Every day now, I take my sister to receive brain radiation. She gets locked into a mask and affixed to a table, a box is lowered over her head, and she squeezes her eyes closed while a searing light steals what’s left of her cognition. And in turn, perhaps, extends her life by a few months. […]
I finally reached my sister’s hospital room on the night of Christmas Eve, in the year that I was 24, she 28. Her head was a swollen mess of bruises and stitches and blood and hair. I’d caught a ride with a stranger to find the girl I’d loved for all these awful years so close to gone that […]
Around the age of 13 I was sent off to live with the Westons, the result of Mum deciding I was too much to handle. Which isn’t a slight to Mum. I actually was. Like, even for myself. I’d taken to hanging around with a strange group of friends. Strange in that they were kids, […]
I’m not sure what it means when something unknown and unexpected feels familiar instead. For all my livelong life, I’ve been propelled by some strange conflagration of nervous energy. A certain run-and-hide dynamic that leads me, time and again, into the arms of safely dangerous men. Which is perhaps where I’ve found myself again, except […]
why are you already a home to me and why was walking in on you, asleep on the couch to the left like walking through a dream i’d had as a child of the woman I would one day become the taste and smell of your breath […]
Now that we are at the boarding house Sunny is a not-Sunny. He leaves often and never takes me and pre-dawn comes back to a heavy sleep from which he can’t be woken. “Who are you?” I whisper to his hulking form when I am sure it has reached its slumberdepths. “Tell me what you […]
So it’s on Facebook this morning that I find out Stevan’s brother is dead. And it’s one of those moments that doesn’t make contact. I read the post several times, trying to make sense of it. But it’s too sudden and I’m not ready. I’m not ready for my childhood friend to have lost his brother. […]
I really wish I could do this. In the first month we shared a dream, even. But I’m fucking up already, and I can tell the road we’re on by the bumps. I’ve been over these bumps before. And I don’t like this road. I know where it goes and it’s not a good place […]
The night that her stepfather bashed in her mum’s face, Delilah learned more about Ann Catherine than she did during the rest of their seventeen years together. Domestic violence is not always what you’d expect. And Delilah’s memory of sitting with her mum, staring at her colorful, swollen face, is oddly a sweet one. Husband […]
Half of my family was staying on the east coast the summer it all went down. The other half was supposed to meet us there. Not all of them made it. I was eleven. “Stop faking,” Mum demanded, when I came to her about the staggering pain. By that time, I was well aware that […]
my delusions 