Words are my enemy. Spoken. Written. It doesn’t matter. They’re out to get you. Birth certificates, applications, references, diplomas, licenses, interviews, gossip, whispers, family stories, newspapers articles, books, magazines, all of it, all of it, is just waiting to do you in. Words are a trap, a snare. They will catch you, crush you, cripple you. They push you around from the moment you’re born.

The Chief Justice would not consent to die. He had felt the tremors first in his fingers, when the train had departed Niagara Falls, but dismissed the barely perceptible tingling as the motion of the locomotive over the rails. But now, the right side of his mouth began to droop, and he sought to speak but could not. He tried to lift his arm, to motion to the other gentlemen in the first-class compartment, the rocking of the train having lulled them to sleep, but it was too late.

Hannah’s death was doubly final. Lizzie burned her, then took the whole urn with her when she left for Indiana—you don’t get any part of her, Lizzie told me.
And then Lizzie buried her.
Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory, the preacher said.
But I keep her toenails around my neck, in a locket strung on a silver chain.
Hosanna in the highest, the preacher said.
Holy shit.

The memory is barely a memory. The night is a wound healed over, skin knit back together until it’s almost eerily smooth—a silky stretch of scar tissue betraying its otherness. It’s flashes of light cutting through trees, hot salt on my tongue, gurneys bumping over the curb and sliding into the backs of ambulances. It’s needles stabbing flesh, hands examining every inch of me, searching for answers.

Chelsea Hartman stared out of her bedroom window, a dull ache deep within her chest. Her once vibrant world had become a monochromatic landscape, devoid of laughter and girlhood friends. Just like every morning for the past few weeks, she watched as the sun peeked through the clouds that hung over Southern California. The sudden closure of her school just as she was about to return after Spring Break marked the beginning of her isolated life.