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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.

A mother from shul says I do too much for Elijah, that if I keep coddling her she’ll never learn to stand on her own. My mother made me pack my own lunch from the age of four—and any time I woke in the night to ask her for a cup of water, she’d say, Ezri, you know where the tap is. Teddy bear in tow, I’d army-crawl to the kitchen, low to the ground so the ghost wouldn’t find me. She always did.

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.

We are forest creatures who’ve wandered into the man-made road, eyes frozen and wide.

People love slivers. If a sliver were to happen in a life that looked like mine, that life would change its ways for the itty-bitty sliver. It would look at the sliver and think, my Lord, what a beautiful sliver. What a charming, funny, smart sliver! Something about this sliver is just! Irresistible! Nothing like that other child, that non-sliver child.

Who’s texting you? asks Elijah. You know how Eve gets, I say. Is she worried? Should I be worried? I tell her no, but she knows better. I wonder which of my lies she’ll remember, which she’ll cry about to her therapist, a decade or two from now.

“You look good.” “That’s a lie.” “You know I do not lie,” she says, taking my cheeks in her palms. “You are beautiful, handsome, strange, ethereal, professorial, dark, an ocean. Rugged, dangerous.” “Stop,” I say. “I will not stop,” she says. “You’re the ancestors’ greatest dreams realized.”

“You sure you don’t want to go with me?” I ask, even though of course she doesn’t. The impulse driving the question is an urge to punish. I want to put her in her place, call attention to her cowardice, her weakness, for abandoning me. Any sweetness I have for her or anyone cannot last, can’t be depended on.

Mother forgot her own advice. 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.

Mama is here—if not in the house, in me. I feel her in the way that right now, stomach growling, I am sickened by my desire to eat: a vestige of her constant dieting, alive within me.

For today, said Mama obliquely, not prepared. She hadn’t had time yet to make up a story about who I was, to explain the way my gender shifted and changed. Gifted, she wasn’t used to confronting things she didn’t understand.

Someone like me, more imagination than can fit into one body, you can die inside a fantasy of yourself.

You know I don’t bullshit, honey, not to anyone, certainly not to you. Only to yourself, I say, and slump back in the passenger seat. I expect her to say excuse me, miss in that tone, that awful tone, but she is thoughtfully silent for a few moments before she says, As we all do, Ezri. Baby, you’re wise beyond your years. A brilliant, fierce thinker. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that you know the truth of things. You don’t even know if your poem is good or not. I think it’s good. Do you? Where does it fall short in your eyes? Or do you not even know? Are you simply desperate for my approval? An outside voice to tell you that you are good and worthy? Well, you are good and worthy. I will tell you that. But who am I? Why should I be your arbitrator? Am I God, Ezri? What does it matter what I think?

Don’t think me small. If I am ever fragile, it is only because I prefer to be.

Sweetheart, says Mama to me after helping me up from a fall. You are so perfect. With your weird little blood poems. My darling, my darling! How sweet it is to have made you.

God, is that all life is, checking the facts, finding yourself wrong, then doing the opposite of what it’s your nature to do?

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.

In her mind, this was because she wanted a good life for her children, but it was also because parents atone for their personal lacks by punishing their offspring.

Frank comes limping out after her in what I’ve come to think of as his uniform. Khaki green trousers, worn in, a tucked-in white shirt, and dark red suspenders. As a kid, I coveted his look, and I still do. The easiness of it, of him. A cool, boyish, shy masculinity.

Of course, everyone says these things about their families, and that’s what I mean about kinship, kindred, kin. The comfort of a particular history no matter how horrid it might be. It’s ours. A magic that only we can weave.

“You’ll see Elijah soon,” I say. “But do me a favor and don’t do the whole name bit around her. She’s sensitive. Keen to be taken seriously.” “Ah, yes. That age. When you think you know a thing or two and are worth a damn. She’ll learn soon enough.” “But not from you,” I say. “Not from me.”

And I think that’s because, well, when we speak of a house that is haunted, all we are speaking of is a house that is violent, and many houses are violent. Mold-besmirched. Leaded water. Holes in the floor. Windows that let in cold. Heating that doesn’t work. Shitty cladding. In its end, Grenfell Tower was a haunted house. Every house in Flint, in so many cities, is a haunted house. So, 677 was a shelter, a space, and everything so awful about it was not so different than many other houses.

I’m reminded of life and death, their intimate interconnectedness, lovers getting off on the movement of their bodies against each other. Maggots feeding on a corpse. Earth feeding on bones. So any death never really ends in death.

History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.

Emotions are little curses, spells. They come over us and take us away, outside ourselves. There is no predictability. At times, one spell trumps another, or multiple spells war at once, and the body becomes a shell in those moments, a shell that does not belong to you. Mama is far away right now. I am far away all the time.

That’s the trouble of it all—this oscillation between identification and alienation, camaraderie and war. We are all the same. None of us are the same. People hurt us, and we hurt people, and it’s endless. It brings me to the floor, supplicant, devastated, ready to surrender to anything that might offer peace from the cliché reality that life is pain.

Eve has read that book that circulates widely, about the children of emotionally immature parents, and knows that if you’re waiting for some admittance of wrongdoing, of mistake, if you need an apology to move on, it will never come. Never.

The realization that validation of the pain will never come from those who inflicted the pain has the power to obliterate. Did it happen? If they’re not apologizing, if they’re not admitting they’ve done it, did they do it? What is real? What is true? Is my life a fantasy?

Elijah wants to understand everything but knows she never will. She wants to be loved so fully and completely that her heart explodes from the pleasure of it, but knows that she never will.

Elijah isn’t the sort of girl people fall in love with. Timid, anxious, acne-faced, and fat, she is finding that all life has to offer is not meant for her.

Though I am functionally an atheist, it still baffles, the way the world has plans for us so out of line with what we could have ever predicted. And it brings no relief to acknowledge that that is because there is no plan.

Outside it’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 Celsius. Inside, it’s 65F/18C. There is something about this false cold that comforts me. Is it simply the familiarity? Rarely does one find indoor places so cool during English summers, even though the climate has permanently changed to have summers full of heat waves. I wonder if it’s a heat wave if it’s constant, or if by calling them that, there is some attempt to hold on to the notion that this might pass, that some old England of mild winters and mild summers will return. So much of what we speak is our attempt to make our fantasies real.

There is no way to describe a person that is not a reduction.

I would’ve forgiven Mama everything had she said it, the only thing I ever longed to hear from her: I am sorry for the abundance of pain.

I have this incredible daughter, who’s so clever and so brave and so compassionate. And she needs me. She needs me. I didn’t know that before. Never could believe it. But now I know.