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. She chose the most expensive option, then rubbed away drips with a microfiber cloth. The rims are blinging, bass bumping, and she’s cruising a smooth five over the speed limit.
The white woman is on her way to get her daughter from the private school where she recently enrolled, transferred quickly and quietly once she found herself within the crosshairs of a seasoned bully. Though only a grade above her daughter, the bully was almost three years older, held back twice for chronic absenteeism, according to local gossip. The youngest of a large and notoriously violent family, she’d seen things no kid should ever see - the kind of gal you’d feel sorry for until she knocks out your front 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 inquire how she’s coping, she just laughs and says she’s in mama bear mode. The laugh is to assure her friends that she’s upset, but not venomously so. Though this girl has a significant history of violent aggression, the white woman explains, she is still just a teen deserving of help. The phrase “restorative justice” gets tossed around, and everyone feels better for saying it, even if it doesn’t happen.
In every conversation about her daughter’s bully, the white lady is careful to mention her family’s class and racial privilege, because without doing so, her story would fail harder than half of the kids at the public school, where trauma trudges through the hallways with clenched fists looking for an excuse to use them.
Violent fights are the norm, as well as poor communication, teacher burnout, and failed policy, longstanding problems that have transformed the school into a gladiator pit, 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. Then, an ass-beating between classes, or better yet, just beyond the edge of school property, so the aggressor can avoid suspension and keep coming to school to eat. 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.
“I know, I know, the system, not the individual,” she assures an administrator, who narrows her eyes when the white woman slips and says it’s unfair this student is making school an unsafe place for her kid. The administrator uses the word “trauma” a dozen times when explaining the challenges faced by the district, and when the white woman asks whether being threatened at school is a form of trauma, the administrator differentiates between big T and little t trauma. What her daughter has experienced is little t. Bullies have been around forever, no? Her daughter is not coming to school hungry and unwashed, is she? Basic needs met?
The white woman blinks hard at this comparison. Swallows a hot lump. She’s ticked, but minding her manners. The administrator notes this rare showing of parental restraint and offers an olive branch. “Listen,” she says, and leans forward, lowering her voice. “Our hands are tied.”
The administrator opens her mouth to say more, but the conversation ends abruptly when the walkie talkie attached to her belt squawks with an emergency. There’s a rapidly-escalating situation near the south stairwell, and she rushes out the door without a goodbye.
“You probably have a black pussy,” the bully said to the woman’s daughter, who just turned twelve. So many levels of complexity here, and the white lady does not know how to explain this one to her kid. She tries, but the conversation sputters before it’s shut down by her daughter, who already knows more than she does. “Mom,” she says, “please stop.” When she suggests that its no longer safe to stay at this school, her daughter pleads with her. She loves her friends and does not want to leave them. “I’ll get jumped one time,” she says, “and then she’ll move on to someone else.”
Welcome to the experience of being a poor woman of color, a friend says when she shares her concerns, and it confuses her, this response, but she does not ask for clarification. She thinks she might know what this friend is getting at, and a tiny part of her always wants to slap this friend, who is always saying things that sound like koans concocted by the radical chic. Instead, she compliments her new hair color. “Gorgeous,” she says, applying lip gloss. “It looks almost natural.”
Besides, for the past five years at work, the white woman has shared a lunch table with a small group of women, none of whom are white. Two of the women make at least double what she does, the other three, she suspects, much less. They’re a good cross section of their city, they joke, capable of solving any problem since they’re all moms. When she spills her worries about her daughter over lunch, the oldest of the group sets her fork down and shakes a finger in her face.
“Get your baby out of there.”
“Thank you,” the white lady sighs, 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 adds, 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 goes home that night and shows her daughter how to throw a right hook, which she learned from two years of Billy Blank’s Tae Bo. She holds up a cushion from the couch, and her daughter balks - she doesn’t want to hurt anyone, ever. ‘C’mon!” the white woman hollers from behind the cushion. “Smash it!”
Her daughter says no. She won’t.
“I’m so lucky to have the resources to consider an alternative,” the white lady whispers to a girlfriend while unrolling her yoga mat, since the alternative is accompanied by tuition. Though the strain of this has triggered migraines and the type of insomnia no visit to Sephora can hide from her collapsed face, her friend agrees with her. So lucky.
In addition to dealing with all this stress, the white woman is sad! Years ago, when her daughter was young, she had sworn to support public schools after listening to a podcast series sent to her from another white woman, whose political mission was to inform others about the drawbacks of charter schools. The conclusion was simple. Show up for public schools by sending your kids to them. Resist white flight. Keep the tax base healthy. Supporting public schools was her duty, according to her left-leaning friends, a few whose children went 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 had run into the girl’s bathroom and locked herself in a stall, tucking her feet on the toilet seat to hide. The worst part of it, she sobbed, was that she knew she couldn’t bear to stomp the bully’s head had she tried to crawl under the door, and the thought of being trapped in a small space with her caused a panic attack. She’d rather have her ass whooped in front of the entire school.
The white woman moved quickly and quietly. She got her baby out of there.
The memory of that horrible day makes her heart skip, so the white woman does three dragon breaths and tunes into Dr. Dre. Damn, 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 car crashes. Occasionally, a demented man, grinning and holding a knife over her neck while she sleeps. (This is because the white lady is histrionic, at times. And because she is white, lacks a certain type of imagination, or so 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 ass. And though she is vibeing hard right now in her shiny white 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 is so fucking sick of things! The white woman recalls the most recent public school board meeting, which she watched on her phone rather than attended in person. (The truth is, meetings involving the public often smell like cigarette smoke, and her nose is sensitive.)
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 wildly. The energy in the room deflated within seconds. There were so many vital things to discuss, but instead, those in attendance were forced to ride the rollercoaster of a mental health crisis. If hope was scant to begin with, now it was gone.
“That poor, poor man,” she reported back to her friends. “Absolutely heartbreaking.”
(The better word was galling, but she’s no idiot.)
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, cracking the window to temper a hot flash. Calm down, you dumb bitch, the white lady says to herself, since shame is practical.
She does another set of dragon breaths but can’t seem to stop perseverating on the school board meeting. The next public comment was even worse, and almost caused 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 haddock their way and crisp it up.
“Y’all look like nice enough people,” they addressed the board, before scolding them for not resembling the students in their district. (The school board is mostly white.) “Representation,” they breathed into the mic, almost pornographically, “matters.”
The white woman almost lost her shit. Are you fucking serious, she spat in the direction of her husband, her eye twitching. Is this person implying that it’s the job of these exhausted, underpaid board members to find their replacements?! For positions they were elected for?!
Unable to waste another second of her time, the white woman shut off the video, took a shower, and exfoliated her feet with some strange but effective tool that had been marketed to her on Facebook.
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. 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 smoking indo causes the red planet between her legs to spin - slow revolutions that radiate big heat. A memory from long ago swirls to the surface. The first time she kissed a woman, mouths 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 slows down to turn into the 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 bumpers. The white woman groans, but decides on optimism. Just a few weeks ago, when picking up her daughter after her first day, she could see the relief on her face as she climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s weird,” her daughter said, looking out the window at the stream of students pouring through the front doors. “I’m not even scared.”
It came out as an offhanded comment, but the white woman felt it like a stab to the heart. The sweet faces of her daughter’s friends, stuck at the public school, spin like a roulette wheel in her mind, and she prays to God that none of them get hurt.
Because what else but pray can 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.
She stares at the front doors, waiting for them to burst forth with tittering students, and thinks again of the twitchy man. The asshole with the patchy beard. Her daughter’s 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, everything’s okay, and takes a big breath, proud of how well she’s dealing.
A thought worms its way to the surface, and she sighs with annoyance. Man, does the white woman hate it 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 of dollars in damage before I got fed up and bought a trap to rehome it, but after taking to social media to ask whether melon outperformed apple as bait, a few 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 told. Released within two acres of an already-established groundhog, it would be forced to fight for territory or starve. Was the yard not the animal’s rightful home, as much as it was mine? Did I want the blood of an innocent animal on my hands?
I supposed 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 put chicken wire up; the groundhog dug under it. I bought a jug 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 the groundhog had caused in a few short months, I messaged a guy I knew from social media who was always posting about returning to his ancestral roots - a journey, he said, inseparable from establishing food sovereignty. I’d seen pictures of him enjoying groundhog tacos, and wrote to see if he’d like some more.
He was in.
An hour later, he pulled into my driveway and slid a metal spear from the backseat of his car. The groundhog had already been trapped, so things would be easy, he assured me. Up close, I noticed his spear was actually a rusted picket salvaged from a wrought iron gate.
Is that gonna work? I asked, brows raised.
The tip is kinda dull, he admitted, but it’s what I use since 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. He was digging around in the trunk for a plastic bag when the groundhog lifted its head from the pavement, making a gruesome attempt to drag itself away.
Dude! I yelled, jumping backwards. 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 still gnawed at the edges of my sleep, I wrote to He Who Carries A Dull Spear.
I’m freaking out about how much the groundhog suffered, I wrote. I should have said something and I didn’t, so I’m writing now to ask if you think there is a better way to harvest future groundhogs?
His answer was curt. He recommended that I consider what the groundhog’s death might have looked like had white men not extirpated native rattlesnakes and wolves. I should consider what it would have looked like if the groundhog was 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 freezer.
Sharpen your spear? I suggested, then snoozed him for 30 days.
*
I smudged every corner of my house, then I smudged my yard. Though I’d been told countless times that sage was not for white ladies, it was the only thing that helped.
*
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.
*
Groundhogs are clearly a nuisance for lots of 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 are waltzing into our public schools and brainwashing boys into thinking they’re girls.
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.
*
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 an extended 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?
Save it for the Republicans, my husband says.
*
Occasionally, the marm who lives in the unheated schoolhouse of my solar plexus scolds me, her voice thick with cobwebs: Think it’s time for jokes, while the planet floods and burns? While cities are razed and 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 marm, 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 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 in disbelief. 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 up to the homemade 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 - owned by both sides - makes me laugh. So clever!
*
The groundhog is gone, relocated to a 20-acre field of clover.
Settler-colonialist, I call my husband, who puts on a pair of thick leather gloves before opening the trap to release it. The groundhog’s ass, grown huge on my veggies, wobbles as it disappears into lush grass.
That’s not a term people use, my husband says, peeling off his gloves and tossing them in the backseat of the truck.
Infidel, I say, laying on the gas, speeding away before someone catches us.
*
I read: Generally, 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 students protest 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 babies, sickened 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, THAT’S 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 the preferred word if it’s 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 publish 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 15 minutes. It was the tenth-deadliest shooting in U.S. history.
While law enforcement searched for the shooter, the city remained suspended in terror. Blinds were drawn and doors were locked. Victim counts changed by the hour. Over social media, rumor outpaced fact. Parents tried their best to keep children distracted, telling jokes and performing melodramatic readings of silly books.
More! the kids begged, delighted by this unexpected 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 again, which no longer felt like our own.
*
Two months after the mass shooting, a local woman hoping to boost morale decided to move forward with the holiday event she hosted every December. Local businesses in the downtown would open their doors for an afternoon of holiday shopping, as they had in previous years. There’d be hot chocolate and handmade crafts, Christmas carols and cheese boards. After two months of unspeakable heartache it seemed a little warmth could go a long way. Struggling business owners desperate for connection and customers began advertising for the event. Excitement built hesitantly, then steadily.
On the day of the event, a group of 50 pro-Palestinian 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 in unison, 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.
Local residents who came out in support of the holiday event froze at the sight of the bloody caskets. Some heard the word “MURDER” reverberating off of buildings upon stepping out of their cars, turned right around, and drove home. At some point, a local florist asked the protestors to move up the street a little, 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, I overheard the woman who organized the holiday event say, tears streaming down her face. A lifelong supporter of organized protests, she did not feel this one would translate into support. In fact, just the opposite. At some point, she sat down on a stool and sobbed into her hands.
Later that evening, curious to know more about 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 they’d inevitably see on the street.
They achieved exactly what they were there to do, a woman commented on Facebook, in response to whether the visceral intensity of this protest was tone deaf to the reality of a city struggling to grieve eighteen stolen lives, including a 14 year old boy and his father. Make them uncomfortable, she wrote, and hit those complacent business owner’s right in the wallet.
*
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 end, took a big breath, and deleted it from my phone.
My friend was Black, gay, and cuttingly clever. His aesthetic was deliciously queer - the last time I’d seen him, he stepped off the bus in a pink denim skirt, his bare shoulders shining with sweat. He embraced me, leaving a slick of fruity lip gloss on my cheek.
My friend also happened to be a Christian missionary who’d been tortured in a prison camp for 10 months after crossing into North Korea to protest the inhumane treatment of children.
Our friendship - both before and after he was rescued from North Korea - included full days of adventuring, open-mouthed laughter, and removing 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.
But I’d grown fearful of his increasing aggression and isolation, and I was pissed that he’d refused all attempts at help. I was a new mom and trying to figure out how to stay sane with what seemed an unending scroll of responsibility paired with 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 cold ash.
*
When my 6th grade daughter came home from school and sat down to a snack I’d made - a bowl of yogurt and three huge strawberries - she reported that one of her teachers hates strawberries.
She hates everything about them, she said, teeth pink with their juice, even the smell!
Perhaps she’s 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 animal totems pisses people off, I explained.
He threw his head back and laughed so loud people stared.
Humans have found meaning in animals forever, he said, shaking his head, and 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 natural world and spiritual arts. Though Animal Speak received criticism for being “typical white shamanism,” 500,000 copies were sold in five years.
In an Adirondack chair by a raging 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 felled to Asiatic 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 the top of his laptop.
When a fire gets so hot, it consumes the smoke as fuel.
*
Social media baits outrage on every side, a fire burning hot on a diet of its own smoke.
*
I’ve lost the secondary burn. Smoke billows across the yard in choking gray sheets.
Reaching into brush pile to grab an armful of kindling, there’s movement in my periphery, then a high-pitched whistle. The groundhog bolts from the pile, heading straight for my feet, her black eyes shining.
Sidestepping her trajectory, my sneaker catches the edge of a canvas tub and I fall on my ass.
From this perspective, I can see two small heads peering from the hole she’s running for, and before I can stand up, she and her pups disappear into the burrow.
*
TIME TO BURN IT TO THE MOTHERFUCKING GROUND.
A sensation of heat pricks at my neck, limbs numb. My breath sounds funny.
Tears well up 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 clears and rewidens. There’s an emerald canopy of oak above my head, sunlight glittering through the spaces between leaves. Little spots of sun are cast across my body, their location shifting with the light breeze. My jaw lets go, hangs open. I must look like a doofus, staring into the tree tops with my mouth slung loose.
I do not care.
*
I don’t know is an enormously disorienting thing to say.
*
It’s quiet in my yard but for an occasional sough of wind through the white oaks.
Cautiously, they step from the burrow, heading for the 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 Nat Geo about caterpillars in which the writer refers to them as “cylindrical eating machines.” That makes me think of you, since your appetite refreshes on the hour to sustain your lengthening.
Caterpillars grow extraordinarily fast due to constant feeding, I learn, molting several times before the pupal stage. 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.
Once 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 cylindrical 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 a pupal 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, direction from your dad.
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 tactic that allows me to dodge the laser beams you direct at my forehead. I refuse to stop having fun because you suddenly loathe me!
So, sweet girl, go ahead and attach your silk to the red maple of my heart and melt into goo 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 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.