Red Glare | Excerpted Work

This room is full of flowers. On the table, on the nightstand, pressed and dried inside the drawers of the oak dresser. They pepper the wallpaper, the bedding, the smoothly carved mahogany of the bed frame. In the daytime they draw the light in, lilied patterns across the floor. The light makes a home out of this room, gaping and open. It stares out upon that ceaseless landscape, careened floral mouths, cleaved petals lain open.

The farmhouse lies on swelled ground that’s tucked itself away above a replete Canadian hillside. The sky touched to the mountaintops like three blue fingers, swelled between the trough of the mountainsides.

I remember the first time that I walked into this room. The smell of sweet pollen rose around the doorway, crowning beneath my nose. The scent nearly crumpled me. I pressed my fingertips into the smooth wooden floorboards, felt the light on the wood, carving into the bulb of my cheek, and I cried. The smell of flowers was soft and familiar, but it felt foreign in my mouth. As I sat there, a soft, springing terror echoed inside me, small, sinking reiterations that condensed, slowly, into hollow desperation. I remember that I lost my breath then; my mouth opened and closed, a fish growing, shrinking.

The house is built on a broad stretch of Ottawa farmland. An amaranthine landscape that rounds itself on the horizon, curling out in sweet measures. The sun ghosts the hills beyond the pasture, aureate light that touches gently upon the tin roof of the farmhouse, tender and fine. The windows reflect silver in the growing light. It glints on the deadened grass around the front porch steps.

The first time I saw the farm, it was sunrise. I rode in the back of an eighteen-wheeler. A long, narrow freezer with hung pig carcasses, anchored to the ceiling by iron carabiners.

The light in the trailer bed was white and fluorescent blue. Shuttered, flickering flashes of light. The truck came to an abrupt stop, lurching my body forward toward the metal wall. I grasped onto an empty carabiner to steady myself. I could hear voices outside, but they were bloated and indistinct. Like listening through a glass against a wall.

There were four of us inside the truck. A woman who looked to be about forty, and two girls, each who looked fifteen, maybe sixteen. I wondered most about them. Who are they? What happened? Where’s their mom, or dad?

It felt strange, our bodies curled inward upon themselves, like sacks of meat. We may as well have been packed into crates of our own, left to freeze. Lambs awaiting slaughter.

I worked to memorize them as time passed. I worked, tireless, carving out parts of them to lay upon my tongue, to swallow, to digest.

Early on I noticed that the soles of Angela’s shoes had split from the canvas at the apex between her toes. They made flippant, flaccid mouths that belched when she tapped her feet. I imagined a story there. A story that might lie in her shoes, caked to the bottoms of her feet, and her sister’s, too. I noticed small scratches up both their legs, too. Thin, dotted cuts that tore red lines above their ankles, leading up beneath the edges of their pant legs. I imagined the two of them running, through brambled fields maybe, sharp stems clawing at them, lambasting their narrow legs. I imagined too, the both of them laying low in a river’s eddy, coarse weeds tied around their legs. I pictured them lifting their heads above the water’s surface as they hid, waiting, watching black trucks swing fast around the river’s bend.

We were inside that freighter for two days. Forty-eight hours or something like that. For a while, none of us spoke. We didn’t know what to say. What could we have said?

And when our silence broke, it shattered.

The woman’s name was Marisol. The girls were Janey and Angela. Marisol had been a housekeeper at a women’s college in Connecticut. Janey and Angela hadn’t graduated high school yet, somewhere out in southwest Virginia.

I aborted my child, Marisol told us. They arrested me.

Our mothers wouldn’t get divorced, Janey said. The state took us, arrested them.

They told their stories, what they could of them, over the loud tremoring of the truck against the highway. I told them mine, too, what I could summon of it.

I can’t tell how much time or space has passed when the delivery men opened the back hatch again. The warm summer air swept into that frozen vestibule. It’s reminiscent of fire, a heat that glances upon the skin, soft singeing. It eased my arms from their locked position around my cracking knees, and what followed was like a loosening of my body that I couldn’t yet quantify. Through a hatch door, one of the delivery drivers crawled from the cab of the truck into the icy trailer, dragging a duffel bag behind him. He dropped it between us, open to reveal T-shirts, shorts, pants, and a few loose pairs of shoes.

“Grab some shit and change.” His voice was brusque, terse. “Do it quick. We don’t have a lot of time.”

We undressed quickly, silently. Peeling the layers back, I felt like an onion. One that’s been rotted, gone soft. We stood naked in the belly of that ice box. Our bodies, sexless, pale, harsh protrusions of the flesh; a vulnerability that couldn’t be helped.

One of the pig carcasses swung slowly behind Janey, casting navy shadows. I watched it, the shadow that fell beneath it, a thin grey, blue that lapsed the two children’s bodies. I wondered, looking at them, how it would feel to be killed, then cast, drained, and hung to dry. I wondered what it felt like to die, or to die without reason, if that same fate might’ve touched my bones. If I’d stayed home, stayed there. Not home anymore, but that place where my body first touched air, first brushed earth. I wondered if we had anything in common with the carcasses above us, swinging with blank inanition from rusted carabiners.

The delivery man came around to the back of the truck again. “Alright, come on now, get down! Hustle. Light is coming on quickly.”

With a gruff hand, he wrenched us down onto the hard dirt path, one at a time. I looked again at the pigs, swinging gently still inside the truck, rocking slowly back and forth, as a child. Their deadness felt suddenly more real to me, corpses glowing. I whispered, silently, something like a prayer for them. I don’t know why.

The farm was small. It felt like new earth to me, soil yet untouched by foot or bone. There was a farmhouse and a stable built into a grassy hillside that seemed to breathe so softly. The dirt road sewed past the house as a needle and thread, caked, cracked, a bister mud that had dried and packed down tightly. There was a pasture that stretched beyond the house, over the hill, bound by a pinewood fence. There weren’t any neighbors to account for. Not for a mile or two, at least.

Two women sat on the front porch steps, watching us. They took turns each taking pieces of a sliced peach that sat on a plate between them. I watched them, each woman looking like she was somewhere in her fifties, maybe sixties. Their hair was long and grey; their faces were broad; one had a tattoo of something on her left foot, the other freckled knees; one of them had her hair pushed up into a bun on top of her head, the other a thick braided rope that hung down her back. The picture of an American dust bowl, laid out on some quaint Ottawan farm.

The women stood together and started toward us, wiping the peach and dirt from their pants. I watched them carefully from where I stood. A creeping trepidation moved up the sides of my stomach, watchful of what ghosts lay behind their eyes.

They were careful not to get too close to us. Like animals, we stared wildly at them, crouching forward, daunted and unsure. Up close, their faces looked strange to me. There was no reservation behind them, no hesitation. Instead, there was light. Their cheeks bloomed as dandelions might, orange and gold on the quiet dawn. I wondered what this morning air tasted like on their tongues. Their names were Sylvia and Patricia, they told us. This is Ottawa, not far from the Canadian border. There isn’t another house for three miles, any way you turn. Welcome to Canada, they said.

They led us into the house quickly. A herding of cattle.

It was warm inside. The walls smelt of rosemary and pine.

The hallway was dark at that hour. There was a low humming inside the walls, a reverberating that hacked hollow melodies. Pipes that thrummed, maybe, or ghosts.

As they led us into the kitchen, Sylvia reached for the window above the sink and pushed it open, letting a thin breeze catch the cream curtains around it. The sunlight curved around the sink with it, touching the floor, a crescent light that ties into the curved knots in the wood floor.

“Have something to eat,” Sylvia said to us. Her voice was quiet, soft, like linen. “You can’t have eaten much for days now.”

Patricia pulled chairs out from the table. Angela and Janey sat beside each other, each leaning into the other’s limp frame. My own body melted into a chair across from them. I watched Patricia moving around the kitchen, a lightness to her body that could float, a featherweight body. She set a pitcher of water in the center of the table and four glasses alongside it. A bowl of fruit, a quart of milk, a white plate heaped with loaves of bread, meat, and cheese.

I wondered what they thought of us then. We must have looked decrepit and small; mangled bodies, parched mouths without color. How pale, how weak, how dull we must have seemed. What did they think of our circumstances? What were our circumstances? My own had become twisted into something unrecognizable, a skeleton melted upon itself, muscles softened, an anemic body been drowned.

I can’t imagine what we must have looked like. The way we ate so quickly, shoving the food deep into our mouths, ravenous limbs stretching across the table, like animals. My body felt like a creature, alien and strange, bizarre. The food stuck in my mouth like glue; like sawdust on my tongue. I felt like an animal in a zoo, being watched this way, crouched forward on the chair; on my haunches, almost.

The plates emptied quickly; we couldn’t help ourselves, rapacious, desperate as we were. When it was gone, Patricia took the dishes to the sink and Sylvia swept the crumbs from the table.

“Better?” Sylvia had asked, throwing the dish towel over her shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get you all to bed.”

She led us up the stairs toward a narrow, L-shaped hallway. There’s a sky light above the top of the stairs that let in the warm light of the sunrise, casting tawny pink across the oakwood floor.

There were six bedrooms that lined the hallway, each with a cherry mahogany door and a pinched copper doorknob.

At the top of the stairs was a shallow room with two twin sized beds, each nestled against opposite walls, where Angela and Janey would sleep. Marisol was to stay in the next room over, where a queen sized bed stood beneath a wide, barrelled window. At the very end, Sylvia opened the door to a room with a broad bay window and a great canopy bed.

“Here you are, Jo.” I looked at her, the two of us alone in the doorway, and I felt a sinking in me, a feathered chasm between the ribs that seized me.

I could hear Sylvia’s breath in soft murmurs; I imagine, in her mouth, a ghosting light. Pale and pink, silver, white. The light curves a lunate wreath around her head.

She doesn’t say much. She’s quiet, buzzing. I imagine a bumblebee in her mouth, buzzing about the shadows beneath her tongue.

There’s something about Sylvia that feels eerie and familiar. There’s an aria, a dream in her eyes, a reverie, a reminiscence. I wonder who she is. Might I have known her, had I been born in this place, instead? Might she have known my mother? I wonder what she thinks of me. If I feel like some sort of fantasy to her, too.

There’s a hole in the shell of the taillight at my feet, streaming bitter air whistling through the trunk of the car. My body is curved against the cold metal of the trunk’s inside, the tire frame pressing into my back. I can’t move beyond twisting my wrists in small circles, relieving some of the tension that coils throughout my body. I wish that I could stretch my legs out, ease the pressure between the choked muscles and bones. It crawls upward, through the body in slim agitations, a snake’s tooth, curling, rolling.

We’ve been driving for almost three days now. The man had given me a small watch before shutting and locking me into the trunk, beneath two thick wool quilts. I am grateful for that small piece of humanity. Without time, a person begins to lose themself; there’s a trapping of the mind in timelessness, in the dark; it’s a thing ungracious and crude that swallows, in small bites, the parts of a mind that make a person whole.

I feel unwhole inside here. I find myself praying that each simple stop of the car doesn’t end with the trunk door opening, my body surrendering to the grey light of day, two arms in a black uniform, my body being dragged out, a crude and mangled thing, a dog, howling.

I do not want to think about what that would feel like. I don’t want to imagine the sounds that would drag from my mouth, their arms clinched around my threshing body, the smell of blood and gunmetal, the swell of my body coursing, devastated.

I try not to think of a life beyond this place, either. I may never make it out, if an out still exists. If it could exist for me. We could be seized at any moment. The car could be run off the road. A tire might go flat, spin us off a bridge or over the face of a cliffside.

To hope has become such a futile, burdensome thing. It tastes the way blackened metal might, coarse and bitter, sour, like iron and blood. I feel emptied, gutted, ravaged in a way that leaves me deserted; of nothing.

I hold my wrist beneath the narrow strip of light that filters in through the hole in the taillight and look again at the slow-ticking hands of the watch. When it was still light out, the sun came through; now it’s only the shuttered lights of the city as it streaks backward, away.

It’s four o’clock in the morning now. I watch it, the slow twitching, and count. It gives me something to do. I feel stowed, like a piece of luggage. I wonder, in an airport, if I would be a checked bag or carry-on. Probably the former.

I feel the car stop, the brakes howling beneath my head. A moment passes, and I hold my breath, gripping my own body between two fists. The trunk door pops open, and I see him above me, his body heavy and dark, his back against the moon. I climb out quickly. Around me is what seems to be an ever-reaching forest of redwood and pine. There’s a small log cabin standing in the clearing, built scabrously on its foundation. It’s dilapidated and shrunken, like those old cabins you would see on the historical plantations they used to have. We used to visit them on middle school field trips, traipsing across the dust-bitten wood floors and poking our fingers through the gaps between each log, wide enough to slip our fingers through.

“Quite a drive,” he says, gesturing toward the cabin. He starts toward it and I follow, eyeing the terse hand he has placed on the pistol at his waist.

I don’t know his name. We won’t ever get that far; the less we know about each other, the better for both of us. What I know is this. He is a tall, gruff man. His hair is brown, beginning to grey. He is wearing black overalls with a burgundy flannel shirt underneath. I wonder what he knows about me. My hair, my build, maybe he’s noticed my nose or my eyes. Does he think anything of me? It’s dangerous to presume, but how could anyone help it?

“Come on now,” he says, unlocking the door and swinging it open. “Hurry it up, c’mon. Don’t be slow about it. Can’t risk anyone seeing us out here.”

I step in after him, and the wire screen door snaps shut. I close the front door, and with it the damp and dark of the house swallows us both. I hear a clicking behind me as he flicks a small flame from the tip of a lighter, casting the dank, barren room around us in a faded blonde light.

“It’s not much,” he says, “but it’ll do you good for now.”

I look up at him, feeling disquieted, a prickling that moves from my palms over my wrists and arms, up my neck, into my open mouth.The cabin is one big room. There isn’t any furniture. A small pile of folded bed sheets sits on the floor, stacked neatly against the far wall. A woodburning stove sits in the center of what could be a kitchen. A tap beside it, rusted shut.

“I don’t know how long you’ll be here. Someone will signal you, but I haven’t got any idea when or who it’ll be. What you need to do for now is to stay hidden. Keep out of sight. Don’t leave the cabin, except every now and again. And uh, if you do, don’t go far.” He looks at me, a look in his eyes that is keen, cutting. “Stay low. Keep inside. This place isn’t big, but the land is overgrown, and it hides the structure well enough from the highway and the sky, in case any helicopters fly over looking for you. They know you’re missing, you know.”

I watch him move around the cabin, an agile fumbling. It’s odd to watch; the careful carelessness, the sonorousness in his voice, the way it warms, like wax beneath a flame. I feel a lump rising in my throat, thick and swelled, like wet paper, clamoring up toward the back of my mouth.

“Thank you.” I cough, clearing my throat, and glance back at him. He nods and turns away from me.

“What about, like, waste?”

“Leave any garbage or whatever down under that same floorboard,” he says. “I’ll grab it on my way back through. When you’re gone.”“No, that’s—I don’t mean that. I mean shit. Human waste. What do I do with it?”

He laughs at that; a bolstered sniggering that takes shape, grisly, of cracked bone. “Right, honey. It’s best you bury it. You’ll have to dig the hole with your hands, ‘cause we can’t have a shovel around. Just another thing that’ll give you away, right? I wouldn’t do it in daylight, if I were you. Wait until night, or before sunrise. Never a good idea to be out there in daylight.”

“Is there anything to eat or drink?”

“Under here.”

He moves toward the far corner of the room, squatting down on his knees to pry up a loose floorboard. “Under here, there’s perishables that should last you about two weeks. Out back there’s a well to draw water from, but be careful. It takes time, only giving yourself away if someone’s around. Never know, even out here.”

I watch him move, memorizing the size of him, the weight of his boots, the curve of his hands, his mouth, his nose.

“I’ll be back in a couple weeks. Whether that’s to bring more food or to sweep the place of any fingerprints or remnants of your stay depends on if you’re still here. Guess we’ll see.”

“Still here?”

He looks at me. “Yeah. This ain’t your forever home here, hon. Someone’ll come for you eventually, to whisk you off on the next great adventure.”

I cough what feels like dust. “Right.”

He laughs to himself and I stare, my mouth hanging open. “You’ll be alright, kid. Just use your head, huh?”

A moment of bereft silence settles between us, puckered, spectral; a tumefied ghost waiting in the walls. I watch him move around the cabin, an agile fumbling. It’s odd to watch; the careful carelessness, his sonorous voice, the way it warms.

“Thank you.” There’s a deep croak in my voice, leaden and falling as the words leave my mouth. How does one thank a person for a thing like this? There’s disparity in my voice, something lost, something tamped down into the shell of my voice.

He looks at me finally, fully, laying his eyes on my sallow face. His eyes are grey, almost blue when they catch the light of the candle. “Take a breath, honey. You’re safe here. Just, y’know. Be smart, alright?”

He sticks out his hand to shake and I take it, looking past his face with an awkward appreciation in my eyes.

“You take care,” he says, his voice softening. “You’ll be alright.”

I’ve been in Ottawa for 348 days now. I still count the days, the hours, even the minutes the way that I used to, a banausic passage of time in that grisly place.

Counting feels like a force of habit now, some halfway interesting and tangible thing that rose out of the tedium of my life before this place. I used to count the cracks in the ceiling when I couldn’t sleep at home, before Sam moved out of the apartment. I try to connect the lines, plaster constellations; counting stars, counting sheep. One, two, three, four…

I use the scalloped ceiling in this bedroom to lull me to sleep, shallow and sweet, but tonight it itches me farther away. Memories of Sam swallow me in the bare moments before the black unfolds.

Sam’s hair lines the pillow, hands open against the floral sheets. Her warm honey body, indigo eyes halfway shut. In those eyes is a silent prayer, sweet sermons parting peppermint blue.

I’m lying in bed, awake, staring upward; I imagine that she’s beside me; I feel the goosebumps on her arm, the brush of her hand against mine; I hear the soft whistling of her breath while she sleeps. Her body is arched against mine, curled inward to fit against the shape of my hip.

Her open mouth. Warm breath, her freckled shoulder.

I see her eyes in the winter sky here when I look out my window, a greying blue in the low light of the afternoon.

Sam.

When it snows, I see her looking back at me, carved out in crystal white, thick and heavy, she sinks down into the black earth. That place swallowed us both, a tongue unfolding, our bodies mangled against the dark and wet. Her body grew pale, and we lost, unfound space between us.

My wakefulness falls away slowly, in pieces. Each night the room melts, liquid glass turning, ashes floating. I lie in bed, imagining her body beside my own. Falling into sleep feels desperate and shapeless. The black unfolds; the pinstriped walls drip into it soft and blue, the room sinks, mahogany burning.

The sky above the cabin swelled at night, a globe tipped downward, small and effulgent stars, blinking down upon this log cabin. The blank sky spread out above the thin breaks in the warped roof of the barn. I could see stars sometimes; they were quiet and still; blinking, white, small; a terrorizing image.

I could allow my mind to wander in that place. I would do it in pieces, letting out the leash, inch by inch, decentering myself. I would allow my mind to stretch, press its black-marred fingertips out, reaching for edges not there. I liked it, those furled moments, a luxury not always afforded before. Now an opulent thing, a given no longer. When the cabin would lull backward into sleep, there was a blankness that swallowed. Me, it; gulping. There was time untouched, eyes unpeeled. I am raw, a body carved open, blood and dirt, mingled matter. I felt it that way.

There were moments in the blank and empty cabin when I would think of things ugly and grotesque, delusions which would take crude shape, nebulous and obscure. I thought about killing. The act of it, the innervation, the necessity, maybe, the paleness. I didn’t let myself think about it over the wood, watch his eyes choke. In my mind, the men were faceless. Gray skin pulled over polished bones, crescent moons in sunken cheeks, colorless reprisal. In my mind, my hands were strong, fingers molded from iron or steel. My eyes were open. I was awake.

In the earliest parts of the morning, I would step outside onto the hard, dense ground. The waking light before dawn that slipped above the horizon, only barely, touched down onto swelled earth. My body had always felt raw against the morning air. It was only ever for a few moments that I would allow myself to leave the cabin. Only to piss like an animal in the bushes and touch my palm to the grass, dewy and wet from the sweet morning air.

The space of the forest clearing was concave, bent. Broad redwoods and branching pine trees proffered up toward a black and hollow sky.

Each morning, I tasted the air first. Tongue between my lips, I’d close my eyes as the air settled; it tasted ripe, clean. As if pulled from the clouds, cold, brittle, splicing. Those early mornings, the sky folded outward, creased, unsealed. A line of golden thread pulled taut against a black horizon; honey blue clouds bellied-up against an ultraviolet sky.

Each morning that I wake in this room, I feel like I’m floating. The Ottawa hills peak through the windowsill, glowing in the thin morning light. The sunrise slips quietly through the narrow part in the curtains to fall across my legs in bed. The mornings here feel like that first dawn, the heavy freighter, analog light. I feel each day folding inward upon itself, a never-ending origami shape, tucking into itself over and over.

Syl bakes fresh loaves of bread each morning. The scent of it wafts through the house, folding itself over to slip through the crack beneath my door. It smells of yeast and country, a crackling perfume that I taste on my tongue. I lie in bed and breathe in the smooth, doughy scent. I feel phantom dust, lining the curves of my body, the distortion of my arms, wheat flour, the smell of it a caressing thing. I let it settle into my hair and my sheets, folding the soft aroma into my thick quilted blanket.

I tend to wake early, but never as early as Syl and Pat. They wake each morning before sunrise. I hear their footsteps on the wood floor of the kitchen, gentle and dull, the soft murmurs floating up through the house. I imagine them together in the kitchen, the morning crowning between their hands as they sit across from each other at the table, drinking their coffee. I imagine candescent touches of the fingers, the palm, the wrist, the tips of toes grazing each other through thick woolen socks.

I wonder what their love must feel like in this place. It feels impossible to remember a place or time where love could burgeon from some unwounded place. The States became so empty of warmth, destitute; it no longer seems as if something like it could exist ever again.

I dress quickly and move through the hall to the top of the staircase. I find Rosemary kneading the dough that Syl had left to rise. I lean against the doorframe, watching her fold the dough, over and into itself.

“I can feel you watching me,” she says, turning to glance at me. Her broad and freckled face burns in the pursed light of the window. A laugh rises into the hull of my throat, like coughing up feathers.

“Are you hungry?” She asks, turning to lean back against the counter. She wipes her hands on the apron tied around her waist, throwing flour dust around her feet.

I give her a pointed look. “I can fend for myself every now and then, you know.”

She drops her eye in a wink and turns away again, pressing her hands back into the dough to continue the knolled process of kneading it. Her body returns to that same back-and-forth motion, pressing and shaping the dough, rolling it slowly into itself. I look at her, watching that small smile behind her mouth form and give way. She pretends not to notice my stare.

The kitchen swells and deflates as the morning moves, a slow breathing thing. The house is full now. It’s been that way for the last couple of months.

The laundry room smells like lavender and fresh cotton. I like to spend Sunday afternoons folding the laundry fresh from the dryer; it’s mindless and warm. I am without thought in this room, I am without intention. In this suffocated air, swollen and dense, I am effaced, erased.

As I fold and sort the laundry, there’s a knock on the open door. I turn to see Syl, holding another bin of dirty clothes on her hip. “Sorry to pile even more on, dear. This here’s a load from Janey and Angela.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I don’t mind.”

I still see my mother in Syl’s face, crescent moons in the green of her eyes, as my mother’s used to be. It’s hard to remember her now, but small things like that come back to me quietly sometimes, grasping at the concave edges of my body.

Sylvia is a stocky woman in her fifties. She has thick gray hair, long enough to meet the middle of her back when she lets it down; my own mother had short hair, chopped above her shoulders. Most days Syl ties her hair up into a loose bun on top of her head.

Syl and Pat own the house. They bought the land together twenty years ago, with only a single-story house on the property. It took five more years to build the three extensions onto the house, the barn, and the gardens. They built it first as an artist’s retreat, but after the American election, everything fell. I remember it clearly, in visceral, peeling moments, but not the way that Pat and Syl do. Americans collected at the border, dodging across before they were shut down. People congealed there, sick and sticking, like rotted fruit. Protests flared along the Canadian border, riots that upturned ever present ICE stations. A place of wanting, of desperation, it swelled.

The Canadian border was overwhelmed by American refugees. It’s difficult to think of myself as one of them. I didn’t feel like a refugee. It didn’t feel like the idea in my head, of what a refugee might feel. It didn’t feel the way America had made a refugee out to be. It felt unfair, wounded, winding.

This house was shut down almost immediately because it looked too much like a front for an illegal refugee shelter. I heard about houses like it on the news when the US released the first wave of repeals. Every night there was a segment on the news that warned us against the private prison houses that were cropping up in the Canadian countryside. These houses were welled, distorted places where immigrants were caught, shelled, and caged.

Caged. It only matters now that it’s Americans, white Americans. Now that it’s us. Now that it isn’t just Mexican people, Hispanic children, those skeletal bodies that climbed over the border line, hands fisting dirt and gravel, lost prayers trapped in their hard, agonized mouths.

There was a time when I campaigned for the Democratic National Committee. I canvassed for some politician I can’t remember a thing about now. Going door to door, pushing flyers and brochures into open-faced hands, urging toward something I thought could save us. I had such meager hope then, but I wanted to be guiltless. I wanted to feel my own body, my mind, as something without guilt or shame. I wanted to be absolved. Faultless. Innocent.

People planted signs in their yards, No person is illegal. No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor. If I’d had a yard, I would’ve done the same.

When Pat told me the story of the house, it felt shattered. The story had ruptured inside of her, a thing punctured and bled. Broken in all the ways a thing can be. I had wondered if there were parts of it that she couldn’t remember. Maybe some things she had blocked out, or been erased, or things she had been spared. Perhaps there is no whole, undissected story. A house is a house is a house, until it isn’t.

Syl doesn’t talk about the early years often. It’s like a secret wrapped up in the folds of her mouth, flicker whispers, stories never fully formed. Sometimes I think she might be afraid of us; the refugees in this house, all lost or broken, at one point or another illegal bodies. I’m sure that it’s us. We strike something terrorizing in her, down to the bone.

I finish running the laundry through and vanish quietly to the condensed solitude of my bedroom. I can recede into myself in here, unseen, untouched. I become a thing bodiless in this room, a thing fat and indestructible, sound, heavy. I feel outside of myself.

In this emptiness there’s an echo, a hole in the body that devours, a chasmal hollowing in the pit of my stomach. It feels dark and never ending. I feel as if I could fall into it; if I fell once, I could keep falling, sinking deeply into myself, my own skin, the bloated insides of my body surrounding me, circumambient, holding me.

There are moments when I lose myself, even now, still, after so much time has passed. I feel the soft decomposing of my body, flesh flaking, as if breaking apart. I feel a softening of the brain, a melting. I imagine death this way, slow, delicate, dull. A passive, sluggish emptiness that would wake, overwhelm; it would seize my body; nothingness that effaces.

There’s peace here in the warm wooden smell of my bedroom, in the colors of the walls, the sun that falls in thin laced lines on the floor; tranquil and soft. It feels foreign to me still.

Hours pass through the windows above my bed. I watch the light sink toward the hills, shuttered through the ever-reaching trees. There’s clarity in the passage of time through light, in the fading of the sun’s body, the downward tilt of its sallow face toward the earth.

I don’t know what time it is when Pat taps at the door.

I pull myself from the bed and stand. I move to the door and open it, looking up at the stiff shape of Pat’s chambered face.

“Dinner’s ready.” She looks at me, her eyes cast down to meet mine. “Rose made veggie lasagna.”

I watch Pat’s eyes move over my face, the soft parting of her mouth, the click of her tongue. She can see on my face that I’ve cried, my eyes wet and cheeks withered, aged petals, languid and raw.

“Can I come in?” She asks, cupping her hand beneath the crook of my elbow.

I nod. She steps into the room, magnifying it, the light drawn to her. The sinking sunlight cups the curve of her jaw and she is formidable. She moves quietly to the window, leaning her crooked shoulder against the frame. I watch. A compressed silence falls and I am wondering what she sees.

I open my mouth to speak, but don’t.

“The tulips are beginning to grow,” she says. “See out there, to the left of the vegetable garden?”

I move to the window. Standing beside her, I feel small, like a child. My eyes follow her hand through the windowpane. The land rolls outward, pressing to the earth in soft oscillations. The sun points down and the tulips, orange and red, lift their mouths to the sky.

Another silent moment passes between us. It’s uncomfortable; bleached, bloated.

“I’m still not used to seeing the world like this,” I say. “It still feels foreign to me. I’ve been here for almost a year, but it’s still…It feels like a life I lived before this one, one that I can’t quite remember.”

Pat’s hand wraps around my shoulder, squeezing gently. “Give it time.”

There’s a hungry pitch in me that wallows. I squeeze my eyes closed and press down, attempting to swallow the millpond growing in my gut. Keeping her hand around my elbow, Pat reaches to hold my back, pulling me close. She keeps my weight upright and allows my body to fall against hers; I breathe heavily, near gasping as her hand cups my cheek, holds my face, pushes my hair back behind my ear. She doesn’t speak. My body falls weakly into hers, a welling wave that crashes upon itself...