Idle Hands

by Cassondra Windwalker

The only thing crueller than a prison was the promise that one day, the key would turn.

A woman’s odds of being killed by an abusive partner increase astronomically when she makes the decision to leave. And there are all the dynamics of being a single mother — likely to require some sort of government assistance, absolutely guaranteed to be largely absent from the children’s daily lives. If she’s going to work and put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, she’s not going to be the Super-PTA mom, too, showing up with treats at parent—teacher conferences, cooking breakfast in the morning, helping with homework in the afternoons, tucking them into bed at night. She’s a loss in your estimation, no matter which way she turns — either her children are poorly supervised runabouts lacking discipline and oversight, or she’s the monster who forces them to live in a home of violence and fear.

The quiet creature who drifted through the family hallways and one day drifted out the front door was empty, bare, having taken all the vulnerable fragments of her heart and given them to the ether for safekeeping.

Maybe that’s because, while they’re slaying dragons and clearing post-apocalyptic towns

on big screens, their sisters are measuring out their real, live blood in toilets and pads and accepting the reality that their bodies can produce and host a life entirely separate from its own. Maybe it’s because boys will become men who need desperately to believe in fairy tales in order to be able to survive the expectations society holds for them, while girls must clean up the mess of those expectations.

Given a choice, you will almost always take whatever is other, convinced that it will be better. That somehow your singular choice is the fulcrum on which the whole universe rests.