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by Rivers Solomon

One day soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.

Despite all the coddling denied me as a child, I never became the independent island of my mother’s dreams. I’m a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth.

My youngest sister, Emmanuelle, asks how my daughter and I can stomach such ugliness. I tell her we watch the sensationalized breakdowns of people’s lives in the same spirit we do puzzles. By the end, we hope to piece it all together.

Willow’s internet friend, Malcolm, manifests himself, kidnaps her, and declares his love. A version of this has happened to me at least twice.

Every day, minuscule flakes of what could be dried skin appear in my morning brew. Online, they say it’s limescale, but I’m not reassured.

Land is not dirt. It is esophagus, stomach, bowels. A mid-terrace Victorian in bad repair does not fare well on top of the chomping mouth of Leviathan, nor do any of us.

Though she’s technically younger than me as the middle-born child, Eve slid into the role of wise, bossy eldest years ago when it became clear I could not do the part justice.

Poor Mama and her disappointed dreams. To think of her eldest wunderkind jobless, sick, genderbroken, surviving off disability benefits, and living here of all places. My God, what would the neighbors think?

Mother is God and our house, our strange house, is the Garden, big and teeming with things that I’ve been tasked with naming but cannot. There are words for walls and tiles and banisters but not words for what it means when walls, tiles, and banisters savor the taste of your collapse.

It’s not enough to want to disappear; one needs a good reason for wanting to disappear. At eleven years old, I write that I need to be a sliver because slivers fit between cracks and if I could fit inside a crack, troubles would never find me.

This is how I manage in a crisis. I refer to abstract models of good people in my head and do what they’d do. I become these people. Sometimes these people become me. When I’m no longer fit for purpose, they say, Shhh, Ezri, go to sleep, then live my life for me.

She sinks like an anvil into the part, until she is the part. The other hers disappear, phased-out software.

Once, I replied, Mama, did the ancestors really dream of me? Didn’t they have dreams for their own lives?

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

What’s the point of a job like this? To keep the bad people out? Every guard will fail at that because the bad people are already inside. This is their fort.

She’d told me that white supremacy operates under a logic in which everything whiteness does can be rationalized as good, and everything Blackness does can be rationalized as preternaturally evil.

If somehow Mama is inside, I don’t want to greet her crying. Don’t want to return to her weaker than when I left her.

Surrounded by a house that is nothing but a house, I am embarrassed by my childish fear that mistakenly painted her into something violent. Was it me all along, deluded and deranged, who made her something sinister? Is it me who haunts, me who is the ghost?

It made me seethe, hang up the phone, to know her life was going on as normal without her children—like we’d never been born, like the house never touched her the way it touched us.

Can the cellar that a kidnapper throws a child into be guilty or innocent? The lake that a killer drowns his women in? I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

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

No, it actually doesn’t make sense. That individual abstinence from animal products does everything to ease one’s own sense of moral responsibility but does nothing to challenge the system. It eases guilt, not animal suffering.

At the end of it all, everyone would be left feeling small, even Eve herself, except for that brief moment when she felt big.

There is no great injustice here. Just two people exploring and finding out how to exist in a world in which we are all automatically collaborators in global suffering.

I could never know how Mama was going to react to anything, though. I hated tossing the coin. I preferred to keep secrets. If I didn’t show her who I was, she couldn’t disapprove.

But girls are animals, I counter. You can’t be half girl half animal because a girl is already full animal.

I would argue, she says, that to frame the animalization of Black women as an inherently subjugating process cedes territory to the white colonialist assumption that humankind is separate from and above the rest of animal kind, justifying human dominion over it. How powerful it would be for us to be called animals and say, Yes, yes, of course. And what does that make you? Not animal? Not flesh? Not alive? Dead? Whiteness is deadness.

Fighting for my daughter would’ve required belief that I was somehow good for her.

When I found out Caroline was giving Elijah chlorine dioxide to bleach the autism out of her, my sisters convinced me to get my act together and take Caroline to court.

All three of us live for being chased, desperate for some assurance that if we disappeared, someone might mourn our loss or reach into the walls and grab us if a ghost claimed us.

Jarring, the different versions of events we all have.

Fire loves itself. Wants to keep burning. I’m like that, too, most days, but I’m too emptied out for it now. Not enough fuel in me to sustain a tea light.

If something were to happen to you, you said. If something were to happen to you. I wondered, then, if that meant that everything up to that point was stuff not happening to me.

Every good thing you’ve done is for show, in the hope that people don’t see through to your core, your rotten, non-sliver core.

Or is it something you pursue not for the erotic high of being debased—which, hey, valid, this is a kink-affirming space—but for the purpose of further internalizing your debased place within society?

Nothing is out of place here but me. In this house, and this life.

Somehow, by withholding the type of attention my mother lavished on me, I’ve created not what I’d intended, the independent-minded daughter who doesn’t care what I think, but a girl perpetually anxious to get to know me.

They are the me who emerges when all others have left the building, a pilot, based on a prototype of sitcom parents.

Go to Hot Topic or whatever, as is my destiny.”

I don’t need hand-holding or anything. I am fourteen.” But when I look at her, I see a girl who needs a lot of hand-holding. Such sweetness. Such innocence. Similar to my sisters’ kids. We have, to some degree, broken the cycle of endless pain. Haven’t we?

Though she did not enforce her expectations with the rod, Mama had her ways, giving and withdrawing love according to a mathematics far beyond our understanding.

Eve and I do not beat our children. We follow accounts on Instagram about gentle parenting, peaceful parenting, consent-based parenting. We know how to rupture repair. We are parents who apologize. Yet our kids are still of the world.

I wonder what it must be like to experience the loss of someone you know not at all through someone who actively kept you away from that person.

Lily, who’d she met a few months ago on Instagram, Lily, who’s flown all the way to Dallas to meet her.

I love that he directs his humor and urge to tease at this rather than the hundred other things about me he could.

In its end, Grenfell Tower was a haunted house. Every house in Flint, in so many cities, is a haunted house.

Do you not think your experiences were particularly extreme? I mean, compared to what? Slums? Homelessness and sleeping rough?

you seem unable to extend yourself—selves—the same grace you extend to the rest of the world.

What a terrible, horrid, unsafe feeling. But it’s not just a feeling. It’s true. It’s reality. It’s life.

But how would it feel, experimentally, just to state, It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. Worse. Mmm. Why? Because if it’s not my fault, there’s truly not a thing I can do.