Shiny White Suburban
A white woman in a white Suburban with chrome rims is bumping “Still DRE.” The Suburban has just been through the car wash, leftover drips rubbed away with a microfiber cloth. The rims are blinging, bass thumping, and she’s cruising a smooth five over the speed limit.
The white woman is on her way to pick up her daughter from a Catholic school, where she recently started. The woman transferred her daughter there after her kid got caught within the crosshairs of a seasoned bully at the public school. The bully was an 8th grader with enough cunning to torment her daughter without ever pulling the trigger - physical violence would get her expelled, and she needed lunch. The youngest of a notoriously violent family, the bully had seen things no kid should ever see. She was the kind of girl you’d feel sorry for until she knocked out a few teeth.
Hurt people hurt people. The white woman repeats this like a mantra when she finds herself fantasizing about grabbing this little bitch by the hair and digging her acrylics into the back of her neck. When friends ask how she’s coping, she laughs and talks about being “mama bear.” The laugh is to assure her friends that she’s upset, but not venomously so. Though the bully has quite a history of violence, she’s still only fifteen. The phrase “restorative justice” gets tossed around, and everyone feels better for saying it even if it never happens.
The public middle school is a modern gladiator pit, the white woman quickly learns, first round of elimination over Snapchat. Kids encourage kids they don’t like to commit suicide, circulate vicious rumors about classmates that harden like cement in fledgling hearts. Daily fights, failed policy, and broken communication are the norm. Well-meaning adults wring their hands with worry about the school-to-prison-pipeline while tweens get sent to the hospital, concussed, and teachers flee to other districts.
But the white woman knows she should not complain aloud about the failings of the public school. Instead, in every conversation about her daughter’s bully, she is careful to mention her family’s class and racial privilege, because without doing so, her story will fail harder than half of the kids at that middle school.
“I know, I know, blame systems not individuals,” the white woman said to the principal when meeting to discuss her daughter’s transfer to the new school. The principal narrowed her eyes when the white woman slipped and complained how unfair it was that a chronically-misbehaved student had made school unsafe for her child. Using the word “trauma” at least a dozen times in under ten minutes, the principal lectured her about the challenges faced by the district. When the white woman asked whether being threatened at school could be considered a form of trauma, the principal differentiated between big T and little t. What her daughter experienced was little t trauma. Bullies have been around forever, no? Her daughter was coming to school fed and washed? Her basic needs met?
The white woman blinked hard at this comparison and swallowed her anger. She was ticked, but making an effort to mind her manners. Noting this unusual showing of parental restraint, the principal offered an olive branch. “Listen,” she said, leaning forward, dropping into a whisper, “our hands are tied.” The principal was about to say more, but the conversation ended abruptly when the walkie talkie attached to her belt squawked with an emergency. A rapidly-escalating situation near the south stairwell sent her rushing out the door without a goodbye.
“You probably have a black pussy,” the 15-year-old bully said to the woman’s daughter, who had just turned 12. So many levels of complexity here, and the white lady did not know how to explain this one to her kid. When she tried, the conversation sputtered and her daughter begged her to stop. When she expressed her concern that the school was not safe, her daughter pleaded to stay put. “I’ll get my ass kicked eventually,” she said, “and then she’ll move on to someone else.”
“Welcome to the experience of being a poor woman of color,” a white friend said over a bottle of chardonnay. She suspected she knew what this friend was trying to get at, and a part of her always wanted to slap this friend, who was an avid enthusiast of the Trauma Olympics. Annoyed, she switched the subject and complimented her friend’s new hair color. “Gorgeous,” she said, applying some lip gloss that would take a little scrubbing to remove from the wine glass, “almost looks natural.”
Besides, for the past five years at work, the white woman had shared a lunch table with a small group of women, none of whom were white. Two of the women made at least double what she did, the other two, she suspected, much less. They’re a good cross section of their city, they joked, capable of solving any problem since they’re all moms. When she spilled her worries over lunch, the oldest of the group set her fork down and shook a finger in her face.
“Get your baby out of there.”
“Thank you,” the white lady sighed, relieved she’d been given official permission to make the obvious choice.
“Ain’t nothing stopping you from teaching your baby girl how to throw a punch,” the woman added, dabbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “When I was a kid, my daddy gave me a switchblade, which was funny cause I wasn’t allowed to wear slacks, so I kept it in my bra.”
The white lady went home that night and showed her daughter how to throw a right hook, which she learned from two years of Billy Blank’s Tae Bo. She held up a cushion from the couch and her daughter balked - she did not want to hurt anyone, ever. ‘C’mon!” the white woman hollered from behind the cushion. “Smash it!”
Her daughter said no. She would not.
“I’m so lucky to have the resources to consider an alternative,” the white lady whispered to a girlfriend while unrolling her yoga mat, since the alternative was accompanied by tuition. Though the strain of this experience had triggered migraines and the type of insomnia no visit to Sephora could hide from her collapsed face, her friend agreed. So lucky.
In addition to dealing with toxic stress, the white woman was awfully disappointed. Since the majority of her friends were liberal, when her daughter was young, she too vowed to support public schools by sending her kid to them. Supporting local schools could be considered a basic civic duty, her left-leaning friends argued, though a few sent their kids to private schools, a fact underwhelmingly discussed.
But then her daughter came home from school one day and crumpled into her arms, recounting how the bully chased her down the hallway, barking like a dog. Her daughter ran into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall, tucking her feet onto the toilet seat to try to disappear. The worst of it, her daughter sobbed, was that she wouldn’t have been able to stomp the bully’s head if she’d tried to crawl under the door, and the thought of being trapped in the bathroom with this delulu caused a panic attack. She’d rather have her ass kicked in front of the entire school, she cried.
The white woman moved quickly and quietly. She got her baby out of there.
The memory of that horrible week makes her heart skip a beat, so the white woman does three dragon breaths and tunes into Dre. Man, those lyrics are sweet, the white lady thinks, and cranks the volume.
Still fuck with the beats,
still not loving police,
still rock my khakis
with a cuff and a crease.
To be clear. The white lady was never a fan of defunding the police! She imagines a world without police as a sickening orgy of rape and gunshot wounds and criminal speeding. Occasionally, a demented man, grinning and holding a knife over her throat while she sleeps. (Because she is white, she lacks a certain type of imagination, she’s been told.)
Snoop sticky-ickies, and man, oh man, does the white lady miss snapping her fingers to 90s hip hop and shaking her booty. And though she is vibing hard right now in her shiny Suburban, she is also devastated by how ugly the world can be, so she is feeling her feels.
Feeling feels is something that’s totally okay to do, proved by the Millennials. Everyone should hold space at all times - for themselves, their friends, even perfect strangers - to feel everything. Right now, for the white woman, it’s certainty and sorrow, and they seem to be combining as pressure in her stomach, below her tits. The white woman suspects a fart would release the feeling, but withholds out of politeness even though she’s alone in her car.
The repressed fart sends a cramp into her thigh before transforming into a surge of rage, and she grips the wheel and steps on the gas, hard. She’s so fucking sick of things! She suddenly recalls a school board meeting, which she attended on her phone since the meetings are public and smell like cigarettes. Though she’d already transferred her daughter to a new school, the white woman felt she should share her experience since personal stories, she once heard on NPR, can be effective agents of change. And her story was important.
But the first public comment was deeply unsettling! A twitchy, gray-faced man gripped by paranoia accused school board members of stalking him, haphazardly pulling papers out of a bag and shouting, instantly deflating the energy in the room. The board remained grimly silent until he clocked out of time, scooped up his papers, and left in a huff. If hope was scant to begin with, now it was gone.
“Heartbreaking” she reported back to her friends, though the more accurate word was galling. The thought of the twitchy man threatens to overpower her Dre vibes, and the white woman “yes, ands” with such commitment she almost swerves off the road. She rights the vehicle and adjusts her oversized sunglasses, cracks the window to temper a hot flash. Calm down, you dumb bitch, the white lady says to herself, since shame is practical.
But she cannot stop thinking about the school board meeting. The next public comment was even worse, almost causing her to smash a dinner plate against the countertop. A person with a patchy beard and black lipstick spoke into the mic as if they were making a TikTok, with so much vocal fry you could toss a piece of breaded cod in their direction and crisp it.
“Y’all look like nice enough people,” they addressed the board, smiling weakly. “But it’s just not okay with me that you don’t resemble the students in this city.” Running a hand through oiled hair, they leaned closer to the mic and moaned, “Representation matters.”
The white woman raised the dinner plate into the air, threatening to bring it down over the marble countertop. “Is this person serious,” she spat in the direction of her husband, her left eye twitching. “Are they implying that it’s the job of these exhausted, undercompensated board members to find their replacements?! For positions they were elected for?!”
“I just want to know the obvious,” her husband said, amused and leaning back in his chair, “which is why does this person sound like they’re making a porn?”
Unable to waste another second of her time and concerned about a hypertensive incident, the white woman handed the dinner plate to her husband and beelined it for the master bath. After a hot shower, she decided, she’d exfoliate her feet with a strange but effective tool marketed to her on Facebook. Then a Valium. Then she’d hit the sack.
Recalling this meeting makes her grip the steering wheel, and she flies through a residential area well-over the speed limit. The hood of her newly washed Suburban reflects the sun, temporarily blinding her, and her anger is instantly replaced with satisfaction. Nothing pleases her more than clean lines and gleaming surfaces! She taps the breaks, slows the vehicle down, and exhales through her nose.
No stress, no seeds, no stems, no sticks!
Some of that real sticky-icky-icky
Ooh wee! Put it in the air!
Well, you's a fool, D-R, ha-ha
The song is on repeat, but she lets it play.
Sadly, the white woman can’t smoke weed these days since it causes panic attacks. But she used to! The thought of puffing a fat joint causes the planet between her legs to spin, slow revolutions that radiate big heat. A memory swirls to the surface like smoke, the first time she kissed a woman, her mouth whiskey-warm, hair skunked by the blunt they’d just shared. Dre was playing in the background, she remembers. The other woman had been watching her crip walk before she pulled her close, by the belt.
The white woman brakes to turn into the new school, shifts into park, and texts her daughter that she’s arrived. She sits in a line of trucks and SUVs, half of them displaying red stickers on rear windows and back bumpers. She groans, but decides on optimism. Just last week, when picking up her daughter after her first day, she could see the relief on her face when she climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s weird,” her daughter said, looking out the window at students streaming out the front doors. “I’m not even a little scared.”
It was an offhand observation, but the white woman felt it like a stab to the heart. The faces of her daughter’s friends, stuck at the public school, spun like numbers on a roulette wheel. She prayed to God that none of them get hurt - because what else but pray could the white woman do?
She switches to the next song on the playlist, Tha Shiznit, and lowers the volume since hard-hitting bass seems inappropriate for the parking lot of a Catholic school. Then she reconsiders, turns it back up. Not all the way, just a little.
Waiting for the bell, the white woman thinks again of the twitchy man. The shitty beard. The bully. She realizes what it is she feels in her heart, and gives it ample space.
There are other things too. Self-righteousness. Defensiveness. All normal, she assures herself, and tips her head back to feel the sun on her chest. A thought worms its way to the surface, and she sits up, vexed. Ugh, she finds it annoying when other white people say ‘de nada’ in response to someone thanking them, as if they’re très cool.
She turns up Tha Shiznit, just enough to rattle the sunroof. Her daughter will be out any second.
Groundhog
The groundhog did hundreds in damage before I got fed up and bought a trap to rehome it. But after taking to Facebook to ask whether melon outperformed apple as bait, a group of concerned citizens drowned out my question with a remonstrative chorus of how rehoming the rodent was an act of colonialism.
Displacing the groundhog would guarantee its demise, I was warned. Released within two acres of an already-established groundhog, it would be forced to fight for territory or starve. Wasn’t the land behind my house its rightful home, as much as it was mine? Did I want the blood of an innocent animal on my hands?
I did not.
So, I did nothing.
The groundhog dug labyrinthine tunnels under my shed, displacing a foundation of crushed stone and growing fat on my gardens. I pushed chicken wire into the ground; it dug under it. I bought a gallon of coyote piss and sprinkled it around the garden beds, rolled a smoke bomb into its burrow, but nothing worked.
Frustrated by the amount of destruction it had caused in under a month, I messaged a guy I knew from Instagram, who was always posting about returning to his ancestral roots and food sovereignty. I’d seen pictures of him enjoying groundhog tacos, so I wrote to see if he’d like some more. He was in, he replied, and he would be there to harvest the groundhog as soon as I was ready.
An hour later, he pulled into my driveway and from the backseat of his car slid a long metal spear. The groundhog was trapped, so things would be easy, he assured. But up close, I noticed his spear was actually a picket salvaged from an old wrought iron gate. Is that gonna work? I asked, brows raised.
The tip is dull, he admitted, but I can’t discharge a firearm within city limits.
Thirty agonizing minutes later, when the groundhog finally stopped moving, I walked him back to his car. Tossing the body to the pavement, he leaned into the backseat of his car to grab a plastic bag when the groundhog lifted its head from the pavement and attempted to drag itself away.
Dude! I yelled, jumping backwards. What the fuck?!
I can’t believe this thing isn’t dead yet, he muttered, grabbing a mallet from the back seat of his car.
*
Weeks later, when bloody incisors continued to gnaw at my sleep, I wrote to He Who Carries A Dull Spear.
I feel horrible about how much the groundhog suffered, I wrote. I should have spoken up and I didn’t, so I’m writing to see if there’s a better way to harvest future groundhogs?
His answer was curt. He recommended I consider what the groundhog’s death might have looked like had white men not extirpated native rattlesnakes and wolves. Consider what it would have looked like had the groundhog been slowly poisoned, or ripped to shreds by a pack of dogs. The animal had not been caged and pumped full of chemicals to make it fit for consumption in an “enslaved environment” - instead, it had lived a natural life and died a natural death at the hand of a natural predator.
Attached to his message were photos of dark purple meat, vacuum-sealed, stacked neatly in a mini fridge.
Sharpen your spear? I suggested, then snoozed him for 30 days.
*
Where do mansplainers get their water?
From a well, actually…
*
I smudge every corner of my house, then smudge my yard. Though I’ve been told sage is not for white ladies, it’s the only thing that helps.
*
On a Facebook gardening group, one guy suggests a .22 for dealing with groundhogs, and a few members call for him to be removed.
This is a GARDENING group! they admonish.
I am a gardener, he responds.
He is removed.
*
Apparently, groundhogs are a pain in the ass for many people.
On a different Facebook gardening group, a woman suggests using a live trap to move the critter, and encourages mindfulness around relocation in order to avoid making the groundhog another gardener’s problem.
Someone in the group calls her a Zionist, and three people like it.
*
Everyone is talking about Palestine.
Everyone is talking about Israel.
Everyone is talking about Palestine and Israel.
One dismembered baby is not the same as eight babies dead to starvation!
While there is no evidence of dismembered babies, there is no question that women, including pregnant women, were raped and beheaded.
It was not a terrorist attack and it was not an antisemitic attack. It was an attack against Israelis.
It’s war.
It’s genocide.
While everyone is distracted by Gaza, drag queens and libtards are invading our public schools and telling boys they have vaginas.
You’re grimacing, my husband observes.
I shut my computer and crack a beer.
*
I come across this paragraph in a book by Patricia Lockwood, published in 2021: There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.
*
At the nursery, I spot a beautiful Wandering Jew. A sign below it states that its name has been changed to Wandering Dude.
The name Wandering Jew is antisemitic, the sign says, since it references the Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to Crucifixion, cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming.
I take the plant from its hanger to examine its purple striped leaves, looking closely for spider mites and scars. To avoid any trouble, I’ll just call it Lebowski.
*
Beautiful Wandering Jew! my Jewish friend says, pointing to my new plant.
Actually, it’s Lebowski, I flinch, explaining the name change.
Fuck that nonsense, she says, rolling her eyes. It’s part our heritage, not having a home!
*
On Facebook, a friend posts: Aaron Bushnell is a hero.
Aaron Bushnell was the 25-year-old serviceman of the US Air Force who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy, shouting “Free Palestine!” while burning alive.
I ask, Did you watch the video?
No, he writes back. Too traumatizing.
*
I’m stuffing a tangle of bittersweet into a blazing fire when I see him, shuffling out from under my neighbor’s shed, dazed and mangy. After a long pause, he stands on his hind legs and sniffs the air.
Fuck!
The sound of my voice sends him scrambling back to safety.
*
When your friends do not worship your personal gods - Bjork, orbweavers, cowboy boots - calling them an infidel is funny, or not right now?
*
Occasionally, the marm who lives in the unheated schoolhouse of my solar plexus scolds me, her voice thick with dust: Think it’s time for jokes, while the planet floods and burns? While cities are razed and little children plowed into graves? While homeless men take heroin and horse tranquilizer only a mile from your daughter’s school?
I’m telling a friend about my inner schoolmarm, how she can pop up and instantly ruin the fun.
You’re supposed to say unhoused, not homeless, she says, exhaling her vape in my face.
*
I read in an editorial: Using words other than “suicide” to describe Aaron Bushnell’s death strikes me as reminiscent of how we restrict the meaning of the word “murder” to killing that we believe is unjustified so that we avoid it in the context of war.
*
I listen to a recording of a Hamas fighter telling his parents that he killed ten Jews in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, all by himself.
Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! Mom, your son is a hero! he boasts.
He tells them he’s calling from the phone of a Jewish woman he’s just killed, encouraging them to check WhatsApp for proof.
I wish I was with you, his mother says.
*
Kunti is a character in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. She is the queen of Kuru, the first wife of King Pandu, and the mother of five sons known as the Pandavas. Kunti is known for saying, When one prefers one’s own children to the children of others, war is near.
*
I’ve set a live trap for the new groundhog.
A woman I met - a farmer - scoffed when I shared my concerns.
How much food will you lose before you grow a pair and get rid of him, she asks, shaking her head. Cantaloupe, she says, a cigarette pressed between her lips, and a friend with a truck because that bastard will piss and shit everywhere.
Her personal method is to angle a wooden plank against a five gallon bucket filled with water, a trail of apple slices leading straight into the swimming pool.
*
Whatever you do, don’t lose your sense of humor, said Jerry Seinfeld in the commencement speech he delivered to Duke graduates.
Protesting his presence, a small group of students walk out.
It’s because he’s Jewish!
No, it’s because he’s a Zionist!
One student is quoted saying they walked out because none of them particularly wanted to listen to Seinfeld.
*
Look at these Ivy elites, embracing oppressed identities, wearing keffiyehs and pitching Patagonia tents on manicured lawns to protest a war they are incapable of understanding after a life in the suburbs, a mustachioed Vietnam vet posts.
The word tentifada is claimed by both sides.
*
The groundhog is gone, relocated to a 20-acre field of clover. It’s public land, so we’ve broken the law, but some rules are worth bending.
Settler-colonialist, I called my husband, who put on a pair of thick leather gloves before opening the trap to release it. The groundhog’s ass, grown fat on my veggies, wobbled as it disappeared into lush grass.
That’s not an actual term, he said, peeling off his gloves before tossing them in the backseat of the truck.
Infidel, I said, laying on the gas and speeding away before someone caught us.
*
I read: Just War Theorists believe that war cannot be ethically waged without having reasonable prospects for success. The logic is intuitive: War inevitably involves a lot of killing, and killing can only be justified if it accomplishes a greater good. If the objective behind the killing is impossible (or extremely implausible), then there is no greater good to be won from the bloodshed.
*
Scorched earth, I read. Humanitarian nightmare. Children burned alive.
*
Students on a college campus tear down posters of Jewish children held hostage by Hamas.
Go back to Poland! a young man shrieks, his face hidden behind a mask, when a handful of students resist the removal of the posters.
Some students shrink away in horror.
Others call it decolonization.
*
A Columbia student writes to his professor: I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.
*
A Tweet with seven million views: A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.
I wonder if this is true. Do student activists historically have some sort of unique claim to moral authority?
I spend the next day digging.
No, it is not true. What it is, is complicated.
*
I read an article about Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, the National Socialist German Student League, and the students who helped Khomeini come to power.
*
Many parents see the footage of the Palestinian father frantically searching the rubble for his children. They feel the grip of his horror and hold their kids close, sick with understanding.
Then the grind calls - the bus pulls up, the timer dings, the toddler shrieks - and everyone moves on.
*
In an article, Palestinian human rights activist Mahmoud Mushtaha reflects on how the recent surge of conflict has made his work impossible: I’m constantly engaged in conversations about coexistence and reconciliation. But Israel’s actions against Palestinians consistently undermine what I am advocating. How can I convince a child who has lost every member of their family to accept the killer as a neighbor?
In a live interview, I hear an Israeli peace activist say the same thing, but about Israeli trauma at the hands of Hamas.
*
A man in a naturalist group on Facebook posts a drone-recorded video of an eaglet pecking at the head of another eaglet until it dies.
VIOLENT, one woman writes, ENOUGH!
Apologies, writes the videographer, I was under the impression this group was okay with the nature of Nature.
*
A poem, by Wislawa Szymborska, titled The End and the Beginning.
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
*
‘From the river to the sea’ must be judged only by what the speaker says is in their heart.
I hear a man on public radio say this and wonder if the preposterous logic of this statement might be used on my husband.
I meant what was in my heart, I’ll tell him, but you heard what flew from my mouth.
*
One argument is that it is impossible for the oppressed to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an oppressor to be the subject of racism.
One argument is that you should never assume the weak are “just” simply because they are weak, or the strong “wrong” because they are strong.
*
On a Facebook gardening group, people fight about the importance of differentiating the word invasive from the word aggressive.
Invasive is correct if the plant is out of control and killing everything, but it's not native. Aggressive is correct if the plant is out of control and killing everything, but it's native.
*
I wake suddenly from sleep, heart racing. Where did all the Ukrainian flags go?
*
Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive without humor, said Jerry Seinfeld to the Duke graduates. Humor is the most survival-essential quality you will ever need to navigate the human experience.
In front of him, silently, unfolds the Palestinian flag.
*
A poem titled “Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
*
I cannot share this, I tell my husband, listing friends who will cancel me.
Why would they cancel you, he asks.
Because you’re not supposed to feel conflicted, I snap, heading outside to burn.
*
I read this, in the book by Patricia Lockwood: Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn't care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.
*
In the fall of 2023, my hometown was brought to its knees by a mass shooting that killed eighteen people in under fifteen minutes. It was the tenth-deadliest shooting in U.S. history.
While law enforcement searched for the shooter, the city froze, suspended in terror. Blinds were drawn and doors were locked. Victim counts changed by the hour, and over social media, rumor outpaced fact. Parents did their best to keep young children distracted, performing melodramatic readings of silly books and telling jokes.
More! the kids begged, delighted by all of this attention. More!
*
The manhunt lasted two days until the shooter was found dead by suicide in a tractor-trailer.
We began to breathe, just enough to feel our bodies, which no longer felt like our own.
*
Two months after the mass shooting, a local woman trying to boost morale decided to move forward with a holiday event she hosted every December. Local downtown businesses would open their doors for an afternoon of holiday shopping, just as they had done in previous years. After two months of unspeakable heartache, a little warmth seemed it could go a long way. There’d be hot chocolate and handmade crafts, Christmas carols and cheese boards. Struggling business owners desperate for connection and customers began advertising for the event, and excitement built hesitantly, then steadily.
On the same day of the event, a group of 50 pro-Palestine protesters gathered downtown to voice their disgust with a local congressman. The congressman had voted in a way that made him complicit in the murder of thousands of Palestinians, yelled a woman into a bullhorn. Women and children! Blood in the streets! Protestors responded to her calls, shrieking “MURDER!” Child-sized caskets covered in white sheets stained with fake blood were set out on the sidewalk. One man held a sign suggesting the congressman should be jailed for his vote.
Some local residents who came out for the holiday event froze at the sight of the bloody caskets. Some stepping out of their cars heard “MURDER” reverberating off of buildings and drove directly home.
At some point, a local florist asked protestors to move up the street a few feet, so customers could better access her front entrance. They refused. The woman running the holiday event asked, too, assuring them that this was not a request to disband, just to better share the street. They refused.
After two hours, the protestors moved on, and the holiday event sputtered to an early close.
It’s not like they shut down a weapons manufacturer, the woman who organized the holiday event said, tears streaming down her face. She’d participated in plenty of protests, but was convinced this one wouldn’t help anything. A friend embraced her before she plopped into a plastic chair and sobbed into her hands.
Later that evening, curious to know more about who organized the protest, I found the public invite on Instagram, aptly named “Shut It Down for Palestine.” In addition to the time and place, the invite included a reminder to be respectful of the unhoused people the protestors would see on the street.
*
They achieved exactly what they were there to do, a woman commented on Facebook, in response to whether the timing and intensity of the protest was tone deaf. The city was still struggling to grieve stolen lives, including a 14 year old boy and his father who were out for a night of bowling.
Make them uncomfortable, she wrote, and hit those complacent business owners’ right in the pocketbook.
*
My questions trip over themselves, wriggling stupidly on the floor.
*
I had a friend who died by self-immolation.
A month prior to his death, and after a gradual erosion of mental health, he called me in the middle of the night and left a belligerent voicemail. I listened to the message, took two deep breaths, and deleted it from my phone.
My friend was Black, queer, and cuttingly clever. The last time I’d seen him, he’d stepped off a bus wearing a pink denim skirt, his bare shoulders glistening with coconut oil. He picked me up, swung me in a circle, then left a slick of cherry lip gloss on my cheek.
My friend also happened to be a Christian missionary who’d been tortured in a prison camp for ten months after crossing into North Korea to protest the inhumane treatment of children.
Our twenty year friendship - before and after Jimmy Carter secured his release from North Korea - included day-long adventures, open-mouthed laughter, bitchy fights, and ripping off our shirts on the dance floor. Sometimes, in the purple hours of the evening, he’d close his eyes and deliver messages from my ancestors. Once, he offered my entire family foot massages.
In the last few months of his life, I’d grown scared of his increasing aggression, and I was pissed that he’d refused all attempts at help. I was a new mom trying to figure out how to stay sane in the face of new responsibilities and scant sleep. Not responding to his voicemail was an act of self-preservation, I decided. Radical self-care.
Soon after leaving me the voicemail, he walked into an open field in San Diego and struck a match.
*
There are no words for the smell, a witness cried in an interview after Bushnell’s suicide, his face the color of wood ash.
*
When my 6th grade daughter came home from school and sat down to a snack I’d made for her - a bowl of yogurt and three huge strawberries - she reported that one of her teachers hates strawberries.
She hates them, she said, her teeth pink with juice, Even the smell!
She’s probably allergic, I offered.
Nope, she said, stuffing another one into her mouth. She’d asked.
She even asked if her teacher had past trauma with a strawberry.
*
Animal Speak is a book about identifying and understanding animal totems, gifted to me by a Mi’kmaq man who laughed when I asked if I had any business exploring such a thing. White people talking about their spirit animals pisses people off, I explained.
He threw his head back and laughed so loud people turned their heads to stare.
Humans have found meaning in animals for all of time, he said, shaking his head. To think otherwise is ridiculous. But if you’re gonna be precious, call it your ASS.
Animal of Special Significance.
*
20 years ago, my friend, Terrence, told me his spirit animal was a hamburger.
One thing I’ve stolen is that joke.
*
The author of Animal Speak is Ted Andrews, a white man born in Dayton, Ohio, who devoted his life to the spiritual arts. Though Animal Speak received criticism for being “typical white shamanism,” 500,000 copies were sold in five years. In an Adirondack chair, feet by the fire, I flip to the section on groundhogs.
Groundhogs go into hibernation and spend about four to six months in that condition. They prepare for this by fattening themselves. They gorge through summer and late fall. Their temperature will drop from its normal 96 degrees to about 40 degrees, barely above freezing. They achieve a state of unconsciousness and will usually awaken in early spring. When groundhog shows up as a totem, lessons associated with death and dying and revelations about its process will begin to surface. Its medicine is that of going into the great unconscious to touch the mystery of death without dying.
*
My ASS is a groundhog, teehee.
*
A maple in my backyard is down to American bittersweet, which vined up the length of the trunk and choked it out.
American bittersweet is native, while Asiatic is not, though both like to strangle trees.
*
I’ve entered the secondary burn, I tell my husband, pouring myself a glass of water before heading back outside.
What’s that? he asks, peering over his laptop.
When a fire gets so hot, it consumes the smoke as fuel.
Like armchair politics, he says, chuckling at his own joke.
*
I’ve lost the secondary burn. Smoke billows across the yard in choking gray sheets.
Reaching into a brush pile for kindling, there’s movement in my periphery, then a high-pitched whistle before the groundhog bolts from the pile, heading for my feet, her black eyes shining. Stepping to the side, my shoe catches the edge of a canvas tub and sends me to the ground.
From this perspective, I can see two small heads peering from the hole she’s running for, and before I can get back on my feet, she and her pups disappear into their burrow.
*
TIME TO BURN IT TO THE MOTHERFUCKING GROUND.
A sensation of heat pricks at my neck. My breath goes funny, ragged.
Tears well and I rub them away.
But they come back.
*
Once the panic attack dumps me back on the ground and my breathing slows, my vision widens from pinprick to panorama. There’s an emerald canopy of oak above my head, sunlight glittering through the spaces between the leaves. Shapes of light are cast across my limbs, disappearing and reappearing in the breeze. My jaw lets go and hangs open.
I must look like a doofus, staring into the tree tops with my mouth slung open, but it feels too good to shut.
*
I don’t know is an enormously disorienting thing to say.
*
It’s quiet in my yard but for the occasional sough of wind through white oak.
Cautiously, they step from the burrow, heading for my flower beds.
Hagfish
Though hagfish have been around for over 300 million years, they’ve barely evolved. Researchers think this is because hagfish are equipped with a defense mechanism so effective they have few natural predators.
When under attack, glands lining their snake-like body release proteins that transform into a cloud of slime upon hitting the water. In under a second, the proteins expand to 10,000 times their original size. So, imagine a 5 gallon bucket of snot. The gills of the predator are clogged, and the scare of suffocation sends them looking for Mucinex.
If you google “hagfish,” you’ll see pictures of a common species, its anemic-pink skin loosely attached to its body like a fleshy sock. With a mouth full of comblike-teeth that move horizontally and a rasping tongue, hagfish are well-equipped to rip flesh from carcasses found on the ocean floor. Boring a hole into carrion face-first, they prefer to eat their meal from the inside out.
*
A YouTube video shows a group of hagfish tearing flesh from the bloated carcass of a whale.
One article describes their anatomy: five hearts, boneless, blind.
In another video, a cloud blooms from inside the jaw of a shark, the hagfish slipping away.
*
What does it feel like, the jaws of a shark cracking down upon you?
I shut my computer and stare into the dark, an undertow tugging at my feet.
Will my daughter know it too?
*
I want a defense mechanism so effective evolution is unnecessary for millions of years.
*
Where might I manifest slime glands, if I magically could?
Since glands in my nose would be nasty, I picture them budding from the smooth surface of my cervix, enhancing its natural gift.
*
For 10 years, my husband and I had a recurring fight about cookies. He consistently ate 80 percent of the cookies - chocolate chip and always baked by me. 100 percent of the time, he finished the last one.
Once, I’d rushed home from work anticipating the pleasure of a cookie microwaved for 10 seconds and consumed in three bites, only to discover he’d eaten the last one.
Again.
What the fuck?! How can you do this to me? I hissed, my face a pickled beet.
I’m not doing anything TO you, he hissed back, I wasn’t even thinking of you.
*
One reason I love my husband is that when he’s an asshole, he’s an honest asshole. He ate the last cookie a dozen more times before the issue surfaced in couple’s counseling, his behavior admitted to without shame.
My love language is you not eating the last of the fucking cookies I bake, I said, kicking my commitment to nonviolent communication to the curb.
Ouch, he says.
100 percent of the time, I say, looking away.
*
After almost 10 years of eating the last cookie, my husband apologized.
I was an only child, he said, and I’m not used to making accommodations for others. But I understand eating the last cookie, every time, is inconsiderate. I’m sorry.
Within minutes of his apology, everything is slippery.
*
Hagfish are also called snot snakes, I say aloud, searching under the comforter for my underwear.
Huh? my husband asks, wobbling, his foot searching for the leg-hole of his boxers.
Suddenly halved by pain, I sit on the edge of the bed until it passes through my pelvis.
*
Growing up, I had a neighbor who permed his hair and loved to make his pecs dance for the ladies.
On hot summer days, he’d strut down to a shared beach in a Speedo to tan on a square of reflective foil, occasionally standing up to flex his lats while commenting on the physical fitness of anyone wearing a bathing suit.
I’d submerge myself underwater to avoid his gaze, but lift my nose and eyes above the surface, like a crocodile, and imagine sprinkling sea salt all over his oiled body, extra pepper. I’d cinch the four corners of the foil, sliding him smoothly into the oven.
*
Would you get a look at those gams, the neighbor in the Speedo said to me. Keep at it, he said, tracing the line of my body with a finger through the air, because if you don’t, you’ll end up looking like them. He laughed, and pointed to a group of women I loved.
*
He used to sell knives, my mother told me. Just imagine.
*
What did he say, anyway, in his polyester suit, holding a case of knives?
Ma’am, go ahead and clear your kitchen table and fix up a pot of coffee while I demonstrate how these knives will improve your life, oh, you already own a nice set, let’s take a look, aren’t you sweet, honey, these are cheap, so cheap they’re dangerous, so I’m going to offer you a 15 percent discount, frugality is good until you lose a finger, no need to wait until your husband comes home, I don’t like it when my time is wasted and I’m sure he doesn’t either, how about another coffee while you grab your checkbook, that’s right, you need the best tools to work in the most sacred part of the home, which everyone knows is a woman’s kitchen, congrats, sweetie, we just made your life better, and before I leave, I’m sure you have some friends who need this upgrade to their life too?
Slime would work well against high pressure sales, I suspect.
*
An 81-year-old friend of mine recently shared a secret she’d only ever spoken within the wooden box of a Catholic confessional. She’d birthed eight children, all of them still living. But the birth of her seventh child was so difficult it almost killed her as well as her newborn. At 31, her vagina was prolapsed, her blood pressure out of control. Her husband worked incessantly to put food on the table, yet there was never enough to eat. Her church did not allow the use of birth control, since artificial contraception was considered evil.
When she discovered she was pregnant for the eighth time, she did not tell her husband. Instead, she got the name of an out-of-state doctor who performed abortions, but she could not afford the travel, the cost of the procedure, or the time away from her kids. The birth of her 8th was excruciating - a three day back labor followed by near-fatal hemorrhaging upon his arrival. Within a month, her son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and a seizure disorder. He was 50 now, and lived with her. He’s the most charming of all my children, she whispered, and a wizard in the kitchen.
Her secret was not that she loved him best - which was true - but that she’d believed for most of her life that her son was born with disabilities because God had punished her for seeking an abortion.
When she confessed her fear, the priest behind the anonymity screen assured her that God does not give us more than we can handle.
*
The skin of the hagfish is loosely attached to the body along the ridge of its back and filled with almost a third of its blood, giving it the impression of a blood-filled leg warmer.
*
In the late 80s, the toy I loved most was called the Water Snake, a pliable plastic tube filled with liquid designed to allow movement within the contained unit of the tube, which meant that it was impossible to hold. The moment you applied the grip needed to hold it, the pressure would displace liquid and send it slipping from your hand.
Unless you practiced, of course.
Catch! I’d holler, and fling the Water Snake through the air to a friend, who would snatch it from its projectile but find it impossible to hold long enough to fling back.
*
When I met my 81-year-old friend’s son, I was attracted to his dry sense of humor and his green eyes.
We connected over social media, then connected more due to a shared love for French cooking and Ricky Gervais.
There’s nothing more arrogant than praying to a god who didn't stop the Holocaust, thinking he’ll help you find your car keys, he posted.
I hearted it, then hearted a photo of his beef bourguignon, considered by many chefs to be the mother of all stews.
*
It was an especially boring CCD class that I skipped in order to take my mother’s car without permission to my boyfriend’s house, where I smoked my first menthol cigarette and dry-humped him on the hood. On the way back to class, I prayed that God could help me wipe the shit-eating grin off my face.
*
When I was 13, I spent the summer kicking everyone’s ass at Spit, a lively card game dependent on quick hand-eye coordination.
On the last day of our summer, before we packed up to head home, my sister beat me. She punched the air with joy, and I lunged across the table and slapped her face.
Her expression proved I was a godless sinner.
For the next two days I spiraled with self-hatred until I tired of it and apologized.
*
Occasionally victim to their own friendly-fire, hagfish can sneeze to clear mucus from their single nostril.
*
I had a boyfriend in my 20s who was so committed to spoken word, he once rhymed “bitch” with “Filet-O-Fish” and the poem was about my pussy. After telling him the poem angered me, he read it again in public, only a week later.
After refusing to talk to him for two weeks, I finally agreed to a walk through a public park to hear what he had to say for himself. After a stretch of silence under towering oaks, he wheeled around to face me, his face pink with rage.
If I wanted to be his girlfriend, I could not police his writing.
*
Five years later, I attended a reading he gave at a coffee shop. Time tends to bleed men of immaturity, I thought, failing to get comfortable in a shitty plastic chair.
This is for Lauren, he announced to the crowd. It’s called Filet-O-Fish.
Before leaving, I let him know that his beard looked like a pile of pubes swept up from a public bathroom and glued to his face.
*
He sent me snail mail.
In one poem, handwritten on the back of a napkin stained with coffee, he rhymed rabies with labia.
*
Some hagfish species are endangered due to destructive fishing practices. This is especially problematic in areas where cod, haddock, and flounder are commercially fished and large amounts of bycatch discarded. The water suffers, since all the dead shit rots at the bottom when there are not enough hagfish to clear it away.
*
A flat mate from northern England once told me he’d put pubic hairs in my milk should I refuse to be his bird.
It was my first week in a new country, so I chalked it up to cultural differences, perhaps some Monty Python-like, absurdist humor I wasn’t yet versed in.
Later in the week, suitcases unpacked and excited for classes to start, I went out for a pint and a game of snooker with a group of new friends. At the end of the night, he tried to kiss me, and I politely refused.
As the days went on, I became skilled at avoiding him. During long stretches at the library, I satisfied my longing for sweetness by stuffing my face with English chocolate and tea biscuits, gaining twenty pounds in under six months.
*
Some research shows hagfish can absorb nutrients directly through their skin.
*
When I returned to the states after my year abroad, I sat across a sticky kitchen table from my ex-boyfriend, whom I still fucking, when he told me that he and his friends had rated the girls on campus.
I was a 5/10.
When I asked him why a 5, he told me I was 30 percent too large.
If I were a smaller version of myself, I’d be a 7/10.
*
At work, an old man with lips the color of raw liver told me he’d looked at my website and saw a picture of me with short hair, which he did not prefer. I moved his walker out of the way and supported his elbow to help ease him into the reclining chair, where he’d receive a medical treatment from me.
Cripes, did he ever hate it when women styled their hair like men!
*
Home after work that evening, I touched the cotton gusset of my underwear.
I’d ovulated a week early.
*
A middle-aged man inquired if I would give him a better treatment if he paid more. When I told him that I treat all patients the same - meaning, to the best of my ability - he laughed and assured me that money was not an issue.
So what will I get if I pay more, he asked.
*
When hagfish slime is stretched and dried, it makes a soft thread that can be woven into durable fabric. One website claims garments prepared from hagfish fiber have bulletproof properties, similar to Kevlar.
*
When I finally saw a D.O. to address neck pain I’d been ignoring, the doctor, a man in his 60s, was assessing my cervical spine with his finger tips when he began venting about the state of our country.
The downfall of the United States could be traced to women entering the workforce, he said, his voice thinning, thumbs straining against my neck. I know you own your own clinic, he acknowledged, clearing his throat, but -
Before he could say another word, I slipped from the exam table, pulled my paper gown aside, spread my legs and covered his face in a 5 gallon bucket of snot.
*
On the drive home, the puddle in my pants expanded. When I got out of the car and saw how big it had grown, how it had soaked my seat, I giggled like a girl.
*
After devouring two tins of sardines, their silver flesh smothered in mustard and spread on water crackers, I shed my clothes and stepped outside to absorb some hot sun.
Jesus, no one needs to see that, you old hag! yelled a teenage boy from his bike, scowling and pumping his legs to race away.
Since there was no need to disrobe, I aim and fire, instantly knocking him from his bike.
On the ground, blinded by slime, he’s stunned.
I release another stream of goo, just to scare him, and he flips to his knees, scrambling for his phone and crying.
Attempting to stand, he slips and lands on his back, moaning.
*
Discharging slime leaves me ravenous!
Fist plunged inside the cookie jar, fingers scrape the ceramic bottom.
There’s the familiar ache. My husband will be home within the hour, and I can’t wait to see him.
Instar
~for Esmé
I can hear you digging in the snack cabinet again, and it’s got me thinking about a piece in Natural Geographic about caterpillars in which the author refers to caterpillars as “cylindrical eating machines.” Caterpillars grow extraordinarily fast due to constant feeding, I learn, molting several times before the pupal stage. That makes me think of you, since your appetite refreshes on the hour to sustain your recent growth.
At some point, a specific hormone surges and the caterpillar spins a pad of silk in which it embeds its cremaster (fancy name for “hook”), then hangs itself like a Christmas ornament to start the mystical process of metamorphosis. In chrysalis, the caterpillar liquefies into what one scientist refers to as “a chunky stew,” while specialized cells called imaginal discs dictate the remodel. There are imaginal discs for wings, legs, and antennae. Eventually, the eating machine emerges as a winged butterfly equipped to sip sugar from flowers with a proboscis that looks like a straw.
You’ve molted at least three times this year, upping an entire shoe size in less than three months, and I suspect you’re approaching the pupal stage. Your body grows beyond itself, seemingly overnight. Once hormones dictate it’s time to dissolve into goo, I think you’ll find imaginal discs for eyebrows that connect in the center, as well as an aversion to working in groups. Let’s hope you get your sense of style from me, sense of direction from your dad.
But how crazy, girl! Never again will you undergo such rapid growth in such a short period of time! I feel for you, burgeoning child, your brain flooded with hormones that whisper wicked things in your ear, swearing to you that everything I do is intolerable. The furious amygdala of puberty leaves you vexed when I laugh off your annoyance, a helpful tactic that allows me to dodge the laser beams you aim at me on the hour. I refuse to stop having fun because you loathe me!
So, sweet girl, go ahead and attach your silk to the red maple of my heart and liquify while I keep the mildest of weather, and one of these days you’ll forgive me for staying merry. Just this morning, I reigned in a chuckle when you became angry in response to whether you’d like pancakes, and when you returned to the kitchen table to devour them after sulking in your bedroom, the pat of butter atop the stack had just begun to melt.
The Trinity
There once was a woman who loved coconut. The woman thought about coconut every day. The woman thought about coconut every night. The woman thought about coconut all of the time.
One afternoon, in late spring, the woman was reading in a field of wildflowers and sipping from a freshly drilled coconut. Preoccupied with the coconut’s creamy water, she failed to notice dark clouds gathering above her head. As the woman tilted her chin to enjoy the last of its ambrosia, she was struck by lightning.
The woman and the coconut were turned to stone.
Years later, the field was bought by multinational conglomerate with plans to build a parking lot for a casino. Within weeks of purchase, a crew arrived to level the field. One of the workers, Ángel, stumbled upon the stone statue of the woman and her coconut. It had fallen to the ground and was covered with purslane with the exception of a single, pointed breast. Ángel cleared the purslane and lifted the statue from the ground, instantly realizing he’d discovered something sacred – a woman in a state of rapture. That evening, he loaded the statue into his truck and quit his job.
On the seventh day, Ángel made love to the woman and her coconut, kissed her pointy breasts, loaded her into his truck and drove to a cliff outside of the city. With one hand on her stone coconut, the other on her stone buttcheek, he tossed her from the edge. As Ángel walked back to his truck, he heard the muffled pop of the statue’s impact with the ground below.
The woman and her coconut were now dust settling into red clay below.
Lilith
There once was a young Southern man who was raised in a pious home. The young man dressed modestly and had every crooked tooth straightened. Every Sunday, he spent sixty minutes in a wooden pew, his chin redemptively tucked.
Not a single member of his brethren suspected that the young man wanted more than anything to lose his virginity to the devil. Every night, once the household stilled, he ripped back his bedsheets and exposed himself to the night air, waiting for the devil to pounce. But the young man waited in vain, and his penis became soft and cold. Sobbing into his pillow, he’d collapse into a fitful, disappointing sleep.
In the young man’s dreams, powerful urges came to life. A sex-crazed, dark-haired woman with giant buttocks, each cheek like a halved watermelon and breasts as big as truck tires would straddle him, pinning his arms to the bed with unimaginable strength, her head spinning like a top. When he couldn’t take it anymore - not a single second more - she’d release his arms and he’d grab frantically for the horns protruding from her mane, climaxing into swirling darkness.
The young man would wake in the morning in a state of elation, but the moment he realized the sweat on his pillow was his alone, he’d plunge from grace. Shuffling to the shower, he’d weep with despair and watch his seed swirl down the drain.
Years later, the man went to college and lost his virginity to an exuberant feminist with orange eyes. The feminist’s sex drive was insatiable. They found pleasure in each other nightly, and she smothered his face with the dark hair that grew all over her body. When he was ready to come, the young man lifted his head from the pillow, peering into the twin embers of her eyes, his mouth as round as a pie tin. “Food of hellfire!” he’d howl, “I’m avenged!”
“Yes!” she’d yelp, squeezing his nipples with vigor.
They remained lifelong partners but never married or had children. When she died, the man buried her ashes near a golden forsythia. A day after her burial, the bush spontaneously ignited but never burned.