All the Dangerous Things

by Stacy Willingham

The truth is, people love violence—from a distance, that is. Anyone who disagrees is either in denial or hiding something.

it reminded me of the stars: how two can collide and fuse into one—bigger, brighter, stronger than before. But what I didn’t know then was that when they collide too fast, they don’t fuse at all. Instead, they explode, evaporating into nothing.

I’ve experienced firsthand the sick fascination people have with other people’s pain.

Because that’s the thing about time: It feels endless in the mornings, the day stretched out before you like a long yawn.

But now that he had me, I felt myself starting to tarnish in his eyes, like a piece of fine jewelry left alone for too long. I tried to tell myself that that was just marriage—an inevitable, slow decay that took place as the years stripped us of our spontaneity and spark—but I didn’t want to accept it.

As if Margaret’s little backpack weren’t still suspended next to mine in the mudroom, partially zipped shut with her favorite sweater peeking out. It was like we all wanted it there for her, just in case she clawed her way out of that coffin and came walking back from the graveyard, wet and shivering and covered in mud, looking for something to keep her warm.

Deep down, the chief must have known it wasn’t true, but still, he let himself believe it. It was the story he had wanted to be real. The one that was easier to accept.

Postpartum psychosis is considered a clinical emergency, I continue to read. Symptoms wax and wane, meaning a woman can be lucid enough to hold a conversation, then suffer hallucinations and delusions just hours later. There is a five percent suicide rate and four percent infanticide rate associated with the illness, and the risk of developing postpartum psychosis is higher in women with a history in their family, such as a mother or sister—

I have never felt more naive, more foolish, than I do right now. I remember thinking that we were different—Ben and I, we were different from them—but that’s just not true. We were the same. Allison and I were the same to him. Interchangeable.

Nobody understands what it’s like to be locked inside the mind of a mother: the things you think that you aren’t supposed to; the beliefs that burrow themselves deep into your brain like a parasite, making you sick.

If someone had explained to me the way men like that work: how we’re just pawns in their game, their gentle hands steering us in the direction that’s most beneficial for them.

We are nothing but what we choose to believe, but it’s all a mirage, bending and warping and shimmering in the distance, changing its form at any given second.

He’s always known how to suffocate someone from the inside out; how to starve them, drown them, push them so close to the edge that when they look down and see nothing but empty air beneath them—when they dangle their foot off the ledge and feel themselves starting to fall—the idea of it might actually feel good.

But aren’t all of our lives just stories we tell ourselves? Stories we try to craft so perfectly and cast out into the world? Stories that become so vivid, so real, that eventually we start to believe them, too?

He didn’t want to know the truth, what actually occurred, but instead wanted to hear what was easier to believe. So he had asked me all the right questions, listened to me recite my lines, then shaped a reality in his mind that was better, more convenient, than the one that really existed, holding his own lie tight against his chest before watching it wriggle away, like something slippery in his hands.