Browsing Tag

truth

Guest Posts, Fiction Fridays

The Attorney – Fiction

March 4, 2022
boat

Some Fourth of July, huh? I’m glad you called when you did. My timeshare is only a few houses down…get a towel, man. You’re still dripping.

So, to confirm, you have no recollection of what happened after you took the boat out with your niece?

I know, I know, slow down. Let me think. I need to work this out in my head so we—everyone—has their story straight. You told me over the phone that your wife doesn’t know anything. Not the whole thing, at least. That’s good. We don’t need anything else from her, so long as she doesn’t slip outside your alibi—if you need one, of course. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Did you say you often lend your boat out to family? Like your brother-in-law? Was he in town last night? Ah—I forgot—he’s in Bristol for the holiday. What about the others, do they sail too?

Hey, it’s not like we’re implicating anyone. That’s not what I do. I work with plausible deniability. We’re just seeding reasonable doubt, that’s all. It’s my job. Do you want to come out on the other end of this? If you do, you’ll listen to me.

Right now, if they suspected anything of you, all the evidence would be circumstantial. Anyone in your family could’ve taken that boat out last night. Son, cousin, sister. Your niece might have gone out there all by herself, came back, and took a bus to wherever she came from. She used to be so into sailing back in high school if I remember correctly. How many sets of keys do you have…four? Well, I only see three. Someone must’ve taken them, understand? You see where I’m going now?

When they ask about the boat, don’t even relinquish to the possibility of you going out on the lake. I mean, you were so drunk how could you know?

What was that? Fingerprints aren’t an issue, so put that out of your mind. Our real challenge is keeping it straight and keeping it quiet. We have no reason to be worried about anything yet. No body, no evidence of a struggle, no motive anyone’s aware of. Well, besides you and me. So, when the police arrive, don’t give them an inkling about what might have happened between you and her.

You don’t remember telling me, huh? You told me what went on between you two. That your niece seemed to forget all about it when she showed up for dinner out of the blue. That, before last night, you hadn’t seen her since she left for college. You seriously don’t remember telling me this? You need to watch your drinking from here on out. You told me enough about it anyway. Not like I wanted to hear it.

The sun is about to come up, and everyone will start wondering where she is, which even you don’t know. They’ll look around while you’re sleeping. When you finally come downstairs, be calm. Don’t be too sobby or too worried, alright? Call the police after you make your rounds. Check the shed, the guest house, pool house. Does she have any friends still in the area? Call your neighbors, even the bus depot. No one knows where she is. That’s the truth. That’s our truth. Last night could’ve been a dream, for all you know.

Back to the subject of the police—hey. Hey! I need you to focus. Look in the mirror. Look at yourself. You got this glassed-over look. It means you’re thinking about something and any two-bit cop, even around here, is going to figure out that you’re hiding something. I can tell you’re thinking about her right now. You’re replaying the situation—wait—is that her right there? The one with the little fish on the line. Huh, pretty. Hopefully, the press won’t catch wind, but if they do make sure they get this photo.

Okay, let me recap what you said over the phone. After dinner, you believe you two stayed up after everyone went to bed. She’d just turned 21, so there’s nothing wrong with having a nightcap with your niece. You all get to talking about everything. About what happened a few summers ago, how it wasn’t so bad. You two get to reminiscing, but then, all of a sudden, it was just like before: both of you, up later than everyone else, moon on the water, summer breeze. It wasn’t that bad, right? She was just a little younger, huh? I don’t care what you do behind closed doors, man, but you certainly had to think this would come back. I’m sure when she walked in, now in her twenties—a woman—it must’ve really sent you back. Having dinner, laughing, that rushing excitement of a shared secret with everyone around the table clueless to the truth. And then you two took the boat out—at least you think you did. Then it’s just…what? Black? Fuzzy? Well, that’s good. You don’t even know if you two had an argument. She was just gone. She just wasn’t on the boat anymore. But all you need to say is that you don’t definitively remember anything after your…let’s say second drink at the house.

Have you told your wife that those business trips were lies? That you’d come around here instead? Might be best if you did. I’m sure she’s wise to it anyway. I can imagine what she thought when she saw your face as your niece walked in to surprise you all. Like a shadow crawled into you. After your wife talks with the police, she should stay in her room, you know, bad lobster from last night. Keep her alone to keep her story together. The same goes for you too. Drill it into each other.

The sun’s coming up and I should go. Knowing your family, one of them is bound to be up for an early morning jog, and they shouldn’t see me yet. Get yourself together. Take a shower and snap yourself into the present. Got me?

When the police arrive, I’ll pop in like a concerned neighbor wondering about all the commotion. Stay calm. I’ll see you soon.

Matt Gillick is from Northern Virginia. He went to Providence College. He received his MFA from Emerson College in 2021. Find his other work in New Square, Sincerely Magazine, BOMBfire, and Newfound. He’s working on a novel about homelessness, domesticity, and September 11th.

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Antiracist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, Abuse, Letting Go, Mental Health

Yellow

November 10, 2019
smoking

By Kelly Wallace

I was still in love with my ex when I broke up with him over the phone late at night at the Hilton Garden Inn in Ithaca, NY. It was the first Sunday in June 2017. I was there for my friend’s 20th college reunion. My ex was making me question my sanity. I wasn’t telling my friends what was going on because I was ashamed. We argued for hours. We had tried therapy. It failed.

I had had enough.

According to an article titled “In An Emotionally Abusive Relationship? 5 Steps to Take” on the website Psych Central “…Is it me or him? You feel anxious around him, believing that somehow you can make things right again, you want to feel the love you did when the two of you first got together. Deep down, your biggest fear is that his opinions of you are right..that there really is something wrong with you, and you just may not be loveable the way you are.”

I was enough for myself.

***

We talked for hours in his kitchen and he made me pesto with the basil that was almost dead from his garden box. He referred to his ex, Stephanie, as “shitbag” when he told me about her. She was the mom of one of his students. He taught elementary school band in a suburb of Boston and retired at 40, a few years earlier. She had had her eye on him for a long time. When her daughter was done with band she swooped in. They met for coffee. She was still married. She told him she was divorcing soon. They started dating. Three years of them breaking up and getting back together should have been a red flag.

For me it was an invitation.

It’s August 2018, a little over a year after I have ended things with my ex. I’m on week two of vacation with my mom but take a side trip down to Boston to get away from the 250 sq. ft. cabin we are sharing on Sebago Lake in Maine. Throughout the trip Mom is coughing up a storm. In the morning. At night. It drives me bonkers. She has COPD and sounds like death.

She smoked for 15 years. 3 packs a day until she quit.

***

I am creepy.

On my side trip to Boston away from my Mom and her coughing I take another side trip-to Medway, Massachusetts, a rural town 45 minutes west of Bean town. It’s sleepy, woods, twisty two lane roads and ponds. My ex hated it and left to live in Portland, Oregon where I live. We live. We live on the same block. I don’t talk to him.

He stares at my driveway when friends come to visit and studies their cars. They come to the door saying the same thing over and over: “Did you know your ex was standing in his yard totally staring at me as I parked and got out of the car?”

“Yes.”

It’s beautiful in Medway. On the radio, the Dj asks: “how are you creepy? There’s something trending on Twitter about being creepy.” I think about calling into the radio station to tell them what I am doing but decide to pull over to the side of the road and use my notepad on my phone to write down what the DJ is talking about. This is perfect for a story.

***

My parents divorced almost 35 years ago. Dad is bald, 69 and glasses. He is home resting in Oregon after falling off a ladder and breaking his right shoulder and hip. He texts me: “Boston. My aunt so and so lives there. I haven’t been out that way in a long time.” He has so many aunts I can’t keep them straight.

He was in the hospital for two weeks undergoing intense physical therapy. Sometimes I feel like he is judging me but I don’t know. I don’t know what the what is. There’s something in me that wonders. He has yellow teeth. He’s a lawyer. There are no grey areas. He is black and white. Law and order.

Right before he fell I had a phone reading with a psychic. The psychic, Donna, kept talking about him in the past tense. I corrected her.

“But he’s alive.”

“I hate to tell you this dear, but, I’m talking to him from the other side.”

“What does that mean?”

“He will be passing soon.”

That was a year ago.

According to the AARP, the increased chance of older people dying after hip fractures has long been established in a number of studies. Now a new study has found that breaking other major bones also may lead to higher mortality rates for older adults.

***

My ex was a heavy smoker. When he quit smoking twenty years ago he was living at home in Medway with his parents. He started chewing Nicorette, that terrible gum. His Dad worked for a pharmaceutical company and would bring home bags and bags of it. He became addicted to the gum and then had to wean himself off it.

One day my ex’s dad came home from work and my ex was searching in the couch cushions for a piece of that gum, in case one had fallen out of his pocket.

“Why don’t I just give you a piece of that gum?” His dad said.

“No dad,” he turned an easy chair over and was searching under it. “This is what I need to do to stop chewing that gum.”

According to WebMD, “Most users of nicotine gum…see it as a short-term measure. GlaxoSmithKline, marketers of Nicorette, advises people to “stop using the nicotine gum at the end of 12 weeks,” and to talk to a doctor if they “still feel the need” to use it. But that guideline hasn’t kept some people from chomping on it for many months and even years.

My ex’s childhood home in Medway is two story, purple with a horseshoe driveway and even more rural than I imagined. I drive to the end of the cul-de-sac, put the car in park and look at the front windows. That’s where he was hunting for the Nicorette under the couch. I drive away because I’m creepy. A half mile away there’s a “Stephanie Drive.” His ex’s name. I pull over to write the detail on my notepad. Another perfect idea for the story.

***

My fourteen-year old formerly feral cat, Billie, died two months before that night we broke up on the phone in Ithaca, NY. Billie would go over to my ex’s house on her own and spend time there. I had to get another cat right away. The house felt lonely without her. My ex and I went to Purringtons and he found a tuxedo with a little white star on his head staring out the window at all the people walking by on MLK, Jr. Blvd. I put a hold on the cat with the star on his head, Starboy, and took video of him playing with a Donald Trump catnip toy. My ex was coughing in the background and talking excessively. He was always talking so much with his dull yellow teeth. They were yellow because he smoked for over a decade and never went to the dentist.

I said something to him and sounded annoyed in the video.

According to the website Empowered by Color, “…The color yellow can be anxiety producing as it is fast moving and can cause us to feel agitated.”

My teeth were yellow after a friend committed suicide and I started smoking a pack a day for almost two months. I quit shortly afterward. Cold turkey. No Nicorette gum.

Starboy’s eyes are green.

My ex eventually did quit the gum.

***

The motorcycle cops started going by my house escorting the hearses following closely behind. It became a regular Sunday morning routine along with me reading self-help books with Starboy and his green eyes curled up next to me on the couch. There’s a cemetery nearby. I would tear up as the cars drove by with their flashers. Yellow. Blink. Yellow. Blink. I was determined to be different.

Billie’s eyes were yellow.

My house is green.

***

After she is done coughing Mom goes into the kitchen in our cabin in Maine and rustles plastic bags, pushes buttons on the microwave, talks to herself and clinks spoons while she eats her breakfast. “What are you doing in there old lady?” I wonder. Her ocd and need for order marching her around like a drill Sargent. I get up from reading in bed. She separates crookneck squash from the trash into a plastic bag. It’s not for compost. It’s to keep it from smelling up the regular trash she tells me.

***

I text my best friend back in Portland about the weird food separation. “She’s crazy,” she texts me back. I probably shouldn’t use that term to describe my mom. According to the article, ‘Personal Stories: Don’t Call Me Crazy,’ on the NAMI website…”Mental illness is an illness, even though some choose not to accept it. ‘Crazy’ has been a word to portray those who suffer with mental illness as dangerous, weak, unpredictable, unproductive and incapable of rational behavior or relationships. It is a word used without any serious thought or consideration… It is a word that can be used to criticize an individual or group, keep a stigma in place or, when used in commercials, sell cars, sweets and even peanut butter.”

***

While I drive around Medway I hear my ex in my head telling me I’m crazy. He told me things like, “northeastern women had an edge.” He didn’t need to tell me that. I had spent considerable time on the East Coast. I knew about that edge. I had friends in New York. I had plans to move there at one point. He said I wouldn’t survive in New York because I wasn’t assertive enough.

“Bobby, from Leominster,” The DJ says in his thick Boston accent. “What’s the creepiest thing you have ever done?”

“For a while I was collecting corn snakes,” Bobby from Leominster pauses. “That didn’t really attract the ladies.”

“Ugh,” the DJ says. “That’s pretty weird.”

This is perfect for a story.

***

During my verbal fights with Mom when I was in high school she would say “you’re just like your father.” I didn’t know what it meant except that I was bad. I was always the bad one. I carried a yellow blanket and sucked my thumb until 10. I was the bad one for reporting that Dad’s dad, my paternal grandfather, molested me. My grandparents hid the blanket in their closet. Dad’s silence. The paternal family’s silence made them complicit. The police searched my grandparent’s house and found the blanket.

***

My paternal grandmother allegedly called me “Crazy Kelly.” Whenever we argued my ex called me crazy. After we broke up I wondered what nickname he had come up with for me.

Crazy?

Crazy Shitbag.

***

My ex told me he had a lot of projects he wanted to tackle when he bought his house in Oregon. He wanted to install a new roof himself on the back side of his house. “I don’t want you doing that,” I told him when we were together. I didn’t want him breaking a bone or ending up in the hospital.

A year after we broke up I saw shingles being loaded onto the roof of his house.

I didn’t care if he broke a bone.

He deserved it.

***

I was a smoker for 5 years.

My mom smoked for twenty years.

My ex smoked for 15.

My dad never smoked.

I wasn’t going to end up like any of them.

 

Kelly Wallace developed a writing style that both roots in the moment and peels back the layers of human nature at the Pinewood Table writers group led by award-winning authors Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose. Kelly’s writing honors include publications in VoiceCatcher and Perceptions magazines, fellowships at the Summer Fishtrap Gathering and the Attic Institute, and residencies at Hypatia-in-the-Woods. A graduate of Wells College in Aurora, New York, and an entrepreneur in Portland, Oregon, Kelly avidly photographs odd sights while out driving for her day job. Kelly is an active and recognizable member of the Portland writing community, consistently engaging with hundreds of readers and authors of all genres and levels of writing.

Upcoming events with Jen

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THE ALEKSANDER SCHOLARSHIP FUND

 

 

Guest Posts, depression, Eating Disorders/Healing, Writing & The Body

A Tale of 19 Wet Towels or How I Failed to Shed My Skin

March 23, 2017
towel

By Ella Wilson.

1. Birth

Every time in my life that I have had the opportunity – that is to say I have been in the presence of a huge coming or going or leaving or starting, a massive adding on or taking away – every time I have had the chance to step out, to leave behind, to shed, to transform, to butterfly, to snake – every time I could have showered off the detritus of some time in my life that lay heavy on my skin. Every time I could have grown, instead I wet-toweled.

2. Starting school

Here is how you wet-towel. You take the thing you might have stepped out of, a skin, a time, a loss, a tiny pair of pants, a hit in the face. You take that thing and you wrap yourself in it.

3. Suicide attempt age 12

You shiver at first because the wet towel makes you cold. The weight of it makes you slow. After a few days you start to smell old and nothing seems like a very good idea.

4. Puberty

Shame is sticky and the antidote to transformation.

5. Losing my virginity

Shame tells you to hide, unfortunately the tools it gives you for hiding promote shame on shame. Shameless self promotion.

6. Leaving school

When you would rather not be seen it is preferable to hide in anything you can find.

7. Leaving home

8. Getting a job

9. My father dying

When my father died I did not notice. This is not because I was not paying attention exactly, in fact I paid so much attention, maybe too much. Nursing him from when I was 13 to 22. But something can become normal, like someone being ill, like thinking someone won’t really die. So I slept on his hospital floor for months. I swabbed his throat with little pink sponges. I knew the nurses names. He died. I wanted to stay on the floor. I wasn’t ready not to have a father. I wore his clothes. I didn’t cry. I did not become fatherless. I just became personless.

10. Moving to America

11. Being hospitalized for anorexia

12. Getting married Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Surviving

Gravity is Denser Here, Everything Sticks to You

January 23, 2017
message

By Melissa Joan Walker

At Country Fair Apartments, I come out at night and stand in the hall, 4 years old, and watch my dad and his friends, smoking a bong. My dad strains forward in his chair, eyes excited, and yells at the fight on the TV pushed against the dingy white wall, the rabbit ears wrapped with tin foil for good reception. He lifts the foot-tall purple bong to his mouth, then cleans the bowl with a long metal prong with a curl on the end of it. His index finger grabs that curl and pushes through the hardened resin. Loosens it to smoke, then repacks the bowl from the baggie. Says, “Bud?” in a strange voice and his friends, Ed and Maury, lean back into the sofa and laugh.

Ed, tall, thin, Native American blood, with a bony nose that makes him look like Abraham Lincoln to me, wears a leather biker jacket with no shirt. His skin shines with sweat. Maury is black and for decades he will be one of my favorite of dad’s friends. They all laugh when dad makes jokes about my body, but Maury is the only one who says, “That’s fucked up,” and ducks his head, glancing in my direction. Later he gets pudgy after he has to stop drinking and go on antipsychotics but now he holds a can of Miller Lite loose in his hand and leans forward on the couch, and covers his mouth with his arm as his laughter turns to coughing.

Ed is languid, his movements slow, his chin-length hair pushed over to the side, one lock of hair falls across his bony forehead and into his eyes, he leans back on the sofa. He is my first crush, this beautiful man. His eyes close and he smiles. Moves his hand up to his face and rubs an itch like he is moving through water. He wears jeans and black work boots. His motorcycle is parked outside, in the edge of the grass, at the edge of the parking lot. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Beauty Hunting

Truths To Live By

December 18, 2016
truths

By Moin Qazi

Our great universe is flooded with a galaxy of wonders. It is a vast and unique canvas exhibiting a rich and kaleidoscopic diversity of fascinating objects. Spread all across the planet are different creatures with unique traits and characteristics. The world beckons us incessantly to savour its rich beauty and explore its endless charm. Surely, life around is so amazing, we ought to hold fast. It is wondrous, full of beauty and splendour and laden with such amazing charm that it permeates the radiance through every pore of God’s own earth. We are always amazed by this great mystery but often fail to appreciate it in the heat and bustle of our daily life. All too often we recognise it in hindsight or in our backward glance when we remember what a spectacle it held for us and then suddenly realise that it is no more. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, parenting

Lying To My Son

July 6, 2016
parenting

By Paula Younger

When I was ten, my cousin told me, “Did you know Grandma is really our step-grandma?” I am the youngest of four in a Catholic family of loving people who tend to omit important information or lie to avoid discomfort. But my cousin, who didn’t follow my immediate family’s rule, leaned in and said our mothers’ mother died from cancer when they were young. This seemed suspiciously like the time my older siblings convinced me to take a bite of a banana peel, but my cousin convinced me with a detail. She grabbed a strand of her hair and said, “She had blonde hair, like me.”

I pestered Mom with questions until she showed me pictures of the grandmother I never knew, but Mom still didn’t open up about our family secrets.

When I was twelve, the same cousin said our uncle Frank had AIDS. It was 1988, when our Catholic community saw AIDS as a punishment from God. I waited for Mom to tell me. I even wondered if my cousin had been wrong, but then Mom took my siblings and I to our uncle’s house in Houston. Uncle Frank had been our fun, young uncle, ready with gifts and adventures. But his bones were visible beneath his skin. Black bags hung beneath his hollowed eyes. Lesions mottled his pasty arms. My sisters were eighteen and seventeen, my brother fifteen. They helped our uncle and his partner when they could. They didn’t act bored even though we rarely left our uncle’s house. Their normal too-good-for-everything expressions had been dropped. They avoided eye contact with me. They knew and had known for a while.

I cornered Mom. “When were you going to tell me he has AIDS?” Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Sexual Assault/Rape, Surviving, Young Voices

From One Survivor To Another

June 11, 2016
writing

By Courtney Cook.

When I think about being raped, I think of mosquitos. I think of the sound of a buzzing street lamp. I think of sweat, of sand, of silence. And I think of the women on the tennis court nearby, blissfully unaware of my presence a mere fifty feet away.

There are no bicyclists in my story; there is just me, a girl barely 15, and him, not much older. I am so grateful there are heroes in your story. You never deserved what happened to you, but you did deserve all the kindness in the world that those men gave to you in your most vulnerable moment. I wish they’d never had to extend such kindness, but if something so horrific had to happen, I am glad good men found you. I am so thankful for all of the good men.

 

Two weeks before I was raped, my future rapist was pulling me away from a party. It was Halloween; I was dressed as a sailor. I can’t remember what he was dressed up as, but I can tell you the way his arms felt wrapped around my wrists as he drug me away from the party. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Life, Trust, Truth

Truth and Consequences

April 15, 2016

By Amelia Zahm

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”

“The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control.”
–Adrienne Rich

I sat down to write about lies. More specifically, I intended to write about your lies, all the millions of tiny and gigantic untruths you spun into a glistening web around you and me. I set out to tug on those fibers, to peel back the sticky net and expose the raw, pink flesh of truth hiding underneath, to reveal you. I want to bring your greatest fear to life. I want the world to see behind your mask, and I want to be the one who pulls it off. That’s the meanness in me.

But I can’t hold onto meanness the way you do. I don’t have the stomach for it. Anger and jealousy flash through me, blazing then burning out. I’ve learned to clean up the debris, compost it, and move on. I’ve seen what holding a grudge can do. During the twenty years of our friendship, I watched you smolder with resentment and envy when you felt slighted, upstaged, or challenged. I just never believed you’d turn that on me. Continue Reading…

Anxiety, courage, Fear, Guest Posts, The Body

Body Work

February 3, 2016
anxiety

By Lizz Schumer

I licked the blood off my finger without thinking. To taste what I was made of. My ear had left blood on my fiance’s T-shirt, and we didn’t know why. Startled, I stuck my finger in and considered the source. Every unconscious action is a self-discovery mission. Everything is a symptom of a syndrome caused by something that happened before.

Or I’ve done too much therapy, or not enough.

A scratch inside, turns out. There are answers everywhere, if we know the right questions.

“You don’t have an off switch,” my mother told me once. An inbred love of excess. I write like that, too. Voracious for language, asking the page questions and answering them back, and again, I ford down pages like rivers. My essays explore writing as if the answer is in the language, wandering downs sentences like wormholes, squinting into the darkness ostensibly swirling inside my own mind.

William Faulkner once wrote, “I know what I think when I read what I’ve written.” Faulkner’s luxuriance reads that way. I wonder what answers “The Sound and the Fury” gave him. If he ever found the end of the tunnel. His language leaves me lost for it, looking up from dog-eared pages to find sunset where afternoon had been and I’m bereft of time and place, belonging stolen by the universe imagination created. Through the looking glass words steal me, and I emerge mystified by my own world. My chest always seizes when I return to my own world. It’s been hostile since I can remember, demons hiding in the shadows collecting at the corners of my mind, if nowhere else.

Anxiety first chained me to its bosom when I was a child, facing the world for the first time. Yanked from my mother’s womb at 29 weeks, my parents signed a form to authorize an experimental treatment to get my little lungs to inflate. Doctors pumped cow cells into my body with a tiny, blue balloon and I gasped into the world. They transferred me to a clear plastic box for the first few months of my life, where I lived under glass for all to see, poked, prodded and examined every minute of my early days. Electronic blips and buzzing replacing those gentle coos of a normal human’s first hours; frenetic saviors where peace belongs. My baby album is Frankenstein, pages of my body engulfed to the nipples and knees by the smallest diaper they had, an improbably large needle sticking out of my skull. Tubes and wires snake from every orifice, and in some snapshots, a cartoonish hand sneaks into the frame: My mother. On an early video, my father slides his wedding ring over my foot and onto my upper thigh. My first garter, shackle.

Throughout my early years, I wailed and screamed before every class play, every concert, my belly full of a fire I didn’t understand. The idea of all those eyes set me alight, in a way I loved and hated all at once. Special demon, imperfect specimen under glass, the stage enticed and terrified every enigmatic cell. I shook and shattered with excitement my tiny body couldn’t contain. Teenagers can’t rail like children, so I painted my eyes black and rolled inward, writing feverishly through study halls, math class, after school. Pouring that shaking, stuttering soul onto pages black with melodramatic ink, I discovered the roads language could lead me down, the salve of pouring my quivering heart onto the page.

My earliest trauma roots in me like I always thought a watermelon seed would, growing in my belly and snaking through my limbs, into my brain and as I trace the language of my body back, back, back, I reach the edge of that glass box and see the baby inside, squirming under impossibly bright lights. Her head too big for her spindly body, I wonder if she misses swaddling, if that nakedness is why she loves to be held back together in flighty moments, if there’s comfort in breathing deeply after those first, desperate balloon-choked gulps. If everything in us is nurture and nature, if we’re all products of what we were going to be as much as what our worlds shaped us to become, those first few days seem all the more desperate. And yet, the days, weeks, years after fall into a sort of marching order, a tenuous thread stretching from gasping baby to screaming child, scribbling teen and shaking writer with her hand on a pen she trusts to uncover truths her scar-tissued heart has buried.

How much of me is that baby in a box is still me, squirming under the probing eyes and fingers of doctors, fellow patients who know me no better than myself which is to say, they don’t. Not except in the medical sense we know our flesh, our bones hold us together when emotion leaves us languid.

I wonder.lizz headshot

Lizz Schumer is a writer, artist and freelance editor living and working in Buffalo, N.Y. Her creative nonfiction and hybrid poetry centers around the effects of environment, economic climate and sociology on the self. Her first book, “Buffalo Steel” was released by Black Rose Writing in 2013, and she is currently at work on her second book, “Biography of a Body.” Lizz‘s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Connotation Press, The Manifest-Station, Minerva Rising, Love Your Rebellion, Robocup Compendium, Wordgathering, Salon.com and many others. She can be found online at lizzschumer.com, @eschumer, Facebook.com/authorlizzschumer or via email to schumeea@gmail.com

 

Join founder Jen Pastiloff for a weekend retreat at Kripalu Center in Western Massachusetts Feb 19-21, 2016. Get ready to connect to your joy, manifest the life of your dreams, and tell the truth about who you are. This program is an excavation of the self, a deep and fun journey into questions such as: If I wasn’t afraid, what would I do? Who would I be if no one told me who I was? Jennifer Pastiloff, creator of Manifestation Yoga and author of the forthcoming Girl Power: You Are Enough, invites you beyond your comfort zone to explore what it means to be creative, human, and free—through writing, asana, and maybe a dance party or two! Jennifer’s focus is less on yoga postures and more on diving into life in all its unpredictable, messy beauty. Note Bring a journal, an open heart, and a sense of humor. Click the photo to sign up.

Join founder Jen Pastiloff for a weekend retreat at Kripalu Center in Western Massachusetts Feb 19-21, 2016.
Get ready to connect to your joy, manifest the life of your dreams, and tell the truth about who you are. This program is an excavation of the self, a deep and fun journey into questions such as: If I wasn’t afraid, what would I do? Who would I be if no one told me who I was?
Jennifer Pastiloff, creator of Manifestation Yoga and author of the forthcoming Girl Power: You Are Enough, invites you beyond your comfort zone to explore what it means to be creative, human, and free—through writing, asana, and maybe a dance party or two! Jennifer’s focus is less on yoga postures and more on diving into life in all its unpredictable, messy beauty.
Note Bring a journal, an open heart, and a sense of humor. Click the photo to sign up.

 

March 13 NYC! A 90 minute class for women, girls and non-gender conforming folks (we encourage teens 16 and up) and all levels that will combine flow yoga, meditation, empowerment exercises, connection and maybe, just maybe, a dance party. This will be a class to remind you that you are enough and that you are a badass. It will be fun and empowering and you need no yoga experience: just be a human being. Let’s get into our bodies and move! Be warned: This will be more than just a basic asana class. It will be a soul-shifting, eye-opening, life-changing experience. Come see why Jen Pastiloff travels around the world and sells out every workshop she does in every city. This will be her last class before she has her baby so sign up soon. Follow her on instagram at @jenpastiloff and @girlpoweryouareenough. Jen is also doing her signature Manifestation workshop in NY at Pure Yoga Saturday March 5th which you can sign up for here as well (click pic.)

March 13 NYC! A 90 minute class for women, girls and non-gender conforming folks (we encourage teens 16 and up) and all levels that will combine flow yoga, meditation, empowerment exercises, connection and maybe, just maybe, a dance party. This will be a class to remind you that you are enough and that you are a badass. It will be fun and empowering and you need no yoga experience: just be a human being. Let’s get into our bodies and move! Be warned: This will be more than just a basic asana class. It will be a soul-shifting, eye-opening, life-changing experience. Come see why Jen Pastiloff travels around the world and sells out every workshop she does in every city. This will be her last class before she has her baby so sign up soon. Follow her on instagram at @jenpastiloff and @girlpoweryouareenough.
Jen is also doing her signature Manifestation workshop in NY at Pure Yoga Saturday March 5th which you can sign up for here as well (click pic.)