And Then She Fell

by Alicia Elliott

She’d already resigned herself to the idea that her body was no longer hers: just flesh and bone on extended loan,

Her name even sounded different when they said it—precious, musical, like that one word was its own small ceremony.

How could so many people see such injustice and consciously rewrite it as triumph and romance?

That was the first moment I really felt the difference between us and the worlds we inhabited. On Six Nations, we’d introduce ourselves by saying who we were related to, then spend the next five minutes trying to place how our relatives knew one another, or if we were relatives ourselves if you went far back enough. Each person a walking history book, a branch waiting to find more family trees to graft onto.

The most important thing wasn’t that she had fallen. The most important thing was that she had been caught. That she had allowed herself to be caught.