When I die I want to be burned to ash, and I want my cremains to be halved between my sisters, Marcella and Isabella. I don’t care what they do with them—I have no desire for a specific place to be sprinkled. I can’t remember why, exactly, I felt the need to plan for this initially, but I suppose it rose out of a fear of what would happen to my body once I fully lost control of it. When I was a child I saw an episode on a horror TV show about someone who died, but he didn’t actually leave his body. It was told from his perspective, and he was still trapped inside, helpless but conscious and constantly thinking and terrified as he watched and felt everything, and it ended with him buried underground for as long as his body was here in the physical world.
If I could feel the flame burning, I’d still rather be blazed quickly than spend a relative eternity underground alone with my thoughts, myself. Even the pain of being burned to almost nothing is surmountable if I know that I would be able to do nothing to stop it physically. There’s something near joy in this realization—if you can’t fight, then you don’t have to worry about trying, and surrendering to the heat is easy. Even conscious, as an inert corpse, I wouldn’t be able to back out of being cremated after death—this is why I made the decision while I can.
Though, the idea of being split between my sisters has me still clinging to some meaning inherent in this worldly plane: my ashes should be cared for by the people who most want to.
I am in the autumn of my life as I ride my bike across Brooklyn, thinking of my inevitable, ashed future in an oversized and under-washed black jacket I bought at Goodwill. Made of the thermal material that always reminds me of my stepfather Dick and his long johns, it swallows me. I tried it on and thought of how I wore his giant jackets when I was a child, and the way he’d put them over my shoulders, and how I tried to imagine that this was a good thing, to be touched by a father figure, swaddled in his masculinity, my own budding self aswim in the musk and warmth of the beer-stained denim, cotton, flannel. I felt so small, a feeling I’ve been seeking ever since. The size of my body feels like a betrayal to my youth. The deterioration of my body, now already in my thirties, is also a betrayal. My body is a betrayal.
At some of the most lost points in my life I’ve been able to find grounding when I’ve made myself feel small—looking out into the ocean for the first time, or up into the giant Kansas sky, flat on my back in a field. When I went to Mexico and saw the mountains, I was minuscule in the presence of God’s proxy.
I dreamt Dick was still alive, and he cooked Marcella and me a meal late at night in the dimness of the old brick house on Main Street, which in reality has since been demolished. I have nightmared my way through this house for years after my escape, trapped in its damp bathroom, locked in the dark kitchen, frozen in my childhood bed, which was two mattresses stacked on the floor, always with the sound of someone dead but breathing, the feeling of a shadowed figure watching from outside the windows.
We hesitantly ate Dick’s food since we had no choice, whispering to each other so he couldn’t hear us, dream secrets between sisters. I noticed one of his long black hairs in the noodles, and then another and another until I realized the food was covered in his hair. He stood at the stove, and never turned around, so in this dream, like so many, I did not have to see his face. I don’t know if that’s a relief or a menace.
When I woke up and brushed my teeth in the morning, I pulled a long black hair out of my mouth. Since his death when I was thirteen, Dick has been following me, making sure I cannot forget. I hate when people say words can’t describe what comes next—in fact, words are the only hope we have of getting anything close to truth in description.
The first spring in the house on Main Street, like an omen, tulips shot up, almost overnight, in a bed-sized rectangle under the backyard clothesline. At first, I thought it was a grave or a memorial, some secret my great grandmother had had when she lived there, and which nobody alive knew about, and every year the pale blossoms pushed through earth to greet her, to remind her that they knew the secret. I thought of the body that might be buried there, or the barrier the tuliped rectangle might create between the world I knew and some other world, with fairies and unicorns and snakes bigger than busses.
I was always on the lookout for portals—usually the natural kind, like a tree cloven at the root below ground that grew up into two trunks, with a space in between big enough for a body to pass through, or the opening between branches of a weeping willow. It didn’t always have to be trees, but any negative space between forms that I could walk or crawl through. The culverts, so many of them, tunneled under roads and alleyways, were wet portals, each of them able to deliver you to their own watery worlds, if you believed. That was the trick of portals—they were always in plain sight, but only visible to the type of person who was over-sensitive enough to feel their presence.
I had my go-to portals, the ones I’d walk through every day, like the split tree in the Bullworth’s yard next door. I’d walk through it on my way to school and again on my way home. When I walked through, I tried to clear my soul and unfasten my mind, and make myself as present as possible to see if I could register the shift in realms, hoping the new realm would be better. If I ever felt it might be worse—perhaps I got a chill walking through, or heard a car horn or a dog bark as I passed—I would look around to be sure nobody was watching, and slowly backstep, without turning around, until I had undone the passage.
As with portals, I was sensitive to splitting poles, too—when you’re walking with someone and you let a pole, or pole-like thing, cut between you. It brings bad luck, and that bad luck, like a cosmic due you owe, can keep you in the realm you’re in until you pay up. The only way to counter a pole-splitting is to say “bread and butter” out loud when you’re in the act—you can’t do it after.
If you’re walking with someone you don’t love, it doesn’t matter if you split, because it is not bad luck to sever your astral self from someone you hate. When I walked with Dick, I would go out of my way to split any poles, street signs, fire hydrants, or other obstructions that could come between us. And each time, I would think, I want you to die, and glare at him. I was afraid he’d catch me, and sometimes he did.
“Where the hell are you going?” he’d ask if I had to walk too far away to get something to slice through us.
I know I was a mean child. What I mean to say is, I was so very angry, hateful, and violent, violent, violent. I’d get angry and hit Marcella, pull her hair, smack her. I threw her on the ground to knock the wind out of her, pressed my hands around her neck long enough to make her pass out. The latter started as a game. We’d get together with cousins and neighbor kids and make each other pass out. One person would lean their back against the wall, take a deep breath and hold it, while another would press hard in the middle of their chest until consciousness was lost, and they would slowly slide down the wall, eyes dead to us, the watchers.
It’s no excuse—because there is no excuse—but I know I was born through violence. My mother thought my father would kill us both when she was pregnant with me—he beat her on the day I was born, on the way to the hospital. I saw a photograph of her holding me after I was delivered. In it, you can see her eye already starting to blacken.
I didn’t see that photograph until I was thirty, in Mexico, where my father and his side of the family lives, after I finally flew to meet my older sister Isabella and the rest of them. My grandparents, who weren’t a part of my life after my mother left my father, kept every photograph that had been taken when my parents were still together. My mother didn’t take pictures, and she didn’t save them either. Even our school photos, when she bought them, which was rare, she gave them all away. I only know what people on my mother’s side of my family look like if I’ve met them. Mom didn’t have pictures of her mother, so I never knew what she looked like since she died before I was born. This untethered, floating and abandoned nature is also what I was born into.
My mother told me I was evil just like my father, that he had poisoned me with his blood since he wasn’t around to teach me this evil. Some of my first memories are of her face-reddened and threatening to box me up and ship me back to Mexico to be with him. I imagined her picking me up without making eye contact, and placing me inside an open box, then taping it shut. I thought of suitcases from movies, plastered with stickers from different locations, and wondered what the box would look like by the time it got to Mexico, which was impossibly far away.
I’m afraid of how hateful I am, how angry I can get, how thoroughly capable I am to want someone to die, how much I wanted Dick dead. I didn’t hate Dick at first—when mom met him at that AA meeting, when they were both freshly sober and newly dating, I thought he could be the one who saved us. But things change, and looking back, it happened so quickly, but trapped in my youth like an ant in amber, the change felt slow, heavy, and inescapable.
Time passes differently in transit. Whether on train, bus, bike or car, there are moments I can feel everything time has cluttered onto me peel away, and I wish the ride would go on for eternity. Sometimes it almost feels possible, like when I was a child in the car and mom was driving us somewhere, usually in winter and away from Dick, and late on our way to her night shift at the nursing home. I didn’t ever want to get out of that car with the heater blowing full blast.
Now, in New York, if I stay on the train long enough, there’s not much else to think of beyond myself—though, that’s already what I’m usually thinking about. But on the train, I can start to consider anew my past, my future, and feel my present in a way that’s so immediate and intense that I start crying, thankful that people crying on public transport draws little attention here. In New York, it’s easy to keep myself so busy, so tired, that I have no time or energy to think about how much I hate myself, to the lengths I have gone to hurt myself, and all the collateral along the way.
I’ve always wanted to run away, like my mother did—she cut and run, leaving her life, her children, leaving everything multiple times. And I think, why can’t I? What’s stopping me? Why am I the one who is forced to learn from her mistakes—to carry this anxious, clutching fear in my chest that lets me know even when you run away, you never actually get away. I have two mothers—the woman running into battle to protect us, and the woman disappearing, fading through a smoke so scentless it confuses, it numbs.
In certain warcries, you can hear the acceptance of failure, of death—some warriors know without a doubt they will die in the war they scream their way into, and yet they still have audible hope, a knowing hoarsening. I don’t know the source or direction of that hope, be it for the abstract future, a sense of indignation and righting of wrongdoing, or their children, but it’s there.
When I was a kid I convinced myself I was bipolar based on internet searches at the library because I’d have these mood swings, or what I thought were mood swings. I was always depressed and anxious and angry and upset, but sometimes I’d get really gung-ho, and think about leaving, getting out, doing something better, escaping, laughing. It wasn’t until recently that I realized it wasn’t mood swings, it was just hope. Having hope felt so radical I thought it was mania. Hope was a dangerous thing for a kid like me to have, but I had it.
Sometimes, in the silence of my nights, my mother’s cries come back to me. I jaggedly descend into sleep trying to remind myself everything is fine, because nothing matters, and there’s a chance I may never wake up, which offers, of course, release. In the morning, with the sun slowly rising to tighten its grip around me, I awake a wild, ragged animal, frazzled as if I’ve been outrunning a predator in my sleep.
Mom had escaped Dick for only a few months before she allowed him back into our lives, and nights he’d stumble drunk or high through the door, and the two of them would sit in the dark living room and smoke cigarettes on the couch in the glow and low murmur of the television.
One night she had to work a last-minute double at the nursing home—she could not afford to turn down an extra shift. This was when she was working in Coffeyville, 20 minutes away, as she had gotten fired from the nursing home in our town after accusations of pills being stolen. It was so much simpler when the word “accusation” didn’t have guilt embedded in it by history.
It was just Marcella and me at the house that night. I locked the door as soon as we got home from school and listened for Dick for hours, silently making dinner with Marcella and keeping away from windows. It was raining heavily and when he arrived I could tell by his pounding he was peak drunk, the kind that puffed his lips and glazed his nearly-shut eyes.
All the lights were off, and Marcella and I hid upstairs in the shared closet that connected our bedrooms. We stayed there all night until mom came home. I knew Dick would not leave, he would just pass out on the porch and wait. And I knew mom would just let him in. I also knew Marcella would not have kept him out if it weren’t for me, that, in fact, she probably did not want to keep him out. She did it for me. I suppose it was solidarity, protection, or fear of angering me. Something can be learned from all of this.
In New York, I entered the winter of my life when I first moved there, and the men I met on my drunken nights out in the cold were the black ice I skated over, dull skate blades hungry for vodka-thinned blood.
This predictable story has been told so many times—the poor child of an alcoholic grows into his own alcoholism as stupidly and surely as mold in damp and rotten cellars. For seven years it’s like I was blacked out. I think back to one of my caseworkers when I was a foster kid, how, like so many adults in my life, she crossed lines of appropriateness, and she did so by befriending me as an equal. She told me in her forties after her first divorce she was drunk for two years. At that time, I tried to imagine how that was possible, measuring it against what I knew about Dick and my mother’s drunkenness, which while chronic and spilling on for years, was broken up by bouts of sobriety here and there.
“Nope. I was always drunk. Not a dry day in sight,” she said. We were in her apartment, behind heavy drapes lit by yellow lamplight.
She was a lifeguard back then. “I don’t know how I did it, up on the stand, with my little water bottle filled with booze.”
I pictured her head back and arm gracefully draped over her forehead to block out the sun.
Was there a sun for me?
“Be careful what you wish for,” mom said when I told her I wanted Dick to die. She did not tell me it was wrong, just that the wish might have repercussions. I knew that all negative magic you put out in the world came back to you threefold.
“Well, you won’t leave him,” I said. It was winter, and we were driving to the nursing home.
“I told you, we can’t right now. Do you have the money to move us?” Her window was down just enough to let the smoke from her cigarette escape and the windows were all starting to fog.
So much of my childhood was spent waiting in the car for my mother. She took me everywhere, because we of course never talked about it, but we knew it was better for me to be with her than alone with Dick at the house. She would go to the nursing home to pick up her check, or ask for an advance, or to get her schedule. And I would sit in the passenger seat, listening to the radio with my eyes closed, and trying to soak up the heat of the sun, keeping all the doors locked until she came back.
Or, she was in Static’s house, asking to borrow money. Static was an old man who was retired and lived alone—never a wife, nor children. He drove a yellow station wagon and was always slowly doing laps all around our tiny town, gazing out through dark sunglasses under his baseball cap, wearing overalls with no shirt on underneath. He smiled his toothless smile, waving and winking at the girls.
Mom would stop by his house if she saw his car was there, and go in for half an hour, and come back with money. She told me what happened. She’d go in and chat with him for a little while, making sure she didn’t sit down. She’d eventually ask him if he could spot her some money for gas and cigarettes, and if he had it he’d give it to her. They both knew mom would not pay him back.
In the car, I stared at his house, trying to imagine what it looked like inside, knowing that I would never be able to see inside, where all the lights were off.
“Oscar’s in the car waiting, so I’d better go,” she’d say, and I learned my place as a tool, a protection. On the way out, he’d go in for the hug, and mom would not fight it—he’d slide his hand down the back of her jeans, or cup and squeeze her breast. Once he licked her neck.
“He’s just a dirty old man who’s lonely. But he still gets that Social Security check, and he can’t have enough use for all of it on his own,” she said.
I need to tell you how Dick never hit me, how even when he yelled at me, and told me he wanted me to get run over by a Mack truck and watch my prepubescent body spread out on the pavement under all those tires, that he never struck me, he did not pull me around by my arm, which was not almost yanked out of its socket. When he told me I was worthless, that I didn’t have the body of someone who deserved respect, he did not slap, kick, choke, or punch me. This is true.
Yet, to say Dick did not hit me is not to say that he did not touch me—I was never a stranger to his hands. It is this part of the story I cannot master, the section I cannot own—is sexual abuse real if I can’t remember it clearly, but just the way it made me feel? Is this kind of abuse, if buried for years and years, the kind that can be erased by my own violent behavior? What does it mean that a memory I have is being called into the bathroom, Dick naked and in the tub, and then what comes next is just a blankness?
I cannot see myself without the burning light of rage. As such an angry child, it was easy enough to kill Dick—I sealed his fate at dusk in our driveway, under the large cedar tree. All the other ways I’d thought of doing it were too convoluted and involved. I once kept a black widow spider alive in a jar with plans to eventually put the spider in his sock, or release it on his body as he slept after mom went to work. I’d read online that this was a fool-proof and untraceable way to murder. I wanted to push him down the stairs, but was afraid he’d live through it, newly armed with the knowledge that I’d done it. I kept a dagger I’d found in an abandoned house hidden in my room, though I knew that if I were to use the dagger, it would’ve been only in immediate and unmediated defense—even for him I could not imagine planning to and then cutting into flesh.
In the driveway I was alone, just me and my years of aching for his death. I had a bucket of clay I’d collected from the ditch near the opening of the culvert and a kitten I’d taken from the litter in the barn that sat unused near our house. And, most importantly, I had a piece of newspaper neatly folded to contain his hair, which I had kept in my room for months, waiting for the right time to utilize it. It felt so wicked and right that he had willingly given me his own hair. Once after he shaved his beard, in a rare gesture, he’d thought of me and saved it, because he figured I could use it for one of the dolls I made. When he had inspected one that I had glued chunks of my own hair on, he seemed genuinely fascinated. He’d asked me what it meant that none of the dolls I made had faces. It was because I did not know how to give them faces.
The spell I used for his death was not one I had learned from any book. It was a feeling I steered toward, like storm chasers after a tornado. I had planned on killing the kitten, because I had read that for this kind of magic, blood was the dangerous and necessary ingredient. I had killed a kitten before, accidentally while trying to save it—it had been sickly and abandoned in the garage, with so much mucus built up and hardened on its face it could not open its eyes and was barely breathing. There were maggots just beginning to hatch and feed when I found it. I didn’t know how to help it, and mom told me to just leave it alone, as nature had already taken its course when the maggots showed up. I dipped the kitten in a bucket of water and cleaned its face as much as I could. It was the first and only cat I’ve washed that did not, could not, mind the water. Later that night the cat died. Dick wouldn’t let me bring it in the house, so, still damp, it froze to death outside.
I thought of that dead, frozen kitten as I held the live one, the only kitten in the litter tame enough to let me catch it, and I could not kill it. I thought of the time I did not catch our cat Pantera when I had been throwing her up in the air, and how I still had probably not been forgiven for hurting her like that. So, I cut my own finger and used my blood in the bucket with the clay and Dick’s hair. I visualized him leaving my life harder than anything I had ever visualized before as I stirred. I tried not to call for his death explicitly at first, but eventually I named it. I thought of his death over and over, of his heart stopping, his body going gaunt, his mouth falling open and jawbone dropping from his face. I pictured him in that bathtub in the bathroom, slowly being pulled underwater, arms and legs thrashing and fighting until he eventually went still, and the water calmed.
The spell didn’t take much more than this—I took the new clay mixture and made a small bowl out of it, let it dry and harden in the sun the next day, and fed Dick mulberries from it. He had always thought I was peculiar, so I knew it would be no cause for concern. Then, I waited for the full moon—the Strawberry Moon, the smallest moon of the year—and I took the bowl outside and smashed it with the poll of a rusted axe under the moonlight, then collected and threw the dust of it, like ashes, into the loudest part of the creek.
When the police came to get my mother to identify the body I was not surprised, not sad, not even happy, but I was free. There was no autopsy—a known drunk and drug addict like him did not require one, and who was there to ask for one? Certainly not my mother, already being pulled toward her next grand exit.
“His heart exploded,” they told us. And that was enough.
I wondered what was the threefold return on murder?
In New York, I found a seat on the crowded train and opened my book. A young girl, maybe six, and her father walked on and the girl sat down next to me. I thought of offering my seat to her father, but was thankful he had already walked a few feet from me, facing away, before I weighed how good of a person I felt like being against the ache in my feet. The young girl had black hair down the length of her back, and she held a tangled chunk of it in her hand just far out enough away from her body that it rested on my arm. I felt guilty as soon as I gave her a dirty look I knew she didn’t deserve.
“Dad,” she called out to her tired father, who did not look her way.
“Dad, if it’s broken, you have to fix it!” she whined in a voice that sounded younger than she looked. In my periphery, I could tell she held something in her tiny hand, but could not tell what it was since I didn’t look up from my book, though I wasn’t reading anymore. Her young voice bellowed again, and in my annoyance, I felt a primordial unity with the father, who continued to ignore her. She said it a few more times, and the father came over and angrily whispered something in Spanish, and she went silent.
A seat opened up across from me, and he sat. Alone, between me and a middle-aged woman wearing bright red lipstick, the girl began to fall asleep. At first, I was glad she finally shut up, because I felt like a bad person the more my hatred—should I say hatred? Yes, hatred—grew for her as she continued to make noise beside me. However, as she swayed, eyes-closed, with the rocking of the train, she nodded and jerked awake when she hit either me or the woman. She leaned on both of us back and forth, and I was angry I couldn’t respond to her with the disgusted shoulder jerk I would’ve with an adult who couldn’t stay awake and upright next to me. I wondered if I hated her more or myself for having these thoughts.
Though I still could not bring myself to look at the little girl, I looked to the woman with the lipstick to see how she was handling this asshole of a child sleeping on her, oscillating between us. She was looking down at her, smiling, with a smudge of red on her front tooth. Still across from us, the father started whistling loudly in short bursts every time the girl bobbed and she lurched awake and looked over at him. The whistling grew more irksome than the girl. I resented him for betraying the unspoken agreement that there should be no whistling on the train, and that this whistling was an egregiously inappropriate way to interact with a child to begin with.
A man with a blonde beard sitting next to the father traded seats with the girl so she could lean on her father, and I thought, this is the compassion I assumed I wanted to possess, but witnessing it now, I know I’m only grateful to the benefit it provides me in situations like this. Lucky was I this man cared enough about these two strangers to stop them from leaning on my shoulder and whistling in my ear, and yes, I know I’m making it about me, but when am I not?
I could look at the girl easily now, her black hair spread out like thick ink on her father’s shoulder, and she was comfortable. I saw what she had in her hand—a tulip, snapped at the stem. Her father leaned back against the window and closed his eyes, and, dozing, they were like a male Madonna and Child. He was barely taller than she, and I remembered being small in the third grade, when all the girls were so tall because puberty hit them like a two-by-four before it came for the boys.
I saw myself in the girl. This wasn’t surprising, because what was I forever looking for in others if it wasn’t some shadow of me—either who I was or who I wanted to be? But in this girl, I couldn’t tell which. I felt the longing she had when she wanted her father to fix the tulip, felt the weight of youthful exhaustion. I felt myself shrink down to her size, and smaller still, back through years of growth until I was nothing. Then, still on the train, around me tulips sprouted, shooting up through the floor, on the seats between people’s legs, through the windows, and they bloomed around me, pressing against my face, so many tulips—millions of yellow, white, red, and purple petals blocking my vision, filling my ears, my nose. I screamed, and they filled my mouth and I began to choke. I pulled at the tulips with my hands, ripping through the soft meat of them with my clawing fingers. And just as quickly as they appeared, they began to dry and shrivel, browning and disappearing. My vision pulled upward and away from the train, and I looked down and saw myself inside, next to a man in all black, only I did not have a father there to whistle me awake, so I fell asleep on this stranger, a stranger who hated me more than I even hated myself, and I never woke again.
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"Untitled (Spring)" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.