I Knew Things Would Get This Bad, I Just Never Thought They'd Get This Weird by Nadia Wolnisty

       Bradley Huchteman CC


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I Knew Things Would Get This Bad, I Just Never Thought They'd Get This Weird

I.

Mom sent me death threats on Christmas. Let me rephrase. It occurs to me that this is an Absurdist play, and I must try and fit the cadences of Beckett and all the rest. Mom told me if I did not forgive her, she would kill me. It is not an effective strategy. There. Something like that, between lines about death and how beautiful the Eiffel Tower is when the first snowfall starts.

Let me set the stage. I am on the phone with my sister, pacing the aisles at Kroger's. None of the items make any sense. There's adult diapers, baby toys, shampoo, a whole section just for toothpaste, lit up to the point of glowing. The Kroger's is cavernous. It is a metaphor for despair and doom.

This isn't about families, not really. It's about staring into a void, but in this case the void is shiny linoleum at Kroger's. When I was a kid, I thought there were florescents under the floors, and we were standing on glass.

But like those Absurdist plays, there is humor in this, right? Besides the irony, the situation is just impossible. What is she going to do? She probably weighs 100 lbs, cannot drive, and doesn't have the mental wherewithal to plan something so elaborate as murder

My mother called me into this world. She cannot be the one to send me out of it.

II.

Mom sent me death threats on Christmas. This is a poem, a synecdoche for the state of affairs. I could spell it out for you, how I was disowned, blamed for her suicide attempt, cleaned up blood, how she tried to control my body and screamed at me for not being a virgin or, earlier, for getting my period too young. I could tell you how any attempt at peace-making is a game she plays. She acts like she wants a clean-slate, but it is always the person who has wronged begging for a clean slate.

She wants things to be good at my sister's wedding, in nine months. Not the sister I am on the phone with, the other one, the younger one. She told me in an email. Sure, let's not have a fist-fight, a punch-up at a wedding, but this doesn't undo anything. She just wants to control things.

A year before, she had sent me a string of disturbing emails. I will give just a synecdoche for that as well. I forwarded them to my therapist, and my therapist had two questions only: Is English your mother's first language? and Your mother has Borderline Personality Disorder, right?

Look, I don't really want to go into it, so I'll write it out in haiku format, which is sort of a synecdoche anyways.

Threatening to kill
me is not an effective
technique to cleanse wrongs.

III.

This is a graphic novel, my on the phone with my sister at the Kroger's by work. And I don't mean one with superheroes and villains, although it does feel that way. I mean the literary kind. Think "Blankets." Think "Fun Home." Alright, so this is about families. Graphic novels about families are always the most heart-breaking. The sympathetic imagination trying to make portraits. Always, always it is an act of failure, and you have to lie and say that failure means something too, right?

My family spent Christmas together without me. Draw those panels in a different style than the one I am in, here, now at Kroger's.  Make them blotchy and with tons of blank space.

They all went to my older sister's house, four hours away from me, my parents, my younger sister, her now-fiancé, and my older sister. It wasn't merry. It wasn't anything. I can't remember if they called or not, just the email.


Draw me from above, from high inside the commercial ceiling. Hide my face. Get my asymmetrical haircut and disheveled business-casual. Get the hard symmetry on shelving full of bright objects. But make it black and white to keep the costs down, and color has no business being in this scene.

IV.

Mom sent me death threats on Christmas. This is a prophesy. Whatever the wedding will be, it won't be easy. Perhaps in all her insanity, in all her childlike helplessness that really is childishness, my mother is Cassandra, I think in a moment of panic. If I don't forgive her, perhaps it will fester, somehow. But that's bullshit, right?

Being abused feels similar to a prophesy in that it is doom and there is only two outcomes. Did it make the victims enlightened or tainted?

It is a grim augery, whatever it is.

V.

Mom sent my death threats on Christmas. It is the first line to an essay I will have to draft 100 times until I get it right. Like the essays you wrote in high-school, with the quote at the beginning to really get your reader's attention. But it is not an example, let alone a thesis.

I was taught in college that a good thesis looks something like this: Even though Y appears to be true, X is the case because of a, b, and c.

I was never any good at algebra.

I can't even solve for Y. I can only gesture at what it might look like. Absurdity on a cosmic order, a quiet compression of emotions and events, something in rough outline, a cruel raving.

My mom sent me death threats on Christmas is not a thesis. Just the beginning.

For now, my sister knows just what to say. She says That's horrible, while laughing.

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​Bio: Nadia Wolnisty is a poet, artist, and performer in Dallas, Texas. Her work has appeared in, Apogee, Philosophical Idiot, Spry, McNeese Review, Essay Daily, Paper & Ink, and the Art Uprising anthology “Desolate Country,” among others. She has two chapbooks: “Manual” from Cringe-Worthy Poetry and “A Zoo” from Finishing Line Press.  A chapbook and a full-length are forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press and Spartan.

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