is good. Articles about parenting are great, as long as it’s not ‘disciplining’ tips or anything too aggressive like that. Also please look for funny ‘memes’ about motherhood. Basically just fun, light-hearted stuff. Oh, and add appropriate captions, please.

Posts should go up once every morning and once every afternoon. You can start whenever you feel ready. Just let me know when that is and I’ll leave it to you 🙂

Take care,

TB

I can start today, I wrote her, or I may die of boredom.

I went on Google and looked up ‘parenting article’. I clicked on a page titled What to Expect When Your Child Starts Kindergarten.

It opened with an image of a mother and daughter smiling together.

Oh … god.

You’ll want to keep track of all of the school activities and meetings and help out when you can, it said.

Making friends with other parents will be a huge stress-saver.

Your child may cry because they’re scared or because they miss you, but that doesn’t always mean that they don’t want to be at school.

Your child will be a lot more tired than before. They may start to fall asleep in weird places. It will be cute.

As I read, the pain where my baby used to be flared up like a phantom limb. I couldn’t do this. I hadn’t realized how difficult this would be.

ECMA definitely didn’t realize it, either, though. They had been so kind to find this job for me. If I didn’t do it, I had nothing left.

I decided to just try a different route. I exited the article and Googled, ‘Mom memes’.

The first image was a simple illustration of a woman, accompanied by the text, That moment when you’re checking on your sleeping baby and their eyes open so you run before you make direct eye contact.

My eyes swelled and my hands contorted. Just hurry up and post it, I told myself, then you can go wallow under your covers again. I saved the image and put it up on the Facebook with the caption, Haha, I hate when this happens!

Pressing every key was like stabbing myself over and over.

I was still under the covers that afternoon when I heard James unlock the door. Thankfully, he fussed around cooking in the kitchen for a while before approaching the room.

“Lil?” he mumbled. “I made dinner.”

My brain foggy, I forced myself to get up and follow him to the dining room. He helped me sit down at the table. He’d set out steak and potatoes for us. Plus, a bottle of wine, with wine glasses. He offered me one.

“Thank you, the food looks amazing,” I said, “But not right now.”

“Why not?” he asked, uncorking the bottle. “You can drink it now.”

I stared into my lap and ran my tongue between my teeth. “What is this?” I finally asked, my voice sharp.

He sighed. “I wanted to make it up to you, after last night,” he admitted. “You were right. I shouldn’t have been fighting with you.”

I sighed, too, nodding. I was still hurt by what he’d said, but I didn’t want to bring it up. Clearly, he didn’t either. So we made dull conversation about his day as we ate. I avoided talking about mine.

When we finished, he took away the dishes and I went to the living room couch.

“What are you up to tonight?” he asked, entering from the kitchen behind me. “Want to see what’s on TV?”

“Could you get me my book?” I countered. “In the bedroom?”

“Sure,” he said. Then, “Why don’t you read in there? You’ll be warmer.”

“I guess, but I’ve been lying there all day.”

“I could help entertain you,” he said. He came up behind me and rubbed my shoulder.

I turned, looking up at him with a grimace. “You know I can’t have sex, James.”

He chuckled. “I mean, it’s actually not that big of a deal-”

“Except I’m really not up for it. In any capacity.”

He paused. “Okay, okay, just trying to be close with you,” he grumbled, before walking away.

Of course, I was going by what Dr. Schuster had told me–and James, as her peer, should have known better–but, in truth, I was most resistant for my own reasons. I just could not get that image of James’s invasive, destructive sperm out of my mind. I did not want his semen anywhere near me anymore, after what it had done to me. I was disgusted by it, by the very idea of sex with him.

Unfortunately, throughout the next few weeks, James continued to try to initiate it with me. And, as I continued to say no, he continued to get grumpier. Funnily enough, I couldn’t remember him ever being this horny before. It was interesting that he wanted to fuck me the most now that he didn’t consider me human.

Eventually, he got the message and he stopped pushing. In one sense of the word, that is. Instead, he began to push himself, sometimes, onto my healing abdomen while we were cuddling… to even, some nights, knee it in his sleep. But I suspected that he wasn’t asleep.

When I would go to the computer to post for ECMA, in the morning, I also started to find paused porn videos left open on the computer. I understood that James needed to get his urges out, somehow, but, like the kneeing, it happened just a little too often to seem truly accidental. This was another expression of frustration at me, then. James was rubbing in my face that I wasn’t satisfying him. He was showing me exactly who all of the younger, hotter women were that were getting him off.

I only really started to become afraid when the porn started to get violent. I would go to the computer to find images of women–though that wasn’t what they were being called, in these video titles–being stepped on, hit with things, choked. Their faces always showed distress or discomfort, and when they didn’t, it was because they were being shoved into a bag, trashcan, or toilet. At that point, I shouldn’t have been surprised that this was the kind of thing that James was into. But I felt that this porn might have become more than just a taunting… had it also become a threat?

I cried a lot during those weeks. Fearing for myself, what he might do to me in my sleep, I locked myself in the bathroom at night and slept in the tub. Weirdly, he never challenged me for it. He acted like everything was normal. He’d ask me how I was feeling. I would tell him everything was great, and he’d smile.

When I went in for my first check-up with Dr. Schuster (Aileen, she said to call her), she told me that I was behind in my healing. It was most definitely the kneeing, I knew. But I realized what I had to say.

“We had sex,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. I felt a heavy shame for disappointing her, even though it had been a lie.

“I understand you want to try again,” she said, sitting down at her chair across from me. “It’s common for couples in this situation to have trouble dealing with it, at first.”

I wrung my fingers.

“I hope this isn’t intrusive for me to say, but… your husband has seemed depressed lately,” she continued, her wide face dipping a little. “He’d mentioned how many kids you two wanted… so I wanted to ask you how you’re doing, mentally.”

I looked back into her eyes. James and I had never actually talked numbers. Both of us adored kids, of course, but it had made sense to me to just take it one at a time.

I almost said nothing. “How many kids did we want?” I decided to ask. It came out grumbly.

“Pardon me?” asked Aileen.

“How many did he say we wanted?”

“Well… he’d said at least eight.”

I felt so heavily confused and disturbed, in that moment, like I could fall over–like she’d reached out and slapped me. Eight kids? Eight? Where the heck had he gotten that idea? My personal limit would probably have been half that number; why did he go around saying something so outrageous, when we’d never even discussed it?

I had an itch of a thought, and so when I got home, I did my own personal Googling. One of the results included a page in a women’s health blog, What is Reproductive Coercion?. I dismissed it at first, but the title kept chipping at me until I went back and clicked on it.

Have you ever heard of men obsessed with getting and keeping their partners pregnant?, the author wrote. Chances are that you haven’t. However, new studies have found that this form of domestic abuse is almost as common as are bruises and broken bones. Whether subtle or forceful, it is just another form of power and control that a man can exert over a woman’s body and life. He may be performing reproductive coercion if he:

Sabotages your birth control. Maybe he’s lied about having had a vasectomy, or he ‘accidentally’ keeps ripping the condom, or he tells you that your birth control is making you fat. He might even escalate to doing something like rip out your contraceptive ring.

Isolates you–limits your access to money and transportation. It may also be a strategy to prevent you from acquiring birth control. Or maybe he wants you to quit your job so that you can focus on being a mother (and be totally dependant on him). Isolating you can also prevent you from getting refuge from your family or friends.

Verbally, psychologically and/or emotionally pressures you into having sex and/or getting pregnant.

Uses violence or threats of violence to pressure into having sex and/or getting pregnant.

Wants you continuously pregnant. He may attempt to make another baby either directly after you give birth (or miscarry), or as soon as your previous child begins kindergarten (and your schedule opens up).

A stinging, tingly feeling surfaced in my limbs as I read. It gradually got stronger, then moved to my core.

I sat, paralyzed, thinking back to the beginnings of my relationship with James. He’d been upfront about his traditional leanings, his need to get married and to have kids. I’d found it endearing, romantic—as I had his eventual suggestion that we run away together. Men with a passion for children are attractive to many women, including myself. And, because I’d shared his passion, I suppose that I had never had to face his wrath. Until now.

As Aileen had suggested, he was probably refusing to accept that I was now infertile. His obsession with sex was probably a desperate, delusional attempt to get me pregnant again. Either that, or he was panicking and trying to control me in other ways.

I almost scoffed at the predictability when I came to the computer, one morning, and found ‘pregnant woman porn’. Of course James had this fetish. And of course he was going to go down this road; this was the ultimate taunt, the ultimate display of what I could never be for him.

I should have grimaced and closed the tab as quickly as possible, of course. That was what I usually did. This time, though, something different happened. I stared at the image. Really stared at it.

The woman was leaning on all fours, her eyes jammed shut and her mouth agape, her inflated belly dangling pathetically. Her hair, a mess, fell partially in her face and was pulled partially back by the man fucking her from behind. I hit play on the video. The words suffer, you pregnant bitch clotted together in my mind.

When I finally did close the tab to get to my Facebook responsibilities, my bitterness lived on. It always did, when I did this work. This time, though, it was even more intense. It filled the room, now. Plus, now that it knew what revenge felt like, it wanted more of it.

I had a few notifications from comments on my latest pregnancy meme–one that had especially made me feel like killing myself. They were idiotic, tart messages like ‘sooo truuueee’ and laughing faces; god, I pitied these women’s children. Rage spiralled in my stomach, flashed underneath my skin as I stared down their profile photos in the same way I had the woman in the video. Their big bellies and smiling husbands made me wish upon them the same fate. I wanted, so horribly, for them to feel that humiliation for being pregnant. That trauma.

I realized that maybe I could get them close.

I logged out of Facebook and created a new account under the pseudonym Joe Coen. I then went back to the ECMA page and to the profiles of frequent commenters. I composed a message, which I sent to all of them:

Here’s where I’d like to see you soon 🙂

And I attached the porn link.

A few hours later, I received a call from Trish. When she said we needed to talk, my inner sanctum–the satisfaction I’d made for myself–imploded on itself. She knew that it had been me. Somehow. How? It made no sense how she would. Yes, I controlled the Facebook page, but it was also accessible to everyone. And the world was not short of misogynistic men who sent messages like that.

It was probably a coincidence, then. This was about something else. Still, the worry would keep me up all night if I didn’t talk to her today. I asked her to come over, preferably before my husband came home.

The low look on her face, when I opened the door, made my worry flare up worse. I invited her over to the kitchen. Her steps were careful. I was definitely in trouble. My mind ran in zig-zags, debating what to do.

I offered her a seat at the counter, and, when she denied a drink, sat across from her. I forced a smile. I decided that unless I was offered undeniable proof that she’d tracked me down, I would do just that–deny.

“So,” she said. She was still avoiding eye contact. She rested her French-tipped hand on the counter and cleared her throat. “I don’t know if you heard, but a lot of women from our Facebook received a really nasty message this morning.”

I widened my eyes and gasped. “Oh no,” I said. “Did you want me to do something?”

“That’s not why I came, no,” she said, and she finally looked back at me. “I’m here to ask you to tell me, completely honestly, if it was you.”

Her eyes pressed into me like a drill, making me shake.

“W-why would you think it was me?” I responded. Acting had never been a thing of mine.

“Because I had a miscarriage once,” she said.

My shock, then, was real.

“Surprise,” she chuckled, baring teeth. “Yes. I was pregnant once before Noah, and no one knows except my husband.”

“I’m sorry-”

“Don’t. I’m just trying to make a point,” she said, resting both arms on the counter now. She was shaking, too. “I had become such a mess, y’know. I hid it well, but I was super depressed for about six months, and… angry. Like, I hated pregnant women… moms in general. I had thoughts that… and, my therapist–yup, I have one of those, too–told me that that can happen when you miscarry.”

I swallowed, gripping my shirt.

“And so I can’t imagine how much worse it might be, for you, because…” she continued, pursing her lips and speeding up her blinking. “I thought about it today, and maybe having you do the Facebook may not have been the best idea. Right?”

I put my head down and nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. “If it was too much-”

“Because… I need… “ I struggled, putting my face into my hands.

“Do you have a support system?” she asked, quieter now. “Your husb-”

“Is that a line from your therapist?” I retorted.

“Maybe,” she said. Do you want his number?”

I looked back up at her. Chuckled. “Maybe,” I said, crossing my arms. “Now that I’m out of the mommy group. Now that everyone’s gonna hate me.”

She shifted in her seat.

“How about this?” she said. “I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine.”

I found myself leaning back toward her. The heavy look in her blue eyes was filling me with some hope.

“And… I understand that you need friends right now. So, even though I’m gonna have to kick you out of the group…” she continued, “You can still come to our social events.”

“…Do I have to pretend to still be pregnant?”

She paused. “No,” she said. “That would be cruel. And… weird. And people would figure it out. Besides, they’ll understand. I’ll just warn them about your situation, if that’s okay, so that they don’t say anything… uncomfortable. But we’re capable of socializing with people other than mothers. We could even use it.”

I thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d be able to handle it, honestly,” I said.

“Well, you can leave if you really need to. But I really think that if you get to know them, you’ll hate them less.”

“Is that what worked for you?”

She nodded. “We’re having bake sale Sunday afternoon,” she said, then. “I could use some extra hands. Would you be able to help, or are you still out of commission?”

“I should be, but I really need to get out of the house.”

“Great.” She actually smiled. “Most of the women you sent those messages to will be there. I hope that you can make friends.”

That hot, sunny Sunday afternoon, I drove up to Trish’s place early. It was tall, multi-sectioned, with lots of big windows and a fancy BMW parked out front. As soon as I saw it, I sped up and drove down a couple of blocks to park. Then I remembered that I was also driving a BMW. I took several deep breaths.

Once parked (closer, now), I reached, with some pain, for the pan of date tarts in the passenger seat. I strained my way with it to her door. I had been expecting to see a table or two on her lawn for the bake sale, but there were already several rows of tables propped up, ready to be used. This might as well have been a baked goods convention.

The door was partially open, but I knocked anyway, and soon heard the approaching clacking of what sounded like wedges.

“Lillian! You came,” she exclaimed, with her IKEA-white smile. She was wearing a purply sundress and had done herself up all nicely. “You’re the first one here. Come in!”

I handed her the pan and she thanked me and led me to her kitchen. “I’m about to start putting things out,” she told me. I walked behind her through her large, wood-and-stone living room; her little boy and girl were playing quietly in front of the fireplace. Seeing them gave me a flash of cold.

The kitchen was more modest and cozy. The floor was yellow tile. To my left was a wooden table cluttered with baking supplies. Trish went around it to the counter against the wall. A multi-colored curtain hung on the window next to her.

“Oh, good, Rick put in the muffins,” she said, peering into the oven. My body tensed.

I got worse as more mothers arrived. Trish figured that I should be sitting down, because of my healing, so she set me up at one of the tables to sell things. That meant that I was approached by all of the moms wanting to offer something and those wanting to buy.

I tried to make conversation, and get to know them, like Trish had suggested–I really did. Unfortunately, my anger rattled so loud in my brain that I could barely hear anything that they said. When I tried to talk about myself, my jaw remained so tense that it barely even worked. It was pathetic, trying to speak. The woman across from me would always end up walking away in silence. That made me more irritated, though. Trish had told them what I was going through.

So, like the nauseating smell of the melting icing, every new addition to the party further constricted my throat. Every new belly, every new child on that lawn took more air out of me. The sights became too much. The conversations–about the school, about bedtime routines, breastfeeding–circled around me like hyenas. The laughter–fuck, especially when it came from a child–sounded like the ugliest cackling.

I found myself wishing agony on the pregnant women, especially. Stretch marks, saggy breasts, vaginal stretching–things that could lead their husbands to cheat on them. That cheating would mess up their children so bad that they’d become drug addicts and criminals. Yes. That would make me feel better.

The baby in my belly had, at this point, been officially replaced by a solid mass of pure fury. And, unlike my baby, this fury had a heartbeat, which I felt pulsing hard through my body. Unlike my baby, it was twisting, crying, and kicking.

“Are you doing okay?” Trish’s voice came floating above me. Suddenly I was back in the world. Self-conscious again.

“Yeah,” I managed, looking up at her.

“You don’t look it. No offense.”

That’s when I realized how sweaty I was. And also that I was shivering. Like a sick woman.

“This may have been too much too fast. I’m sorry,” she said. She waved me up and then led me back into the house. “Eliza, can you take over for Lillian?” she yelled. Once we were out of the sunlight, and away from all of the bodies and voices, I found myself gasping for breath.

“Do you need to lie down?” she asked me.

“No. Let me do something else,” I pleaded, heaving. I was still holding onto a stupid slice of hope that I could make it back into the group, one day. I needed to prove that I was still mother material–not just another child to be taken care of.

“Okay… well. I just made another cake. Maybe you can help me decorate it.”

I nodded, but cringed a little when we found Kate in the kitchen. I knew her from the group and from Facebook. She was young, Italian looking. Thick eyebrows, small belly.

“Hey! Glad you could make it,” Trish said to her.

Kate nodded. “I was just looking for you,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Right. How dare you have an ultrasound?” Trish giggled. Her smile then left and she got quiet.

Keep cool, Lillian, I thought. Please.

Kate looked at me. “Is everything okay?” she asked. “You two kinda rushed in here.”

“Uh-huh,” said Trish. “Lillian was just overheating.” In a sense, not a lie.

Kate and I smiled at one another, but as her eyes dug into me, my embarrassment deepened. She was definitely wondering if this had something to do with my miscarriage. There was nothing I could do to stop her from wondering it. I looked away and focused hard on the wall above the stove.

Trish walked to the oven, then, to take out the cake. She moved it from its pan onto an embroidered plate and then placed it on the table.

“It’s strawberry shortcake,” she said. “Just needs some whipped cream and strawberries.”

“Do you need any more help with anything?” asked Kate.

“Don’t worry,” said Trish. “Unless you want to help me clean up.”

Kate did. The women cleaned, chatting, as I sat silently decorating and trying to recover. Now that I felt like I had some breath back in me, my inner fire had, thankfully, blown out. The foundation to it was still there–a gaslight that could easily ignite another flame–but, for now, I was sane enough to question all of those horrible thoughts I’d been having. I held back tears.

“Lillian?” Trish ended up saying. Fuck, she’d noticed. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” I tried to say.

“Do you want to call your husband?”

“No,” I demanded. Too quickly. A tear finally escaped. Child. I was a child. “He’s busy,” I said, in a diluted voice.

“Is that why you didn’t invite him today?” she asked, taking the seat next to me.

“Yes,” I managed, standing up. The cake looked good enough now, but I needed something else to give me an excuse not to look her in the face. I grabbed a knife from the other side of the table and started to cut it up.

“Lillian,” Trish protested, placing a hand on my arm. “If something was going on at home, you could tell me. That’s something we do for women here. We help. You know that.”

I stopped moving but the knife shook hard in my hand. Hers felt like soft tissue. I found myself turning towards her.

“Is it okay if Kate stays?” she asked me, slowly.

I nodded, swallowing some tears and snot. I had to accept it. I was still that sad little girl who just needed some friends.

Kate approached me with softened eyes.

“Sit back down, love,” she told me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Tell us what’s wrong.”

I nodded again. Sniffing, shaking, I started to sit, and I reached to put down the knife.

“Have a piece of cake,” Trish told me.

“Yeah!” said Kate. “Or- I brought madeleines.”

[pascalepalaces]

"Brainworm" in Eclectica Magazine 24.4:

Oct/Nov 2020  •   Fiction

by Pascale Potvin

I didn't understand why she'd had to kill him. I'd heard her wails from across the house like an anti-birth. I found her red when only two weeks prior she'd been all blue confetti.

"She doesn't remember any of it," the doctor had explained, once the cries had stopped reverberating in me. "It may have been some sort of trauma response."

I spent the first minutes next to her wondering how I'd explain this to our families. Andrea had been the sole survivor of a knife attack? She'd only been trying to trim his hair?

I had my own trauma response when I heard her again, just weeks later.

"Liam, I'm so sorry," she sobbed, hard into me. "I think I was too scared of hurting him."

"What do you mean?" I told her. "You did. You did hurt him."

"Yeah, but..." And she hugged me tighter—to avoid my eyes, I sensed. "I think I was trying to save him. From me. Later on."

She told me about the fears, the thoughts she'd had ever since the gender reveal. I drank myself to sleep nearly every night after that, and I slept more during the day. I only ate take-out, not able or willing to stomach what I myself had brought into being.

I would sometimes hear Andrea throwing up, upstairs, too—but the whole sound of it was different. I was by that point convinced she was going all the way back through the pregnancy. Somehow rewinding.

Yet when I next followed the noises to our bedroom—my clumsiest climb—I saw a new, brighter shine of remorse in the woman's eyes. In her hand.

"I'm a monster," she said to me. "I deserve this."

"No," I mustered, my brain going heavy. "We'll get you into therapy."

Still, she raised her fist and crossed herself out in one swipe—right then and there, like she'd used red pen.

"We got concerned because she was so precise with the cut, with hitting her carotid artery," I was informed that night by a Doctor Number Two. "Yet she was also just shy of a fatal depth."

There was a ringing in my ears like screaming, again. This time, I felt I was hearing every cry beyond her office walls.

"I don't know what you're saying," I groused.

"We found what is called P. Caedis," the doctor explained, her face furrowing. "In Andrea's brain. It's usually found in rodents. Do you know if you have a rat problem?"

"No," I said, my mind still all bent. "I don't understand."

"Essentially, it's a really nasty parasite," she told me. "And she'll be okay, but I'm very glad we found it when we did. It'll take hard control of its host and is essentially lethal."

The air around me stiffened.

"It's all gradual, but often it gets the host to hurt themselves, to drain blood from their brain and take over further," she explained. "It's hard to know for sure, but we think it may have sensed your late son's brain, before hers, and treated it as the threat."

I was overturned.

"So that thing is why she hasn't been herself, lately?" I asked.

"Absolutely," she said. "But I want you to know, the surgery has a high success rate."

As expected, my wife could only remember shy and dizzy parts of the prior weeks. We celebrated her recovery in the spring, with a boozy lunch by the river and a walk where the plum trees were budding again.

Her eyes were shimmering just like the water, her voice like the birds.

"We'll try again," I finally spoke, finally said it out loud. At that, Andrea smiled faintly at me, and she raised her chest to take in the warm air. She looked over to the kids playing frisbee, in the field, like she had so many times before.

[pascalepalaces]

"Being Morally Superior to You in the Greenhouse" in perhappened magazine, Issue 10 (Daydream):

Nominated for Best Microfiction (2021)

I dropped acid because I saw the picture you posted with your girlfriend, and I really wanted to see her face ugly-twist away.

But you’re not what I meant when I thought I needed euphoria. Your glow somehow makes my eyes feel greener, and my lids crack open like pistachios; the next thing I know I’m watching the milk turn into coffee (I dropped acid at 9 AM), realizing that you had been twisting just like that. I even think that if I were to tell you about the intricacies of my coffee’s moves, you would pay attention in a way that reminds me of the garden where we used to gather (while our socially-close dropping was still a thing). We would settle for greenhouses in the winter, in the same way that you had settled for your girlfriend, and you and I’d do things that would make me a much better person overall.

It was so hot in there but you would speak phrases that, I swear to God, set the place on fire.

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[pascalepalaces]

"The Other People" in Maudlin House:

PASCALE POTVIN x OCTOBER 14, 2020 x FICTION

The screams upstairs were distinctly Ivory. “Ew- Dad! Kill it! Kill it!” she cried.

“Where is it?” August returned, clunky sigh accompanying.

“The bathroom.”

“Okay, get out of there. Don’t let Ninie see.”

He could hear it, too, by the time that he reached the head of the stairs—and halfway through opening the door he hit its shrunken leg, earning an accented groan. Fuck, he thought to himself: it’s probably on the rug.

He found it’d drooled quite a bit as he shuffled into the room, and so he grabbed it by its white roots and began the drag toward the bathtub. Thankfully, this one was smaller than most he’d seen before.

Its groans were almost angry as he pushed it into the cast iron—and he thought about the day that one had appeared already there, it’s head right beside the drain. It was the only time he had laughed, imagining that it might have been trying to make up for the inconvenience. He’d been reminded, almost, of a centipede that’d crawled all the way up and out their plumbing, only to then respect the tub walls… although maybe a worm, from a wormhole, might have been a better analogy.

“Iv, can you throw me the mallet?” he called, his vision honing too.

The disposal crew arrived around forty minutes after his call. Two teenaged-looking boys were carrying the body bag down the stairs, and then out through the front door as he signed the paperwork.

“We offer a clean-up upstairs too, now, for a small charge,” offered the woman with the clipboard once he’d returned it.

“What? Are you kidding me?” August replied. “First you guys cut the injection for budget, and now you’re making more from all the messes?”

She shrugged, surely too used to the question.

“Where exactly are my tax dollars going, again?” he urged. “You’re kinda making me feel like a monster, here, y’know.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, and she stepped back toward the door. Her eyes caught at a small distance behind him just before she turned, however—and August spun with his instinct to the kitchen, where his youngest daughter was still staring.

“Fuck,” he grumbled. He lowered his tone further—his body, too—when he approached. “Ninie, what are you doing down in here? You didn’t finish your colors, did you?”

Little Eponine only stared upward, her eyes in full pout.

“Are you a monster, Dad?” she asked, just as he’d feared.

“No,” he said. “Of course, no.”

“Are they?”

“No, no. They won’t ever hurt you.”

“Then why do you always have to kill them?”

August took her by the hand, led her to the couch.

“Did your teacher ever explain any of this to you?” he asked, placing her on his lap.

She shook her head.

Well, of course she hasn’t, he thought. He might’ve filed a complaint if she had.

“You’re right that killing is usually a really, really bad thing to do,” he said, sinking his hands into Eponine’s hair. “The difference here is that these people—I mean, the sort of people, I guess—they’re not supposed to be here.”

“Why not?”

“We all think there must have been some sort of mistake, like a black hole, or something similar… you know about those from your space kitty show, right?” She nodded in his hands. “One of those is making them come here, sometimes.”

“When they die?”

“Right.” And he caressed her under the ears. “But you have to remember it’s not them, they’re not really people. They’re really bad copies… just like how our scanner turns all of your pretty drawings to just black in white.” Eponine giggled, at that comparison: it cushioned his insides.

August had considered asking Ivory to lay out the concept as she had for one school project—when she had compared all the weak copies to researchers’ past attempts at human cloning. He well remembered the tears she’d shed at her sister’s age, afraid that these ‘people’ had come to ‘heaven’ only to be slaughtered. It’d given her relief to understand that it was more than likely impossible to copy memories, that their bodies were nothing but shells.

“It hurts them to be here,” he further explained to his littlest angel. “They don’t fit. They’d die again super fast, just because their organs are just weak and too small.” The fact varied with how the originals had died, of course: sometimes their copies came paralyzed, and with especially shriveled hearts, or with wounds in their abdomens, and the like. It was always hard to tell without close study, because no matter how they’d passed they came looking more withered than any natural human could.

Eponine stuck her head into her father’s shoulder, at that. “And they’re from that different version of where we live?” she asked.

“Yeah. You got it.”

“So are there other versions, too? Or that one, only?”

“There could be. They could be coming from dozens of them. We just don’t know.”

As much as she could, the girl wrapped her arms around him.

“In all the other worlds out there, are you also my daddy?” she mumbled.

“Yes, of course,” August smiled, and he returned her hug. “No matter how many.”

Yet holding her, he could which question was still lingering in the little soul. Was there any universe, out there, in which her mother—Ivory’s mother—still existed?

The last time that August had ever seen Rosaline… it hadn’t been Rosaline at all. He’d been taking his eldest out the door, out toward the bus stop, and there his not-wife had been: on her side on one of the outer steps, flailing her legs and gulping. Ivory had recognized her, unfortunately, just before August could pull her back inside.

They’d both stayed home, that day: she because of the distress, he because the occurrence would be the only time he’d see Rosaline white-haired and wrinkled. He’d had to keep his eyes on the blurring trees as he’d eventually sedated her.

It wasn’t irregular for one to come across lesser versions of their loved ones, sadly—no matter if they were presently dead or alive. Quickly after the copies had first begun to appear, it was deduced they’d probably kept the coordinates of their originals, even if what was a home in that reality was in this one a construction site (unfortunate events had occurred in cases such as those).

August had been dreading, like most, the day he might come across himself… and he did, just as he was intending to fetch his laptop from his bedroom. The thing was on the carpet next to his closet, a waned but recognizable self: and it looked up at him with half-shut eyes, making noises muffled with drool.

August took a moment, heavy-chested, and then he took the needed steps forward. He pulled his hand back, his fingers mostly sweat, then quivered at the small voice behind the door.

“Daddy? When is dinner gonna be done?” came Ninie’s quiet melody.

“Soon, honey,” he told her, his mouth a dry bed. “Go help your sister downstairs.”

Only after hearing the fading creaks of the stairs did he turn back toward his other-self. He noticed that it, too, had turned its head toward the door; yet it was staring, still, and something was wholly indisputable in its eyes.

August had never known any other love that strong.

“Do you…do you know her?” he mumbled, in that next moment, from a quickly flattening soul.

But the other self only grunted at him. It grunted, over and over… and, at first, it sounded as if something—more emotion—was still incoming.

Yet the rumbling was degrading every time, and it was fading gradually, and it was less and less and less recognizable.

[pascalepalaces]

"Aboveunder" in the winnow magazine, Issue 7:

Nominated for The Pushcart Prize (2021)

Transcript:

I need to kill. I need to kill something.

I’d never been diagnosed with anything. There was no mental illness in my family, as far as I knew, unless hitting one’s wife and children was criteria enough.

 Yet it wasn’t coming from the radio. There were no tapes in the TV. Maybe it’s simply violence that runs in our web of cranial nerves, I was thinking, by the time I hit my fourth day with the voice. Maybe I’m not technically hearing anything. 

Perhaps the desire was all my own, rising to my surface like seaweed. 

“Don’t come,” I told Stephen. “I’ll stay here until it stops. Then, maybe I’ll come back, and then maybe we can go to Sea World or something.” 

“My love, what the hell are you talking about? She’s been looking forward to this all summer.” The phone cut out for a few moments; it tended to do so, so far into this wilderness. “What am l supposed to tell her, that her mother is too scared she’ll hurt her this specific year?” 

I need to kill. I need to kill something.

Observant, yet he somehow hadn’t asked what would happen if the thoughts didn’t stop. 

“Trust me, I hate being here alone,” I told him, the air around me crystallizing into harder salt. “The water is too cold to swim. The waves sound like they’re hitting the windows.” 

This duvet was clawing at my legs. The ugly wallpaper was yellowing.

“Would it help if I had a sitter stay with her? If it was just me that came to see you?” His question almost made me cry, right then, under the spotlight of that ceiling’s house of flies. “I believe you’ll be okay, ma beautée Martine. We will figure this out toge-” 

He cut off, then, of course. Because the crappy phone. Crappy dial-up. Crappy nail polish chipping off onto white sheets.

Have to kill. Have to kill something.

For the first time while the sky was dark, I smiled as I heard his motor through the net of the back window, the night following: my knight under a shining moon. And his wheels were on the rocky pathway, a dragging rhythm that seemed to turn into something else. 

It was turning into something warm, and steady, and wooden, just like Stephen’s love. Just like his words. 

Or—holy shit, no—wait, what the fuck, no, it was accompanied by his words.

813-2567. 813-2567. The—yes, the cabin number 63. I think that’s her car. Fuck, uh—uh, no. 813-2567. Maybe it’s not too much of a risk to write it down. No. Maybe I’ll call tonight so she gets the number here.

I was at the back deck before he was the door. The wind was swimming in the waves of my ears, the tears everboiling my throat.But the voice—I need to kill, I need to kill something—that was loud, like seaweed.

[pascalepalaces]

"I Think There Might Be Something Between Us" in Superfroot Magazine, Issue 1 (Loverboy):

Transcript:

I think there might be something between us. I can't stop staring at it. It grows new arms each morning, which nowadays look more so like fingered tree branches.

I usually see it among the storm of lockers before I sense your presence—and it's always right there, flying at our perfect middle point. Sometimes, I'll catch you looking in my direction—your mind clearly on the ceiling, a light of its own—and it makes me believe that you see it as I do.

Often, I wish you and I could be the same invisible.

I remember our summer church camp, my second rhythm waiting for my roommate's every snore, keeping watch of the hallway as my hand shivered and shivered between my legs. You can't touch a repressed motherfucker on the neck like that, I had been thinking, I remember—and I'd stared at our shared shame while I'd pictured, still and unstill, longer and harder, that hot touch.

The being was looking at me, too, from its spot in the hall (you know, with all of its hovering eyes), and somehow, that didn't feel weird. I think it's been a privilege to see it, at any point, and especially that night. I haven't read all the after-school Bible that I've claimed, I know, but I do know the forms of the Old Testament angels, and I can tell we have our own.

More than anything, I remember my gasp to the ceiling the moment that it started down the hallway. I still see the way that it moved without pause, and in my direction.

You and I were somehow never caught, in the many, many moments following; still, I do think that we gave a hell of a performance between the wings.

[pascalepalaces]

"Mertyr" in Pyre Magazine:

Every time that the ocean ejects from my mouth, you don’t know what to do except to call my brother. He takes his own look, gives the medical opinion that I am mother earth’s martyr and that I should go on national television to say we’ll all die within a half century. Every time, I get stage fright—or seasickness, maybe—and via our toilet I throw the salt seawater back into itself. 

There is an investigation into the cloning and the incest.

[pascalepalaces]

"Ice P(r)ick" in Your Dream Journal, Evil Exes Issue:

Posted on February 3, 2021 in Fiction

Apparently, no doctor has found the cause for what we call Ice Pick Headaches: those stabbing, shattering pains that enter the minds of their sufferers like me, then disappear in a hotter flash. They’re not linked to any sort of brain damage, it seems, yet some say they might indicate a flaw in certain pain receptors (given that there is no correlation with any environmental factors).

Maybe that kind of flaw would explain, too, why I still haven’t run from you.

At the bar with my friends, I sometimes admit that when I’m up to my lips with ice, you put me on my knees and you strike—you work away until there’s nothing left but water in my mouth. 

They always urge me to get rid of you, of course (skip the town, if you really need to) but I think that I have too much love for our little Artic, Indiana.

Besides, why should I be the one to leave?

On the days that I still try to reach your good heart, I think of the summer that you and I went to the lavender field close to the library: my favorite spot where I used to sit and read or sleep. You’d laid down with me in that grass just like one would an epic novel, and you’d flipped through my pages with all the attention of a high scholar.

“Oh, so sweet of him,” my mother said to me, later that afternoon, seeing in my hands the flowers that I’d ripped from the ground.

But because it is winter now, I only want to rip my brain from its own stem. I want to wring out my grey matter until I can find that goddamn ice pick, catch it in the act and remove it from the world for good. These last few months, it’s come back to me again and again (usually as I’ve been walking the road to see you), just like the butterflies that used to meet my stomach.

If this disorder is not linked to my environment, as so claims the great Internet, then why does it so happen in such correlations, I wonder? Could it mean that you yourself are not really my environment? Perhaps you are, truly, the ice pick?

Either way, I think that something was set off in me, that day I arrived intending to watch those Marvel movies with you in your room. I think it was maybe that it was ten below zero, that day, or the fact that you were using your scraper-brush on your windshield as I sort-of approached, or maybe because you looked up at me as you continued to do it, and in any case the hearty pain came again and I grasped my head with a new yell.

Somebody said icicles would, hypothetically, make the perfect murder weapon; I think the logic was that icicles are sharp, and they melt, which does make sense. At the time, I must have misheard.

Also published in Hecate Magazine (2021)

[pascalepalaces]

"Doors" in Underwood Magazine:

“Oh, my god,” says Kumar. I turn my head, and he puts his phone screen to my face. It’s a video of a corgi doing a mini obstacle course.

“Oh, my god,” I agree, gasping and laughing. We smile together for a few seconds as the video ends, and then we go back to our phones.

We’ve been lying on his bed, like this, for about an hour now. A 2019, Gen Z stereotype, yes, but Kumar understands that I don’t always have the energy for more. He’s the only friend who’s stuck with me through all of high school, and because of that I’ve called him whenever I’ve done something self-destructive–even the time I crashed my car and lost my license. Aside from my therapist, he’s been my sturdiest emotional support.

It makes me want to fuck him so badly.

I’ve always been into the shy, nice guy type; Kumar is unfortunately so nice, though, that he’s never once hit on me. He’s never even lightly rubbed at the idea of hooking up–not even while drunk. Still, he’s a straight, teenage boy, and so while I’ve never had much self-esteem, I know that I could probably make something happen. The real problem is that deep down, I know I don’t truly want him; I just want to ruin the only friendship I have left.

I’m a self-destructive mess.

There’s also the fact, though, that he and I are leaving for separate cities in a few weeks… and so things might not ever be the same between us, anyway. Maybe if I initiate something, now, he might even come home for Thanksgiving.

No, Adrianna, I think. Control yourself. These thoughts are just a flashing sign toward another damaging path, but you’ve been on such a good one lately. Don’t let yourself swerve.

“It’s after three,” Kumar notices, interrupting my inner slut shaming.

I look at the time on my phone. He’s right.

“Should I ask if we can do it another day?” I grumble. Yesterday, I’d piled together what I want to store at home while I’m gone, and today, my mom and I are bringing that stuff up to the attic. We’re also shopping for new school supplies for me, even though it’s still early to be doing so. I guess coddling’s what you get when you’re an only child (with a tendency to do things like crash cars).

Kumar shrugs, sitting up. “I need to take my sister to the store soon,” he tells me.

I try to gather my energy. I’m jealous because his sister is awesome (seriously: the coddling’s getting to me). “Okay,” I say. I switch my phone to my left hand and then reach out for his arm, using it to pull myself up. He laughs. While he doesn’t have that much muscle, he has just enough that I appreciate the moment that I’m touching him. I also like his dark arm hair and the tattoo on his tricep: a downturned triangle with small lines and hexagons passing through it. I was there with him, when we were sixteen and he saw it in the parlour window; he thought it looked cool, and he just got it on the spot. Ever since then, the shapes on his left arm have been like a flower bush to me, only revealing themselves in the spring and summer–as if they know that they look good.

I realize, then, that that’s going to be Kumar, in general, now that we’re going to separate colleges. I’ll be at Hagerstown Community; he’ll be chasing opportunity right out of Maryland, altogether. The thought of that is really weird to me. While we only really became friends through ninth grade debate club, we’ve always gone to school together. The world’s already started to feel unstable.

As I leave his room, I shout goodbye to his parents and sister (who still think that I’m dating him), and I let myself out. The heat closes in on me as soon as I exit, and the sidewalk blinds me for a second. It smells like burnt tire out here.

The heat over-relaxes my muscles as I walk, and gravity feels even stronger than usual. Kumar and I both live in the suburbs, and my place is only about a ten-minute walk away, usually–fifteen when it’s hot. When I finally open my front door, the air conditioning greets me like a Harlequin lover.

I hear stomping. I go up the stairs and my mom is leaving my room, a cardboard box between her hands. Her frizzy brown hair is in a disorganised bun.

“Hi. I just started,” she tells me. “Did you add to the list?”

I pull the folded paper out of the back of my shorts. Opening it up, I chuckle again at what she’d written. Adrianna College Needs, it says, in smothered ink. The first item: a daily planner. The second: pepper spray. She wants to get me the first thing because I have bad depression, and the second ‘cause I’m a girl. Y’know, equally crippling flaws.

Once Mom is finished looking over my additions to the list, she places it on my desk and grabs the box again. I go into my room, take another, and follow her up the creaky stairs to the attic. It’s dark up here, but even more humid. The dust annoys my nose. There’s furniture, coat hangers, and a couple of old bikes leaning against the bare-wooden walls; in the right corner, a pile of brown boxes has already germinated.

Mom goes to the boxes. She places the newest one down and then picks up another.

“What are you doing?” I ask, following the path that she’s cleared through the dust.

She wipes some sweat off of her forehead with her tiny wrist. “This is a total mess,” she says. “I thought I’d also organize it all so we can actually find stuff later.”

“Oh,” I say, putting my own box down in front of the pile.

“So, I’m gonna bring some of these down to the storage room. But I’ll take care of that; it’s really dirty in there. You just bring everything up from your room.”

I nod. As Mom heads back down the stairs, I decide to look around a little. I never go into the storage room, or up here, and I wonder how old everything is. Some of the boxes at the top of the pile have a lid, and some don’t–like memories shut away and memories not. I read some of the labels. Thesis books. Must be some of Mom’s old stuff. Wedding gifts. I laugh when I see that one. Adrianna Kindergarten. I was five years old just about… seventeen years after my parents’ wedding. Mom was right; there is really no order here.

I use my tiptoes to peek inside of the kindergarten box–because I’m self-absorbed, I guess (Gen Z, remember?). I see a few small, ribbon hair bows: pink, white, and yellow. I smile at how cute they are, and because I faintly remember them. Underneath is a stack of papers, with a little drawing of red flowers at the top. I think I remember that, too–making it in class. My smile grows.

I hear Mom re-emerging up the stairs behind me. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Just a second,” I say. I plop back down as she returns to her side of the pile. Something else has my attention. The box to the right of Adrianna Kindergarten–marked 3rd Grade–has a lid, but it’s lopsided. It’s like something inside is too big for the box. I lift up the lid, and what I see poking out is even stranger. A golden soccer ball. I squint.

“What is this?” I call to Mom.

“Huh?” she responds. I hear her approach.

“This trophy,” I say. “I never played soccer.”

“Yeah, when you were little,” she says. “You don’t remember?” She grabs the box from in front of me and goes back to the stairs.

I feel a boom in my stomach as my mood falls on its ass. “Right,” I lie. “I remember now.”

And once I’m back down in my room, I text Kumar that it happened again. On Saturday, we lie back down on his bed.

“Did you ask her more about it?” he suggests, once I finish telling him the details. We’re both on our backs, staring at the ceiling. I wonder if the white bumps are moving and distorting for him, too.

“I didn’t want her to think that my brain’s not all there,” I tell him.

“But it’s not,” he says. He reaches over and puts his palm on my face.

“Stop,” I laugh, and he pulls away. He sits up, grinning down at me. He’s got a wide, dimply grin that complements his triangular jaw. “You know what I mean,” I say, and the moment starts to pull itself back together.

“Yeah,” he mumbles.

“Every time I come home from hanging out with you, or come down for dinner,” I continue, “I’m already scared she’s gonna say, like, I’ve changed my mind, you’re not okay enough to go.” My joints take on familiar stiffness as I say it out loud.

“I get it,” he says. He looks down at his bed. I stare as he rubs at the side of his neck. “I was just thinking, maybe if you asked for more details, you could remember something.”

“Except it said third grade,” I tell him. “It’s not like I was too young to remember being on a freaking soccer team. And long enough to get a trophy. I should remember that.” I realize how loud I’ve gotten. I’m sounding desperate, pathetic, like I think that yelling I should remember will magically make it happen.

“Everyone forgets childhood memories,” he says.

“Not this many important things,” I say. “There’s been so many.” Despite trying to calm, I’m still weirdly loud.

Then he looks back at me, sympathy exploding in his eyes. And the moment that we make eye contact, I finally go quiet. I gasp, and it’s tiny in my mouth, but it rumbles down through my insides.

Brown eyes are God tier. Especially his.

But I sit up, and then I look away from him. I draw my eyes over his Gorillaz poster–the cartoony surrealism of it–as I force myself to re-rail my train of thought. “Like, even if you think the soccer thing’s debatable,” I finally say, squeezing at my calves, “What about that hole I made in the wall? Like, that… was so major, and still…”

“Your mom said that just was a dumb accident, though, right?”

I squeeze harder at myself. “Yeah,” I say. But it’s a lie, one of the only lies I’ve ever told him.

Because of the subject matter, I’m still trying my best to look like I’m holding myself together: to look good, or at least presentable, to him. My core’s completely tied up and tight, though; I’m just like a pretty little bow. Meanwhile, I can feel the truth trying to crawl up my throat, and it’s threatening to make me throw up all over the bed.

I sense him take a big breath, lean back on his hands. “You told Lisa about all this, right?” he asks, referring to my therapist, and I nod. “What’d she say?”

“That my parents should understand that depression can sometimes cause memory loss,” I tell him, almost reciting. “And that that doesn’t make me less strong or capable of going to college.”

“There you go,” he says.

“But what if they find out that it could also be my meds? If they stop paying for those, I’m fucked.” I’m already feeling rickety about having to find a new therapist; I’ve had Lisa since I was fourteen. A place called Hagerstown doesn’t sound like the epitome of mental health, either (no offense, Hagerstown).

“So, what are you gonna do?” Kumar asks.

I put my hands in my lap. “I was thinking of asking for her help. To help me remember,” I tell him.

“What? Like hypnosis or something?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“That stuff doesn’t work, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I read about it.”

“What?” I repeat, shaking my head. I pick up my phone and type memory recovery hypnosis into Google.

He’s right. According to the first source, that kind of treatment is usually a scam, and no good psychologist will do it. The ones who do sometimes wrongly convince their patients that they were sexually abused. Uh, no thank you.

I can feel Kumar leaning towards me. I look back up at him and sigh. “So? Believe me now?” he asks, with a proud smile.

“No,” I pout, and I go back to my phone. I go back to the search results and keep scrolling, hoping for an opposing source. Eventually, a video icon catches my attention. It’s an old, wide-eyed, balding man standing just a little too close to the camera. RECOVER YOUR MEMORY WITH CERTIFIED HYNOTHERAPIST HERMAN PAUL, is the title.

“What is this?” Kumar chuckles, leaning in even closer to me.

It takes me a second longer than before to press the link.

“Do you feel like something’s been missing from your life?” the man asks, once the video starts. “Like there’s something you’ve forgotten, and you won’t be happy or successful until you get it back?” The overall quality is poor, and an ugly rainbow effect floats behind him. This must be a commercial from the nineties or something. So, yeah, this man’s methods are probably out-dated; I wasn’t even alive in the nineties. I wonder if he’s dead. “Good news: the answers are all still inside of your brain,” he continues. He still hasn’t blinked. “They’re just hidden behind a door, and you need a licensed hypnotherapist to help you unlock it.”

“Seems legit,” Kumar mumbles.

“Don’t wait another minute,” Herman practically yells. “Call now and I’ll help you unlock your memory and open the door!” A phone number starts to flash on the screen.

“Another minute?” Kumar mocks. “Holy shit, Addie, hurry!”

We lose ourselves to laughter. He puts a hand on my shoulder, like he’s trying to hold onto his sanity. I start to feel like I’m losing mine, as well, but for slightly different reasons.

“Fine. You win,” I say, as we finally start to sizzle down.

“Thank you,” he smiles.

And when he lets go of me, it kind of feels like having a knife pulled out of my body. The feeling his touch gave me was very bad for me, yes, but losing it feels worse–and now I’m bleeding all over his duvet. Somehow, that’s not much better than throwing up.

I lie back down, placing my hands on my stomach and staring at the ceiling again (because what else can I do, at this point?)

“I mean… does it really matter that much, really?” Kumar mutters. I can tell by his voice that he’s treading water, trying to not get too deep. “If you don’t remember?”

At that, my mouth folds in a little. I pause.

 “It’s not, like, the actual memories that I care about,” I admit, the words shaking in my throat. “More like… the feeling that my brain is literally falling apart.”

“Right.”

“It’s like I have no control,” I tell him. “My memories are literally part of who I am. And what if there’s way more that I already lost but I don’t know about? What if I lose more?” I realize that my voice sounds punctured, and it’s filling with dread. So, I don’t really care how deep we get; I already feel like I’m drowning.

“You won’t,” Kumar says.

“I might.”

“You can still remember without any hypnosis.”

“I don’t know,” I say. I clench my teeth.

“Really. You can still try and trigger stuff. I read about it. Seeing or hearing things related to the memory can help.” I feel him shift, stare down at me.

“But the trophy didn’t work,” I argue.

“It’s gradual,” he tells me, his voice softening, dropping down onto me like a blanket. He knows how to do that. “And if you try to remember some things, it can train your brain to remember other stuff. Like, trying to remember the soccer thing could help you remember the hole in the wall thing, or reading those books on your shelf.”

“What?” I turn my head to face him.

“And that’s also a really gradual process but at least it’s legit, unlike-”

“Why did you read all this?” I ask, squinting up at him. His face withdraws a bit, and then I know the answer. “Because of me,” I say.

“Well, yeah,” he mumbles. It occurs to me that Kumar could have a tiny crush on me. Or maybe he’s just that great of a person. Either way, he’d be an amazing boyfriend–but since my idiot brain is trying to destroy our relationship, of course I only want to fuck him.

“I can’t ask my parents about anything,” I tell him. I look up back to the ceiling, and it’s like my words fall back down on me and hit my face. I really hate that I can’t talk to them about this. “They can’t know.”

“Who needs them when you have me?” Kumar responds. I can hear him smiling a bit; he’s using his comfort-Addie voice.

It works. And it also turns me on.

I retreat from the feeling. I’m so freaking backwards. It’s really like I’m some insatiable slut, which doesn’t make sense with the rest of my life. They say that it’s the girls with no self-esteem who go after sex, but I’ve never had either. Something about Kumar just gets to me, just pushes my ‘button’, and it’s not normal.

“Wanna go to the soccer field?” he asks, forcing me to regain focus.

I haven’t been to my elementary school, Phillip Ridge, since the night in tenth grade when my group of friends had loitered in the playground. Kumar had left a cigarette butt on the field, and we’d laughed, saying that the kids would be scandalized the next day. I hadn’t remembered anything about soccer, then–but I also hadn’t known that there was anything to remember. I’m hoping that Kumar is right and if I try to remember stuff, now, it’ll help open up my memory to things (help to open the door, if you will).

Kumar and I decide to check the school out, again, since the breeze today makes it bearable outside. He drives us there, and then we walk through the soccer posts in the field, behind the school. Being summertime, the field’s as desolate as my memories of it. I definitely recognize this area–the chipped white paint on the goalposts, the saggy nets, the fake but convincing grass–but I don’t remember ever actually playing out here. That’s except for one time, for gym class: I remember Mr. Gibson explaining that we were being tested. Dylan got pissed at me for not passing the ball. There end my memories of soccer. 

“Do you remember me being on the team?” I ask Kumar.

“Sorry. I didn’t pay any attention to that. Or you, back then,” he says. I look at him, and he has a teasing glint in his eye. “Maybe…” He pauses. “Maybe we could try to find someone who was on the team with you, and see if they’d help.”

“Even if that worked,” I say, “I’d rather try other memories first before I tell anyone else I’m a lunatic.”

He laughs.

We reach the playground beside the field and I slump onto one of the swings. As expected, it burns at my unprotected thighs.

Kumar sits on the swing next to me.

“I have memories here,” I tell him. Images of playing jump rope with my girlfriends, of pretending that the slide was a teleporter, of twisting my ankle in a bucket of chalk are all funnelling into my mind. Meanwhile, I’m still staring at the field, trying to focus on it, instead–but it’s rejecting me.

“Uh,” Kumar says. I hear his sneakers twist on the concrete. “Do you remember what the jerseys looked like?”

I bite my lip, thinking. To my surprise, I see a blurry image of a neon jersey on a clothing line. Could this be a flashback?

“Yellow?” I ask.

“Oh,” he says. “I don’t actually know.”

“You’re useful,” I tease, looking over at him. His dark hair is flipping a little in the breeze. I force myself to look away again and harder at the memory.

“Wouldn’t they probably have been the school colors, though?” he mumbles.

I nod. And I realize that the jersey I’m seeing is actually way too big for a nine-year old.

Except… I don’t remember that either of my parents were ever into sports …

I turn my hands hard around the swing chains as my stomach turns. I really am getting worse.

“Hey. You’re trying, and that’s probably still gonna help,” Kumar says, and I realize he’s behind me, now. “For the long term.” I feel his hands on my shoulders, and they give me a different kind of flash–in my stomach and in my loins.

We spend the next half hour or so messing around on the swings and on the playground. We laugh and take pictures. More so than before, I forget about the soccer. From the moment that Kumar pushes me on that swing until the moment I’m asleep, he’s the only thing left on my mind.

As good as it feels, though, I know that my brain is only trying to trick me. These thoughts are no different to the ones that tell me to go outside without sunscreen or to drink with my meds. If I want to keep getting better, I have to resist them.

Thankfully, when I get up the next morning I’m only thinking about breakfast. I find my dad at the table, on his tablet, once I reach the kitchen.

“Hey, bug,” he says.

“Hey,” I say, opening the fridge. “Where’s Mom?”

“At the flea market. Apparently they’re having special deals today.”

I stop in place. Mom doesn’t work anymore, and she’s almost always here. Is this a sign, then? Is it my chance? Dad worries a lot less about me, and so without Mom here, I might be able to sneak a few questions about the past. After yesterday’s failure, I especially need to know that I can remember.

I’m not going to ask about the soccer, though; I have some more biting questions.

“You gonna… get something?” Dad asks, behind me. I realize that my face is cold. I grab the bread and throw the fridge door closed, then take out a piece and drop it into the toaster. I decide to ask everything while I’m eating, just to seem as casual as possible.

“Remember when I made that hole in the wall?” I ask, finally, with all of the breath that I can gather.

It’s been bothering me for two years. The day that I found evidence of the hole was the day I truly realized I had a hole in my brain. Looking for my phone, I’d moved the living room couch and found a square of a different white than the rest of the wall; Mom had explained that I’d gotten frustrated at a game of chess, once, and hurled the wooden board across the room. I went limp when she said it. She seemed confused that I didn’t remember, and so I didn’t ask any more questions.

While Kumar did say it can take time for triggers to bring memories back, it’s been long enough, since that day; I need more information.

“What about it?” Dad replies, after a pause.

I swallow, still thinking up my strategy. I turn to face him. “Did you see it happen?” I ask.

“Uh… yeah,” he says, winding his squarish jaw. He places his tablet on the table. “You had… thrown the board, and…”

“How old was I?” I ask. That fact, I need to know the most, because I’ve had a worry boiling at the back of my brain–something too upsetting to admit, even to Kumar. And now, the questions pop and fizzle extra hard in my mind: had I just been a young child throwing a dumb fit? Or had I been older than that? If I’d been in my teens, that would make the throw more concerning; I could, without realizing it, have become more than self-destructive.

“Uh…” Dad repeats. He’s raking his nails across his cheek, his graying beard. “Sorry. I’m just trying to remember.”

Me too, I think, with an internal sigh. It sort of feels like he doesn’t want me to remember, which makes more suspicious that I’d been on the older side.

I do have a different theory, though, about what’s really packed into his pauses.

Something I do remember well is that teachers (and adults, in general) have always given me uncomfortable, pitiful looks. For the longest time, I didn’t know why; they did it even before my parents figured out that I had mental health problems. Nowadays, I truly believe that they could all sense my issues before those issues ever sprouted. Somehow, they could already see that I was hopeless. And I think that that’s what’s going on here, too. Whether my questions are inconspicuous or not, Dad can still sense that they’re linked to my depression. So, I need to stop, or he’ll figure out what I’m trying to do.

Before I can decide on my next move, though, my toast pops. My heart flinches, and I groan.

But it’s as I go to get a plate that I hear another sound. A crash. The crash into the wall. It’s a stiff, crackling sound.

It’s barely distinguishable, too. I try to play it again and again, in my head, trying to hold onto it, trying to make it louder. Still, it sounds so distant, like a far away memory… like a memory pushed away. And no matter how hard I concentrate, it doesn’t change. It’s not enough.

Frustration starts to take me over–not because I’m remembering my anger in the moment, but precisely because I’m not.

“You must have been… about fourteen,” Dad finally says, and I feel frothing in my stomach. Not only does that age make the act very questionable, it also means that I definitely should remember it.

At this point, I can sense that every new step toward my lost memories will need a ton of work; it’s like my inner self has a ball and chain. But I’m already so, so exhausted, and I’m starting to think that I might need to be locked up, for real. The fact that I’d thrown the board hard enough to make a hole… what if I’d hurt someone? What if I’ve hurt other people, too? Maybe I have; maybe that’s why most of my friends have abandoned me, at this point. In the most literal way possible, I have no idea what I’m capable of.

“What’s made you think of this?” Dad asks as I sit down and start dragging peanut butter across my toast.

I clench my teeth and try to pull an excuse out of the ground. “’Tryna prove to Kumar that he was a worse kid,” I say, with a forced laugh. The lie is, of course, dirt–but Dad nods. I take the excuse to grab my phone, stare downward. Then I create a broody fog around myself, trying to figure out what to do. It takes me a few seconds to notice Kumar has actually texted me.

Fam just left for the market. Wanna play Mario Kart on the big TV?

His words climb from the phone up to my fingertips, making them numb. When Kumar says let’s play Mario Kart, he actually intends to play Mario Kart with me–and if I weren’t sexually frustrated, it’s something that I would love about him. By the time that I swallow down my last piece of toast, however, I’ve decided that I want something different, today.

I go back to my room to get dressed. I douse myself in setting spray, so that my makeup won’t melt in the heat outside (or the heat inside…). Then, I powerwalk to Kumar’s house. My heart is going so hard, at this point, it might pre-emptively burst the buttons in my shirt.

I’d tried to retreat from this outcome. I really had. But, like a tsunami, that’s only made me plunge back onto it, even harder. If I’m going to be out of control, then I might as well own it. I’m done with feeling like I’m drowning; I want to be my own flood.

“Hey,” Kumar says, after opening the door for me. He steps aside, and I enter. “Feeling better?”

“Not really,” I admit, kicking my sandals off and against his wall. “I tried talking to my dad,” I say.

“About what?”

“The wall thing. Didn’t work.”

“Oh,” Kumar says. He has no idea how much his eyes are pulling me into him.

“So, I give up,” I say. I place my arms by my sides and keep them there, firm. “This is too frustrating.”

“But it could still be doing something,” he tries, pinching his face in a little. “And you just-”

“Except I realized that I shouldn’t care,” I say. My knees feel tight, now. My arms are tingling.

“Why not?”

“Because if I don’t have my old memories, I shouldn’t be trying to get them back. I should be making new ones,” I say. I step in an inch closer to him. “Like, I didn’t remember anything yesterday, but I came out with even better memories. With you. I want more of that.” My lips start to feel heavy with the growing weight of my words.

“Well, we’ll keep hanging out this summer,” he says. His smile sneaks up like it’s still unsure of what’s happening.

“Yeah,” I say. My breaths rise and drop like tidal waves. “But if I want true control of my memories, then I need to make the ones I specifically want.”

He’s not dumb. At this point, he understands. He shifts backwards, a little, under the crash of my words.

“You mean…” his voice starts to dwindle.

“Yes.” I say it, and my lips, my body feel lighter again. I’ve done it. I’ve stood in front of him and shed the weight I’ve been carrying for months.

Now, there’s nothing left between us but clothes.

Still, he hesitates. “Addie,” he says, looking my face up and down.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He looks away, and his eyes float all over the wall. “I just… never thought that this would happen.”

“But have you thought about it?”

He pauses, again. Then, a pulse travels down my body as he nods.

In that moment, though, I do consider turning back. If he’s thought about it, and I’ve thought about it, then it’s practically a shared memory. That’s more than I can say for some of my real past. It’s a shared memory, which means that it’s basically already happened.

Tell that to your vagina, is my next thought.

I take another step forward. I can feel Kumar’s breath on my face, now. It’s warm, cushiony. There’s an underlayer of spice to it, too–but in the sense that cinnamon’s a spice. It’s so him.

“I get it,” I tell him. “Why would you ever think it would happen? All I’ve been is depressing. Our relationship has always just been you comforting me,” I say. I then take his hand, and I place it on the inside of my thigh. “That’s why I have to repay you.” The words are like a sacrilege to say, and it’s exhilarating.

Kumar, on his end, still looks scandalized. His face is spread out, wide, like a person holding out their hands to show their innocence. Here’s the thing about his actual hand, though: it hasn’t moved. I let go of it, and, still, he keeps it on my thigh.

Sure enough, his face starts to melt, to relax under my heat. God, I just want to eat those chocolate brown eyes of his. But they start to eat me up, first. When he finally does move his hand, it’s in a grabbing motion.

He puts his other hand on my cheek, and we start to kiss. It’s a little sloppy, but I’ve wanted him for so long that I actually love the nastiness of it. I wouldn’t have even minded if he still smoked.

He starts to rub at me through my shorts, and I feel my heat there rising. He pulls his mouth away and puts it at my ear.

“Look at you,” he mumbles. “I texted you and you were here, like, right away. And you put my hand on your thigh.” His comfort-Addie voice may have turned me on, but his degrade-Addie voice makes me take off. “What kind of eager little…”

“I know,” I rasp, near silent.

He lets me go. I feel like I’ve been dropped, even though I was standing.

“I’m gonna text my family, make sure they’re gone for a while,” he says. “Go to my room and wait for me.” His words are soaked with lust–almost as much as I am. He turns and goes into the living room, and I hurry down the hall.

Once in his room, I carefully place myself on his bed instead of plopping down, like I usually do. I can’t believe this moment is real, and it’s like I have to be careful with it, or I’ll shatter it. I lie on my back, propping myself up by my elbows on the duvet. I push out my chest. I wait.

I’ve seen this room so many times, from this same vantage point, but my senses are heightened, now, and I see the details again. There’s a band of light shining on the off-white wall, from the window behind me; Kumar told me he installed his blinds a little too low and never bothered to fix them. His small desk, nailed to the wall, is busy with papers. There’s also a tub of protein powder, a box of cat food, his still-unsolved Rubik’s cube. Above it, his posters: Gorillaz, Artic Monkeys, The Beatles.

Then I hear him in the hallway, and my eyes go back to the door. My heart starts, again, to rabidly fuck my chest. It’s a bit intense, actually. It feels like it’s going to explode. I know that I’ve been dying for this, but I didn’t expect to have a real heart attack over it. I realize, too, how fast I’m breathing, but that all the breaths are somehow failing to bring me any air.

When he enters, with intent in his eyes, I feel the bed tip sideways. I clutch the sheets, trying to stay on. I’m seasick. My mind goes black.

“Wait. Are you okay?” I hear, faintly, but I can’t respond.

My mind isn’t black in the passing-out sense. And, for once, it’s not in the empty sense, either. I’ve been trying so hard, lately, to remember, and now, I do. Now, all I see is the memory. I was in my bed and I was in the dark.

“Oh, my god. What’s wrong?” Kumar asks. “Was I too much? Fuck, I’m sorry. I just thought-”

“No,” I groan, once I get some power back. It comes from my core. “It’s okay.” I’m shaking like a terrified cat.

“No. You’re freaking me out,” he says. I feel him sit next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I start feeling a little more grounded, more pulled together. My brain materializes. Reality starts to fill me up, and my eyes start to get hot. “What happened?” he begs.

But I can’t think about what happened. The memory is too awful. It’s so bright in its horror that I can’t look at it directly. Looking at it would sting.

Living it made me go blind.

“Did you… remember something?” Kumar asks. I realize that I’m crying. I force my head up and down and try to force some air in through my swamped nose. It rattles my lungs, makes my next breaths frantic and unstable. “I’m sorry,” he whimpers, coming in closer to me. “Fuck. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

I turn and hug him, trying to tell him that it’s not.

I realize how blind I’ve been to this memory, until now. And, having been used to that blindness, my small peek at it was so painful that it made my eyes, my mind flood. I can’t look back at it. With another creaky breath, I make the decision that I just can’t.

Instead, I decide to look at the doors. I try to understand the event by looking at the moments in which it entered and exited my life. I remember being happy to see Connor opening my bedroom door, that night. I remember being sad to see him being taken out of our front door, the night after that.

“You know that I admire you a lot,” Kumar says. I stick my face into his chest, getting his shirt wet. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I struggle. My words fight my nausea, also creeping up into my mouth. “It could make me remember.”

I remember more than enough, already. I want to shred this new information back out of my mind, to bring it back to its split, unintelligible state. But what’s done can’t be undone; it won’t go away, no matter how much I beg.

That’s when another question starts to pull at me. What happened on the second night, then? What made Connor get caught? I take just one more peek at my bedroom door, and then it comes back to me. The door. I’d heard the creak, across the hall, and I’d been tough.

“Come on. Open the door,” Connor had urged me. “It’s okay, Addie. Open the door for me.”

“No,” I’d whispered back, into the darkness. “No.” No more.

I’m keeping it locked.

I beg my brain enough, please, as I run back to the present. I lie with Kumar, trying to stop thinking. While I still don’t see the memory, though, I still can’t ignore the angry banging on the other side.

And I realize that for all of these years, this event had been hidden deep in my brain, like food forgotten at the back of a fridge. It had been rotting my mind, slowly, from the inside, without my knowledge. It had taken that smart little girl and made her hate herself. It had made her want to sleep with the boy who’d acted like a brother to her.

A stifling horror latches onto me, in that next moment, because I also realize that I haven’t been pushing Kumar away, at all. I’ve been trying to make him stay.

I let out another muffled cry, and he pets my hair. I try, again, to focus just on him: on his hands in my hair, on the movement of his breathing. After a little while, I start to feel more evened out. I think of the positive; at least I think I know, now, what’s been so wrong with my memory. Repressing this trauma has probably corrupted my ability to remember things, in general. That’s probably what’s been going on with me.

Another horrible thought slices through me, though, a moment later. I let go of Kumar and I sit. I feel groggy.

“Addie?” he says. He puts his hand on my back.

“I have to go,” I pant. I realize that my whole body is sweaty.

“Let me drive you.”

I agree, and we leave right away. When we get to the front of my house, I see my mom approaching from down the sidewalk. I groan. It’s deep and internal.

“I’ll text you, ‘kay?” I tell Kumar.

“Okay,” he says, putting a hand on mine. “I love you.”

“I love you,” I tell him. I do love him–a lot. I’ve been unsure of a lot of things, lately, but not that.

As I step onto the sidewalk, though, I become only focused on my task. I march to my front door like the killer in a horror movie.

“Addie?” my mother calls, from my left. “Are you okay?”

I ignore her. Like the memory, I can’t possibly look at her right now. I climb the porch stairs. Once I’m through the front door, I head to the main stairway.

“Hello? Which one of you is it?” my father calls, from the living room. “Hi?” But I leave his voice behind, too. My chest is burning with dread and lack of air, but I climb as fast as I can. I reach the hallway and go for the storage room across from my bedroom. I open that door. The entire room is a pile of boxes, but I can see parts of the gray walls. My mouth breaks open, trying to let me heave through the thin, piercing air.

I can’t delay for long. I grind my teeth and rake my eyes over the pile, searching for the marking 3rd grade. I knock boxes down, looking. Books and papers and kitchen supplies splash onto the floor, onto my feet, but I don’t feel anything. Soon enough, I see the lopsided lid.

I push it off, and I grab the neck of the golden soccer ball. I pull the trophy up out of the box, then hold it up in front of my face, panting. There are two pairs of stomping behind me, in the hallway, as I read the inscription on the base. I start to cry, again, because it’s exactly as I thought.

Most Player Potential Phillip Ridge Junior League 1998