What begins in a haunting ends in an explosion. We Are Parasols' Inertia treks the wastelands with assured machinic soundscapes shimmering and shattering beneath an earth that is quietly burning. The second track, Concrete, is a lush Cocteau Twins like wonder garden of sound. Although this music has fangs it also has a weird, other worldly beauty clinging to it. Lead singer D's vocals burrow underneath your skin like an anesthetic, and the wound that comes next is somewhat wonderful; The Perfect Host-the listener, is opened by a wall of sound, colors generated in slow motion.

The sun here is atomic, the hallway; long and dark, yet opening onto splendid ground. Hush washes over you like a black ocean. If Lovecraft could have composed sounds instead of words it might have been somewhat close to this. Quarantine shoots out of the barrel smoking hot, unnerving narrative voices swallowed up by a haunting. Recoil will have you for supper, mirroring that moment when bands like Nurse With Wound scared the living hell right out of you with a sudden jump into the abyss. "Do you even know what you want," screams D. Do you?

Something weird this way comes. This music is voodoo spectacular. It haunts, hits and grows right into you, meshes with your DNA, scrambles all your code. Inertia is anything but, this album is all over the map, re-drawing industrial territory with urgency and fearlessness.


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Ambition 

You liked her lemonade stand.  You take it 
in hand.  You  speak like a daddy so that 
she’ll understand.  Her girlification 
of your business plan — will not read what 
is written.  Taste.  Demand. Push pennies at
her — grime, black residue.  Sunshine beneath,
a glint — cute, squinched — of you.  Placate
with pats, promise offhand.  Sharp teeth 
bequeath; good girls understand.  You’re all plans, 
wingtips, projects to do; her saccharine  
empire eclipses you. You own the land.
You burn her sign, her stand now ash once pine.
Simplify her, something small to amuse --
ambition’s just ammunition you use. 

​

Bio: Kristin Garth is a poet from Pensacola and a sonnet stalker.  In addition to Anti-Heroin Chic, her sonnets have stalked the pages of Occulum, Faded Out, Drunk Monkeys, Midnight Lane Boutique, Ghost City Review, Neologism Poetry Journal and many other publications.  Her poetry dollhouse chapbook Pink Plastic House is available from Maverick Duck Press (maverickduckpress.com).  Follow her on Twitter: @lolaandjolie.  

“Glasses = Intellectuals?”

                     —found scribbled in a book  


As William James would wear them
were it the tool to view his surrounding
potential causalities without
staring through a grimy window.
I’ve seen too many sad-sack scholars
whose lives were ruled by paperwork
or news that made them mute to reason.
Have their effete spectacles helped?
Have mine? Let’s do a census
on how many senators, delegates,
mayors, & members of local school boards
wear them. Yesterday, I watched
a man in glasses bicycle down the street,
shouting, “Bitch! I’ll kill you!”
at no one, unless he spoke to Divinity
in the existential manner,
placing himself on a sage-like quest,
following the path of Zarathustra.

​
​
Bio: Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea, 2016). He is an ex-con, ex-reporter, ex-husband, and exhausted by all the things he isn’t anymore. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Rattle, River Styx, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

     wakingphotolife: CC


​Dirty Habit

I’m the only one sitting too close to the fire, the flames are practically licking my knees. Maybe my jeans will burn, or melt to my skin… Doubtful. The night is growing colder by the minute, and all I want to do is crawl inside our tent. I’m no camper, but when there’s enough peer pressure from your friends to spend the night in the woods, I suppose I mumbled out a yes - afraid to say no. I forgot whose brilliant idea it was to have a party out here. It’s freezing for a night in the middle of October.  The guy to my right keeps spreading his legs and raising his eyebrows at me each time I glance over at him. I’m not sure if I even know him. The cigarette he’s smoking is making me nauseous, so I get up and stand apart from the group. I pretend to check my walkie talkie, making sure it’s turned on so we can hear if someone we know calls. Nobody will call from across the path, nobody ever calls. I start to pick off the dry skin from my lips, the only dirty habit I possess. Behind me, I hear my friend vomit onto the ground after a fit of coughing, I guess she couldn’t handle all the shit she swallowed earlier. That reminded me that I do know the guy with the cigarette. I blew him a few nights ago for money to buy the drugs that everyone around the fire was high on right now. It was my friend’s idea, but now she was wasting my money. I was already numb without it. It wouldn’t be so bad if the cold wasn’t getting to us. I had to pee but was sure if I pulled down my pants, I’d die of hypothermia. “Are you okay?” A voice behind me asked. I was startled, but had to force myself to turn around. “What?” It was the guy with the fucking cigarette. “You dropped the radio,” he said, then nodded down at my feet where it had landed. I guess my hands are numb. Where were my gloves? He picked the radio up and threw it into the woods beside us. I looked after it, unblinking. Now my only lifeline was gone. His eyes tested me, knowing I’d have to retrieve it. The radio was my responsibility, everyone else was too far gone. “Fetch.” He said. He flicked his cigarette butt at me, smirking. “Don’t.” I said. Inside I wished I was covered in kerosene so I’d erupt in flames before his eyes, an image that’d be burned in his mind for the rest of his shitty life. “I’ve never fucked you in the woods before…come show me your cunt…” He trailed off, or maybe I stopped listening. My eyes drifted over to my friend who threw up. She lay on the ground, passed out. Too messed up. Then I felt a hand brush my face. I flinched away. “What are you talking about?” I said to the guy with the cigarette. He reached his hand towards my face again, trying to grab at my cheek. I froze. “Don’t you remember what my basement looks like?” There is a guy on top of my friend now, or two, I think. One is holding her arms above her head, and the other is kneeling between her legs. My hands are shaking now. Shit. I think they are trying to fucking rape her. She’s laying in the dirt, it’s muddy, I think. They’re kneeling in the mud. They’re taking her pants off, and I can see their breath steam in the cold night as they start ripping her underwear from her legs. They’re holding her down but she’s not even awake. How could she try to fight them off if she’s not even fucking awake. I squeezed my eyes shut. I held them shut to make it go away. “Please stop.” I whispered. The guy was talking to me again, some scum whom I should have no affiliation with, his mouth is moving  “I guess you can’t remember since your face was against the wall the whole time.” My face is wet, I think. It’s cold, my tears are frozen. “What if someone calls…” I squeaked, coughing. I couldn’t breathe. “I guess you were too fucked up to remember.” He laughed. “Remember what?” Confused, I forced myself to meet his eyes. He stopped smirking and reached his hand out to grab my hair. I yelped at the pain as he turned me around and threw me to the ground. “This,” he said. It was almost a whisper. I could barely hear him, and then he was on me. I couldn’t move, didn’t want to move. I suddenly imagined that if I tried to resist, he’d kill me. I turned my head to see my friend. Her legs are so white in the cold, the pale standing out between streaks of grime. And there’s blood. They’re fucking taking turns, taking turns raping her. They’re making her bleed but she’s not moving. She’s not moving now.

​

​Anxiety #2
​
Most days
I am
just where
I am
still sitting
in nightmares
soaked in
rain like
crows on
powerlines
like horses
rode until
they need
shot like
unclaimed children
and wounded
soldiers
I rot
in a
city
I swore
I'd leave
back before
life beat
me into
a corner
before it
threw my
heart against
the wall
and the
war spooked
me back
into this
burning barn
I am
too afraid
to leave.




Drill weekend
 
Putting on
the uniform
sometimes
feels like
putting your
fathers slap
back across
your face
like walking
back into
the night
you found
her in
bed with
another man
like the
morning she
left you
the day
you lost
your job
the night
Billy hung
himself
 
some days
putting on
the uniform
feels worse
than all
the all
the mornings
you still
spend wiping
dead soldiers
blood off
your  hands.




Poetry reading
 
Tonight
I'll thread
my pain
through
the eye
of a
hurricane
throwing
sand and
blood throwing
bleach and
bones into
the world
 
hard enough
to knock
my house
down.

​This Will Only Hurt For A Moment

        The clamp is cold and feels like two ice cream scoops that have just been removed from the freezer. I’m sitting on a paper-lined chair with my feet in stirrups, drowning in fear and anxiety. My body is cold beneath the pink paper gown, but my hands are clammy with sweat. I’m a living, breathing conundrum. Dr. Fields walks in resembling a coal miner with a clear, plastic shield over his eyes and a flashlight wrapped tightly around his forehead as he preps himself for battle with my cervix. If I wasn’t so scared I would tell him how ridiculous he looks. He turns on a buzzing machine (called a cryoprobe) that looks like a spinning toothbrush and inserts it between the pathway provided by the clamp. As the smell of sanitizer and burning tissue fill my nostrils, I hear him say, “Try and relax, Kristin. This will only hurt for a moment.” Easy for you to say, Doc.
        After what seemed like hours, Dr. Fields decided to give me what he called “a break.” Although his definition of what that means is questionable. For 5 minutes, I laid there with a cold, metal clamp holding open my empty body. For 5 minutes, I had to fight back my body’s natural reaction to push the clamp out. Those 5 minutes I spent fidgeting with my silver bracelet and digging my nails into the palms of my hands were no break at all. They were 5 long minutes of excruciatingly loud silence. Dr. Fields walked right back into the room and continued the battle.  To think that things had come to this after a simple yearly exam just a few weeks ago is unfathomable.
        I’d gone a year without experiencing a period. I was excited at the thought of not having to endure the monthly inconvenience that comes along with being a woman. I mean, who actually wants the mood swings, the cramps, the emotional ridiculousness of crying at the silliest of commercials, or having to take stock of feminine products all the time? Not me! I enjoyed the lack of inconvenient womanhood until I had a routine check-up and was put on birth control pills to help regulate me. After a year of taking birth control and a year with a regulated cycle, I received a phone call from my doctor’s office and heard the dreaded words:
        “Hello, Ms. Trujillo. We’re calling from the office of Dr. Fields about your recent examination. It seems there were some . . . issues with the results that he’d like to discuss with you in person.”
        Dr. Fields was a gentle giant. He was African American and had the flawless combination of salt and pepper hair. He was about 6’4” with a pudgy belly and large hands that always seemed perfectly moisturized. He was always straight to the point, but had a softness to his voice that was never condescending or unfeeling. After receiving the phone call about there being issues with the results of my pap smear, I couldn’t help but picture him as a villain who has come to knock me down a few notches on the scale of positive outlook. 
        I scheduled the appointment and shifted nervously in the examination room waiting to hear what “issues” were found in my results. According to Dr. Fields, they found precancerous cells on my cervix that needed to be removed via cervical cryosurgery. This meant that he would have to insert a cryoprobe into my vagina and freeze the cervical tissue using compressed nitrogen gas. As if that wasn’t scary enough to hear, I might also have trouble getting pregnant if I ever attempted it on my own—which meant I would need fertility drugs for assistance. I’d never experienced anything like this before so, at 20 years old, I had no idea what questions to ask. I watched Dr. Field’s lips move, and I’m sure he was saying something important, but I just couldn’t process any more of the information he was offering. I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry at the thought of having my right to carry a child erased from my list of options for the future.
        So here I sit, on the paper lined chair in Dr. Fields’ office as he attempts to rid me of these precancerous cells while I spin my bracelet around my wrist as a distraction.  Why is this happening to me? Does this really mean I won’t be able to have my own children someday? Does it make me less of a woman because I’m not working properly? What did I do wrong to deserve this? These are the questions I’m trying to avoid concentrating on as the buzzing from the cryoprobe fills the silence.
        I felt defeated when I left the office. My body felt violated and my ego was bruised. But more importantly, one question remained in my mind . . . Do I even want my own children? That one question gave me the feeling of immense guilt that I couldn’t seem to shake. I think about all of the women in the world who desperately want to start a family, but lack the capability to do so. I think about the women who, like me, have to endure this uncomfortable procedure in order to prevent threats like cervical cancer. I think about the women who are told that they actually have cervical cancer. I think about what I might have done wrong in my life to make me feel like my body was broken. Like my body doesn’t work properly—the way a woman’s body should.
        When someone tells you that your right to bear a child might be compromised, it really sends you into a whirlwind of emotions. Here I was, only 20 years old, having to contemplate this existential crisis without even knowing what I want to eat for dinner that night. I was forced to put myself in this headspace where I knew for a fact that my reproduction system rejected me completely, and that I would never be able to get pregnant. So, when my brother told me his girlfriend was pregnant just two months later, I promised myself that I would experience all that I could experience with my future niece or nephew that I wouldn’t be able to experience with my own child.
        When my niece, Briana, was born I felt an instant motherly bond with her. I changed her diapers, gave her baths, fed her, turned down nights out with my friends so that I could stay home and marvel at this beautiful little creature. I remember looking at her rosy cheeks and thinking about how impossible it was to measure my love for her. It was something I always heard new parents say about their children when they were born, but always thought they were exaggerating. Here I was, this broken shell of a woman, (possibly) unable to carry a child of her own, but still carrying that motherly instinct. 

​

​Checkmate


You never heard the warning bells,
just the cracking of bones
             —your left hand as shattered as your future.
It was never supposed to end like this.

You held on so long before now,
kept your head down,
            your shoulders hunched, said
This is where I belong, said,
it’s better here. Mistaking the white spots
in your vision for a light show.
You never saw them as the warning sign they were,
your body’s desperate plea
for you to take in oxygen.
            It was never supposed to end like this.

You called it safety, called it home,
called all your wounds collateral damage
             —called them deserved.
You thought the pain meant you were still here,
forgetting the way a body can continue to bruise
even after a heart has stopped beating.




Red Nail Polish


I’m crying on the floor again.
            There are too many stories that start
             with exactly these words,
but I’m crying on the floor.
Again.
Red nail polish oozes across the floor
            looking like fresh blood in the low light.
There’s glass everywhere,
and my friend keeps telling me to put on shoes,
let him clean this up,
do I want to get hurt?
The nail polish looks like blood,
            and I’m crying on the floor,
            which is now stained red.
Someday,
I will be able to look at red nail polish
and not think blood.
Someday, I will not remember
the way a blade feels against my wrists.
Someday, I will pull out the broken glass
that has always been under my skin,
and when I’m asked do I want to get hurt?
I will put on some goddamn shoes.




Here


Just like that I'm 19 again,
             smoking broken cigarettes in the woods.
The only person I'm hiding it from is myself,
                         as if by doing this in secret I can hide the addiction--
but I'm the only one who knows,
and the only one who cares.

I'm writing poetry in the dark,
as if this makes it more real, more
who I am, instead of just an English major, pretending--
             like somehow, I can erase the future and put in someone else's words.

This is the way time goes in circles.
This is the way smoke becomes fire.
I wait until sunset to start a project that was due three days ago,
because it's prettier that way, right?
That's what matters.
Because prettier is what makes it better,
                                                                           right?
If it looks good it must be okay--

When John Keats got sick
his friends raised enough money for him to go
to Italy to recover,                      and he didn't.
I mean he went,
            but he didn't get better.

When I got sick,
I stayed in my room for three days,
with the lights off,
             —as if that would make me better.
As if by not existing my friends wouldn't have to take me anywhere.

So I took myself to the woods and thought          here.
I took myself to the woods and I thought
          no one will know.

My lungs have never given up on themselves,
never broken down until all I breathe is blood,

              but I know the feeling of drowning.

When Wordsworth brought himself to the woods,
             it meant hope, and nature, and beauty,
and God.

I bring myself to the woods,
as if this is where poetry lives.
            —as if by taking out my own heart I can fill my chest with something better.

Who are you hiding from?
                          Is it only yourself?
I bring myself into the woods, and I turn off my phone,
and I think this is it.

I'm not on a boat in a storm-tossed ocean.
No one will ever find my mummified heart.
            I'm the only one who can pull myself from this sickness.
There will be no trip to Italy.

I bring myself out of the woods,
still smelling like cigarette smoke--
            still smelling like fire, still feeling like drowning.
But I bring myself out of the woods anyway
                                   and start over.

​

Voices

       I hear his voice all the time. It hangs over me, a grand piano dangling by a thread. I’m pretty sure he finds joy in watching me make bad decisions. He’s always quick to point them out. I fall victim to his incessant, condescending attitude each time I slip up.
        You shouldn’t stay out that late.
        Mom would never approve of this.
        That’s too much alcohol, Katy. Even I didn’t drink that much.
        You shouldn’t be at a party on a school night. You do want to get into college, don’t you?
        An F? Last year you never would have gotten an F.
       He talks to me now more than he ever used to. I like to pretend I’m over his death. I like to believe that I have moved on. I’ll wake up in the fresh fog of a new day, only to be greeted by the same words, a gentle reminder that I’ll never be over it.  
         You still miss me, don’t you?
       I can’t get him out of my head. No matter how hard I try, he’s always there. When I wake up, when I go to bed, and every moment in between.
        The start of my day always comes with a groan and the sound of his voice dragging me out of bed and into the kitchen.
        Mom is probably already waiting for you. You’re going to be late for school if you don’t get up now.
       I move through the world in a haze. My mind is static on a television screen, rocks in a blender set to high. I find myself in new places, yet I never remember how I got there. Maybe it’s the alcohol, or maybe my fucked-up mind has taken away the pieces of my life it doesn’t consider important.
        I sit at the table in different clothes. My hair has not been brushed and instead is pulled back in a ratty ponytail. I don’t care.
        “Good morning, sweetheart,” Mom says.
        She hands me a cup of coffee and kisses me on the forehead.
        I nod, a smile appears on my lips uninvited.
        You should talk to her, she misses you. You’re not even making an effort.
        I want to reply. I wonder if he would listen. I’ve thought about arguing the voice away, but maybe that would make me look crazy. I’m not crazy.
      My eyes shift around the room, they fall on the pictures of him from the war. He wears a camouflage jacket and a smile that I don’t recognize.
        Mom hums faintly in the kitchen, she smiles too. I can’t figure out her secret. I don’t understand the happiness of others, how they can move on so quickly, act happy so fast. Especially Mom, humming over a lost son isn’t something I can wrap my head around.
She’s moved on. You should too.
        I dig my nails into my palms, leaving half-moons behind. I try to think of a way to rid my body of this anger. The train in my mind derails into a forest of dark thought. I let it.  
         The thoughts stop spiraling when Mom opens her mouth again.
        “Something came in the mail this morning,” she says. Her voice is a silhouette of what it used to be. I don’t look her in the eyes, I’m afraid of what I might find there. She’s worn. I don’t know how she keeps herself going. I certainly stopped trying, or maybe I never started in the first place.
She places her hand on my shoulder and I flinch under her touch.  
        “What is it?” I ask. My voice is soft, it doesn’t match the fire under my skin.
        “Just look.”
Mom slides a box across the table. Camouflage pokes over the top.I stand up. “What is that?” I pull the box close to me and suck in a breath at the sight of his name embroidered on the coat. My fingers run over the stitching.
       “I think he would have wanted you to have it.”  
        I rip the jacket out of its box and hold it close to my chest.
        Looks like you don’t need me anymore.
        It smells of him, a scent I thought I had long forgotten.  ​

​

Bio: Megan Prevost is a Creative Writing student in Florida. Her work has appeared in The Beacon and Scarlet Leaf Review. In her free time, she likes to cry over stray cats and take pictures of lighthouses. You can follow her on twitter @megpre_23

​
Radioactive


​                        “Why the hell did you short me five dollars?!” Finn yelled at me. I stood in front of the person who had once been my best friend not that long ago. He was blocking my bedroom doorway, towering over me. I had come armed with boxes and movers. I knew this would be the last time I would enter our shared apartment. I didn’t have many emotions about this, beyond the sinking feeling of loss that I knew I had onto brought on myself. He stared me down. I avoided his eyes out of shame. “You really should kill yourself, you know”, the voices whispered to me. I clawed my palms with my fingernails, trying to focus.
                        Finn and I were hashing things out. Loudly. I had shorted Finn five dollars on the electric bill. This had not my intention when I went to dingy looking gas station near my soon to be former home to get the cash to pay this final obligation. I had counted the bills haphazardly while I was in the checkout line to get iced tea. It was a mistake, but in a situation where all his good intentions had been betrayed, my mistake turned into an insult.
                        Our friendship had come down to a list of possessions to be divided (like most bitter divorces do). I yelled at him about all the things I was taking: the toilet paper, the paper towels, the dishes, the silverware, the blender with no lid, the bedroom lightbulb. He yelled back about the missing five dollars, fury radiating from his brown eyes. “Just like you to fuck your friend over, you stupid bitch”, the voices said. “Just fucking give up now.” I ignored them or tried to. I felt sick inside every time I heard them.
                        Finn had been my best friend for five years by the time I stood in front of him in my bedroom doorway, ignoring the voices in my head, screaming about blenders and lightbulbs. We were an odd duo, the maladjusted former homeschooled girl and the artsy anime nerd. But it worked, somehow. Finn and I dyed our hair together, went to concerts (at one show, Finn made balloon animals for all the members of the band Mindless Self Indulgence, which they loved), sang along to Rent, Wicked, Glee and all our other favorite musicals. (If I was granted the privilege of asking one question of him now, it’d likely be to ask what he thought of Hamilton.) I had started smoking pot because of an ex-boyfriend but I kept smoking it because of Finn. He and I commiserated about our various loves and hookups, took art classes together, got butthurt when the one of us had gotten a piece put in an art-show but the other hadn’t, overshared about our sex lives (that was mostly me), and argued fiercely with one another. We did nearly everything together. I cannot describe my feelings for Finn adequately with words, to this day. If it was his life or mine, even though we haven’t spoken in years, I’d pick his every time. Another friend summed it up well for me, saying Finn was a person who had pressed his face into my soul and left a deep indent that would always remain. It was one of the most intense friendships I’ve ever had, and I am thankful for that experience.
                        I’ve always seen myself as a time bomb: when I’m well I’m very well, but when I’m not, I’m REALLY not. I have been diagnosed with a myriad of psychological disorders in my life: Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and later (the cause of my voices), Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features. These illnesses live with me in my bones, even though they are not actively turbulent. They are bedfellows that seem almost banal to me now, after years of therapy, years of learning to control the fires that rage on inside of me. However, I avoid close friendships. (Finn was one of the first close friends I have ever had, and he likely will be the last.) I don’t confide in many people. I actively avoid social activities when I’m unwell, not wanting to inflict my presence and subsequently my problems on others. One acquaintance, when I told him that I go to therapy regularly, asked if I didn’t have a friend I could just “spill all my shit to”. I told him the kind of shit I spill needs a professional with a master’s degree in psychology and an hourly rate just to be tolerable. On the outside, I am a people person. I am often described as “bubbly”. The reality is different. I have periodic anxiety attacks and bouts of depression. I struggle to maintain healthy coping mechanisms. I am too much. My problems wear people out. I have learned through experience that my friendship comes with an emotional body count, a price I’m not willing to inflict on anyone. I am radioactive, a glowing green orb that looks pretty from far away. If you get too close to me, over time, you will slowly get poisoned. It’s the kind of thing that lingers in your bones, eats away at you until you realize you’re dying.
                        Finn was in the process of poisoned, though he didn’t know it when moved in with him. I had come to live with him about a year and half before our fight in my bedroom doorway, when I was twenty-three. I had moved out of my prior roommate’s house because he’d gotten bedbugs. This was only a tragedy for my belongings, really. There wasn’t much left of me to find. I had been raped by a virtual stranger the year before at an arts festival Finn and I had both attended. I was in complete denial about it. I had not been in a good state of mental health before the assault. My parents were emotionally and physically abusive, I had been sexually abused as a child, all the generic sad white girl tales. I always was one of those perpetually suicidal friends you don’t really take seriously, someone who just seems a little sad. The one who makes occasional suicide threats now and then, mostly for attention (which in my case was mostly correct). However, the assault and my denial of what had happened had destroyed me. I had pushed away most of my friends outside of Finn with my maladaptive coping skills. For lack of better things to do, I had spent a lot of time in my old home alternating between drinking myself into a stupor and turning the gas stovetop on high when no one was home, until I felt like I was gasping for air. I was not well. I was hearing voices even then, though they were less frequent. I couldn’t tell you exactly when they started, though I date them to sometime after I moved in with my prior roommate. I hadn’t told anyone this, because it terrified me. At first it was even something I could ignore, a kind of low-level static hum whispered darkly in my mind at times of distress. “You are worthless. You are terrible. You should die. You deserve to be alone.”
                        Finn asked me to move in with him mostly out of pity, with a tinge of loneliness thrown in the mix, as his girlfriend had just left him several months prior. I knew then it wouldn’t end well. I had made all the rookie mistakes: I had slept with Finn just before leaving my prior living situation, and I had feelings for him. He’d asked me a few months before I moved in if I was in love with him. I hadn’t wanted to ruin the friendship, so I had lied through my teeth, a thing I typically did in those days. My emotions weren’t the only thing I had kept from him. He didn’t know about the voices either, and I’d do anything to avoid him finding out. The shame I felt about it, the fear about being viewed as crazy, the worry it would affect our friendship….I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. The radioactivity beamed off me, piercing the heart of our friendship. Finn didn’t know this yet, because he couldn’t see it.
                        Still, the cracks and blinding rays showed despite my best efforts to shield us from them. I became aggressive. I couldn’t handle criticism. If Finn tried to bring up how I never cleaned up after myself, how I left my cups of tea in my room to mold, I screamed at him. If he tried to point out how it wasn’t necessary for me to know where he was, what he was doing or when he’d be home, I cursed him out. If he told me that maybe I should slow down with my drinking, I threw his pot use back in his face, not even willing to broach the fact I had a problem. I felt terribly guilty every time I did it. I was learning then that if I didn’t contain my own irradiated problems, it had consequences for everyone around me. My behavior reminded me distinctly of my father in the home where I had grown up, how in times of stress he would berate me for almost anything. This horrified me, but I didn’t know how to stop doing it.
                        Meanwhile, the voices grew louder in volume. “You are a terrible person. Why do you even bother to get out of bed in the morning?” they yelled at me in stereo. Whenever I was alone I’d listen to them tell me how I was “a stupid depressed lump of a person. You are useless”, they said. They told me to repeat after them, every harsh thing they said, so I’d know who I was. I often did so whenever Finn wasn’t home to hear, watching my mouth move reflexively in the bathroom mirror. I’d take my razor and run it down my thighs, the sticky red blood mixing with my tears as I spoke the words along with them that I was convinced were true. Everyone was better off without me. I had deserved to get raped. I had deserved it because I was a liar, because I was a slut, because I was bad. I was terrible, I was a slut, a bitch, a bad friend, and I deserved to die. It was a harsh place to live, surreal and bizarre. Even though Finn couldn’t see this, I couldn’t hide it. He knew I’d changed. He finally felt the those poisnious ions coming off me, piercing his skin. He would beg me to tell him what was wrong, but I couldn’t. I was looking into an abyss that I saw no way out of and felt like Finn could never understand this.
                        Finn was tired of this. I didn’t blame him. It didn’t help that I was jealous of his new girlfriend, a beautiful Columbian girl with curly black hair named Marcie. She was petite, with tiny hands and a cute smile. She wore crops tops, shirts with the backs cut out, high heels. She knew how to style herself. She was uncommonly nice. She liked X-Men, Adventure Time, anime, and other prerequisite nerdy things that you needed to care about to even enter our apartment. I could tell he liked her right away. I hated her. I had no reason to, beyond jealousy and what the voices told me. “She’s replacing you”, the voices whispered. “You’re obsolete, he hates you so just go away.”
                        This came to a head on a day when the Texas heat surrounded us like a cloud of steam in a hot sauna. Unrelenting, yet soothing all at once. We stepped into my Finn’s blue Honda, the windows fogging up from the humidity as we entered. The fog hid our faces. It hid Finn’s chocolate brown eyes, his rich brown hair, the left hand with the scar on it, right by his thumb. It hid my face, my blue eyes, the mousy pixie cut, and a waifish figure. We both felt the wall in our silence. “He thinks you’re an awful person. Put a bullet in your skull, you slut”, the voices screamed at me. I shuddered, trying to ignore them, as always. I looked over at him warily. He tried to turn the radio up, out of instinct, before he remembered his car’s stereo system had broken a long time ago. We rode for a time in silence, avoiding the other’s glance.
I broke the uncomfortable silence. “What’s wrong, are you mad at me?”
                        He looked at me, pursing his lips, drawing the discomfort around him like a cloak. “Yeah, I am. Marcie told me….” he hesitated. “She told me she doesn’t want to come over, because every time she does, you’re a bitch to her. You are, and it really bothers me. I really like her, and I want her to be in my life for a long time. Why are you doing this? I don’t understand.”
                          The steam rose up in me, boiling me alive, like I was possessed by the heat that surrounded the Texas landscape. The yelling in my mind continued in full force. “You are worthless. You are stupid. You should die. Just kill yourself now and do everyone else a favor. That fucking whore is going to kill you and replace you and you need to stop her Hannah. Oh my god, shut up shut up shut up!!! God please forgive me-you’re a whore, you’re a whore and she’s a whore she’s a whore-fuck!”
                   I stared ahead, gripping the denim cloth of my jean shorts as I whispered what I heard in my mind, what the voices kept whispering to me. I mumbled only barely under my breath, repeating what they said just hoping to get them to stop.
“She’s a whore.” I said.
“What the fuck did you just say?!” Finn yelled as he stopped the car.
                         I made some excuses. I honestly don’t remember what I said. Some bullshit, slut shaming remark about how Marcie dressed perhaps. We got the apartment, in silence once again. He got out of the car fuming, radiation poisoning slowly kicking in. I made an excuse about something I left behind. I walked away, leaving my cell phone, my wallet, my keys in his car. I started running through the streets to the park down the road. I looked furtively around me, making sure I wasn’t being followed. I was crying, tears running down my cheek. I stopped at the edge of the park near our home, the quiet spot by the creek where the tallest trees met the darkness of the night. I could taste the salt from my tears on my tongue, flickering on it like a bug. I took out my arm, scratching it, the voices yelling at me unrelenting. “You are a piece of shit! Everyone hates you and you deserve to die!” “Shut up!” I screamed, my nails gripping the skin of my arm tighter and tighter, scratching myself until I drew blood, red like a tide. “Please god fucking stop!”
                        Not too long after this incident, I completely succumbed to the contamination that my illness had brought me.  I was depressed. Everything hurt. The voices wouldn’t stop yelling at me, no matter what I did. I wanted to die. The only reason I hadn’t was I hadn’t wanted Finn to have the burden of finding my body. I had locked myself in my bedroom, not wanting to ever come out and expose anyone else to my sickness ever again. I started screaming and ripping the pages out of my books. The grey-white pages with their tiny black type made little sense to me. They mocked me as they fell to the floor, my only hopes at recovering the silence that had once ruled in my mind. My screams only served to mildly drown out the voices going now at full blast in my mind, only saying one thing: FUCKING KILL YOURSELF ALREADY BITCH, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!.
                  During this most recent breakdown Finn had called my friend Alex crying, because he didn’t know what to do with me.  The radiation had burned his flesh, singed his hair, left a bitter test in his mouth, and he couldn’t handle it anymore. Alex was a woman in her thirties who had faced her own demons, made it past them, and took no nonsense from anyone. She immediately picked me up, made me go to her house and stay there for a few days. She wasn’t sure what my issue was, but she insisted that I get help before I got any worse. If I didn’t, she said she’d take me to the psych hospital (a place I hadn’t gone for fear my fiercely anti-psychiatry parents, whose health insurance policy I was still on, would find out about it). Desperate to avoid this, I agreed. I started therapy at my university’s health center, but it was a slow recovery process. I didn’t tell anyone about the voices out of fear, of what I don’t know. “Dumb cunt,” they said.
                     I was angry, I was scared, the bullshit in my mind kept playing over and over and wouldn’t stop. I was struggling with strange thoughts. Magical thinking if you are charitable, and delusions if you are not. Looking back now, I remember thinking these things, and I could tell you that I know they were illogical. They were crazy. I was deeply convinced they were all happening at the time. They varied in tone. People could hear my thoughts. Everyone knew how terrible I was. Everyone hated me. Finn hated me so much in fact, he was trying to kill me. I was convinced I was possessed. I left my shirt and shoes in a cemetery near my home one night to keep the ghosts there from continuing to bring me bad luck. I walked through the park at night, screaming at the evil things I saw in the trees to stop tormenting. I slept in the woods sometimes, telling both my Finn and my boyfriend I was at one place or another, because there were times I was certain Finn would stab me in my sleep. In this moment, I did a shitty thing. I started mailing Finn junk mail. I mailed him boxes of DARE flyers, travel brochures, sent the Jehovah’s Witnesses to his door. I’d spend hours finding things to send to him. I glowed a bright green, dark energy burning. Finn was left to choke on the deadly dust I had strewn about our home.
                         I lied about it to him later when he found out about the junk mail, to protect myself from his deserved anger. Somewhere in me, I knew my reasoning made no sense. I knew it was terrible, and I knew it would end whatever was left of us. I felt like he was better off without me (the only assumption regarding this situation I still hold to be true). His face when he figured out that I was the one doing it, and the hurt in his eyes I’ll never forget. So, I decided to do what I did best at that point, nope out. I moved out, just told the apartment manager I was leaving, turned in my months’ notice, paid the next month’s rent, told Finn I was gone without ever discussing it.
                          So, there we were, him standing in my bedroom doorway. Me standing just outside it. His eyes hard with betrayal and hurt. Me standing there broken and leaking my radioactivity, avoiding my illness, my voices, the fact that I had done terrible things. I packed my things and left the apartment as quickly as I could. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you fucking traitor bitch,” the voices said.
                          Psychosis is like a waking dream that feels real, until you wake up in a cold sweat, and reality fades in. Everything is meaningful in the moment, everything is true, until the storm leaves you, and you see all the destruction you created without even realizing it. I often pick through my memories from this time as though they are debris from a tornado. I find shards of glass, bricks strewn around, pieces of paper, but never enough to grant me the whole picture. Almost everything is trash, mostly useless. Every so often, in the rubble I find a photo, a family portrait or an heirloom with some meaning, though I cannot connect it to any specific context. The things I do find distress me. I have a cognitive dissonance between sick me and well me. I sometimes even question if I ever did those things, though I know I did. I can’t ever allow myself to forget it.
                      After I moved out of Finn’s, I started getting better. I finally confided in my therapist about the voices and got properly diagnosed and medicated. The voices and delusions receding from my mind only left me a dry mouth and no sex drive from my medication, and the wide-eyed horror of what I’d done to Finn. I couldn’t forgive myself for it. I left the social world for about two years, going to therapy twice a week, taking my medicine regularly, drying out from my drinking, going back to school, getting my shit together. It was a form of decontamination, a lead box for myself and my illness. I kept to myself. There were lessons to be learned in the silence and isolation. I knew I needed them. If I ever could hope to have friendships without hurting anyone, I needed to learn them.
                             There are things we do to people in life that are unspeakable. There are no words to express the profound anger and sorrow I hold against myself for the things I did to Finn. They were the death throes of a wounded animal, but I refuse to defend them. Instead, they speak to me at 3 am, when every negative trait I will ever possess comes to beg me for a second chance. I sit still in my lead box, radioactivity buzzing around me, and tell those traits, no, never again.
                      This would not be the first time my mental illness and I would ruin a friendship. However, failures with Finn are my most spectacular ones, the ones that cling to my soles of my sneakers like old gum that can’t be scrapped off. My friendships are often collateral damage in my fight with my illness. I burn them if I’m not contained. I’m flaky and unreliable, I’m judgmental, I let my friends down a lot, and often I don’t explain why. (“I’m so depressed, I can’t get out of bed”, “I didn’t sleep all night because I kept having flashbacks”, and “I’m too anxious to focus on what you are saying right now”, never seem like good or believable excuses.) I cannot deny my own culpability in this, despite my mental illness. The truth is that I’m a lousy friend. I’ve lost the people I’ve loved most to my own selfish destruction. While this has improved over the years, my failures with Finn still remind me never to forget what happens when I let my illness go unchecked.  
                           I tried to apologize to Finn. I am never very good at saying I’m sorry, if only because I know those words are never enough. They’re only a band-aid for the wounds we inflict on one another that never stop bleeding. He does not owe me forgiveness, and if he never speaks to me again (like I suspect he won’t) I will deserve it. Not too long ago, he asked me never to speak to him again. I ignore him as he requested. It’s a reasonable request, it’s the right request, it’s a request I completely understand. At this point, walking away is the best thing I can do for him. The soul can only absorb so much radiation before it withers and dies.
                          But sometimes when I get home at night, after I’ve seen him at an event or a show we both mutually happen to attend, I go into the locked drawer of my desk. This is the place where I keep the things that break me. I take out the picture I have of me and him from my 21st birthday, him in the beanie with the blue flames and the superhero shirt, bitch beer I picked out in his hand. Me in the navy-blue college hoodie and that ridiculous sombrero he forced me to wear.
                         I sit on the concrete stairs by my current apartment, smoking a cigarette. I stare at the photo, though every detail of it has been etched into my mind for years. I look at both of us, smiling and ready for the future, and say to the children in that photo the same thing, over and over again. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m sorry.”

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Bio: Hannah Searsy is a writer who lives in Fort Worth, TX with her partner Luc, and their two Siamese cats Mojo and Scrambles. Her work has appeared on Madswirl.com and is forthcoming in Thimble Literary journal.

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​another paragraph overnight

Decades still to come (two)
With a tarp on the roof over the husk
Of a burnt out trailer 
Grandpa chokes on smoke 
And you can’t keep the ashes from blowing into the trees 
To mix with curled yellow leaves.  
 
(Two) decades later you dream you find the ashes  
And forge them back 
Into your Starter Coat
And the 98 Accord, and your grandpa’s .22 
And the fishing pole  
The trading cards 
 
Even the phone in the hall, so you can talk 
At long last to your mother and  
Ask her why she  
Didn’t take you home from the hospital 
Why you ended up with your grandpa 
Standing in a pile of ashes 
 
But instead you’re away from it all, 
Without a way back so what the hell
You maybe take it a little too far 
Your son at his mother’s and  
The ashes envelope you on a Wednesday night 
A hundred miles away.

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Bio: Stefan Lutter was born and raised in Upstate NY, where he still resides. His work has appeared in Word Riot, Five 2 One, and Vending Machine Press.