Autumn Christian's Blog, page 3

Art Can't Save You

You have to accept change or it will destroy you

There are parents that love their life, and those that resent their children. What seems to be the fundamental difference?

It’s the acceptance of change.

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Once you have a child there is no “returning to normal.” Your life has been irrevocably altered. You will never go back to the days when you don’t carry with you the responsibility for another human being’s life. Resisting that change, wishing that things were different, will mean that your life becomes a constant source of suffering.

I used to put high value on not “being changed” by a child. I didn’t want to become those mothers that made being a parent their whole identity. I didn't want to be swallowed by the angry mouth

Now I can see how silly that worry was. A child is not something that slots neatly into your life, between work and afternoon Pilates and drinks with your friends at night.

It obliterates your conception of self. It’s supposed to.

If you’re in the right frame of mind, this should make you happy. It adds a new dimensionality and texture to life. It brings new parts of your being to the surface. You’ll realize you don’t miss your old self at all, because she was fundamentally missing something that’s now crucial to you.

Its okay to unplug.

I’m one of those people that always have to be “doing something.” If I fold the laundry I need to be listening to a podcast or an audiobook so I can maximize the time. I can’t just take a bath. I need to have a book with me. If there’s a spare second I find myself doing a bit of research, logging onto Twitter, or figuring out what the next thing is I should put on my to-do list.

I had to stop and asking myself if this was enriching my life, or distracting from it. I often had the distinct sense that life '“Wasn't enough,” and it needed to be enriched with fantasy. But it turned out trying to constantly distract myself was a big contributor to my boredom.

One thing I focused more on this year was being present. I allowed myself to put my phone away for hours and play with my child. I let emails go unanswered for half a day. I responded to texts when I had the time. My child and I would go for walks or play in the grass outside and I'd leave my phone inside.

What I discovered was that the idea of “missing out” was a lie. I’d mistaken a dopamine fix for doing something important.

Information and data streams exist in reality outside the screens. I could learn more just by being present and observing than putting on a podcast. Reality is an infinite joy to be experienced.

A lot of evil comes from wanting to take the easy way out

When we think of evil we often think of serial killers, genocidal monsters, and rapists. It’s evil that announces itself in obvious, blackened corruption. It screams when it destroys, leaving behind devastating holes, and doesn’t allow itself to be denied.

But many people are leading lives of quiet evil. They’re okay with letting their spouse be unhappy as long as it means they don’t have to do more work. They yell at their kids because they don’t want to dedicate the time and effort to properly parent. They buy dogs and then neglect them. They take shortcuts at work that mean other people get hurt, or inconvenienced.

People don’t often choose to be evil. They choose to be lazy.

They choose to avoid responsibility to make the pain go away.

They lash out and blame others because it’s easier than dealing with the internal strife or putting in the work to deal with the issue themselves.

They justify their non-action by telling themselves that what they do doesn’t matter.

All the while they leave devastation in their wake, the ugly thumbprint of a person who refuses to try to make the world better.

It's okay to ask for help

I find it difficult to ask for help. I find it even more difficult to be precise in the ways that I ask for help. I want a savior to come to me, on folded wings and a black card in their wallet, and give me everything I never knew how to ask for.

Once I had a child I realized that it was too much for me to do by myself. I needed help or I was going to collapse under the weight of everything that needed to get done.

You can realistically know that “asking for help doesn’t make you weak,” and yet inside still feel the despair and pain that comes from being vulnerable. It’s easier to ask for help when you realize the alternative is oftentimes resentment and bitterness.

We are a communal species. It's easy to pretend that you're going it alone when you can swaddle yourself in comfortable modern life. But you've done nothing in this life by yourself, and you are fed and clothed and comforted by the invisible work of millions of other human beings. We all work to help each other every day.

Accept Imperfect Working Conditions

On the writing side of life: this year I managed to finish a draft of my novel, write and publish a short story, write several newsletters, acquire an agent, and finish the edits for the second edition of Girl Like a Bomb.

I could have done more if I’d accepted earlier on in the year that I’d never return to the leisurely pre-baby days of having hours upon hours to write and meander around the recesses of my brain. Being a writer was so much of my identity. It felt cosmically unfair that most days I couldn’t get to the computer and work on my novel.

I've let go of a lot of my precious rituals, my delicate pretensions. I learned how to write on my phone. I learned how to write in ten minute increments. I learned how to write in my car or in the closet. I take notes during stroller rides and naps. (My baby is sleeping on me right now as I write this.) I learned how to write when I didn't feel my best, when I was exhausted or had a headache. I learned to write when I knew I wasn't writing at my peak performance, and just add notes to go back to it later.

For a couple weeks my only goal was to write a single sentence a day. Sometimes even that was a struggle. But over time I found my writing muscles strengthening, my stamina increasing. I started to write more and more.

Having a child has strengthened me and made me into a better writer. It's honed my discipline. It's made me more adaptable. It's taught me what's important and what I can let go of.

it can seem frustrating to only get half an hour some days to write, if at all. But inch by inch you move forward to your goal, as long as you don't give in to the easy despair of not being able to work like you used to or the excuse of “baby brain.”

You don't always have to react to your emotions

Sometimes negative emotions announce themselves with a blistery urgency.

Oftentimes there's no concrete reason why you're feeling bad, but there must be some reason, and it's demanding that you find it and extricate it from your life.

Now.

I've discovered that many of those emotions simply disappeared if I didn't react to them.

That's how you know they weren't real. They became vapor once you stopped looking at them. 

Real emotions, like grief over a loved one, don't disappear. They sit inside of you with finality. They cannot be altered with breathing meditation or a change of perspective.

Art Can't Save You

I became a writer because I wanted to disappear.

I wanted to create an inner world vast enough that I'd be able to cover my wounds with it, escape into it, turn my bones jnto fertilizer for a healing garden.

Most of my earlier stories are about escape. My characters feel oppressed and suffocated by circumstances they believe to be outside of their control, so they find ways to leave. They die. They cease to become human. They're lured into fantasy worlds by demons with sparkling teeth where they don't have to worry about overbearing mothers or unsympathetic husband's.

No matter how much I wrote I couldn't make myself disappear like my characters. I tried to twist myself into an abstract shape so the pain of being human couldn't affect me. Yet the more I wrote, the more pain I felt. I couldn't transmute my blood into gold.

The only way to address your pain is by living.

Art can’t save you. At least, not like that. It's a part of reality and not an escape from it. Use it to enrich your life. If your life outside of art is terrible, it won't be enough to fix you.

We can take our pain to art to try to understand it, but we can't destroy it. Characters who disappear into fantasy worlds to escape their problems are as good as dead. They've committed a beautiful, literary suicide.

It's Okay To Be Consumed By Love

I haven't had a break for longer than four hours since September 25, 2022. For the first ten months my daughter barely wanted to be held by anyone else.

My child is almost always with me and requires constant care and attention. Her needs are ever present, dynamic, and changing. It's required a total lifestyle overhaul and a need for resilience. I've had to completely change how I think about life, because it's not just me and my husband anymore.

The other day she saw me come into the room and when she said “Momma!” and giggled, tears started to pour from my eyes. I couldn't understand why something loved me so much.

For the longest time I thought I didn't want kids, because I didn't want the responsibility.

I didn't want to be consumed by love. I didn't want to know what it felt to have something more important to take care of than your own ego. I saw how that kind of happiness annoyed people, like loving your child was a direct affront to them. Like love itself was some mechanical manipulation, a dead end, a thing that served no purpose.

But without the spirit of love you live in a hollow world. A place where you can gorge yourself and never feel satisfied, a palace that’s not even worth the rocks it was built with.

That’s what it means when someone like Bukowski said “Find what you love and let it kill you.” The alternative is to be killed by the empty place where a spirit should’ve been.

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Villain Era

“My own corruption is violent, tumultuous, enticing, and entangling. As it conceives sin, it wars within me and against me.” - John Owen

I was a different person three years ago. In many ways I was a better person.

I moved from San Diego to Oklahoma (for the second out of three times.) with my husband and my dogs. I was learning how to live with a family. I started planning for a baby. I pried open my heart and found infinite possibilities in the places inside me I’d tried to ignore. 

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For the first time in my life I felt beautiful when I looked in the mirror. People would stop me on the street to tell me that I was beautiful. That’d never happened to me before.

And I was beautiful. My happiness transformed the way I held the muscles in my face. I felt sorry for all the iterations of Autumn in the photographs I took where I used to think I looked cool, or intellectual, or pensive. Her eyes couldn’t hide the pain she carried. It dragged down the entire infrastructure of her being.

I started making eye contact. I held my shoulders up straighter. Other people didn’t feel like enemies anymore. Their souls waited on the cusp of their gaze, reaching out to touch another person. They were open to being wounded.

I even wrote better. I’d spent so much of my life trying to hide from my own revelations and blind myself. I curled behind my shoulders like a disaffected ghost. How could that not affect my writing? But once I started to see, I started to find the places I hid from myself. It was like I’d been living in a basement my whole life, only to discover there were stairs to a first floor, and a second, and a garden, and a path to the street, and a field that led all the way to the mountains that dangled underneath the moon. My writing seemed to gain purpose.

When I think back to that time I can’t pinpoint exactly what I did to change myself. I went to therapy. I did EMDR. I tightened up my diet and exercise. I learned how to shoot a gun. I helped my grandparents around their farm and cooked their meals. I became more disciplined in my schedule. There were a hundred little adjustments that I made. But it all seemed to come down to this:

I had hope for a better life. Hope for a future that didn’t end in the slow erosion of my soul, death to a great godless nothingness. I was going to have a family. I was going to be the writer I always wanted to be. I was going to become someone who could light a fire and not flinch and turn away from the spark.

It didn’t last.

I won’t get into the details of what happened, but I closed my heart again.

I emptied out the reservoirs of my spirit. I became empty.

People often think that corruption is a single and abrupt decision. A villain’s journey is marked by a recognizable turn into darkness, an obvious point of no return. Othello puts his hands around the neck of Desdemona. Anakin Skywalker makes the choice to accept the dark side of the force. Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain for eternal youth. The light and the dark don’t intermingle. There’s a clear line between each and once you step over the whole landscape changes.

The thing about corruption is that you rarely recognize it as it happens. It breaks you, piece by piece, and then fills in the empty space with a new version of you. The part of you that could recognize the corruption taking place has been replaced by this new thing that carries your face and your name.

If you looked behind you to see your old self you wouldn’t even be familiar with its eyes.

Villain era.

I didn't even have the pretension of being a cool girl anymore. I couldn't lose myself in the sadness the way I used to, tell myself that my tears were unbottled inspiration and every good artist was tortured. Red lipstick and gunpowder in tequila and emotional neglect to bring out the best of my writing. Pain like nectar.

I'd been happy before. I'd seen how it made everything better. The idea that unhappiness brought special insight was a lie, but a useful one. We needed to hide our flaws from our sight, because if people saw how broken and miserable they were, the full extent of it, and for no particular gain, many of them probably wouldn't survive.

Now I didn't even have that.

And besides that, I became a mother. I couldn't go out partying or lay in bed to revel in my sadness all day. Things that seemed edgy and sexy in my twenties seemed ugly once a child became involved. It no longer became acceptable for me to lose myself in my pain, my little acts of self-destruction. My child needed me.

But that meant all of my feelings rubbed raw against me. All of my flaws blistered in the sun. I couldn't hide from them anymore.

Isn’t being a villain supposed to be freeing? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to not be caged by the responsibilities that other people have? You don’t have to feel guilt anymore. It’s been devoured by a greater ambition.

Even when we see the downfall of a villain we recognize the pull of the devil’s bargain. Maybe it is worth it. What is a soul, anyway? A soul is such an insignificant and small thing in the face of my overwhelming desire to stop feeling this pain. 

If only that were true. It’s a devil’s bargain because it’s not really a bargain at all, and once you truly see what you’re getting for it, you’d realize it’s worse than nothing. Hell doesn’t come after you’ve gotten your wish. It’s always been there. It’s created the toxic environment for your desires.

How do I get back to being that person I used to be?

It’s easy for me to get lost in all the ways in which that’s impossible. I love to romanticize my sadness. It’s my mating call. I could tell myself that I already destroyed my chance at happiness. I took my Faustian bargain and now I have to spend the rest of my life submerged in a hell of my own making.

But there’s another easy solution.

I have to find hope again.

I have to learn to accept pain as an ordinary part of life.

Day by day. Moment by moment, if I have to.

Right now I’m typing this while I watch my daughter sleep on the baby monitor. It’s like her breath is curling around every part of my being, like our spirits are connected in suspension. Earlier we headed into the city and bought a Christmas tree. My daughter and I played in a baseball lot while my husband got the tree tied to the roof of his Jeep. She stomped around in her pink light-up shoes and blue sweater. Oklahoman wind ran through her blonde hair.

And for just a moment I wasn’t lost in self-pity and pain. I was alive. We were alive.

That’s hope.

It dances in every strata of all existence.

I have to keep looking at the sun until my eyes remember to let the light in.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb is now available for pre-order! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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How The Sims Gave Me My First Existential Crisis

“Also, after people play these Sim games, it tends to change their perception of the world around them, so they see their city, house or family in a slightly different way after playing.” — Will Wright, Creator of The Sims

“It is good,” he thought “to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it. And now I know it, I know it not only because I remember hearing it, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. And it is good for me to know it!”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Cover art belongs to EA and Maxis.

Note: This is a repost from an older newsletter back when I had MailChimp and no archive, so I’m publishing it again for posterity.

Being famous and wealthy usually doesn’t make people happy. Children with starry-eyed dreams become depressed starlets and overdose queens. Power couples divorce after a few years of being at each other’s throats in their mansion by the beach. Kanye pissed on his golden globe award after a manic episode. And many of us have reached a goal in life only to realize that obtaining it doesn’t make life any less painful or confusing. The job we desperately wanted has internal issues that actually made working it miserable. The girl of our dreams turned out to have an addictive personality and a bad childhood. Or maybe we realize that the girl of our dreams just bores us, and isn’t actually who we wanted at all. Nothing we want is ever quite what we imagined it to be. Sometimes it takes years of struggling and pain for people to realize this.

I learned this by playing The Sims.

The Sims came out in 2000, and for those who weren’t around then — it was a revolutionary game for its time and became one of the top bestselling PC games of all time. The concept was simple: You have a family of simulated people, or “sims” living together in a house. They go about ordinary lives, get jobs, get married, have children, and fulfill their basic needs such as hunger and hygiene. There were no objectives and no end game, so you were free to play however you wanted. Nothing like it had ever been created before and people were amazed at how fun it could be to just play a facsimile of ordinary life. I remembered at ten years old playing it at my dad’s office, and his co-workers laughing behind me because I’d put a hot tub in the middle of my living room and a toilet on the side of the house outside.

The sims was partially responsible for jump-starting my game career. I put thousands of hours into The Sims, and the first job I ever did QA for was for The Sims 3: Pets for console. My first game design job was for TheVille, which was a sort of sims rip-off for Facebook. And I’ve recently started playing Sims 4, after holding off on purchasing the game for six years because I was in a losing battle with EA Origins.

So what does this have to do with existential despair?

Playing the Sims 4 has brought me back to the moments I played the first game. It came out when I was only ten years old. I’m not wealthy or famous, but my Sims were. I took them from rag-to-riches, moved them from trailer homes to mansions. And after being riveted for hours with the journey I’d have my sims at the top of their careers, with their beautiful spouse and bevy of children. They’d sit on their golden toilets, with their moods constantly in the green.

And I’d be bored.

So I’d get creative and lock the sims in rooms and make them my prisoners. Force them to sleep on the floor or piss themselves. Sometimes I’d have my sims seduce married men to get all their money, then drown them in the pool. The ghosts of all the wronged men would haunt my sim’s home, eventually driving my sim mad. Other times I’d put curtains on top of fireplaces in every room and burn my hard-earned mansions down, force my sims to wear rags and clean up the ashes and start from scratch.

If I got bored with The Sims, and The Sims was supposed to be a representation of real life, then what did life have to offer to keep me from being bored? And now that I knew getting to the top of my career, having children, and getting all the money I could want didn’t radically change my understanding of life — then what the hell was I supposed to do?

Was I too, just caught in a simulated loop, a person on a save file pulled out only to be discarded a few hours later? (I mean, probably not, but it’s fun to think about.)

I wrote this story about the Sims back when I was 18 and I’ve unearthed it from the vault of my email account for your reading pleasure. Fair warning, I was a serious edgelord back when I was 18 years old, and some of the references may be confusing if you’re not actually familiar with the game.

Autumn Christian Arrived in SimCity…

I should have known something was wrong from the beginning when Autumn Christian arrived in SimCity. Fresh out of college, I assumed, twenty-something with mechanical motions and a perfect expressionless face, studious, myopic, an ambitious bachelorette. She had college loans to pay, so all she could afford was a small white trailer on the edge of SimCity, with a patio and a grill attached to the back, a toilet and sink that was constantly being broken, a refrigerator that probably once housed the cool broken bodies leftover from some methodical machinations.

Autumn Christian the sim was alone but not lonely. She filled her small trailer with objects to keep her mind occupied and skills honed. She took a job in the medical career but soon found the hours too demanding. After a few promotions she quit and got into the science career. She kept a laboratory in her bedroom. She read books on every subject she could find. The trailer made noise in the night, and there were frequent burglaries, but Autumn Christian was making a small salary and buying more furniture and objects to keep her interested — she was fascinated with glass, with archaic books, with chess, with her makeshift fitness center, with her laboratory and the strange potions she concocted at all hours of the night. There was something out there in the dark, but she was a bubble contained, a single-minded machine.

Soon Autumn Christian got to a point in her career where she had to network — she called up people on the phone and invited them over to have dinner and watch TV. She made friends, but she only called them up to ask for favors or use them to lift her slowly dragging social meter. She advanced in the science career. She was making more money, and the bonuses from her promotions allowed her to throw out all her old furniture and get more comfortable chairs and couches. She bought a hot tub for the patio. Her friends liked the hot tub, and were coming around more often to chat and soak in the patio after clogging her toilet and eating all her food. Even though she had less time to herself, these friends were still on the periphery of her main goals. She still studied in the long hours of the night, and since she felt off somehow like she was missing something that everyone else had, a skill or a knack, she practiced talking in the medicine cabinet mirror above her sink in the bathroom. She stretched her mouth and made faces and gestured with her hands, but Autumn Christian felt a loneliness she could not describe in her conversations with the mirror. She felt as if she could not reach out and touch the real world, that everything she experienced, every person she encountered, was like this cold, cool reflection, was nothing but an expression on the back of her brain.

Yet Autumn Christian was advancing. With her hard work and networking, she made it to the top of the career path. She felt she should be satisfied, making it to the peak of advancement, but she felt something was missing, something pivotal. She drew up blueprint plans to demolish her trailer and erect a nice, modern house with all the state of the art amenities. She threw herself into this project, but once the house was erected she wandered the halls in the night, reading old books she had already memorized, working out, cooking and taking showers, fixing the shower when it broke. When the expansion pack came out, she bought a dog, and she trained it and fed it and played fetch, but the emptiness wouldn’t leave her alone.

She decided she wanted to fall in love. She called up one of her good friends, fed him, took him out to the hot tub, hug hug talk hug hugged, kissed, kissed again, kissed again until the pink heart turned red. The next day after the same routine, she, being a forward-thinking feminist science woman, proposed to him. He accepted and they got married. He moved into her house. The dog didn’t like him at first, but he made friends with the dog. They got another dog. They made love, whatever parody of love they could anyways, with the blur on everything. Autumn Christian was content. For a while.

The husband wanted to have kids. They had kids. One. Two. Three. Four. She knocked down walls of her house and added new wings, special bedrooms for all the kids, and a playroom, and a garden for them to run and play in. Even then, sometimes her husband would come across Autumn Christian in the garden, playing chess with herself, muttering, reading the books she’d read a hundred times over, pacing, making dinner that she didn’t eat, yelling at the kids. When her husband asked what was wrong she couldn’t tell him. She didn’t know how to tell him, so she burst into tears. She couldn’t tell him that she felt as if there was this pivotal center inside of her, a mechanism for the entire world to turn around, and all of this, the dogs, the kids, the house, even her husband, were just pieces, slots to be fit, necessary things that everyone told her she needed to have her whole life but that she never really wanted. She’d just been taught to want these things, taught that these things would make her happy. But they didn’t.

Another expansion pack. They went downtown and caroused the bars. They went on vacation. The kids never left her alone. They wouldn’t just grow up and get out of the house. She couldn’t even remember their names. They all looked the same, the same rote, expressionless faces, the same high-pitched, indistinct voices. One day, while the kids were at school and the husband at work, another expansion pack came out. A strange man came to her house and left a package on her doorstep. This is makin’ magic! he said. She took the package and went inside. She built a special room and put together all the equipment. She became a magician. She snorted the magic. She sold the magic to her friends. She was addicted. She knew she was addicted, but the world went away, it dissolved through her fingers. At least, for a while. She was so absence, always makin’ magic in her secret room, that all the kids got sent to military school and the dogs taken up by animal protection services. She and her husband got into vicious fights, and he went around the house, throwing tantrums and sulking. One of the neighbors eventually saw Autumn Christian makin’ magic and reported her to the authorities. She decided to get help. She threw away all her equipment, broke her wand, made up with her husband, had four more kids, bought two more dogs. She tore down the special room. She had lost her job, but she got a new one and quickly got back up to the top.

The emptiness set in just as quickly. It knotted in her stomach. These people, this house, Autumn Christian knew they were all illusions constructed by her head. They were illusions that she would never be able to touch. She threw herself back into her work, but this time, drawing up blueprints for her house, secret rooms, staircases to nowhere, elaborate mezzanines with fifteen computers and six statues of David, rooms with windows that burst the sun, rooms with no windows, trapdoors, rooms within rooms, a hedge maze half a mile long that visitors had to navigate through trying to get to her front door.

Her husband tried as best as he could to navigate through the labyrinth that Autumn Christian constructed, but it was becoming unbearable for him. This wasn’t his labyrinth, after all, it was hers, it was the windows and passageways and doors and staircases she saw in her head, the mazes that went down and down and down into endless tunnels, the rooms that squeezed her head, that made her feel safe and everyone else insane.

She lost her job again because she couldn’t get through the maze in time to get to her carpool. No matter, she had plenty of money saved up. She just had to sell all her appreciated artwork and the children’s beds. The children just fell over and slept on the floor when they got tired enough. There was nothing left. This was reality here, inside her head, and nothing left. She began luring strangers into her home and trapping them in hidden rooms. She watched through secret windows while they died. When her husband found out, she waited until he took one of his late-night swims in the pool and removed the stepladder. She burned his drowned and bloated corpse and put the urn on a table.

The kids were taken away. The dogs were taken away. She was alone again, just like she started, but this time the labyrinth reflected in her head had been made her external reality. The labyrinth had been there all along, even when she was in the trailer park, but now she could see it clearly. Now it was all around her, radiating outwards, forever and ever, her in the center, its sweet and unaffected minotaur, its rocking cradle, its axis. Everything but the labyrinth had been a lie she had constructed in an attempt to keep her attached to the world, but this, these mazes, these walls, these dead bodies whispering in the walls, this WAS her world. She had enough money to last her a lifetime. Nobody ever visited anymore, they couldn’t get through the hedge maze out in the front, and even if they did, Autumn Christian never answered the door anymore. She went about her normal routine, ate, slept, showered, soaked in the hot tub, read the books, talked to herself, played chess, worked out, swam in the pool, dressed in the same lacy print dress every day, dressed in the same jumper pajama suit every night, but always, continuously making plans for the labyrinth, making the world inside her with its phosphenes and fractal patterns and auras a reality.

Autumn Christian knew the life they advertised on The Sims(TM) box, the careers and family and love, was never what she wanted. It was never what anyone really wanted, only told that was what they wanted, to keep the houses orderly, the families neat and functional, the labyrinths locked in the head, the meaning put into the relationships, the reality put into the children, the emotions what the sims felt for one another, love and hate and passion and ambition, consequences that actually mattered. Autumn Christian once believed in those consequences. She lived them, but she had seen them in the end for what they really were, and discarded them. She discarded everything for the labyrinth, walked the labyrinth, whispered to the cooling bodies, spoke to death and made zombies rise from the ashes, discarded everything for the fractal dream that had been inside her head the entire time. What a perfect simulacra The Sims(TM) is, Autumn Christian thought, to teach us the utter meaninglessness of a normal life.

In the end, even the labyrinth was a lie.

Even the labyrinth could not justify her existence.

Autumn Christian built fireplaces in every room, every hallway, every secret morgue and laboratory, every fenced in garden and maze. She hung curtains over the fireplaces, set rugs next to the fireplaces, filled every empty space with dollhouses. She went about these motions as she always went about every motion, rote, calculating, mechanical, either unwilling or unable to consider any living creature except herself. She knew that she did all she could on her limited plot of land, built everything she could, constructed everything possible, bought everything possible, and still, it wasn’t enough.

She worked fast. She went from the top room in the farthest corner and worked her way down, lighting the fireplaces in every room. The rugs and curtains and dollhouses caught fire quickly. By the time she finished, the house was a big, blurring blaze. She stood in the middle of the house and watched her labyrinth burn. Watched herself burn. Autumn Christian caught fire quickly. She crumpled to the floor and died. Death walked through the maze, trailing his robe, clutching his scythe, just as he had for every person that Autumn Christian had murdered in the walls of her labyrinth.

There was no one to see her crumble.

There was no one to see the labyrinth dissolve, and there never ever really was.

Of course, real-life has more intricacies, challenges, money sinks, and random events than The Sims. Once you become rich in real life it’s not like you run out of things to buy in the catalog. And once you have a child the struggles have only begun. But many of the principles are the same.

(And wow, I was really obsessed with labyrinth imagery at that age. But I digress.)

After my existential crisis was over I realized that the point of The Sims was not to achieve an arbitrary end goal. It was to become engaged with the process of getting there.

Life happiness wasn’t about goals. It was about processes. Creating the perfect life was not just about aiming for something. It was creating enjoyable habits and structure. It’s been said many times that the goal isn’t the point, it’s the journey that matters. But sometimes we have to learn that lesson ourselves to really understand it.

But sometimes I just have to play with The Sims, kill my virtual wives, laugh with the Grim Reaper, and dance right on the razor’s edge of acceptable behavior. To question existence itself. To wonder — what if I was a serial killer portrait artist or a jealous astronaut who impregnated half the town? If God is real, would he let me murder my neighbors?

Sometimes there’s nothing more enjoyable than creating a little drama.

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The Dangers of Summoning Demons

He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His god and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. - Carl Jung

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I don't want to believe in demons, but I've summoned one before.

It was the night before I started my new QA job, and I was drunk off whiskey sours and wine with my new girlfriend. I made a joke about not being a proper writer because I'd had a fifth of tequila sitting in my apartment for a month, untouched. I was twenty-one years old and finally free and flush with excitement. I wanted to become dangerous.

I used to write my ex letters in which I created our own mythology, full of demons that lived in walls and ate skin, and infinite rooms full of red velvet curtains. That night I taunted the demon to come out. My girlfriend responded by smashing a votive candle all over the floor and putting Sunn O))) on her record player. I still remembered the song. It was "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom."

I drank the rest of my beer and, laughing, threw it on the ground. It shattered. A chain started dragging across the floor. It wasn't the sound of an imprisoned hell beast, but the coffee shop owner below our apartment closing the store and pulling the sign inside before he locked up for the night. Yet it seemed to signify that the sunlight rules were gone, and we'd entered a dimension of night where anything was possible.

When I awoke the next morning my ex was curled up in bed with a bloody gash on her foot, and the bedsheets encrusted with dried blood.

I knew enough about rituals to understand that blood was always required.

The next night I had my first episode of sleep paralysis. A shadowed presence paced around the room as I lay in bed unable to move. I continued to get sleep paralysis and hallucinate the demon until I left that apartment.

My ex too, saw the demon. She'd stay up late at night, terrified, hours after I'd already gone to sleep. She carved "MINE" into the headboard with a pocket knife to try to get it to stay away.

I didn't believe in demons, and yet I'd brought one into existence. I never realized how easy it was to induce a fantasy of evil, to generate an idea designed to haunt me.

When I was a child my mother had some friends come over one night for dinner. They told me how they'd invited a demon into their home and had been possessed. How much trouble they had getting rid of it. Their pastor told them to throw away all their secular books and music. I was scared of monsters like a lot of little girls were, but it was a different kind of terror to have an adult tell you that the monsters you feared, in crevices of darkness and at the bottom of staircases, could be real.

I had trouble sleeping for years. I imagined the demons walking behind me in my blind spot. Whenever I crawled into bed and closed my eyes I would imagine figures staring at me from the foot of my bed. (This later became the inspiration for the demon I wrote about in Crystalmouth, although I’m not sure the years of nightmares were worth it.) I'd whisper frantic prayers underneath my breath, but it never seemed to help. I just imagined the demons laughing at me, leaping across the walls and pirouetting behind my ears. I had a framed print of The Guardian Angel above my bed, but from my vantage point any good spirit always seemed so far away.

But I grew up, and I stopped believing in demons, and for the most part the night terrors went away. Demons were just a product of guilt and sleep paralysis. They were a product of mechanical processes, breath and liquor and stress, and even if they did exist there was no soul for them to take. “Satanic” books and records could not contain the seed of a destroying evil. We hallucinated shapes in the darkness because the darkness contained all shapes, not because there was anything to find.

I thought that my rational brain could conquer the fantastical world of spirits. My prefrontal cortex could steer its way through thousands, if not millions, of years of fighting demonic forces that lived in the stitches of the subconscious.

I thought that by the sheer force of my intellect I would not become haunted.

Yet I summoned a demon, even though I didn’t believe in them, even though God had long stopped listening to me and was probably dead. I summoned a demon and gave myself lifelong sleep paralysis, so that thirteen years later I still get it if I sleep on my back.

And maybe I've been summoning demons my entire life, even though I didn't call them that or recognize them as such. Have you ever had a festering and compulsive thought that won't go away? Have you ever read something that made your life a little worse? Have you ever been compelled to do something self destructive? Have you been drawn to someone that you knew was bad for you?

If a demon is a bad idea that corrupts, an influence that takes us over and does nothing but make our life worse, then we're all surrounded by demons. On advertisements on the side of the highway, influencers on Instagram, message boards and Discord channels tucked into dark corners, the friend that always tears you down, little thoughts like pinches that tell us we're ugly or stupid. They don't need to have red horns and pitchforks and panting tongues that smoke when exposed to cold shadow in order to be demons.

We think our rational brain can protect us from the darkness, but we're consistently reminded that the small and meager light of rationality can be drowned within the abyss of everything we don't understand.

Maybe the people who burned forbidden books and painted their faces and tongues with salve to protect themselves from evil influence understood more about the world of surrounding darkness than we do.

They understand that you can't interact with anything in this world without it influencing you in some way. The world of fiction and the imagination influences reality, and vice-versa. A demon doesn't have to be "real" to hurt you. If you give a harmful idea space inside of you, then it can be just as dangerous as steel and claws.

We surf currents of hyperreality, without ever fully understanding their influence. We are surrounded by the spirits of transformation. Inside and out.

Our world of facts is a thin layer of pond scum on top of a deep and cold lake that goes on down forever.

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A Kind Thing Feeds On Your Heart

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The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.
~Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh 

Love is the answer, before you even know what the question is.

Teaching a child doesn’t mean telling a child what to do or disciplining them. It means becoming the person that your child is supposed to emulate, and living that everyday. It isn’t enough to speak about what has to be done. A path forward must be forged.

The name Samantha means “God has heard.” I didn't know what the name meant when we decided to name her, but I think of it often now. If I could have designed the perfect baby, I don't think she could have been more perfect. Nature rises up to fulfill us in ways we can't understand, because we too, are nature, and the most ancient part of us still speaks the proto-language of all creation.

Samantha started walking a day after her first birthday. I used to be unable to understand why parents got so excited about their kids' milestones. After all, every kid experienced it. So who cares? But watching my daughter learn to walk is like executing a program and watching it run. It's like seeing the patterns of life that God traced a million years ago. It's understanding that life begets life, and that even the smallest mundanity is a disguised miracle.

I told myself I wouldn't be one of those people who had a bunch of toys that their baby never played with. I am one of those people. The toys are just as much for me as they are for her, and it's difficult to resist the impulse to give us everything if it even has the slightest chance of sparking joy.

Every day the darkness becomes more unappealing. Once you see that the glittering void offers you nothing but death and pain with no reward, you can't unsee it. I am not the child anymore in a dark hoodie and dirty Converse with Jean Paul Sartre's "Nausea" tucked underneath my arm. To flirt with misery doesn't feel bold and exciting anymore. It's a courtship with the ravenous nothingness that wants to feed on you, and won't be satisfied until you're dead.

So much of modern parenting is designed around what's convenient for the parent, not what's beneficial to the child. Children are supposed to be annoying and intrusive and loud. They're supposed to take up a lot of your time. They are not supposed to fit neatly into your life in their appropriate time slots. You are raising a human being who will go on to have their own life. You should treat your child like a human being, not a machine that needs to be programmed.

Having a child doesn’t make you a better person, but it does force you to confront the flaws about yourself that before you were able to avoid. There isn’t the time or the space to become comfortably numb. There isn't anyone you can pass off the responsibility of things you've found difficult in the past. But this is a crucible. Some people get through it stronger. Others just double down on their worst traits.

I'd say it probably took me about a year to get used to being a mother, and since Samantha is constantly changing I continue having to adjust, to make refinements and tweaks to my routines and behavior. It's like a second adolescence for women, a time when you're stretched between who you used to be and who you're becoming. All transformations are painful to some degree. But now that I'm on the other side, I couldn't imagine wanting to go back to who I used to be.

Having a child means looking up at the moon and wanting to take her up there so she can see the magnificence of the Earth as it floats suspended in velvet space. It strips away the ugliness you’re so used to seeing because you want to show her that our eyes can become attuned to beauty.

I didn't have postpartum depression. I had postpartum euphoria. I'd wanted a child for so long, and she had finally arrived, and I was happier than I thought was even possible. It allowed me to push through the exhaustion and the huge lifestyle change.

Once I fully embraced that I'd never get to have those huge swathes of time that I used to, writing actually became more fun. It became a challenge to find pockets of time to write, and when I did get the chance, I couldn't afford to procrastinate. It reminded me of being a kid again and squeezing in time to write between classes and chores. It was a private game to see how much I could write. There's more excitement and reward involved because it becomes more of an effort.

Being a mother is obviously a job, but it's a strange one, with long periods of nothing to do but rock a sleepy child, or play with toy trains. It's often slow paced, but you also never get to clock out. Sometimes you'll have a good night's sleep, and sometimes you'll be up at 4 in the morning because your baby had a nightmare. There's nobody watching over your shoulder to make sure you're performing efficiently. All of the responsibility of parenthood rests upon you. It makes sense why people would struggle with the idea of it being a real job after a lifetime of being graded, recorded, and analyzed.

The mysterious process of bearing and raising a child does not come with an easy set of facts to digest. There is still so much science can't explain about the process. There is no prerecorded "right" way to raise a child, so we must rely on our intuitions, like mystics and sages. This is why women are often not considered "rational." Rationality requires a kind of order and a system. We have to live in a place that exists beyond rationality.

One of the best things in this life is to go to a place that you thought was forbidden to you and realize that you belonged this entire time. The life on the other side was just waiting patiently for you to cross the threshold and enter.

A new softness has entered me. There is a thin membrane between my feelings, and the part of me that can withstand tenderness is weak and underdeveloped. People never tell you how much love and kindness can hurt. It can be treated by the body like a kind of hostile foreign invader.

Maybe the heart isn't something that needs to be protected. Maybe it's something to be given up, placed on an altar of loam in a dusk-lit woods, to be eaten by the kind animals that have crept out of the dark to find nourishment.

It's impossible to understand the scope of how much a child will impact your life. It's a relationship that you'll probably have for the rest of your life. Samantha will be a dependent for longer than I've been an adult. I'm excited for each year to bring new challenges and new adventures as we grow together.

If you ever read this Samantha, I want you to know that you were always loved and wanted. And if we raise you well, you'll never have to question the fact.

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Beautiful Surfaces, Terrible Depths

This short story was originally published in Black Telephone Magazine.

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Reality 0

James got the notification he was already dead when we first kissed in the elevator. Maybe I should've noticed something was wrong by the way he tensed when I touched the neural-link at the base of his neck. Or how he grew quiet when I wanted to argue with him about the nature of reality as we laid together naked in my hotel room.

But he didn't tell me that his vision swarmed with biometric errors as he came. His body uncoiled beside me, all sinuous and acute geometry. A pool of city neon tangled with the bed sheets. His Versace belt lay on the hardwood floor next to my thrift store jeans. 

His readout gave him less than six months to live. The cancer would spread like a languid, rotten tongue across his spine. It traced the patterns it'd later push through his bones, filling in its malignant cavity.

If I'd known I probably wouldn't have draped myself across him and asked, "Why do you want to live in a sick body?" I wouldn't have said, "You could be a great writer, if only you got rid of this delusion you have about your own hopelessness. It infuriates me. You've made a cognitive error. It's consuming you." 

"Hmm," James said, exhaling smoke. "I suppose that could be true."

I thought he was staring up at the ceiling. But he was really staring down into the tunnel of his own broken DNA inside the neural-link panel, searching through the factory of stars that generated his early death, trying to find the dust on the lid of our reality, a raw and open spot in the seamless stream of infinite data where an error could've been made.

Reality 2

I stayed up all night reading Nietzsche because the idea of eternal recurrence haunted me. Even after dying and being reborn, squealing underneath the warm bath of vitro fluids, I knew I still had a slave mentality.

I wanted to believe I found it difficult to take responsibility for my own life because I'd been woken up by a recalcitrant machine, pins swelling on my tongue, metallic fingers jammed into unfamiliar hardware sockets. But if I was being honest with myself I was always looking for an excuse.

Once they took the feeding tube out of my throat, I demanded to speak with a lawyer. I had no desire to go through this whole fucking thing again. 

And yet.

I found that once alive, I didn't want to succumb to the nothingness again. My cowardice kept me in a gridlock of weakness where I couldn't completely commit to either option. Life or death. 

At seven months pregnant I bought a copy of James Seward’s latest bestseller, "Vacuous Gravity," at a signing event. I waited at the back of the bookstore until I was the last person there. I waddled over to the signing table, my flip flops slapping against the linoleum, belly straining against my t-shirt. When I put his book down in front of him he stared at me for a moment, trying to place me. Past realities always came to us as broken memories. Like the glue had evaporated between the strands of sense data.  

Then he remembered. An animal in his eyes touched mine.

"Stop narrating me," I said. "I can practically hear it. Something about how I'm a shadow of my youth. A faded beauty. Blah blah. You male writers are all the same."

"Stop narrating me," he said as he signed his book for me. "Probably something like 'He's just a vapid shadow wearing Dolce & Gabana... a dangerous cloud where a man should've been.' That about right?"

"Fine," I said. "We'll both agree to stop narrating. Truce?"

Later we stood in the alleyway. He smoked a cigarette. I stared at the distant city lights with his book tucked underneath my arm.

"You didn't visit me," he said. "When I was dying."

"Well," I said. "You didn't ask me to."

Nietzsche would've laughed at me, because that's exactly what a slave would've said.

The baby kicked inside me hard enough that I groaned. I tried to imagine myself being something more. A woman who was more than an angry voice, an empty hallway housing a broken chandelier.

But I just saw James, skin like gray crepe, surrounded by beeping machines, an oxygen tube smeared with spray tan solution. I knew later I'd read his book with two of my fingers pressed inside me, unable to orgasm, my imagination a rotting thing, wishing both of us were better than we were.

Reality 3

God used to be a blank space. But in Reality 3 God was a Chinese man named Lin Qiáo who invented a new kind of quantum cryptocurrency that ran on consciousness. The dead weren't allowed to rest as long as money could be made.

I met James again in a restaurant in Neo Los Angeles, where the dawn never came. He sat alone as he dined on cod in miso and drank shisho tea. It was the first reality I'd seen him eat anything in.

I sat down beside him, tugging on the train of my shimmering black dress.

"This reality fucking sucks," I said. "Everything here is beautiful and I hate it."

"It does seem to be lacking a certain dramatic tension," he said.

"You can't even cut yourself without having the wound heal immediately," I said. "How lame is that? I bet this whole thing totally ruins your brand."

“You have no idea.”

He wouldn't dance with me when the band began to play, but he liked to watch. I tossed my hair back and my necklace broke, showering the dance floor in gold and pearls. Then the beads formed back together, a strand floating backwards, and wrapped itself once more around my neck. Later we climbed the side of a skyscraper, our feet buoyed up by anti-gravity settings, and he laughed at me as I screamed at God.

"Fuck you Lin Qiáo!" I said as I leaned backwards in levitating suspension, my feet against a window. "Delete me, you coward!"

You'd think in a world without death, I'd stop being afraid. But when I looked down the side of the skyscraper, the reflection of the ocean crashing underneath him, I saw death rotting in the center of my eye. A smear where he should've been. I couldn't see him. Not really.

Even my tears shone incandescent. And no matter how far I looked forward, it seemed that everything always ended in tears.

Reality 487

I shred all my writing contracts and climbed into a cradle of alternate realities I installed in my apartment bedroom. I didn’t want to fall asleep alone anymore, so I let machines milk try to milk the loneliness away. 

My muscles atrophied while I pretended to be a waitress in a strip mall Mexican cafe. When I was serving warm tortillas and trays of frozen margaritas to visitors from other universes, I thought I could forget where I’d really come from. I thought I could hide my grief from myself, like a magic coin pressed up a sleeve.

But one day I glanced up through the window, past the neon Modelo sign, and saw James standing on the other side of the street. He didn’t see me, but I knew it was him. He wore a blazer that swallowed the lamp light. From the angle I stood it looked like the threads of smoke from his cigarette shot all the way to the chain of satellites above.

I disgorged myself from my fake life and went back to my bedroom. It was nighttime and colors had been leeched from the world.

 I rolled to the edge of my bed, my stomach pressed against the edge. The darkly patterned carpet looked like an abyss without a bottom.

 I kissed the vial around my neck that I kept a lock of my dead son's hair. It felt like the bare mattress burned against my bare skin as my shirt rode up, and when I swallowed I felt like ash dribbled down my throat.

Seeing James again evoked a haunted nest of memories. I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd left something undone. That I was supposed to do something in another lifetime, and that if I didn't figure out what it was I was going to be lost forever. Belly on the abyss. A woman who'd never been brave enough to damn herself by eating something forbidden.

Reality 8942389

James texted me: I have cancer.

I thought about sending a message back, but I never did. The phone slipped from my hands and I fell asleep dreaming of a man spitting out flies, at the far end of a lonely hallway.

Reality 9123098492368

I had to have my AI helper send a message to James, because I was too sick and could no longer move my arms.

"I keep thinking about that story you wrote about that man who spreads this venereal disease. And I wanted to say it's boring. Please stop being boring. You have the philosophy of a serial killer. It always ends the same for serial killers. Boring."

He didn't respond. I didn't expect him to. Everyone I knew was dying in hospital beds, alone, in separate parts of the universe. It made me feel ashamed that I'd ever laughed at anything.

Reality 99999.999(Recursive)

My consciousness split apart into fractal mirrors. My head exploded into divergent possibilities. I’d become digital, a dancing solid state, so that my awareness was present through every synapse, every cell. I became one with the universe and my shadow burned away. Time was spatial, and now that I could see in all dimensions I found that reality was a circle, like a shimmering egg. 

My first act of God was to play with the rainbow colors of every permutation of myself.

I found out why I couldn't feel love. I didn't understand the arithmetic of the universe and so had become its prisoner. I'd lashed out and made the world hate me. I'd put myself in a recursive loop of pain. I had made myself a failure by design. Nietzsche had been right. Of course he'd been fucking right about everything. 

Even as I denied my own power over my life I could do nothing but use it.

When I became bored of trying to know myself, I reversed the universe, delved into its machinery, and tried to fix the eternal error. I tried to make sure my son never had to die. I tried to make my husband love me again. I tried to cure death itself. Make us shining and precious eternal beings.

But no matter how much I tried to rearrange and shape the gleaming center of existence, no matter how much I turned and twisted it, observing it from every dimension and angle, the rules didn't bend for me.

I couldn't go back to that place before his conception, put a breaker in the code, and stop James from dying. I couldn't rearrange his DNA so that the sickness wouldn't spread, that he wouldn't bloom toxins, his mass exhaling soft tumors. There was no error.

I discovered that even when a God cries, prying apart the nucleus of each atom in existence, nothing changes. And it never would. 

Even a God could be a slave.

I sighed and exhaled stars, spattered white-hot tears made of cosmic heat.

And when I came to the end of infinity and back around, I found there was only way to go.

Back in. To the beginning. 

Reality 0

I walked down the long, dark hallway toward the back room where James lay dying. I asked his caretaker to wait outside. The room smelled of antiseptic, but it couldn't cover up the scent of cancer. It was like a rotting flower. A fist inside of overripe pulp. 

A slice of moonlight seemed to cut his ragged body in half. An IV snaked away into the darkness. Every breath he took seemed like a miracle.

I hesitated in the doorway. A thousand lives, fractionated realities split off into eternity, and I still thought maybe there was a way to escape from this moment. That there'd been some kind of error I wasn't able to find, that death itself was some kind of error. I thought maybe we wouldn't always end up here and that I wouldn't have to go through with this.

I'd reread one of his books on the flight to Los Angeles. I'd fallen asleep with my head against the window, the book splayed out on my lap. I dreamed of the gleaming demonic streets of Los Angeles. Corpses walking backwards. Parasites pretending to be vampires bending over to kiss my throat. I always hated the way his writing insinuated himself into my dreams. It meant he'd gotten to me. A choke hold I couldn't deny.

But I knew I'd never get another book from him, at least not in this reality, so for once I welcomed the intrusion.  

"I brought you cigarettes," I said. "Please keep it a secret."

I took his oxygen tube out of his nose and lit the cigarette for him. I was careful not to get it near the bed-sheets as the flame flared with all the extra oxygen in the room. I placed the cigarette between his cracked lips, and he reached up with a slender hand to hold it in place.

Then I shut the door behind me and took off my clothes.

"I've been thinking," I said as I stepped out of my skirt. 

"Careful," he said, and his body shuddered as he smiled.

"Nietzsche said the idea of eternal recurrence was the most burdensome thought," I said. "He wasn't kidding."

I walked back to the edge of the bed, and sank down onto the mattress. The box-springs groaned. I pulled my hair behind my shoulders and exposed my collar bones to the juice of the darkness. 

I climbed on top of him. He couldn't have been any more than ninety pounds by that point. I hesitated. I was afraid of hurting him. It seemed like the slightest movement would crush him. My uterus tensed in the way it did when I saw dead animals by the side of the road. I almost stopped. I almost put my clothes back on and walked out the door.

But then I remembered what I'd seen screaming at the edge of a thousand realities. All those times I could have come, and I didn't. I saw the woman who had been too afraid to even see him, like I could somehow stop what was happening if I ignored it. The woman who saw the truth over and over again and tried to burn her eyes out. She always died a slave.

It was difficult for him to get hard, but I managed to slip his cock inside of me. He was semi-soft and cold, his heartbeat slowed like it'd been ensconced in glass. I wasn't even sure he'd be able to feel me, but when I thrust against him his eyes rolled in the back of his head. He moved as if to take the cigarette out of his mouth, but I stopped him.

"Don't," I said. "I always thought you were so fucking sexy when you smoked."

He reached up to touch my face, and the smell of acrid death bloomed upwards between us. I thrust harder, so that his whole body heaved underneath me. I orgasmed to the sound of his heart rate monitor beeping a warning. And when it was over I began to cry. Then I laughed. Heaving, gulping, shivering waves of emotion that enfolded into each other until I didn't know up from down.

"What's wrong?" he asked me.

I wiped away the wetness on my face, and bent down, spine open to the closed door, the emptiness behind me, to hold him. It felt like he was fading in and out of consciousness in my arms. He twitched with irregular motion. The cigarette, still lit, slipped out from his mouth. I stubbed it out.

The truth was it always did end in tears. But it always started with a bang. 

"Nothing's wrong," I said, and for the first time in all my lives it didn't feel like a lie, "Nothing at all. Everything's perfect."

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Flowers For Dogman

This work of fiction was originally published in Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good

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It was about the time my mother fell in love with the dogman, that I ceased to be human. Daddy was driving during a thunderstorm when their car broke down on the side of the mountain. The dogman stood in the trees soaked in the downpour, carrying a big buck in his arms with his hand around its throat. The buck’s eyes were wide open but almost tranquil, washed to gleam in the headlights. Dogman stroked the buck’s rigid back, as if it were his pet.

When my mother locked eyes with him, he growled. The black fur on his arms and legs stood up, and his body went electric-taut. The buck kicked his legs, and in a single motion the dogman broke its spine.

My mother gasped. She grabbed Daddy's hand to steady herself as the dogman, with long, graceful strides, carried the buck off into the forest.

“I thought I was done for, Effy!" she told me later at the kitchen table, smiling. "He must’ve been ten feet tall, and handsome. You could tell he was handsome, even through all that rain. Those dark haunches, that wide chest."

She grew heady during thunderstorms. She dressed in her silky pink nightgown, the one Daddy gave her six years ago that she never wore for him, and stood out in the trees behind the house. Flashes of lightning illuminated her pale, wide thighs and her wet red hair spilling over her back. She held her hands out, as if he might reach out to take them. She bit her tongue waiting for the dogman, and after the storm passed she came back into the house with blood in her mouth.

If Daddy was troubled by his wife's new crush, he didn't show it. After work he spent most nights upstairs in his office, his "laboratory", reading books about wine-making or tending to his dead spider collection. He'd progressed slowly over the years, from a father into an antique fixture. Something that was part of the house, but not exactly living inside of it.

Once he went down into the kitchen to pour water, and his hands remained steady against the pitcher as my mother slapped me. 

For what, I couldn't remember. Maybe I left the stove on. Maybe I was wearing a dress that only a slut would wear. What I did remember, was this: that as I knelt on the floor, my hand trying to cover the lacing of blood now pouring out my nose, he placed the pitcher back into the fridge and walked back upstairs.

I was still human back then, so those things hurt me.

But by the time my mother began to plant flowers for the dogman in our garden and slaughter the chickens so that she could smear the blood in between her menopausal thighs, I didn't feel much at all.

It was my senior year of highschool.

 I often skipped class to spend days in the forest. I’d take my brother’s hunting bow, his buck knife. I hunted small things. Squirrels. Hawks. I built myself a hidden shelter out of thick branches and plant rope and I often slept there, not coming back home for days. At night I travelled by star light, baptized myself in cold springwater.

And sometimes, I watched my mother, from the trees, as she babied the Ozarkian crocus, the delicate orchids she could never quite keep alive, the violets that wilted to one side.

I’d only ever seen her be gentle to flowers and wine glasses.

#

Some people think that once you are born human, you will always be human. But it is easy to lose, easier than anyone might think. 

In the forest I pretended that I was an animal, that I’d never been born in that homestead house with its corset-tight rooms and dirty linoleum. I was an animal that never crawled on all fours through a dark creaking hallway, picking up the bloodied pieces of a 32 glass dinner set. I was an animal that never had her braid slammed shut into a cupboard, or had a boy shove her skirt up over her mouth, or had her fingers smashed in a car door. 

And it worked, for a while. The nights that I slipped through the trees were quiet ones.

But then I started dreaming of the dogman. 

Nobody believed in the dogman, not really. He was something to talk about in the hushdark so that your girlfriend would snuggle close, or to delight-frighten children so that they’d yell and squirm. Everyone knew of an uncle, or a grandparent, who’d seen the dogman in a flash of headlights, or leaping over a garden fence. But he wasn’t real.

Before he left town, my brother took me to an old shrine while we were out hunting. It must’ve been over a hundred years old. A white oak, with barbed wire wrapped around its trunk, and the bones of small animals tied to the branches with twine and cord. The air was still. 

“People used to come here and pay him tribute. So that he wouldn’t steal their crops, kidnap their daughters. Things like that,” he said. “When it’s windy they make this music. It’s hard to describe. Pretty. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

He pulled one of the bones down, a tiny, weatherworn crow’s skull with the cord looped through its eye sockets, and placed it in my hand. 

“Keep this, it’ll protect you from him.”

“You really think that?” I asked.

He reached out to tap a hanging bone necklace, and watch it undulate.

He never answered.

One night as I slept in my little hidden shelter, I dreamed of the dogman. I tried to move, but I couldn’t, my limbs constricted tight by some invisible, thick liquid. He was shuffling around in the dirt outside, snuffing, making these barking pants.

And every time I breathed, in quick stolen gasps, his movements grew more sporadic, more forceful. As if he could sense me, but couldn’t find me, not quite, and my pulse drove him into a frenzy.

And then I could move a finger, two. But I didn’t dare run. He’d catch me and tear me apart. I knew the noise of violence that was only looking for a home, a comfortable place to kill. So I only moved my hand down to my pocket, to grasp the crow skull necklace.

It was one of the few things that I always kept with me, in and out of dreams. 

He created a storm by running back and forth. Trees crashed to the ground. Animals squealed, as they were torn apart. I pressed my back into the dirt, trying to force my breathing to slow.

But I was breathing faster and faster, and the storm was picking up. Hurling. Heaving. More trees, collapsing. The sound of a wolf’s throat being torn out mid-howl.

Then, he upended my little shelter, crumbled the sticks in his hands. His great paw reached for me, blotting out the sky. And then—

The dogman disappeared. The night disappeared. I climbed out of the wreckage of my shelter into daylight.

He’d torn up the entire forest. Nothing remained but the grass he’d trampled into ash and the stumps of trees.

My mother, in her pink nightgown, sat cross-legged on what remained of a white oak. Ragged, red claw marks swathed her face and chest.

“Oh, Effy! He was beautiful!” she said, rocking back and forth, grasping her ankles, laughing. “We killed everything. Nothing survived . Tomorrow night, he’s taking me to space. We’re going to destroy a satellite!”

Then I woke into a hazy, gray kind of morning air.

The dream felt real. It was the kind of dream you wake up from and your chest is sore.

And as I walked home I kept looking behind me, through the trees. Feeling him but not feeling him, in the way that a shadow has no weight but seems to drag heavy, despite all natural laws.

I reached in my pocket and touched the crow skull. 

#

For the first time in weeks, I combed the bugs and leaves out of my hair, and went to school.

In the hallway, I walked past a parade of people I tried to avoid. Like Mr. Sandalwood, who once squeezed the back of my neck at a football game and told me how fragile I looked, standing there by myself. He did not smell like his name, like sandalwood. He smelled of overripe oranges and too-strong mint mouthwash. Like a dog masking his true scent.

Or the girls with straight-shoulders, backs like hollow trees. Evangeline and Lily and Terra, girls with names like flowers and cathedrals, names that did not flow with blood. It was Evangeline, at her poolside party in her golden bikini, clutching her tiny pink towel, who put her arm around around my shoulder and asked:

“I always see you by yourself. Tell me what boys you like? I can get you any boy I want.” 

Me, shrugging. “I don’t know.” 

“You don’t know?” Evangeline said, laughing. “Of course you know. Is it Andy? Miles? It’s Miles, isn’t it?”

Evangeline set me up with Miles for a dance.

He broke my wrist when I wouldn’t kiss him in his car. 

Afterwards in the hallway between classes, I ran into Evangeline. I held my broken wrist between our bodies like a white flag.

But she only rolled her eyes at the sight of the puffed up, bruised blue bones.

“I told him you wanted him. And just look at you, the way you act. You pretend like you’re invulnerable” she said. “Well, you know. You’re not.”

The human parts of me, that stuck stubborn to my skin, were coming off in flakes.

It’d been easier to hold onto them, when I thought in those early days at home that I’d meet someone kind.

Yet kind people were talked about in the same way the dogman was. Seen in flashes. Sideway glances. A campfire tale. “My great-great grandmother met a kind man once, as she crossed the ocean on the Mayflower. He smiled genuine, and bandaged a cut before he fell off the boat and died.”

“I think I saw a nice girl once, at least half of her. She wore a white dress and had a swollen lamb’s heart. She jumped over a fence and disappeared into a meadow. gone in a an instant.”

Or like my brother, they’re chased away. They disappear into the swirling center of city skyscrapers, and do not come back.

#

My brother hadn’t liked school either. Told me that when he sat and tried to read, the words were frozen, but when he sat outside and watched the trees, they were warm with movement, with music, with the singing, growling, vibrating tremolo of everything in existence.

“I can’t learn anything sitting inside all day,” he said to me once.” You wouldn’t put a sheepdog in a reptile terrarium and expect it to grow cold-blooded, would you?”

#

I started the four miles back home, just off the road so that no one driving by could see me through the trees. I’d walked that way often, following a trampled deer path. On the bus I felt trapped. I’d grown used to my brother’s idea of freedom, that anything inside of walls was suffocating, that there should always be a way to escape.

The uneasiness crept up into my stomach first. 

Like I’d eaten something rotten, so that it spread cold through my intestines. 

Then it was in my head, like crawling, living dirt. 

Soon it got into my fingers. My feet.

The wind picked up. And with it, this gentle, almost wooden clacking. 

A sound that I couldn’t remember hearing before. A sound that ruptured through my head in much the same way a dream does.

The sound of bones.

I couldn’t look behind me. I couldn’t look, because he’d be standing there. He’d be bristling and black and angry enough to electrify my skin with a touch. He’d have teeth sharp enough to melt my eyes. He’d carry a dead rabbit in one hand and a torn child’s arm in the other, and when I glanced at his face he’d snarl and tighten his grip so that they’d both collapse in his fists.

I didn’t dare.

I walked the entire way back home, spine rigid, clutching my stomach to try to silence its crawling uneasiness.

The sound of bones didn’t stop until I stepped inside my house and closed the door. 

#

My mother burst in from the garden, her skin flushed. She always looked redder in moonlight, as if it warmed her in a way the sun couldn’t. And she was smiling, lips peeled back as if she couldn’t quite remember the shape. 

Like I couldn’t quite remember if her teeth were always that sharp. 

“Hey Effy!” she said, and I flinched. 

She headed toward the wine rack, twirling her hair, bouncing a little. She took out a bottle of wine, blew the dust off its label. A vintage Virginian Norton

“Come celebrate with me!”

I sat at the table, unable to feel my legs underneath me. My body ached from the pressure of the dogman’s eyes in between my shoulderblades.

She pushed the wine glass at me. I watched its seismic swirls.

“Won’t dad be angry?” I asked. “If we drink his wine?” 

“Your father—” she paused, and then sat down.

The way she said it, ‘your father’ sounded like a bad test result.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked suddenly, and she brightened. 

“I found his paw prints around the trees out back. He’s been watching me! He knows that I’ve been tending the garden for him,” she said, and then. “Why aren’t you drinking your wine?”

How quickly she could go, from buzzing and smiling, almost like a child, to a large and angry and bruised wolf.

I drank the wine. I didn't like the taste, never had. It boiled in my stomach. 

"The flowers will be in full bloom soon," she said. "And then I'll make his bouquet. When it gets winter, he can come out of the trees, and I'll keep him warm."

My mother went up to her room, and I headed toward the trees with a pen flashlight. I walked on wobbly legs, drunk on an empty stomach. I felt warm in all the wrong places. My blood like heated sugar. My head like a freezer burn. I heard it right before I got to the treeline. The sound of bones. 

I didn't want to be out there, searching for him in the dark. I didn't want to kneel with the pen flashlight pointed at the ground, the bones squeezing in on me, the thought of his breath swirling and heavy in my hair.

Everyone knew the dogman wasn't real.

He wasn't real.

A frantic tremor pushed through my shoulders. I spider crawled onto my wrist. I flicked it away. I must've been out there for over an hour, scanning the ground with that tiny light.

I couldn't find any pawprints.

But I still couldn't breathe. 

#

In my dreams I fed translucent ants colored sugar, so that they became a rainbow as they passed between my bare feet. Green. Orange. Blue. 

But then, the ants stopped coming. They left a space in their head-to-tail marching, so that the ground lay empty.

When the ants came marching back, they were bright red. 

I followed the trail of red on my hands and knees. The wet, red dirt stained my fingertips.

I touched a quivering pile of meat.

A dog, laying on its side, its insides strewn in the dirt and covered in ants.

The dogman’s great paws seized me by the hair, and he hauled me to my feet. He pressed my face close to his so that the saliva that dragged from the top of his teeth pooled into the cusp of my lip.

When he spoke he did not speak with his dog mouth. He spoke with the forest. He spoke with the trees, and the blood on my hands, growing into the shape of words. 

“I have never met someone with eyes that do not belong in their face.”

Then his claws were at my cheek. At the top of my shirt. He tore the buttons from the cloth. Not in the clumsy way that dogs but, but in the way of a person who’s trying to get to the skin underneath. 

After he undressed me he lay me down on a slab of petrified wood, crusted black, cold against my spine that was now ticking like a clock.

I met his eyes. They were more violent than his teeth.

His claw pierced my belly button, pulled upward, dragging with it a straight line of blood. He gripped my thighs. His fur rubbed against the insides of my legs.

“And you have the eyes of a muddy pool,” he said. “trying to be a human being.”

I awoke. Not in the woods, on a slab of petrified wood, as I first thought. But in my room. The drying clothes hanging against the bedroom closet lifted up with the draft. I squeaked, and then quickly swallowed it. If he’d been watching me then, from the corner or the window of the room, lips peeled back, an almost-human smile, I wouldn’t have made any sound at all.

#

I haven’t been able to think much of my brother lately. I wondered what he’d say about the dreaming dogman undressing me, pressing his bloodied fur against my skin. But that’s not a dream I could tell my brother.

Evangeline would have said, “You should really stop watching so many fucked up videos on the Internet.”

My father would say with a soft, amused voice, “You’re becoming just like your mother. And here I thought maybe you had a future.”

My mother would say nothing. Not at first. She’d try to smile, but it’d be as difficult for her as breaking a bone. Her eyes would fade of any warmth, shutting off the lights. She’d leave the room, and only emerge later that night. In my bedroom door. A ghost of a woman, her body gone to make more room for her shadow. 

“How could you?” she’d say quiet. “You knew he was mine.”

#

My brother was always giving me objects to protect myself. Not only the bone necklace, but a lock to put on my backpack. A can of pepper spray. He gave me a hunting knife when a feral dog bit me. The switchblade came when my mother hit me again, hard enough to draw blood.

You have to be careful to hide things when you live with a wolf. She had a tendency to creep into my room, to rummage through the drawers, my closet, try to pry open the floorboards, but I hid the switchblade well. 

She never found it, but she knew anyway, somehow. She must’ve felt the heat leave my body when she screamed and I pressed my hand against the switchblade in my pocket. The way my brother and I stood on the porch in the morning before school without speaking. He drank black coffee and I drank orange juice, leaning against balustrades opposite of each other. We carried our new secret like a tense rope between us.

The thing we spoke about without speaking:

Some people are born in warm dens with pink walls and soft edges so that they are not hurt when they fall. 

Other people are pulled out of that den, dropped onto cement and sand, so that their skin is rubbed off at the elbows and knees. 

We don’t have to say which ones we are, and why we need to protect our bodies that have been rubbed raw to the bone. Why we need to prepare ourselves.

I awoke one night shortly afterward to the sound of my mother screaming herself hoarse.

“I can’t even feel safe in my own home, with you two always conspiring against me!”

She pushed my brother through the open front door, so hard that he fell and cracked his head against the steps. 

I expected him to fight back. To say to me, as I stood at the top of the stairs, “I’m going to save you.” As he stood up, shaking, his hand moved to the jacket pocket where he kept his knife. Maybe it was because he was too sick and dizzy with vertigo, pain shooting through his eyes. Maybe it was because my mother, sick-skinny in her nightgown, seemed more pathetic than dangerous. 

Maybe because he wasn’t yet ready to kill, despite everything.

He did not pull the knife out. His eyes softened, like he was releasing a deep and toxic strength. 

Then he got in his truck and left.

#

She harvested the flowers to make the dogman’s bouquet. A wilted and sick arrangement of flowers. She cooed over it at the kitchen table as she cut the stems, ran her fingers over the petals as if they were made of silk. It took her hours, and when she was finished she tied up the bouquet in a velvet bow.

Maybe she dreamed of the dogman too, splitting her on top of a piece of petrified wood. The nightgown torn in half. Her red hair in his big fists.

“Tonight’s the night,” she said. “Come curl my hair.”

So I followed her to the vanity. Shaking and stiff, I unwound the cord for the curler and plugged it in. She dressed in her pink nightgown. She applied red lipstick so old that it pressed onto her lips in dried flakes. She caked dark eyeshadow onto her lids. The eyeliner, She tipped the eyeliner like blades.

“I know it’ll be difficult having a stepfather,” she said as I set the curler to her hair. “But we’ll get through this together.”

When we were finished she made a motion as if to kiss me on the forehead. I jerked backwards, hitting my head against a coat rack.

Usually she would be angry when I did not humor her sudden, spontaneous impulses of tenderness. This time, she left without speaking. 

With her sick bouquet in its big black velvet bow. Toward the treeline. 

#

I went to my room. The cold draft of the open window hit me like a bad stranger. I had no memory of opening the window, but I must have. My mother was too busy preparing for her meeting with the dogman to pry apart my room, and my father wouldn’t have.

I reached for the bone necklace in my pocket. 

It wasn’t there.

The rush of panic hit me right in my stomach. I grabbed the corner of the wall as if to keep myself from falling. But sooner than I expected, the panic dissipated.

It was not the human part of me that crept to my bed, peeled back the coverlet, and smelled the sheets for signs of him. That ran her fingers along the edge of the open window frame, searching for tufts of fur, for blood, for anything that would belong to him. 

It was not the human part of me that took the switchblade from its hiding spot. That pulled on my brother’s old hunting jacket and slung his quiver and bow across my shoulder.

That needed to find him. 

Like I’ve said, it’s easy to lose. Easier than anyone might think.

As I walked down the stairs, my father stepped outside of his study.

“Effy?” he said, in a way that he hadn’t said my name in years.

He clenched a pen in the side of his mouth, and held a jar of dead spiders in one hand.

“Have you seen your mother?”

I shook my head. His eyes fell on my bow. 

“Going out?”

I must’ve responded somehow. But I couldn’t remember, because all I could see was what’d happened to his face. It must’ve fallen off years ago. I saw that he’d taken that face, dried it out in alcohol, then pinned it back onto his skull. Just like he did with his spiders.

He did not call for me when I ran out the door. 

#

I searched the trees for a sign of for my mother, for a scrap of cloth or a wilted flower, but there was nothing. 

#

I tried to call for her, but the sound became trapped in my throat. 

The forest was big and open and quiet.

A hungry child, who cannot ask for food except by opening its mouth.

This was my last chance, I thought. To tell myself, “he isn’t real. Everyone knows the dogman isn’t real.” To turn back.

But when I looked behind me I only saw the sad house, the broken garden, the broken wrist, the girls with stardust eyes who’d torn my skin off, the father who walked around inside of a dried out human suit. 

I kept going. 

I hadn’t gone into the forest since the night I dreamed of the dogman tearing my shelter apart. In my absence, he’d transformed it. My familiar pathways, the deer trails, the trees I’d marked with the tip of my knife, were all rearranged. The sky was muddied, stars removed, like water mixed with ash. The trees were bigger than I remembered, shivering and wounded. 

I tried to find some sort of grounding, some path, but soon became lost.

Then, that sound.

That dry, uncomfortable music.

The sound of bones. 

I could not see the trees my brother took me to once, where the bones were tied. I could not see anything moving except the slight sway of trees, the brush of weeds. But still I heard those bones, as if they were sewn into my hair. 

Then beneath that sound, I heard him.

When you cease to become human, you can not always be responsible for your actions. You do not hunt and sleep and kill because you want to, or because you’ve come to a conscious decision to act. You are put into motion by deep electrical impulses, by magnetic fields, air temperature, estrus, movement, noise, teeth.

He was behind me. Matching my movements. Stepping in with me, stepping out. I kept walking, slipping my hand into my brother’s jacket to touch the switchblade. Opened it with my thumb, just a little bit, to feel its cool edge. 

And then:

“Effy?”

I didn’t recognize the voice at first. It seemed to almost be a growl, a non-word, so I was surprised when I turned and met eyes with my mother. 

Her pink nightgown was shredded. Mud caked her legs up to her thighs. She carried what was left of the bouquet under the crook of one arm.

“Did you find him?” I asked.

“Did you?” she asked, taking a ragged step forward.

Silence. Even the sound of bones ceased.

She took another step forward. Her mouth open. Her eyes open wider. In the dark her teeth shone. Encrusted and sharp white.

“I can smell him on you.”

 “Please stay away,” I said.

“I can see his marks on your neck,” she said, taking another step.

On impulse, I touched my neck. But I felt nothing. 

“My own daughter,” she whispered, trailing broken flowers.

I stepped backwards and slipped out of sight behind the foliage. 

“I should’ve known, all those days out in the forest. You were running to him,” she said.

I walked slow, so as to try to not make noise. Backwards, so that I could see her walking toward me through the leaves.

“It’s your father’s fault,” she said. “That hot blood of his. I should’ve recognized that look in your eyes. I’ve seen that look plenty of enough times.”

I came to my shelter. Buried in the dark, blended into the coating of trees, difficult to see unless you knew where to look. I knelt, slow. 

“Effy,” she said. “We have to be honest with each other. You have to be honest with me and tell me how you did him.”

I held my breath and crawled in backwards. I lowered my body into the dirt and waited.

She began to scream. Heaving, upended howls that could’ve been my name, that could’ve been a bat sewn into a human skin, shrieking. She paced around, searching for me. She tore between the trees. Her screams had the consistency of a nightmare, stretched so thin and so far, storm-ready, liquid heavy. I imagined my thin, sickly mother upending the trees. Killing the animals. Anything was possible with a voice like that.

 When she stopped screaming, it was only to inhale in a ragged gasp so she could scream some more.

My heartbeat slowed to its normal pace when I pulled out and opened the switchblade. I clasped it between my hands, rested on my chest. 

Then she stopped at my shelter, her muddied bare feet next to my head. The air swallowed what was left of her screams. She panted.

“Effy.” 

She kicked the side of the shelter, smashing the branches. She grabbed me by the hair and hauled me upwards. I did not see her face. I only saw an empty space filled with sharp teeth. 

“You knew he belonged to me,” she said. 

She pulled her fist back, as if to punch me across the head. 

It was not the human part of me that spoke, quiet and vicious:

“He’s mine.”

I slipped the switchblade through her ribs, into her heart.

I would not look at her face, as she slipped into a cold spasm. Her pink nightgown caught in my mouth. Her fist, uncurling against the top of my head. I stepped back, and the knife that I pulled out of her was more blood than steel.

I would not catch her as she fell. I would not touch her as she lay still.

In all the different ways and permutations and methods in which I imagined over the years I’d have to kill her, I did not catch her. 

What I did not imagine was how small my lungs would feel afterward, unable to take in quite enough air.

#

I imagined my family standing around the body of my mother. My brother, in his blood orange hunting jacket. My father, in his stiff button-down. My brother kept snuff in the pocket of his cheek, but he wouldn’t chew. A preserved spider sat on my father’s shoulder, its body red like a devil. 

“Are you going to help me with this?” I’d ask, looking down at my mother’s body. 

My father laughed. My brother put his hands into his pockets and looked away.

We were not a family who were born of cathedrals and saplings. We were not the Evangeline’s and Terra’s and Lily’s of the world, who fit neatly into their human houses, their human bodies. We were animals that’d crawled out of the mud, stitched for ourselves skins with human fingerprints, walked amongst real people, ate their food, laughed at their jokes.

But our eyes would always give us away. There would always be that inevitable moment, when we could no longer pretend we were like everyone else.

I dragged my mother deeper into the woods, inch by inch.

#

When the dogman walked through the trees, he did so in heavy, arthritic steps.

He looked nothing like he did in my dreams.

 He was maybe six feet tall, with worn-out, stained fur. His face was tired, his blue eyes perforated with cataracts. His muzzle was scratched and scarred.

He coughed, and his ribs heaved. 

He was not followed by the sound of bones, by thunderstorms, by the smell of blood.

Only a scent like dust, and dandelion. 

As he moved toward me, the air was quiet, except for the punctured sound of me trying to breathe.

He stopped in front of my mother’s body. He tilted his head to one side, questioning. His body swayed slightly from side to side. 

Again, I reached into my pocket for the bone necklace. Forgetting that it’d been lost. 

I expected to panic when I felt nothing there, but my body was calm and dry and dense, like the forest.

I no longer recognized my own smell.

He reached for me with a paw. His dirty, aged paw with the claws worn down almost to the nerves.

I didn’t flinch, but my body went rigid.

He plucked a dead flower from my hair. One of the flowers from my mother’s bouquet, a dead brown wildflower with a scrap of velvet bow still on its stem. 

He brought the flower to his nostrils. Sniffed. Then pulled it back to regard it, turning it around to look at from different angles. 

“It was for you,” I said.

Perhaps I only imagined that he smiled, the lines of his snout upturned. 

He glanced back down at my mother’s body. She was unrecognizable to me now, without her hard lines, the way she snapped when she walked, the way she seemed to make everything she touched cold. Just a body now, its limbs softened. No cruelty left.

“I had to,” I said.

He tucked the flower behind his ear. He bent down. Picked up my mother. 

He cradled her to his chest, her blood dark against his fur. He smoothed out her wild red hair. 

He looked so small holding her. 

The dogman glanced at me once more before walking off with her body. Whether his eyes were empty of reflection or there was nothing for him to see anymore, I couldn’t be sure. 

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb is now available for pre-order! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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I'm Bored of the Pain

"Life is too important to be taken seriously." - Oscar Wilde

I’m tired of hearing about how hard everything is.

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’m tired of feeling like I have to justify my existence by talking about how hard everything is. It’s like I’m carrying around this psychic debt from birth. I need to stand in front of a council of obstinate angels and explain my case. “Sir/Madam/Angelselves, I promise that I have not slept in for years. I don’t eat unless it’s leftovers from a baby's plate. I abuse my body in the name of a higher calling. I know pain, and more importantly, pain knows me. In fact, pain is sick of hearing from me. It wants me to find something else to feel. Please, tell me, am I going to be allowed to continue breathing?”

I stopped going to mom groups, in part, because suffering seemed to be our only commonality. Years ago women didn’t have contraceptives and family planning and easy access to abortion. Having children was not a choice that could be agonized over. It was a fact of life. But we live in a different time. We made the choice to have children. We willingly took on the burden of being another human being’s entire world. We gave up easy Sundays and guilt free Netflix binges and sleep and free time and partying into the night and not having to worry about anything but ourselves. And God, it was hard. It was hard. Can’t you see how hard it is?

We anointed ourselves with our suffering.

I was so bored.

And I found that the more I focused on how hard things were, the worse I felt. My mind became wrapped into an obsession with difficulty. Sometimes I felt like I needed to explain how hard it was to have a baby in order to justify asking for help. Sometimes it was because I was dealing with difficult emotions. But the end result was the same. My life became about hardness, and suffering, and any enjoyable morsel that I experienced soon disappeared into the maw of this beast. I couldn’t experience too much happiness. Happiness was the sacrifice.

The first two or three months of the baby’s life felt easy. I didn’t have post-partum depression. I had post-partum euphoria. Every time I saw my child I saw not only her, but a path toward heaven. I saw a way out of the endless, nihilistic loop I’d consigned myself. But as the months passed I convinced myself to find new burdens and new little pains.

I stopped writing. I stopped reading. I stopped eating healthy and exercising. I stopped doing most things that I enjoyed, because I (so I told myself) was just so focused on my baby and so tired that I just couldn’t possibly write. I would have to put it aside and return to it when she was older. I thought I could be a writer and a baby mother, but that was before I had the child. That was before I understood. I had shot too far. My dreams were threads that were straining to reach out into the sky, and they were disappearing from the exhaustion. Dreams? Let’s not even call them dreams. Maybe they were once, but now they’re starting to look more like roadkill.

When I tried to turn my laptop on and write, a headache flared up at the base of my neck. My joints screeched. My brain buzzed. Oh, I am just so burnt out. I couldn’t possibly. So I’d close the laptop and let a part of myself flake away and die.

If you think like a martyr, pretty soon you become one.

Sometimes we like to tell ourselves little stories about our lives. It’s these stories that give shape and skin to our days. It provides a narration to follow so that we can understand ourselves. The stories are visceral and convincing. They can influence our moods and habits, and even the way that we carry our body.

But we often forget that they’re just stories.

I was trying so hard to justify my suffering that I couldn’t enjoy the quiet stroller rides in the morning, or the way that my baby’s entire body shook with laughter when she was enjoying herself. I had been given a soft and good thing, a cherished gift, and yet I felt like I was drowning underneath it.

Did anyone promise us that life was supposed to be easy? Did they tell us that life was supposed to be fair? Life was not meant to be spent lounging in bed and watching Netflix. We aren’t children who can bang our fists and demand something light and sweet from God.

Be honest with yourself.

Even if you got it, you wouldn’t want it. 

I’m not even convinced that people who are rich, or famous, or have certain privileges have life that’s easier. I think many of them just have different problems, more esoteric pains, grander ways to blow up their lives. I’ve read enough about the lives of successful people to know that suffering is not something that shrivels up and dies in the presence of wealth. There isn’t a way to escape the pain of being human. No golden gates or hilltop mansion that can elevate you from dealing with the prison you built for yourself inside your skin.

I don’t actually have any real advice. I’m a writer. I think in stories.

So I changed the story.

I just decided that I was sick of being someone who was sick and tired all the time. I was sick of thinking about how hard everything was. I decided that I was going to be a writer no matter what. I decided that I was going to be a woman who could coordinate cute outfits for her daughter, and take her swimming and to get snow cones afterwards. I would smile when she smiled at me. I would enjoy each moment, even getting up earlier than I wanted, or Samantha trying to push her plate off her highchair.

I’d embrace the pain because it meant that I was still alive. A hard moment was not something to be endured. It was something to be celebrated.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb is now available for pre-order! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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You are Not Good Enough

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"Flaws are the raw materials of growth; without them, we'd remain uncarved." - Jane Austen

You are not good enough.

That’s not a catchphrase you can embroider on pillows or print on coffee mugs. You can’t write it on inspirational signs in rainbow paint. It’s not a mantra that therapists will prescribe to soothe your nerves. It can’t sell motivational books. You are not good enough. That’s the words of bad mothers and demons. It’s the angry voice with poison teeth that crawls out of the silence to try to ruin your day.

No. You are enough. 

That’s what the pop psychologists say, at least. The inspirational Facebook memes. Your friends. And maybe sometimes you can even believe it. Kind of. On a good day. It’s a thing that you want to believe, at least. Like everyone is beautiful and God has big plans for me. 

Because if you were enough then it’s not your fault that you’ve failed. It’s your parents. Your cruel boyfriends. Your sadistic boss. It’s capitalism, the government, God, the system. Because if you are enough, that means there is an intrinsic value to your soul. If only you were given a chance and allowed to shine. If only there was a rock tumbler for the spirit, so that you could have all your edges and gray, calcified flaws smoothed away to reveal the shiny and polished stone underneath. 

You are enough. You have to be. Because you were born a beautiful angel. The world took a look at your blossoming cheeks and perfect skin and decided that it needed to ruin you. You are the victim of a machine that's greater than you. You have a job that wants to grind you down. Everyone wants to drain you of your time and money. Gender roles and stereotypes and constricting expectations are poisoning and suffocating you. Your depression is manufactured by capitalism and a bad childhood. You're fat because of food deserts and high fructose corn syrup and your stressful job and your husband that keeps ordering takeout and opening wine bottles.

You are enough.

That's just another way to say that you have relinquished control of the ways that you can become better.

Every tyrant wants the world to revolve around them like the sun. If the ways that your life has gone wrong aren't your fault, then you need a villain. You need an enemy to blame. The villages must burn and the landlords and the bourgeoisie and the bad mothers must answer for their crimes against you.

But if you were to stand in the fire and ruin, overlooking the destruction of those who you wronged you, who you felt were standing in your way, you probably still wouldn't feel like enough.

When you climb out of the smoke and stand on a valley to observe the damage, the wind blowing soft and cool against your skin, your lungs clear, the grass will not grow out of the ashes. The youth won't return to your face. The emptiness and the pain won't go away.

Even if tomorrow you walked through the silver gates of Utopia, cast away your insecurity and suffering and exchanged it for free dental care and rainbow creches full of healthy children, it would still have to be built by people like you. People who decided they needed to wrest control of their lives for themselves.

You are not good enough.

That is not a condemnation. It is not a damnation. It is a call of action. It is a reason to be happy.

You have a chance to become someone better. You have given yourself the gift of the power to change the course of your life.

We are all broken in different ways. We all have souls that must be refined with work and dedication and thoughtfulness. We must make ourselves useful, and good, and beautiful through effort and care.

We crawled out of the mud of the infinite. We came out of the dark in a place without stars or air or compassion and we wrested love and truth from the roaring and ugly Inferno of nature. You are the world and the world is you and that means if you want things to become better you must make yourself someone capable of better.

You can be enough.

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Dark Regions of Desire

Note: This was originally published in the now defunct CLASH online magazine.

“Never forget that you are a woman, and the greatest powers you can employ as a witch are totally dependent upon your own self-realization that in being a woman you are different from a man and that very difference must be exploited.” - Anton Lavey, “The Satanic Witch.”

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THE LOVE WITCH is a movie about a beautiful, vampy woman named Elaine (played by Samantha Robinson, who could probably be Lana Del Rey’s older sister) who has moved to a new town for a fresh start, and to seek out a man to love her using the powers of her newfound witchcraft. But it soon becomes clear that Elaine’s deeply damaged, and her ideas about what it means to love are founded upon unsettling ideas about the fragility of men, and the responsibility of a woman to commit to satisfying his desires.

 A review about THE LOVE WITCH wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that it’s shot in gorgeous 35mm, in homage to 1960s Technicolor thrillers and American exploitation films. Every shot is sumptuous, and carefully color coordinated - from the deep reds of Elaine’s car, lipstick, and luggage, to the pastel softness of a lady’s only tea room, to the magic rituals that could be pulled straight from a tarot card illustration. None of these sets could exist in the real world. They’re too careful, too clean. It pushes THE LOVE WITCH into a realm that’s not quite reality, almost a few inches to the left, as if we’re viewing the movie through a sort of subconscious filter. The effect is that the landscape becomes an emotional one, reflecting back Elaine’s sensuous and disillusioned inner world.

In the beginning of the film Elaine tells her new friend Trish, as they dine on tea and pastel cakes in the tea room, how she has come to understand the psychology of men.

“Men are like children, they’re very easy to please, as long as we give them what they want… [They just want] a pretty woman to love, and to take care of them, and to make them feel like a man. And to give them total freedom in whatever they want to do or be.”

Trish is horrified. She asks Elaine “But what about what we want?”, and goes on to say that women can never be equals if they’re always catering to men’s needs. Elaine however, is unperturbed, and we soon follow her as she rides with a man she just met to his woodland cabin, feeds him a hallucinogenic tincture, and seduces him.

Elaine has made herself into what she believes men want. She’s reduced and shrunk herself into a tool for manipulation. Magic is about manipulation, after all, about subverting nature to get what you desire. Every aspect of her personality is about making herself pleasing so that she can receive love. That’s why she appears as a one-dimensional character, a caricature - she says herself that she is a man’s “ultimate fantasy” - and a fantasy is an ideal where reality falls between the gaps.

But the problem is that her magic works. 

The men she encounters fall in love with her, bewildered and dazzled by her sensuous displays and her absolute willingness to listen and accommodate their needs. They become infatuated with her, over-emotional, out of control, unused to the seemingly unconditional love and fulfillment that Elaine provides. Elaine puts herself in the role of caretaker, but finds herself unable to satisfy them, and quickly grows tired of their childlike demands for her attention. Her personality and desires become lost in the ever-increasing hole of their demands.

I wrote about something similar in a story in my collection Ecstatic Inferno, “The Dog That Bit Her.”

“Sometimes I asked myself if I truly loved the girl in the white dress standing outside my window, or if instead I loved the quiet cool place that occupied the space of her, still enough to see my own reflection. That is the curse many of us carry, I think: we wander the earth looking for ourselves and instead we find the quiet girls, the looking for love girls, and we fill the blank spaces with who we think they should be. “

Elaine was able to make men fall in love, but it wasn’t with her. It was the fantasy that she provided. That’s why she finds herself increasingly unsatisfied with the objects of her affection. She isn’t the one receiving the love she desires so much, it’s her carefully constructed persona. And if you expend so much effort into being what other people desire it’ll leave you feeling empty. Hollow. You’re a reflection of everyone else around you. No light can go through the mirrors that you’ve set up in order to attract people to you.

To many women, Elaine isn’t a ridiculous, sexed up caricature. She is a representation of an archetype, a shadow self that many of us feel - a product of low self-esteem, societal pressure, abuse, and sexism.

It’s easy to be accommodating, to ascertain the needs of others and receive their attention and affection. Many self-help books about relationship advice and attracting others is about making yourself more appealing to them with, well, social witchcraft that isn’t much different than the antics found in THE LOVE WITCH. Manipulation. It’s about listening to them, telling them you understand, anticipating their needs, making them feel special. But there’s rarely a caveat that suppressing your own desires can soon turn back upon you, making you unhappy in devastating ways.

It’s not a bad thing to be desirable, but it’s easy to tilt into the dark regions of lost identity, in the pursuit to please.

I won’t spoil the ending, but all of Elaine’s misguided effort is eventually turned back on her in a grisly and terrifying scene. She sees the result of the kind of love that she has perpetuated looking back at her, with all of its sensual illusions stripped away.

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