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No lie ever reaches old age. —Sophocles
gunwale
What does it say about us when we begin to accept someone else’s sacrifice?
Nora McTavish
Tears slid from the corners of her eyes, but she made no sound. A survival tactic.
the family unit things like morality and justice and right didn’t always hold sway. Sometimes a tarnished sense of love reversed things in a weird mirror image of what should be. Normal became split lips and bruises and inappropriate touching. The rotten center of a fine-looking fruit.
simulacrum
They didn’t look back at me, and I couldn’t blame them. I was the bad guy, the boogeyman, someone to be forgotten if they could. I’d taken them from their home and brought them somewhere strange and new. Rose was the kind grandmother who would give them something sweet. This was the deal; we all knew our parts.
Easton,
I liked the roominess of the house even though it was more space than a single person needed. That was what the realtor said when I bought it five years before, More space than you need. How does anyone know how much space someone else needs?
not bothering to check the time. Long ago I’d stopped letting the hands on the clock tell my own when they could or couldn’t pick up a drink.
We all think we have choices, and we do, but we’re flotsam too. At the whim of circumstance, the things inside us, something as irritating as chance.
some of the light that had been nearly snuffed out now reentering their eyes.
chyron
It’s the color of sand, the color of forgetting. I think they made it that way on purpose because who wants to remember the people who have no choice but to go there and fill out forms so they can get money to pay rent or vouchers to buy groceries? Who wants to look at those people with anything other than disdain and self-righteousness?
Any type of disbelief associated with this job has a seriously short half-life. It has to be that way or otherwise you’d always be like a bombing survivor, wandering through the rubble of someone else’s life. You form calluses that look suspiciously like scars and you keep doing your job because there’s always another family, another kid who’s suffering through a special kind of hell, and you have to do what you can.
She was pretty in that strange airbrushed way that didn’t look real.
As a species we like spectacle along with the nice stories. We get off on it. As long as it’s not our issue, our problem, our pain. When it’s removed from us, it’s something else. It’s entertainment.
It was like if she could just steal enough or run far enough, she’d distance herself from what had happened to her. From what was inside her.
The case had grown quiet like it was supposed to when the system was actually working.
I didn’t like how he knew where I kept the soap or the scrub pads, how comfortable he was getting with my place, but filed the irritation away to be examined later. Or never.
Kids, kids, and more kids needing help, coming out of the woodwork as if there was no end to them because there wasn’t.
“We do what we do to help. That’s all. You look further than that and you’ll drive yourself insane.”
Those 2:00 a.m. thoughts and the sharp edges of guilt weren’t admissible in court, but they were a prison all their own.
I’d always marveled at how soundly others slumbered. Their minds could shut down and leave them be for hours at a time, while mine always seemed to be in third gear, just waiting to drop the clutch and burn rubber the moment I surfaced.
This was the place I came to when sleep washed me ashore and stranded me awake.
Tonight I could see everything—even the things I didn’t want to.
Fair isn’t always a component here, you know that.
I didn’t wait around for whatever platitude he was going to regurgitate,
The truth was the system was deeply flawed because people were.
The law is one size fits all, while reality is a series of chaotic events we raft through like white water. The difference is some people get handed life jackets while others are told they should’ve learned how to swim better.
wondered if he were disappointed, wondered if he could see me now, would he want to take his sacrifice back.
drug-lacquered gaze
Toys lay on their backs amid the brown blades like heatstroke victims.
You never get used to the residuals of violence. The debris in the wake of anger. You just recognize it quicker, can identify a bruise that shouldn’t be where it is.
Someone once said we don’t have a justice system, we have a legal system. I think about that. I think about that a lot.
Nature versus nurture. That catchy little alliteration, with the versus in the middle being the most important part of the phrase because it implies a debate is still open. That there’s still hope.
People aren’t always ruled by their pasts, but they never really escape them either.
We were tuned in to each other as much as two human beings could be, the shared trauma our specific radio channel.
Do you ever notice how people use excuses to do what they really want?”
“He had the same dignity. Like he was above the hand he’d been dealt.”
“Doing nothing is always doing something.”
dormers
Silence. The peaceful suburban quiet you pay a lot for.
Toys and clothes scattered here and there—a child’s middle finger to the rest of the orderly house below.
Sometimes the heart hides. It hides in our dreams, our words, our passions. Andrea’s was hidden here in these drawings.
You have your own tragedy; you don’t need theirs too.
But lately when we were together, it felt like I was being wrapped tighter and tighter inside the folds of a soaking blanket. Being waterboarded with affection.
She wanted more than she was.”
This product of the system with her tattoos and anger covering up a deeper sadness, doing the very best she could with what she had.
