*Excerpt* Episodes of a Slowfade

YOU HAVE been counting for four hours and twenty six minutes. Counting heartbeats and breaths and colors; the spin of the tires, the emotions rioting within you,

be happy

be happy

be happy.

It is June 4th, 2009 and the sky is twisted ropes of dark clouds ready to burst open in their anger. You are graduating high school today. Your head is heavy and your body is stiff with I’m trying not to care. You are wearing a blue/black dress and high heels. Your hair is whispering over your back and you can’t help but hear the run it is laying in your ear. By the time you arrive at the Coliseum you have added half a dozen boxes to the cluttered attic in your head. Some have popped open, leaking into a river that is pulling your feet from beneath you and trying to suffocate you. Water is pulsing in your lungs, behind your eyes as you slip into the role society believes you must play – I am a happy teenager.

Lies are oozing from your pores and staining the blue robe decorating your body. Lies have taken over your arms and face, parts of you that betray the cold rage that simmers as an electric flame in your chest, forcing your heart to skip around so as not to freeze. You are not happy. You are standing in a crowd of people that have been familiar throughout your education, residing side by side with the people you wish you could be most distant from. You are fooling them, even as you are mocking yourself with the truth. There is no suspicion that the family taking your picture, hugging you, praising you, is not totally and completely broken. You are smiling when your father is hugging you, refraining the biting words flavoring the back of your tongue. You are no longer sure why you had invited him. Fooling yourself would have been easier without his presence.

But you had and that means something.

You are graduating high school and that means something too. Despite the last year, despite the new moons and the old ones, despite the cruelty and negligence of the man standing before you, you’ve still come out holding your head high. Maybe you just wanted to rub another loss in his face, bunch all of the years he hid in his room, treated his job like a god and ignored you, and shove them in his pockets to weigh him down. He wasn’t a part of this success, he wouldn’t have any part in it. You won’t let him. Maybe you just wanted to feel like you had a whole, happy family. No, that couldn’t be it. Because every time he touches you you’re refraining from curling your lip at the superimposed images of her girls holding his hand, hanging on his laughter, taking the space that should have been reserved for his own flesh and blood.

What you do know, though, know so certainly in this sea of blue, is that it was not an open, healing hand that had extended the offer. You are ready to strike, coiled tight, vibrating in the need for some kind of violence. You wish he would do something so that you could.

There are sighs escaping your smile as you look around. You had been told that a high school graduation was supposed to be one of those refining moments; a mark in time that could be revisited with feeling of accomplishment and relief. So you wonder where they are – these feelings, the relief, the expectation of something brighter and better. All you feel is the ache in your cheeks from holding too-wide, too-fake smiles, the pounding in your head, and the icy burning in your chest at having your family come together, pretending to be whole and happy on your account. Your classmates and friends have bought the tears and smiles and proud parent talk, but you are far too perceptive and your mother too poor an actress to allow you even a moment to think their behavior is real. You know your mother suffers beneath the shadow of your father’s presence, know your grandparents sense the tension and are no doubt reflecting on the cause of it. But today, you need these lies, their lies. If for only a day. You need them to pretend to at least notice all that you have done.

Dropping out of high school in the third year and still coming back, graduating on time with your class, achieving honors, all the while working and cleaning up the mess your dad left in his wake… You don’t feel the gratification or the relief of this high school graduation. There is no immediate future sitting on your horizon. The sun has set, the moon is hiding and the sky is clouded malevolence hiding the stars. You need them to do this for you, because you are tired. And eager, eager for all of this to be over, eager to race away from the house that you can feel, even from here, reaching to devour you. A dark stain on your conscience, billowing and loud.

At a half till two you follow your class into the large, overly flamboyant auditorium, where you wait and wait and wait for your name to be called. You accept your diploma, throw your cap in the air, and then rip the gaudy blue robe from your body as fast as you can.

Outside you will be filing onto a bus for a graduation party. Outside your father tries to give you a final hug, lay a whisper in your ear that he is proud of you – you deny him, pulling away; there are no more cameras to pose for. He leaves with tears in his eyes. You can’t find it in yourself to reach out to him, to care that you’ve just hurt him. The wounds inflicted by his choices still bleed profusely. Why should you care?

“You didn’t have to be so mean to him,” your mother says softly at your side. “Would it have been so hard to give him a hug goodbye?”

“Yes,” you growl, low in your throat, “it would have been hard.” You search the, now night sky, wishing for stars to count instead of the numbers bouncing around your stomach.

“Why did you invite him then, if you didn’t want him here?”

You turn a cold gaze on her, letting her know without words what your intention had been. Her face falls, shadows tugging at the corners of her features, accepting in part that your anger is not solely directed at your father – she has fault in this too. You have hurt them both now. Good. Parts of you are convinced that they deserved the infliction – your father for leaving you and your family and laying waste to a friendship, and your mother for letting him return time and time again, for eating his lies when you and your brother had so often confronted her on his lack of change.

(It takes two thousand nine hundred and eighty two seconds to reach the location of the graduation party – a fitness club. Bandon and the beach is the only thing you let yourself dwell on. That and the miles that will part you from all of this. You spend the whole night in the pool, letting the sound of water lap lap lapping against its confines sing you to sleep, imaginary heartbeats that tells you you aren’t alone, even when you are.)




MOM PICKS you up at seven the next morning. The sun looks like its hanging crooked in the sky. When the car pulls into the drive of the family’s single-story, ranch-style home, your stomach flip flops down down down so that you can’t stop its movement. You hate this house. Hate it hate it hate it, despise what has been birthed in all of its shadows. Your mother takes little notice you think she is blind as she flees the car and bolts inside. Your eyes flutter closed, heavy as you try to breathe. Your fingers creep up your neck, cold against your skin and you tie them up, ball them into a fist around the ring weighing you down. You are shivering and shaking and you cannot stand this place. Past is too noxious here, poisoning Present with all the chemical parts that make it up. There are too many memories billowing from the seams where wall meets wall and floor condemns the roof. The pollution is a heavy cloud; gray memories forming bars on the windows and clawing up the walls and you’re forced every day into the center of the storm because your feet are anchors and you have nowhere else to go.

Today you decide to hide in the words of your favorite stories, walk the dogs, do some chores. Today you are trying to forget where you are because you are so excited for where you will be the next day.

By dusk, the house is a quiet tomb. Your brother has long since escaped. Your mother refuses to leave and you are a sigil that holds the foundation from rocking too much. As the day winds to a close, as night ticks over the sky like a heavy hand striking the face of the day, as the sun tucks itself asleep with the thick horizon, your mother disintegrates into her room. Your thoughts are not friendly in silence and solitude. But tonight you’ll invest in the comfort of knowing that tomorrow three hundred miles will stand sentry between you and this haunted place.  

Tonight routine is carried out with a racing mind and palpitating, stuttering, I can’t I can’t I can’t heart. You lay your head down, curl up and up and up and stitch your lids to your cheeks. But you can still hear, you still feel. There is nothing in sleep to protect your from the demons in the floor boards, nothing shielding you from the claws of their voices sink sink sinking into flesh and mind and heart. And in the bright dawn, in the waking of a new world, you know those words will wait in the dark corners of your head until your attention is pulled from everything else.

Unfortunately those voices pale in comparison to another. It isn’t long until that sound takes over the others. You had forgotten it in the heartbeat of water the night before. Tears whitewash the house in why and I don’t understand and make it right, I’m begging you and help me, and please please please, but your mother’s cries meet only the bubbling silence of the shadows she’s feeding. You want to scream and scream and scream because after all the week’s trials, you just can’t handle it. Not tonight. Not any night when threads are snapping in your mind and her cries are a knife scraping at the fraying, tenuous hold you have on your temper. The boxes in the attic are rumbling around you, threatening to burst open and drown you in their contents. You are fighting the temptation to throw yourself from your room, rip your mother’s door from her hinges and release all those screams you keep swallowing. Shut up, you wish to yell. God isn’t listening, you want to say. He has abandoned you, abandoned them. He is enjoying your misery, sitting up there on His throne taking bets on who will last beneath the oppression the longest. It doesn’t matter how many times she cries out, how many times her knees crack against the ground, the only one listening is you. And you are tired aching exhausted of hearing it, of listening to the click clack click clack click clack of demon feet as they scurry over the hardwood of the floors. You are wasted, thin, starved on their giggles, while they seem to grow, engorged on your mother’s pain, ingesting them like some treasured delight, a treat to satisfy their sweet-tooth.

You drag your pillow over your head and press it roughly to your face, wrestling the need for violence building in your chest. But another bout of echoing sobs, another heinous laugh and you are yanking the blanks off your body and storming out of your room, leashing your shoes to your feet and fleeing the walls confiscating your breath. Too bad the boxes come with you.




MORNING IS mocking you. Tugging at eyes that had just barely closed. You force yourself up anyways. You move with fraying strings in your muscles, making coffee that does nothing to mask the stale smell that permeates the house. You pack bags that are far less heavy than the skin hanging from your bones. You challenge yourself in the mirror, staring down dark, guarded eyes, large against too-pale skin, framed indefinitely by dark half-moons of exhaustion. You wrestle long, straight locks into a messy bun on the back of your head, a few stubborn strays curling around to frame a small oval face, thinned and angry, lacking all animation that had once been present. When the girl in the mirror refuses to change back into the girl you remember, when she defies you over and over again, you turn away, less in defeat and more in acceptance. At a quarter till ten you count to a thousand. A thousand colors, a thousand sounds, time tick tick ticking away as all the breaths you take in that thousand are bottled and boxed. Your mother grabs the keys and four wheels turn to eat away four hours of travel.




EVEN THOUGH you are moving in a constant speed farther and farther and farther from that place, you are trapped in a silence taut with things unspoken, with fear of solitude oozing from your mother’s unmoving lips. You spend the quite wandering around in your head, navigating around all the boxes that you have packed away. This attic is getting too full, but you refuse to even think about opening a single box. You sigh all your wishes into the car where they settle into the fabric and whisper back to you. When you aren’t staring out the window, when you’re not organizing your head, when you’re not counting, reminding yourself that you have to breathe to live, you are studying your mother’s face, knowing in some secret place your anger for her is only as deep at the skin that covers you. You have become more the parent than the child. It is why you need this time, these miles. She leans on you too often now to be as weak as you are at this moment. Your bones are fracturing. So you decided to leave, to rebuild yourself, demolish what you are so that you can be stronger for her. You are too protective of your mother not to be as strong as you can be. You will hold her up. Because no one else has.

Two hours ricochet through your chest cavity before your mother tries to fill the silence with conversation. She decorates it in light and upbeat, instilling it with buoyancy to try and mask the bubbling desperation that seemed to writhe beneath the surface of her skin. You listen. She chatters about goals, ambitions for her kitchen, for the garden you have painstakingly cultivated. It is easy to understand that your mother clings to the things that makes her feel secure. She didn’t like leaving home anymore.

Home. You’ve tried to pack that word away, piling boxes on top of it. House and home are interconnected where your mother is concerned. She doesn’t see a difference. But you know every shadow sitting between the paint and the drywall. You know the whispers that hide in the roof rafters. You know that she does not know. There is no home to the house that holds your possessions. Only four walls that hide the ghosts of malevolent eyes and dark, cruel voices reminding you of all the things you can’t escape. The garden, all greens and browns, it is your only comfort, your place of solitude – dead center in your own chaos. For a moment you let your gaze wander out the window, sub-consciously tangling your fingers in the chain laying against your neck. The ring tap tap taps against your breast, beating a false heartbeat into your body, trying to replace the one that stutters and skips. But then that’s why you wear it, to remind you of its falsity, to remind you of every broken promise you had ever invested in. Your father’s shattered marriage sitting on it. You wish sometimes that you could put this in boxes too and leave it forgotten. But like home, it finds its way out of every containment you put around it. So you keep it in the forefront to remind you – no word is safe, no promise to be trusted.


IT IS just after three in the afternoon when you arrive in town. Your atoms are still vibrating in remembrance of the movement. Now that you’ve stopped, parts of you wants to turn the car back to the open road and just keep going. Maybe stopping is dangerous.

The sun has decided to make an appearance just as you get out of the car to greet the family you’ll be staying with. The Cutlers are a big family, with big arms they use to embrace those around them. It’s why you chose this place to rebuild yourself. But the dead-weight in your diaphragm is singing to you, the smell wafting on the air is whispering to you, and you have cause to wonder...