On Dreams, Auditions, and Anarchy

She arrived precisely on time—heels tapping out composure across the polished stone floors, her suit the soft grey of storm clouds before a downpour. Mid-century elegance wrapped around her like armor: precise, expensive, and quietly defiant.

The lobby was too clean. The kind of clean that made her want to smear fingerprints on the glass just to prove she existed. Two women, tight-lipped and silk-bloused, came to collect her.

“They’re ready,” one said.

Were they? She wasn’t.

A shadow walked beside her,

the person who came with her. She didn’t know who they were, only that they stayed close, like grief or memory. Silent support or silent judgment, she couldn’t tell.

They led her to a small set. Lights glaring. A camera already rolling, red light blinking like a quiet warning.

She hadn’t been called in yet. No cue, no action.

And yet she began.

Mimicry first, exaggerating the teacher’s clipped tones, the theatrical hand gestures, the superior tilt of her chin. A cruel little puppet show. Their mouths fell open, their perfectly painted lips trembling with silent protest.

Then came the collapse.

Tears without warning. She folded like paper, knees to floor, sobbing, “I just want to go home,” her voice cracked with a grief so real it painted streaks of black down her face. Her makeup wept with her.

Before the sympathy could settle, she erupted.

“I HATE THEM ALL WITH THEIR SLOBBERING GREEDY MOUTHS AND THEIR RANCID SOULS!” She flung her arm toward the teacher and assistant like Moses parting a sea of rot, as if she could ward them off or curse them with a gesture.

A breath. A drop in pitch.

“But I can’t kill myself,” she whispered, trembling. “I’m too much a coward.”

Then came the grin.

“Or maybe I will,” she continued, eyes gleaming through tears. “And they’ll find my bloated corpse crawling with flies and bursting with maggots. And my spirit—” she paused, smiling wider “—my spirit will be hovering nearby, just waiting to give one of them a swift kick in the ass so they fall headfirst into my putrefaction!”

The teacher gasped.

The assistant covered her mouth.

She ran straight to the camera, flipping both middle fingers, screaming with laughter:
“FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKERS!”

Then she stopped. Composed herself. Straightened her collar.

Turned to the teacher and asked politely, “So, did I pass?”

The silence buzzed.

The teacher’s voice trembled: “I don’t know whether to pass you, have you committed, or give you a job.”

She looked dead into the lens and smiled like it was a punchline.

“I’ll take one and three. I’ve already done two.”

Gretel In Darkness

 

image credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/342273640428805487/

Gretel In Darkness

This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead
Are dead. I hear the witch's cry
Break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...
Now, far from woman's arms
And memory of women, in our father's hut
We sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
From this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
Summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant
To leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you.
I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln come back, come back-

Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
Hiss in the stillness, Hansel we are there
Still, and it is real, real,
That black forest, and the fire in earnest.
-Louise Gluck

Things I've Never Said To Anyone

 I think about suicide every day. I think about it several times a day every day. I have been doing this since my first suicide attempt at seven years old. I would never attempt it again. Mainly because of my daughter. What would happen to her if I died? I have no will because I can’t afford to a lawyer to get one made, so if I die, she goes into foster care. This is something I would never want for her. I have never told anyone, even my many therapists over the years, that I think about suicide every day. Suicide is a trigger word and people have automatic knee-jerk reactions to it. I can understand why, which is why I have never told anyone. Some mornings, like yesterday, I wake up and the first and only thing I think is, “I’m so done with this world, this life. I’m so done.”

I get hard mood swings. I never go very high, but I definitely go very low. Last night, I was sitting at my computer doing something fairly routine for me and all of the sudden, my heart dropped and I had visions of myself slitting my arms open from wrist to elbow. Intrusive thoughts and more intrusive feelings. When I was in my twenties, the intrusive thoughts were so bad that I thought I was losing my mind at times. So, I learned, for the sake of my own sanity, to visualize pushing those types of thoughts away. Now, I’ve become very adept at it as was the case last night. It’s exhausting, though, to have to constantly monitor your thoughts and to actively push away some of them and replace them with more positive ones. There have been several points in my life where I was so exhausted that I just stopped doing it and let those thoughts run wild. As a result, I nearly went over that emotional cliff that I’ve always been terrified of. 

Involuntary. 

Psychiatric. 

Hold. 

Ever since I’ve had my daughter, though, I’ve given that particular cliff a very wide berth. I’m the Champion of Mental Monitoring. Even though, being a single mother is very hard, I suppose this is one benefit for me. I love her so much that I have, for the last ten years, kept myself from falling in the hole.

I’ve never been diagnosed as Bipolar, but I have been diagnosed with chronic depression. Sometimes, I wonder if I have Borderline Personality Disorder, but then a part of me thinks, “What good are labels?” I mean, don’t labels just limit us in terms of what we think about ourselves and what we can do with our lives? Isn’t living with a label somewhat akin to living in a box-shaped life? On the other hand, I don’t have very much hope for my life as it is now. I can only imagine just living one monotonous, miserable day after another until I die. For a couple of years in my thirties, I was in a serious relationship with a guy in his early twenties. (I remember telling a good friend about this and she said, “I had one of those once. They’re fun.”) I can remember his constant hopefulness about his future, which was in hard contrast to what I felt about mine. His unflagging optimism about his life was so unfamiliar to me that I looked at him in my mind sometimes like a strange being from another dimension. Like a unicorn. We were so different in so many ways, that now I think the only thing that kept us together for as long as we were was the sex.

Irish

 

 I found out at the end that they called her Irish. I never knew why because no one knew if she was even from there. I thought she may have been about sixty years old, but she may have been older or younger. Regardless of whether she had lived a hard life in her youth, it was plain that she lived a hard life now and it showed on her face and the way she carried herself. Irish was not hunched over by any means, as if she had that bone-wasting disease that so many women of her age have. She stood straight and rested most of her weight on one leg and kicked the other one out in front of her as if to tell the world that she had claimed whatever spot she happened to be standing on.  She was not very tall and slight of build, but she was wiry and strong for her size and had short and coarse curly gray hair which she had brushed back from her forehead. She wore mismatched items that seemed as though she might have gotten them dumpster diving. She wore a black leather patch over one eye which had a strap that went across her head and cut through her thick hair. Her brown leather jacket was a duster and fell to her ankles. You could tell it had been worn a lot before she got it. It was marred all over with cuts and creases and completely covered in a layer of dirt. She wore a belt that was made for gun ammo, but it never seemed to have any in it. She never wore skirts or dresses. Always trousers and those were mostly cargo pants. You know, the kind with all the pockets. God only knows what she kept in them. Her shirts were always thin and full of random small holes. If there was a design or a picture on them, they were always so faded that you could only see what might have been there when it was new. To complete her ensemble, Irish always wore a pair of black army boots that were never tied all the way up. Somehow, the laces always seemed to drag, but she never tripped. That was a miracle, I thought. Overall, Irish gave off the air of someone who had come up the hard way and still had to grapple for everything she had and what she did have she would not give up without a fight. She was not a woman whom most would approach easily. This was how she looked when Sam, our local detective, brought her to stand on my front porch. 

She had kidnapped my daughter and a number of other townsfolk's children. My daughter was 9 years old when she disappeared. A blur of giggles and long hair, she was. Sweet, stubborn, insanely smart and empathetic and the love of my life. The day she was taken was the day I died inside. So, when Sam knocked on my door that chilly fall morning, I opened it hoping that he had news of the whereabouts of my daughter. I pushed open the screen door and looked to my right and there she was. On my porch. In handcuffs. Smirking with that damned leg kicked out standing there in front of me like she owned my house. 

"Sam," I said tentatively, "Why is Irish on my porch in handcuffs?"

He cleared his throat nervously.

"She has something she wants to tell you, Fae." 

I turned toward her and right then her smirk broke into a wide grin revealing teeth that looked like they had been blackened with a marker. 

"I took yer daughter," she drawled nonchalantly. 

I looked at Sam questioning, "Is this true?"

"I'm afraid so, Fae," he said lowering his head. 

I came fully out on to the porch at that moment and let the screen door slam. I was numb or livid or desperately sad. I couldn't tell which. I stood still for a couple of minutes, which, to me, felt like millennia. I was trying to process what had just taken place. Out of all the emotions I was feeling at that moment, anger became the foremost. No, it was not just anger. It was homicidal anger. I turned my body toward Irish and lunged at her screaming. A sound that couldn't have come from me tore itself up and out of my body through my throat. I sounded like a wild animal. When I landed on her, I smelled whiskey, cigarettes, and unwash. It permeated everything about her. As if by my touching her, I loosed some weird spores that made up her being. I felt surrounded by her essence and I hated her for so confidently telling me that she had taken my daughter, whom I loved more than anything in the universe. I punched and clawed at Irish until Sam managed to pry me off of her.

"She's not dead, Fae!", Sam yelled as he pulled me off Irish, "That's what I come here to tell you!"  

I disengaged from Irish and looked alternately at Sam and at her. I noticed that when Irish got to her feet, she wasn't so nonchalant. Her face looked like it had been through a meat grinder. Two black eyes, a broken nose and, I noticed a few of those black teeth littered my porch. Now, it was my turn to smirk. 

"That's right, she ain't dead and neither are them others," Irish hissed through her missing teeth. 

Sam let out a breath as if he had been holding it since he had arrived, "Irish told us where all them kids are, Fae. They're out by the old airplane graveyard." 

I started awake. The last thing I saw in my dream was my daughter running toward me down a hill of airplane trash with her beautiful hair trailing behind her. I lay in bed for some time trying to convince myself that this was not real. I got up and padded down the hall to my daughter's bedroom and peeked inside. There she was. Her angelic face relaxed and her hair all around her looking like a burnished bronze halo. It was all a dream. Just a bad dream.