And Then She Fell

by Alicia Elliott

There was something almost insidious about puberty—the way it slammed shut the door to childhood, never to be reopened, and shoved you face-first into this strange, dangerous place called womanhood.

“Them folks from the universities think they know everything about our culture,”

“That they can suck it all up like a vacuum cleaner, claim they’re doing us a favor and ‘preserving it,’ then sell it back to us when we get desperate. It’s not right. They don’t own those stories! They belong to us,

they don’t know how to tell our stories right anyway! Their voices sounding like they’ve never been curious a day in their lives. Like...

I want to forget, for just a night. Smoke a whole carton of du Mauriers. Rip a blunt the size of a hot dog. Drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and pass out. Wake up with a delicious headache entirely my own doing, hold on to that pain and know I deserve it. I want to vomit everywhere, purge every alien thing out of my body until it’s a shell. I want to be entirely unnecessary, ignored, forgotten. No responsibilities. No mistakes making others hurt. No memory of the mess I’ve made. No me.

You’ve had more than enough time to pretend self-sabotage is self-preservation. That’s all over. Now we need you to start moving toward your destiny.”

The sunlight has left me. Or maybe it wasn’t ever there to begin with and I’ve only noticed now. Either way, that’s how it is—as if a veil hangs over my life, dulling it, shadowing it.

all the white women who’d learned to lace their kindness with venom before feeding it to me with a silver spoon.

That’s what’s so terrifying about the idea of trust. You don’t know who deserves it. You can’t—not until you take that wild leap, hoping and praying you made the right choice and you won’t crash. I can’t afford to crash, so I can’t afford to leap.

She Can Pronounce “Hors d’Oeuvres” but Not “Haudenosaunee”?

“You’d think after doing so many land acknowledgments I’d have it down by now. I’m hopeless when it comes to speaking anything but English.

Reading this after the 2024 election results makes me feral

They like for me to know they’re rich in knowledge that should be mine.