Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

Being well versed in the specific tropes of a genre should save me from worry, but knowledge has never saved anyone.

The kids who grow up fine do so because of us, or despite us.

How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.

My sisters and I did our best to flee our childhoods but have managed only to replicate them.

And what of my father? Where is my ire for him? Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

“I know they want to silence us, and usually, doing the exact opposite of what they want is a pretty good plan of attack. If they want me complicit, I act against. If they want me quiet, I shout,” Emmanuelle says.

Humans are gods, making worlds, then making miseries of those worlds.