Electric Literature

I Had a Neighbor Whose Husband Constantly Shouted

Posted on May 28, 2026May 28, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

“Women, in Color” by Neela Vaswani

1.

I had a neighbor whose husband shouted. I suppose the husband was my neighbor too, but I didn’t want him to be.

Once home from work, he let loose, shouting between Hindi and a Garhwali dialect I couldn’t follow, a few phrases settling in my ear: the apathy of women, dinner criticism. Sometimes he read the newspaper outside on a grey metal chair. He shouted there, too. It’s possible he was capable of shouting and reading at the same time, but more likely the newspaper was a prop. When he went to sleep, the quiet was sudden. The clink of my neighbor washing her pots at the outdoor tap sounded spacious and free.

I was there—on a single street two miles above a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas—to teach for a few months in a village school run by a local NGO. I was also there in an attempt to tend to some mid-twenties grief and confusion. In New York, I had an unfinished dissertation, a fiancé, who would, in two years, be a husband, a waitressing job, a teaching job. I needed to remember something essential to myself and I thought living and working in service to children in the town of my grandmother’s raising, in the quiet of the world’s highest mountains, might help. My newly constructed rental apartment was last on the lane, a bicycle width’s space between it and my neighbor’s mud-walled home. I have never lived anywhere more glorious. But even surrounded by raucous monkeys and birds in dialogue and those glinting, snow-faced peaks, my neighbor’s husband shredded my peace. I slammed doors in protest, paced with vengeance, went to bed with headaches. And I wondered at my neighbor and her outward equanimity.

She moved through her days as if the husband was background to her story. From what I could tell, she and I differed in economics and education and aligned in gender, religion, and physicality: if I had taken off my glasses and dressed differently, we might have been mistaken for sisters.

Whenever we passed in the lane, she flicked her eyes at me in greeting. I would scan her face for bruises that did not exist. She was small and lithe and walked fast, her braid keeping time in the swale of her back. She looked too young to have children gone from the home and too old to be childless in India.

In the mornings, while I drank tea and reviewed lesson plans, she milked a beige cow. As an ingenious locating device, she had painted her cow’s horns hot pink. Even before I heard the sound of the bell around the cow’s neck, I would see her pink horns flashing through the trees. In the evenings, as I ate dinner, my neighbor appeared at the front of her home with chapatis for the local pack of wandering dogs. Sometimes the oldest dog—white with stretched-out teats and a patient face—pressed against my neighbor’s legs.

And still, the husband shouted.

She moved through her days as if the husband was background to her story.

I never heard my neighbor respond to him. In fact, in three months’ time, I never heard her voice at all. Once, I heard her laugh—a joyful, raspy sound like a spigot turned on, then off, in drought—as she watched the white dog flop on her back to scratch an itch. And once on a festival day, some women came by and collected her, bundling her into their fold. As they swept down the lane in a flood of bells and chatter, I thought I heard another voice added to their mix, but could not be sure.

Twenty-five years later, what I recall best is her clothing: gagra cholis, traditional blouses and skirts with simple cuts—her colors an insurrection. Every day, flaming from her home like the flag of her own private country. Declarative, amplified, insubordinate.

Two sets I remember:

-a skirt like a pile of limes on fire, with a canary yellow dupatta wrapped around a cotton candy blouse.

-A neon orange and purple skirt paired with a blouse like hammered metal, hemmed in a deep, ecstatic blue. The dupatta—poisonous-frog-green—knotted for efficiency.

At dusk, I would sit behind the apartments near the laundry line at the edge of the lane to watch the distant cloud-topped peaks as they soaked up the waning light. The mountains grew dark and hulking and upside-down triangles of sky slotted into the range, flooding with purple and orange. I felt the sunset all through me. Out there with my neighbor’s gagra cholis, her dupattas end to end, underlining horizon. Dimming the hibiscus. The husband inaudible.

One morning, as I left my apartment and walked to catch the bus to the village where I was teaching, I noticed the grey chair outside my neighbor’s door had been painted hot pink. My neighbor was sweeping her stoop. I said, “Aapki coursi acchi lag rahi hai.” Your chair is looking good. She dipped her head in agreement, kept sweeping. The white dog, panting in the shade, had a thick pink stripe along her flank as if she had made contact with my neighbor’s paintbrush or the drying chair.

I stayed at the school for two weeks, and when I returned to the lane, my neighbor’s husband was sitting on the chair. It had been re-painted grey. He was holding a newspaper in front of his face.

And shouting.

I kept still, dizzy from the effort of not hurling the grey chair with him on it.

There was a bird, singing. Mountain. Wind. Slash of sunlight through the tossing leaves of ancestral trees.

I saw my neighbor in her lime-on-fire gagra choli scorching the street in my direction. Vivid with silence, purposeful as a blade. When she passed by and flicked her eyes at me, the air between us rippled. The wind was oceanic, but suddenly it disappeared, as if I’d rounded a corner into an epic quiet. It was clear to me then that it wasn’t only the husband’s shouting that my neighbor would not allow to diminish her. It was also her dislike of his shouting. I understood her silence as an audacious choice to create her own peace. I understood her silence as a victory. Her voice and wildness, intact in color.

That dusk, I sat under the laundry at the edge of the lane, facing the high peaks. The sunset a golden rip in the sky. My neighbor’s clean clothes fluttering soft. I let what was outside, in. Peace as my heartbeat’s throughline. Chosen. Resolute.

A week later it was my last morning before going home to New York. When the husband left for work, I went over with my brightest wool shawl—spring leaf green. The white dog escorted me, trotting, her teats swinging, the streak along her flank still there, hot pink.

I let what was outside, in. Peace as my heartbeat’s throughline.

My neighbor was pounding dried corn. I asked her if she would like the shawl, saying it would be warm in winter; she evaluated the texture then draped it around her neck, dipping her head in acknowledgment. She went back to pounding—the semi-circle of deep yellow corn fanning around her—as I wished her health and happiness and thanked her for teaching me. I remember she looked at me with an amused kindness reserved for children or naughty housecats.

2.

There was a time in my thirties when I lived in a New York City hospital. I was not a patient but a caregiver for my husband who had acute leukemia. I slept next to his hospital bed on a camping cot I’d brought from home. I covered it with a set of hospital sheets, hospital blankets, one rare hospital pillow—all white. The walls of our many rooms over the years were a murky beige, as if color had been bleached out, along with, maybe, MRSA. C-diff.

In this hospital, down the center of each room, was a grey curtain dividing us from a roommate, and at the center of our side of the curtain was a wheeled plastic table with a faux wood-grain top that raised and lowered over my husband’s bed. The tabletop was crowded with things routinely supplied upon admission: a small blue and white box filled with credit card sized tissues that shredded when wet. A red satin eye shade stamped with the name of the hospital. A plastic bucket, plastic pitcher, and plastic kidney-shaped vomit basin that was useful as a pen holder (no one has ever vomited that little)—all the same shade of pale pink: a monopoly, purchased in bulk, easy to wipe.

Once, I removed everything hospital-issued from our tabletop, dumped it in a bag and shoved the bag under my cot. I left out our books, bandanas, radio, pens, water bottles so there was nothing that wasn’t ours visible. While I was helping my husband in the bathroom a few hours later, every hospital-issued item reappeared on the table, replaced with automatic, well-meaning, assassin swiftness.

During the first year of my husband’s illness, we lived in the hospital for stays of ten days to five weeks. We didn’t often get the window side of a room. In darkness, we marked time by medications, bags of blood, shift change. On slow, IV-tethered walks, we squinted in shafts of sunlight as if constantly exiting a movie theatre.

Mornings, I greeted the nurse’s aides with eagerness, asking about the weather, their breakfast and commutes. Knowing there had been delays on the 6, or the C had gone express made me feel like I was still a New Yorker. When an aide wore candy cane or tulip earrings, it helped me remember to say Merry Christmas or Happy Spring. I treasured the individualities of scrubs: teddy bears, rainbows, polka dots. And pins on scrubs: Pride flags, koalas, F#*K CANCER.

Conversations with staff went deep: a sister’s cheating boyfriend; a cat lost in the Haitian earthquake; voter turnout in Kerala. We all had a fondness for each other, a recognition of community in a hard place. Every day, I changed my husband’s sheets and towels, cleared his and his roommates’ meal trays, and scrubbed their bathroom, burning off some anxiety while easing the staff’s work. The nurse’s aides were tender with me and laughed big at my husband. Even when he was too ill to speak, he would hear them coming and ready the three parts of his body they required, timing his show to their entrance: right arm out from under the sheet for blood pressure; left index finger held aloft for pulse ox; mouth comedically open for thermometer.

The nurse’s aides were tender with me and laughed big at my husband.

Towards the end of our first year living mostly in the hospital, a churning of discontent infected the floor—a palpable current as we walked past the nurse’s station or quiet chats between aides. Then one day all the aides came to work wearing the same color scrubs: bright blue. All the nurses wore forest green. No one had any jewelry or pins.

I asked an aide what was going on. She said the hospital was conducting a trial week of scrubs color-coded by job—no accessories allowed. A uniform mandate. When I asked why she shook her head, pursed her lips. I said, “What about the doctors and PAs and pharmacologists?” “Nah,” she answered. “They can wear what they want.” We raised our eyebrows at each other. Some bureaucratic decision made by someone who had never actually worked or lived or suffered in a hospital, who didn’t understand what very ill people care about: who listens, who smiles, who gets the arterial blood gas needle in on the first try.

The rest of the week was bleak. Blue scrubs, green scrubs, no sparkly pins or funky earrings. An uneasy peace the day things returned to how they had been. Then, postings around the hospital: a permanent change of uniform would be implemented in one month’s time. Mandatory color-coded scrubs for nurses and nurse’s aides. No jewelry, no pins. An injunction. A squashing of identity. I remember, after a long stay inside, seeing the notices on our way out of the hospital, and feeling angry and glad to be leaving.

And then we were admitted again. For one of my husband’s neutropenic fevers, the fever of a person with leukemia whose white count has been purposefully decimated in hopes of a cure. It was the week the uniform mandate went into effect, though I had forgotten.

The first few days, not everyone complied. Some nurses wore their own scrubs. Some aides wore jewelry. Small revolts, soon quashed. One day, I saw nurses with pins attached to their ID lanyards. I complimented one and she shrugged, “Not on the scrubs so we think it’s okay.” The next time we saw each other her lanyard was bare. That dissent blocked, too.

More days passed. All aides in blue; all nurses in green, and a grim tightness in the staff.

My husband had been mainly sleeping and delirious that week, sweating through sheets and chucks, lost in his body full of broad-spectrum antibiotics, anti-virals, anti-fungals, chemo, Tylenol–and lacking in blood, plasma, platelets. A washcloth over his eyes that I ran under cold water every five minutes; the heat of his body dried it out so fast. I had been awake for days. On the seventh day, despair set in and I began to believe my husband would die of the fever. I felt heavy, buzzy, vigilant. It was close to midnight when our assigned nurse’s aide said she had to leave unexpectedly; someone from another floor would fill in for her.

I slept an hour or so and upon waking saw the new aide standing by my husband’s bed. Her back was to me but I heard her say, “I’m going to check your vitals now.” A Caribbean lilt, Guyanese or Trini. No comedy from my husband in his fevered state. He lay still. Parched and dazed. With gentleness, the aide fetched his arm and finger, placed the thermometer in his mouth. When she finished, she turned, and, stepping into the glow of the monitors, asked me if I needed anything.

I stared, not responding.

Her hair was dyed bright blue. To match her unimpeachably bright blue, rule-abiding scrubs. No jewelry or pins. Her eyebrows and sneakers—dyed the same bright blue. Nails, lips, eyeshadow: bright blue. Against her deep brown skin, in colored contacts, her eyes shone. Bright blue.

I sat up and laughed. She had taken that mandate and complied so hard she came out the other side into freedom. When she laughed back, one of her front teeth was revealed. Bright blue. A sticker shaped to the contours of her tooth. Shiny. Iridescent as trout. Glinting in her smile. I laughed so hard then I dipped into that place where laughter and tears overlap. I laughed and cried and the aide did the same, as if she had been waiting for someone to fully appreciate her protest, her style. Her genius. We clutched each other’s hands, cackling like old friends with a thousand private jokes.

I never saw her again. I think about her all the time.

3.

Still life, in memory: a grapefruit on a shelf of our fridge at West 16^th Street.

I had always craved art. Realistic, figurative art. Sculptures, landscapes, portraits.

Honey-yellow with an undertone of pink, darkest in the dimpling. The mighty grapefruit’s enzymes interact with medications; I had bought that one to celebrate the end of my husband’s three-year course of heavy chemo. For two weeks, the grapefruit sat on the shelf. The day it needed to be eaten to stay delicious, my husband’s leukemia relapsed.

I remember the weight of it in my hand before releasing it into the compost; after weeks in the hospital, we returned home, the grapefruit once more verboten. I was thirty-nine. We had just been advised, again, that life—this life, our life—was too perilous for reproduction. I canceled my fertility appointments, took an open-ended leave of absence from work, borrowed money, and prepared to move us to Houston for a bone marrow transplant.

In Houston, we lived in the hospital for thirty days, then an apartment with shuttle service to the cancer center where we spent eight hours a day, six days a week for 150 days. My ability to cry had shriveled, disappeared. I was so efficient, present, and functional that I was given discounts at the hospital cafeteria, mistaken for permanent staff.

Once a week, I took a small break. I changed from sweats to bright colored dresses, dangly earrings. My cousin who lives in Houston picked me up and took me to a museum. I had always craved art. Realistic, figurative art. Sculptures, landscapes, portraits. Museum plaques meaty with information.

In Houston, my tastes shifted. I craved abstract art—color, shape, texture. Looking at it, I felt, for the first time, that you bring the whole of yourself to a painting as much as the painting brings itself to you. I stopped reading plaques. Standing in front of abstract art, I felt my feelings push against my skin. I witnessed the paintings. Was witnessed back.

Every Friday, my cousin and I visited a different museum for two hours. We started with the Rothko Chapel. Fourteen wall-sized paintings in various shades of black tinted greyish purple—in concert with the grackles flirting outside. A comforting space: coffin-dark; womb-cushioned. We pilgrimaged to two sets of James Turrell windows: light spilling past the melted edges of rectangles. Holy, sepulcher sky. We visited the Cy Twombly Gallery most often. That bone-whiteness. That clarity. Ferocious graphite scribbles. Fecund greens. The one painting like a wound, the pulpy red and purple: my chest throbbed in response. And my favorite: Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor: 1994. The year my husband and I got together, when I was nineteen and he was twenty-two. The painting spans a gallery wall: 52 feet long, 13 feet high. Large-scale color explosions on a glowing white expanse. Back and forth in front of it, I walked, my steps intentional, devotional. Dedicated to me. Not matched to my husband’s in empathy or constraint. A gift to my body. The colors, distinct, even as they blended in hurricane swirls. Atom bomb clouds. Giant sneezes. I meditated on them, squinted at the scribbled words, memorizing imperfectly. At the east end: How to gaze beyond the bitter duration. At the west: Us the most fleeting, once for each thing, and we too, just once and never again.

One Friday, my cousin wasn’t able to join me. I decided to keep my appointment.

First, I did things to keep my husband alive. I ran magnesium through his IV, flushed and

Heparanized his port-lines, showered him, sterile-cleaned his wounds, applied steroid and Aquaphor to the entirety of his skin to soothe the GVHD. I sterilized dishes, sheets, towels, blankets, and fed my husband—a two-hour process of steely coaxing on my part and pained recalcitrance on his. We worked on a puzzle, read letters from friends and family. We walked to the parking garage and back: one hallway and two small stairs. An hour of tiny steps. I held him as he wept, settled him for a nap, then drove to the Menil.

It was empty. The New Yorker in me marveled, rejoiced. Then rankled ten minutes later when two other women entered the space, one of them speaking nonstop.

Domineering, theatrical. Blonde, blue-eyed with a bright pink sunburn across her cheeks and nose. Her companion was small-boned, androgynously dressed in grey, and moved with caution, her black hair cut close to her scalp. She walked in step with the white woman, not saying anything. I was trying to get lost in a Janet Sobel, a tangle and splatter of lavender-red-brown. Behind me, the blonde woman described a different piece in minute, specific detail, loud, as if her opinion on the art was worth more than anyone else’s. As if the Asian woman was not standing next to her, looking at the same thing. I sighed and as I walked closer to the women, the blonde still monologuing, I heard the Asian woman ask, “What’s at the top left corner?” Which confused me. She seemed to be already gazing at the top, left corner. I looked into her face. It was rapt with reverence and gratitude. She was listening deeply. She was blind.

For the next hour, I stayed behind them at a non-intrusive distance but close enough to hear the guided viewing. Paintings translated, paintings as narratives, paintings in words. When the blonde woman said, “The next one is a landscape,” or “This one’s a portrait,” the blind woman responded, “No, thank you. Just the abstract.”

We were kin.

I stayed behind them at a non-intrusive distance but close enough to hear the guided viewing.

I tailed them to a 3-D sculpture on canvas, a piece I had moved past earlier without interest. So much color but the blonde woman hardly mentioned it. She said “black,” “blue,” “yellow” the way I say “and” “the” “to.” She described intricate angles and curves in conversation. What juxtaposed and overlapped, crossed and paralleled. She used directional terms: “90 degrees southeast,” and, “on a longitudinal plane.” She didn’t describe the piece’s emotion or mood; she took those tones into her voice. Part actor, part historian, part scientist. About a section of crossed wooden slabs, she said there was a “brittle squishiness” as if the wood might feel like a dry sponge. Hearing her, I felt I had touched the painting.

They came to the Janet Sobel I had been trying to fall into. Mostly color to my eyes. The blonde woman described splatter shapes and brushstroke widths, giving precise measurements in centimeters. Instead of “red,” she said: “like biting into tomatoes.” Instead of green: “lying face-down in grass after rain.” Color as somatic simile. A kind of poetic, hardware store syntax. She said that Janet Sobel had been a New York housewife who started painting as a grandmother—self-taught. She pioneered the drip-spatter-technique that Jackson Pollock adopted and became famous for while Janet was forgotten, uncredited. Music had inspired her to paint.

The blind woman stood unmoving in front of the piece. Her face lit with attention and tenderness. I realized I had tears on my cheeks. The blind woman said, “I used to feel insulted in museums. Hurt. A public space that didn’t include me.”

The women hugged, merged with the painting.

As they wandered into the next room, I sat down on a bench and saw myself sitting there, an abstraction. Framed by bone and flesh. Letting what was outside, in. I wondered how the blonde woman might describe me. Metaphors, measurements? Shoelace squiggles. Limes on fire. East, west slashes. Blue as a metal railing in winter, thirty degrees off a five-centimeter gap shaped like a trampled daisy.

Sitting there. Alive, complicated, beautiful.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Upflow” by Diego Gerard Morrison

Posted on May 28, 2026May 28, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Upflow by Diego Gerard Morrison, which will be published on October 27, 2026 by Split/Lip Press. You can pre-order your copy here.

Mexico City’s water system is the costliest and most absurd on the planet. A series of dams in neighboring states hydro-elevate water past drought-stricken communities before water arrives, polluted and chemically treated, into the drained lakebed that used to be Tenochtitlan, heart of the Aztec Empire, and what is now the overgrown and arid metropolis of Mexico City. From there the water is used before black, residual wastewater finally filters back to the countryside to grow food for the city.

In Diego Gerard Morrison’s darkly funny, picaresque, and hydro-ethnological stories, Upflow follows the path of water in and out of Mexico City. Scarcity, pollution, corruption and even amplified earthquakes rise through the ghostly lakebed of Mexico City’s past to manifest in the present. Through surrealist and historical romps spanning the Spanish conquest, the subsequent desiccation of the lake, as well as modern stories warning of the near future, Upflow’s prescient fictions embody the fluid nature of water and how it often eludes those who need it most.

Here’s the cover, designed by David Wojciechowski:

Diego Gerard Morrison: Upflow is a collection of hydro-ethnological stories that maps the trajectory of water from its source and into the city, a calculated narrative that became a personal story for me as an author as well. Raised in one of the rural communities that houses a dam that feeds the city with water, and then moving to Mexico City, a metropolitan area that houses over 24 million people, I witnessed the chaos that the water supply system creates—including magnified earthquakes as collateral damage—and felt embodied and mirrored in the paradox. Throughout the daily beholding of a parched, thirsty landscape that only contains water which it can’t use, the cover of Upflow provides the ideal sensory experience of the communities that see the water bypass them on the way to the city—thirsty land that yearns for a green that can only arrive with water that is visible but far from grasp, that doesn’t belong to those who live in its midst.

When we talk about water in and around Mexico City, the first idea that comes to mind is scarcity and misuse, but perhaps also the imagined and utopian possibility of abundance as yearning, especially in a location that used to be a basin and a lake system that historically housed water. When it came to developing a cover for Upflow and its complexities, I was thinking about how a flat, bidimensional image could capture this odd dichotomy on paper, how its dry surface could also project the longing for wetness and its myriad manifestations. Split/Lip designer David Wojciechowski subtly, and seemingly telepathically, laid down these conflicting ideas even with the first drafts of his cover design. The shade of anemic green as background provided a subliminal potential for fertility, but at the same time felt reined in, a hue that still portrayed insufficiency, the perennial lack of the vital liquid, the inconvenient feeling of it’s never enough. In addition to color, David underlined the concept of scarcity by adding a texture to the image that mimics the furrows and cracks of soil in times of drought, figures that might be taken as rivers run dry, projecting the vanished water of some past. As a final layer, which anchors the aforementioned ideas, David added the shape of the country of Mexico as a single drop of water, which seems to pop from the page, tilting the visual odds in the favor of scarcity, which runs as the meandering thread throughout the collection. The magic of David’s cover lies in the nuanced and minimalist combination of promise, struggle, the feeling of being forever on the brink of hydric abundance and what it means for those living amidst this zeitgeist.

David Wojciechowski: Diego’s book is all about water (past, present, and future) as it relates to Mexico City, and, while I like the idea of avoiding the obvious, I felt that water needed to be on his cover. I explored a lot of possibilities from photographs to aquifer maps to abstractions. The trick was making sure the connection between water and Mexico was clear. The cover clicked when I stumbled upon the work of 3D modeler Hammad Khan. He had created these 3D maps of countries in different materials, so I approached him about making one of Mexico. What struck me about the finished map was, isolated by itself, it looked so small. The isolation and the lack of rippling on the water made it look like a drop of water in the shape of a country instead of, say, an ocean in the shape of a country. It really helped capture the scarcity aspect that Diego’s book explores. From there, it was a matter of making sure the text maintained that sense of minimalism and scale.

Angel, Those Wings Look Ridiculous on You

Posted on May 27, 2026May 20, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

Heaven Being All Ice Now, Sing Me, Sister, Your Little Song of Fire

I.
The green bùbá of my country felt
silly in that spectral white of heaven. But it was
all Border Control would allow—the cloth
on my neck, futile against a fury
of snow that did not fall
like water off a duck’s back, but stuck
instead like leeches to my wine-
dark skin and sank
their hundred fangs of ice. I could not
speak of the inherent racism that followed
from earth, the obsidian jealousy.
On earth, birds-of-paradise have
long blue tails. What a shame
to have missed such brilliant foreshadowing.
The music of heaven is the blues.
No one here will hold
my frostbitten hands; no one here will pull me
back into the warm blanket of human viscera
I, in earthspeak, call a body—
a life. Heaven is the largest polar
desert of the afterlife, though you may think,
first, of hell. In this pleistocene epoch,
Prometheus, having burned in 27,760 degrees
of god's lightning bolt looks at humans
with no fucks or fennel fronds to give.
The light in the ice is the eye
of Abu Fanus. The mouth that opens
is of the black van of damnation named Maria.
Handcuffed, I am walking towards it.
Take a last look, sister—though this, I don't
say out loud because the big boss forbids,
above all, the evidence of the eye in his land.

II.
Pardon me, sir, but those wings
look ridiculous on you. This, I say
to the smallest angel, knowing he lacked
that righteous anger of god. Light
is what angels are made of,
but he's a white man in heaven, clad
in Armageddon's gear, so what else
to call him but that. An angel—
built too small, dodo-flightless,
he beats me down because he must. Duty-
bound, pathetic as one hand
of a glove—the blind obedience
as five fingers work their way
up its ass—he beats me down
with hands that have never felt god.
And this is where I tell him
of the kinder god that came before,
the greater lord who took the mud
that made us in his hands and reached
for no napkin after. Yes, I was born
in the old heaven—a tropical garden
west of the Nile. It was beautiful
before the bombs. No, there were no
angels in my history of joy. I earned
the destiny that led me here;
struck its stubborn cast-iron till it bent.
No, my dark skin does not mean I escaped
from hell. Or yes, yes it does.
But ask the big boss who made hell hell?

The first nature poem where white is good/night bad—but fear not, there are no ghosts in this one

The little bear jumps up and down; stands
on two hind legs; puffs itself big
and cuddly like a pink smoke
bomb; like a cute human baby saying
with all two feet of body, look,
I’m a big boy, raaahh! What a scene.
In the mirror of instinct, it must
look so scary and tough—intimidating
the small man that stood a few feet away
with his camera black as a gun. Imagine,
in the land of bears, a ramshackle
house of honey and bees, a mother
holding a lesson of survival in her mouth
like herbs—neem leaves, lemongrass—
chewed frantically to cud and waiting
to be spat into the mouth of her young—
those tiny vanities (forgive me),
evolutionary totems of our childhood
and then youth. Imagine then,
the same lesson we teach of bears
and survival, that odd lesson of
colors: If black, fight back. If brown,
lay down. If white, good night (you’re
already dead). The little bear makes
its home midair, running furiously
between the ground and sky.
And so, the hand that holds the flash
is black. And so, camera might
as well be clarinet and this
is nature’s jazz. Because, look again,
the bear is dancing; dancing
as it takes its first human steps,
and mama bear is watching;
watching from the trees, proud.

10 Books About African Americans Reclaiming the South

Posted on May 27, 2026May 21, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Between 1910 to 1970, millions of African Americans left the South in search of greater opportunities for freedom, rights, and economic mobility. Due to sheer scale, this human movement became known as the Great Migration. Richard Wright, one of the twentieth century’s seminal writers, was among those millions and described the experience in his 1945 memoir, Black Boy: “I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.” Over 50 years post-Great Migration, many of its core questions remain resonant for Black people: Where can we build a better future? Where can we gain a sense of security and belonging? Where are there well-paying jobs and economic opportunities? Where can we live a bit more free?

Given this long history of Black people leaving the South, it’s striking that moving to the South catalyzed my creative work. Run It Back, my debut poetry collection, loosely follows my journey as a middle-class Black “transplant” moving from the Midwest to the South and then back home again. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, I moved from Illinois to Louisiana to help open up a youth writing center in the 7th Ward of New Orleans. Two generations removed from the Great Migration, I was eager to be in a majority-black city where I could gain propinquity to Southern culture and traditions that I imagined were lost or diluted with each generation before me anchoring in the North. This is an impulse felt by many—according to census data, Black populations in the Northeast and Midwest have seen a steady decline since the 1990s, while the percentage of Black people living in the South has steadily increased during that same period. De-industrialization and the false promise of Northern city centers have co-produced a new trend—the Great Reverse Migration.

The two years I spent in the South were both harrowing and mobilizing. I experienced how Black Southern culture has shaped so much of the vibrancy of this nation, but I also witnessed how many of the conversations sparking division across the nation are proximate to the people of New Orleans—disaster capitalism, climate crisis, mass incarceration, immigration and labor rights, the takedown of confederate monuments, and larger racial inequities all float on the surface of this Black, Southern city. To see the touristic flattening of its rich culture and history was to witness a version of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in real-time. Being in the South taught me that freedom is a practice that can become a place, but cannot be a place without the praxis. The books below guided my thinking around place-based liberation, the hopes we put into geography, and the complexities of reclaiming an ever-changing place in search of freedom.

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series compiles Lawrence’s iconic 60-panel series documenting the Great Migration alongside the paintings’ original captions, which reflect months of primary research conducted at the 135th Street Library. The captions give depth and complexity to the reasons for the Great Migration: labor shortages in the North, increasing racial violence in the South, and climate and crop devastation that made sharecropping fruitless. Arrival in the North also meant new forms of discrimination and the loss of a Southern way of life—a life rooted in soil and earth shifted toward industry. The book ends with a suite of ekphrastic poems written by acclaimed poets ranging from Rita Dove to Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. This contemporary chorus brings Lawrence’s panels to the present day, weaving in personal histories, meditations that illuminate the intimacies of this mass movement, and the implications of what was lost and which direction are we heading in now.

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

During the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans moved to Harlem, making the 3-square-mile neighborhood the largest concentration of Black people in the world, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In Harlem is Nowhere, Rhodes-Pitts, a native Texan, moves to Harlem in search of what was once known as the capital of Black America and a quasi-mecca and safe-haven for Black liberation, creative expression, and freedom rights. As culture-altering gentrification seeps into the neighborhood, Rhodes-Pitts documents Harlem at a threshold moment in history. With a mix of reporting, historical documentation, and personal narrative, Rhodes-Pitts asks: How did Harlem become a dreamscape in the minds of many? What happens when a place can no longer live up to the promise of what it once symbolized? How do we inhabit and move through communities that are not our own? And how do we both preserve the Black cities that hold our histories while also moving forward into the future?

Negroland by Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson expands the memoir genre by blending a historical documentation of the rise of the Black elite in America with her own personal narrative of growing up in Chicago’s Black upper class. Jefferson coins the term “Negroland” to help describe the pre-civil rights wealthy enclave she was born into and raised within. By her definition, “Negroland” is a particular demographic of upper socio-economic Black people who are hyper-concerned with perceptions and ascension. Jefferson explores Black respectability, exclusivity, and the false promise of both—using personal narrative to describe the psychological challenges of forming a sense of self and community while entrenched in Negroland. This is a must-read to better understand how distancing—geographically from the South and categorically via class—served as a type of escape but not quite a freedom.

Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

These poems tell the story of Hurricane Katrina in minute-by-minute detail through a myriad of voices, including the storm itself. Smith looks at the wake of the storm, the lack of relief or repair, and bears witness to the racial and class violence of that historical moment. It’s important to remember that Smith isn’t a native daughter writing about her home, but a poet who took up the work of documenting this particular place in this particular moment in history with grave responsibility. Should a poet write solely from their own experiences or bear witness to the world? Smith’s book wrestles with these ethical questions about place, geography, and ownership. Blood Dazzler is a lesson to emerging writers that writing the record requires immense specificity and care. In doing so, Smith honors geography and then transcends it—revealing the intimacy of community and catastrophe in a new light.

I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark

Tiana Clark’s debut served as a North Star during the writing of Run It Back. I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood probes contemporary Nashville for historical echoes of racial violence, giving gravitas to twenty-first century racial traumas and touristic voyeurism rooted in the surface-level consumption of Black culture. Here we see Tennessee landscapes superimposed atop one another across time in order to confront exactly what it means to navigate race, class, sexuality, and girlhood in the present.

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

In South to America, Imani Perry strengthens the ties between American history and Southern history in a travelogue-style book partly inspired by Albert Murray’s 1971 travel narrative South to a Very Old Place. Perry, originally from Alabama, journeys across the South to document its complex culture, history, and landscapes. From Appalachia to New Orleans, Perry is our guide, documenting race and place through in-depth research, on-the-ground interactions, and personal narrative. The South becomes the central character, and Perry unveils its contours—the beauties and struggles that reveal how far we’ve come and how far we have to go as a nation.

The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by Charles M. Blow

In 2020, Charles M. Blow faced a reckoning. In the wake of George Floyd, Blow felt called toward urgent radical action instead of the ongoing incremental movement toward freedom rights.. Blow moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta and wrote The Devil You Know, a manifesto encouraging Black people to move back down South as a pathway toward reclamation and equity. Inspired by the 1970s liberal call-to-action take over of Vermont, which led hundreds of thousands of liberals from New York and Massachusetts to move and flip the political status of an entire state, Blow suggests a mirror movement in which hundreds of thousands of Black people move to Southern states to flip the political majority. Similar to Lawrence’s contextualizing captions, Blow’s bold proposition posited political consolidation as yet another reason to fuel the Reverse Great Migration.

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Broom’s debut memoir, The Yellow House, recounts the post-Katrina transformation of New Orleans East through the material history of her titular family house. On and off again, Broom returns to, journeys away, against, from, and towards the mythology of her city, her family, and the South. When Hurricane Katrina displaces Broom’s family—going from 24 family members in New Orleans to two brothers in all of Louisiana—her family’s house receives a letter from the city government announcing its demolition. Broom is forced to come to a new understanding of home beyond materiality. The Yellow House ends with the line “the story of our house was the only thing left.” In doing so, it becomes clear that the stories we hold and share can act as an embodiment and a transference of memory, of foundation, and shelter.

Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership by Brea Baker

Those with ties to the Great Migration know that the lore of the family farm is strong. Those who are lucky still have memories of summers down South or, even better, still have family living on those acres. In Rooted, Brea Baker documents her family’s history of land loss and ownership—sharing how her family farm has served as a safe harbor across multiple generations. In telling her family’s story, Baker reveals the larger history of land theft, including forced indigenous removal and rising barriers to successful Black land stewardship, which led to Black Americans losing about 90 percent of their farmland. Baker argues that reclaiming family property and returning to stewardship of land is one way Black people can heal the earth and racial wounds.

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a pioneer in the field of carceral geography—a term she helped coin—which explores how racial capitalism infuses itself into placemaking, resulting in landscapes and cityscapes that confine. Abolition Geography is a compilation of Gilmore’s essays, written over the span of 30 years, documenting her abolitionist ideologies. This book is a masterclass, weaving post-reconstruction ideas with contemporary lessons on the limits of decarceration, ultimately presenting a vision of abolition that is synonymous with freedom-making and placemaking. Gilmore wants us all to reflect on our role not just inhabiting place, but building place. She argues that it’s our daily actions in place that move us all towards freedom.

Your Next Read, Based on Your Favorite ’00s Indie Songs

Posted on May 26, 2026May 26, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Researching my debut novel, The Maidenheads, which is set in the DC music scene from the late 1990s until 2012, sent me down some curious rabbit holes. I toured backstage at venues in DC, read all I could about the DC punk scene of the 1980s and 1990s, and listened to so much music from the years when my book takes place. The ’00s were a period when guitar-heavy bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes existed alongside more electronic, Brit Pop-inspired groups like Interpol and MGMT; what held it all together was that you could dance to it. The bands I created for my novel—the Maidenheads, a raw but promising art-punk duo, and Les Somnambules, a more introspective and polished indie-folk group—are less pop-inflected, but they have some of the same influences.

As I immersed myself in this period of music, I also read books that felt in conversation with my own, which tells the story of two queer musicians falling in and out of love, repeatedly, over the course of about a decade. Specifically, I read novels about queer heartache. I was hungry for books that showed queer characters making morally complex choices around romance and experiencing the painful consequences. Over time, my playlist and my reading list agglomerated in my head, becoming a mutant beast of ’00s indie rock and sad gay novels.

Below is the unholy result: eight queer heartache novel recommendations, based on your favorite ’00s indie anthem. The protagonists of these novels aren’t always sympathetic—which is part of the pleasure—but we are still drawn into their struggle, even when it’s clearly their own fault, and cheering for them to emerge whole, if perhaps chastened, on the other side. In truth, whatever your musical preferences, you should just read them all.

If your favorite song is “Last Nite” by The Strokes, read Nevada by Imogen Binnie

This song is so fundamentally heterosexual, but reduced to its core elements (girlfriends not understanding and walking out the door) it’s a story of bolting when a relationship gets overwhelming—relatable to all! Nevada, first published in 2013 by Topside Press and reissued in 2022 by FSG, tells the story of Maria, a woman fleeing her cis girlfriend and bookstore job in New York to road trip out West, where she foists her intimacy issues onto a Walmart employee she has determined is an egg-phase trans woman. A classic bolter road trip novel (Maria even steals her ex-girlfriend’s car) as well as a seminal novel of messy trans lives.

If your favorite song is “A Better Son/Daughter” by Rilo Kiley, read All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews

I love the manic earnestness of this song so much, as well as the implication that holding yourself together and caring for the people around you can be an act of epic heroism. All This Could be Different conveys some of that same energy. The protagonist, Sneha, has moved to Milwaukee for a corporate job immediately after graduation, right in the depths of the 2008 recession. Overwhelmed by the strictures of her sketchy boss and her immigrant parents, Sneha cordons herself off from vulnerability, allowing a new girlfriend to believe that her parents have died when in fact, they self-deported home to India. The novel is a beautifully told story of how the slow, tentative opening of connection—with a partner, with family, with a community—can change lives, change the world.

If your favorite song is “Fell In Love With a Girl” by The White Stripes, read Mrs. S by K Patrick

The narrator of this song is deeply in love in a way he knows is going nowhere good; the object of his affection has another partner and only seems interested in him as a source of novelty. So, too, does the unnamed narrator of Mrs. S find herself at the outset of this gorgeous, very sexy novel: working at a British girls’ school and helplessly in love with the headmaster’s wife, who may or may not be queer and is certainly married to a man. I’m fairly sure Jack White’s wasn’t intending to write about the mindfuckery of desiring girls who may be straight, but if any lyrics ever described the feeling better, I’ve not heard them.

If your favorite song is “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, read A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane

Maybe you are familiar with the internet lore of this song, according to which “Maps” stands for “My Angus, please stay”: Karen O wrote the song for her then boyfriend Angus Andrew, the lead singer of the band Liars, expressing despair over how conflicting touring schedules were tearing them apart. I didn’t have that information 20 years ago, though, and just experienced this song as a pure, cathartic rip of pain. Similarly, Mac Crane’s A Sharp Endless Need, while on one level an expertly crafted basketball novel, is also a book-length wail of dogged hurt, the most elemental queer adolescent version: “they don’t love you like I love you,” when “they” is undeserving teen boys and “you” is your soul mate/best friend/sexual awakening, who again, may or may not be queer herself.

If your favorite song is “Modern Girl” by Sleater-Kinney, read The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Tom Ripley, protagonist of this perfect novel, is the ultimate Modern Girl: happy, hungry, and angry all at once, fighting to construct a world that looks very much like “a sunny day” but in fact is a fabrication of his own dark desires. Both fueled by capitalism (his lust for the accoutrements of an elegant life) and doomed by it (because even with those accoutrements he’s still a working-class queer who will never, ever fit in, no matter how many people he murders), Ripley exemplifies the song’s lines about what money can and can’t buy, and the emptiness caused when we conflate the two.

If your favorite song is “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by The Darkness, read Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth.

Deduct points immediately for matching an Irish novel with a quintessentially English song, made famous by its inclusion in the quintessentially English film Bridget Jones’ Diary—apologies, Chloe! But hear me out: Sunburn is a paean to manic queer teen love, the kind of love that makes you sure you’ve met your soulmate when you’re in high school, the kind of love that makes you want to kiss someone every minute, every hour, and every day.

If your favorite song is “Boy From School” by Hot Chip, read Bellies, by Nicola Dinan

“Boy From School” is a classic peppy-sad song (maybe my favorite kind), and Bellies, Nicola Dinan’s debut novel, has some of that same poignant exuberance. It’s a very funny, very sad novel, the story of a couple who fall in love when they are, literally, boys from school, and then fall apart over years when one transitions. The no-fault defeat described in “Boy From School” echoes closely the ache of the central relationship in Bellies, in which both members of the couple are trying, but they just don’t belong.

If your favorite song is “Party Hard” by Andrew W.K., read Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran

Songs and novels about parties always feel sad to me. Why do we “party hard,” if not to pretend, briefly, that the world makes sense? Andrew W.K.’s most famous song is an almost mechanically enthusiastic tribute to good times, but we sense the insecurity and sorrow lurking underneath. So, too, in Andrew Holleran’s classic Gatsby-esque novel of Manhattan and Fire Island in the 1970s, do we experience the tragic emptiness beneath the glitter. There are dated aspects to this novel, but its campy mournfulness feels eternal.

The Girl We Locked in the Trunk Is Very High Maintenance

Posted on May 25, 2026May 21, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

“Driving Through Pennsylvania” by Mack Gelber

We’ve been driving through Pennsylvania for almost two months. People give us stunned looks when we tell them: “How long?” When they ask what brings us through, we tell them we’re traveling children’s entertainers, or we’re land surveyors scoping out sites for a new mall, or we’re searching for our troubled niece Paula, she’s been missing since December, have you seen her? Sometimes they offer to buy us vodka sodas, flagging down the kid slinging drinks at the Best Western Plus. Sometimes they silently mouth the word “wow.” Sometimes they actually say the word “wow,” and each time I’m struck by its fundamental vacancy, its desolation. There is no true wonder at the core of “wow.” The core of “wow” is an IV bag filled with lemon-lime Gatorade. The core of “wow” is a dog eating grass to make itself vomit.

“It says here 16th-century Scots first used ‘wow’ as an exclamation of delight or amazement,” Derf says when we’re back in the car, thumbing through search results. I can picture with near certainty the precise mental image he’s conjured up, visions of Scottish hordes cresting the highlands in their fur and flannel, “wow”-ing at each other dementedly. By now, I don’t need to look at his face to know what he’s thinking.

Although the sky is still dark, the world outside the car is bright with gas stations and loading docks and fast casual restaurants. Beyond them, the faint outlines of foothills—never mountains, always foothills, sanded off on top like the glaciers couldn’t be bothered to finish the job.

“We’re getting there,” Derf says after a moment, quietly, when I don’t respond.

But I know we aren’t. We’ll be driving through Pennsylvania tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. We’ll glide in our midsize sedan past the same hills, the same convenience stores. The same billboards, tucked into the far ends of sorghum fields, advertising Amish buffets and stump-grinding.

“We’re getting there,” he says again, not believing it either.

A little before lunchtime, we stop at a pull-off with a Walmart and a Panera Bread, and I get out to check on Trunk Girl. From afar, it looks like I’m digging around in the back of the vehicle, sorting through groceries or luggage. But really, I’m refilling her water, applying barrier cream to her pressure ulcers, manually repositioning the parts of her body that most closely resemble limbs. Today, Trunk Girl has a happy pinkish color about her, and when I rub in the lotion she relaxes further into her labrador-sized dog bed. “Hi, Trunk Girl,” I say. Trunk Girl never says anything.

Derf is already sitting when I go inside the Panera, bent into a goblin-like position over his Pick Two.

“This Panera Bread is a good Panera Bread,” he says. As he chews, the centipede-shaped scar beneath his earlobe wriggles. Derf’s name is really Fred, but he had it legally changed because he has a cousin in North Dakota who is also named Fred, except that Fred has curly red hair and sells Kias. Derf, on the other hand, has curly brown hair and steals Kias. Due to some clerical oversight on Derf/Fred’s part, the change was rendered effective only within Ohio state lines; at the federal level, he is still considered Fred.

“Her skin is getting dry back there,” I tell him. “Can we please buy some lotion that’s not from the dollar store?”

“Does she look uncomfortable?”

“Would you be uncomfortable?”

He ignores the bait and opens his turkey avocado melt, removes the turkey and the avocado, leaving only melt. I glance past his shoulder toward where the car is parked—it’s a hot day and I’ve left the trunk cracked open. A man walks by with no socks or shoes and a huge rolling suitcase, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll pick up new lotion,” Derf says. “We’re low on root beer anyway.”

When we’re done, I duck into the women’s room and fill my empty soda cup with foaming handwash. I dump tampons out of the dispenser and reach into the metal box in one of the stalls to dislodge the toilet paper. There’s a back exit just outside leading to a dumpster area, followed by a huge garden center. Big enough, maybe, to slip inside and vanish among the ornamental grasses.

But just as I’m about to rise, the toilet paper box closes around my hand like a trap in a “Saw” movie. I contort myself into a series of Twister poses to avoid being degloved. When I finally get the roll loose, a tiny envelope slips out and lands on the tile floor.

RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLE, the note inside reads.

There’s a pair of American Express gift cards, both marked $200 and bearing the words Happy Birthday! As always, the message has a palm tree emblem stamped in the corner, and I stare at it, the image growing hazy as my eyes glaze over. Then, with a sigh, I tear the paper into strips, put each piece in my mouth, and swallow them.

I stopped trusting geography a long time ago. Maybe I never trusted it. The world can trick you, can expand and contract at will, sprout mystery appendages or fence you in like the invisible wall at the edge of a video game world. When I was younger, I’d sit in my bedroom gripping an N64 controller and fling my 1992 Dodge Viper into the ocean, while one floor up my mother watched “Judge Mathis” and slowly went insane. I’d watch as the car careened across the bay, holding my breath in anticipation before it inexplicably burst into flames. Maybe, soon, the same thing will happen to us. Out of nowhere we’ll collide with the boundaries of the rendered world, collapsing the car and our earthly selves with the hollow thwank! of a cartoon cat getting smacked in the head with a frying pan.

“They didn’t have A&W, I had to get Mug,” Derf says when I pick him up in front of Walmart.

“You forgot the lotion?”

“Oh, son of a bitch.” He hoists the 12-pack onto the roof of the car, groaning like it represents the great burden of his life. “I’ll go back in and get it.”

“It’s fine,” I tell him. “Just get in.”

The first few weeks hadn’t been so terrible. Each morning I’d cue up the song “Mr. Maybe” by the 1960s vocal group Fillmore Dave and His Tru-Vettes, from an old CD I’d had as a kid. There was something hopeful in the thin jangle of Eisenhower-era guitars, as if we were charting some unexplored northern territory instead of the necrotic rest stops along I-80.

I once was Mr. Maybe

I once was Mr. Sad

Baby, one thing you know for sure

You’ve made me Mr. Glad

But there were only so many repetitions until those breezy open chords began to feel like stasis, not momentum. Only so many half-acknowledged disquisitions on why Kevin Costner never produced a sequel to “Dances With Wolves” until they were exasperating, not endearing. And there was so much Pennsylvania. Days of Pennsylvania. Weeks of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania silently unfolding itself, forming acres of new nerve and muscle and semi-rigid asphalt.

As we drive, there’s an occasional muffled thump-thump-pause, thump-thump-pause behind us—Trunk Girl communicating that her battery-operated portable fan needs new batteries. When we get to the next exit, we pull up to a tobacco store with a statue of a wooden Indian by the front door, and I walk to the back of the car.

“Everything okay, sweetie? Your fan need fixed?”

Trunk Girl doesn’t respond, just looks straight at me with her one watery blue eye. In it, I can see my own silhouette reflected back, bent into a funhouse shape. Pinched-in shoulders. A head like a swollen eggplant. The words repeat in my mind unbidden: Baby, one thing you know for sure.

One thing you know for sure.

You know.

And I hate that I do.

She was already in the car when we left Ohio. SILVER COROLLA, the text read when it came through, just before 5 AM. FRISCH’S BIG BOY. PENNSYLVANIA PLATES. Three sunny digital chirps from Derf’s phone, each bringing the edges of the room at the Duct Avenue Comfort Suites into sharper focus.

The car was waiting for us two parking lots over, the doors unlocked and a key fob with a metal palm tree charm tucked beneath the floor mat. A square of paper on the dash: KEEP HER ALIVE. EAT THE NOTES. WE ARE WATCHING.

“Definitely not a Lexus,” Derf said, and put it in reverse. “Lying fucks.”

He never told me who we were working for. Just that the connection had come from Geno P.—yes, he said, the Geno P. he used to owe a bunch of money—yes, the Geno P. who once kicked the shit out of him and poured gasoline all over his head, but like, that’s Macedonian humor for you, okay? Beyond that, he only offered a vague allusion to a pair of Polish gangsters called the Zjawiński brothers, who allegedly operated out of an abandoned glove factory in the Cleveland flats. Another time he told me there were bikers involved, which made even less sense. If we’ve been hired by bikers, I said, why are they willing to outsource anything involving long-haul transportation, especially when the cargo appears to be A) Illegal, B) Alive, C) Not thrilled about it?

I wondered what would happen when we got there—wherever “there” was. I pictured a generically distressed warehouse, a biker dude walking out with a duffel bag.

Instead of answering the question, Derf would just stare at me with a dyspeptic look, as if my skepticism about the opportunity—a Capital O Opportunity, he’d called it—was giving him heartburn. He’d stand there and scratch at the nape of his neck, waiting for me to press the case. I never did. And anyway, I had nowhere else to go.

It took me a few days to open the trunk. I’d heard the sounds as we were driving, of course—the taps, the thump-thump-pauses, and a wet, throaty noise that was almost like laughter. Usually Derf would ignore these sounds until we parked for the night, then he’d creep around to the back of the car with a bag of Pirate’s Booty, raise the hatch a couple of inches, and fling the bag inside, jerking his hand away like he was tossing a piece of trout into the crocodile habitat at the zoo.

At first, I’d ignored them too. The same way as a kid I’d ignored the room in the house where a pregnant opossum once chewed through the wall, returning night after night to scrabble and hiss in the dark. I’d hear it as I crept up to the attic to bring my mother saltine crackers and warmed-up cans of chicken and dumpling soup, and then again through the floorboards while I sat there to make sure she remembered to eat them. Eventually the opossum had babies, and I had to start sleeping in headphones so I wouldn’t hear their cries. I listened to my one CD, playing “Mr. Maybe” again and again until I couldn’t tell what was music and what was an opossum sound. After a few days I stopped hearing them at all; it was just Fillmore Dave and his golden sunshine voice.

Then, one morning, Derf was taking a shower at a Love’s Travel Stop when it happened again, louder than before—that half-exhale, half-whimpering laughter that wasn’t laughter. Opossum sounds, I thought—and in fact, they were distinctly opossum-like. Still, I turned off the radio and slipped through the door. I unlocked the trunk. I opened the trunk. I closed it. I opened it again.

I saw fingernails, but no fingers.

Kneecaps, but no knees.

A mouth, maybe.

I was frightened. I could tell she was too.

We wake up from a nap in front of the tobacco store, and beneath the wiper blades there’s a greeting card with a picture of an ice-skating cat and the words Meow-y Christmas! in big red letters. In the corner, the familiar palm tree stamp, rain-saturated and beginning to leach through the paper.

PROCEED ALONG THE ROUTE, the inside reads, and another clutch of Amex gift cards tumbles to the floor mat. Derf tears the message into strips but doesn’t swallow them. Instead, he balls them up and drops them out the window.

“I’m gonna go check on her,” I say, and open the door.

“Didn’t you just check? It’s been like 40 minutes.”

“I’m checking on her,” I say again. And I’m glad I do, because something is off with Trunk Girl. Her happy pinkish color has taken a pale cast. The parts that most closely resemble limbs are heavy and limp, like bags filled with pennies, but everywhere else her skin is bone taut. Her fingernails, I notice, have grown longer.

Something is off with Trunk Girl. Her happy pinkish color has taken a pale cast.

I ask her if she’s okay, reaching out. She’s warm to the touch. Trunk Girl doesn’t say anything.

“We have more Pirate’s Booty,” Derf calls out the window, not looking at me. His phone chimes with a text message, but as I’m walking back, he flips to a live video of a large, blindfolded man comparing brands of specialty barbecue sauce.

“Can you run in and see if they have Advil or something?”

He flicks his eyes toward the store, announced by its sign as FRANK’S SMOKS. A shirtless man in gym shorts comes out the door and rubs the wooden Indian’s neck in a sensual way, then flattens an empty can of Red Bull against its head. Derf glances back toward his phone, giving the barbecue sauce man a long look as he adjusts his bib. Then he sighs loudly and reaches for the door.

“It’s fine,” I tell him. My endless refrain. “I’ll do it. Leave the car running.”

The inside of Frank’s Smoks isn’t much more welcoming than the outside. There’s a single dark refrigerator filled with beer and energy drinks. A wall of tobacco and tobacco-adjacent products, CBD powders, kratom gummies. The floorboards have sunken in on one side, and when a nickel falls out of my pocket it rolls diagonally across the shop, past the fridge, and clinks against a back door where “Employees Only” has been etched into the glass in old west lettering.

“It’s unlocked,” says an elderly gentleman in a vest, perhaps Frank, who emerges from behind a rack of candy.

“What?” I hear myself reply. My voice sounds higher, more alarmed than I’d intended. It’s only then that I notice my hands are shaking and I’ve been staring at the rear exit.

“Sweetheart, listen,” Frank says, speaking softly. “There’s a path behind the shop. You follow it a half mile, you’ll hit 30A. There’s a police station. Or I can call someone for you. Here,” he says, reaching for the sign, “I’ll close up shop.”

“Are we near the end?” I ask, and this time Frank is the one who says “what?” He’s one of those old people with a face that’s both rugged and weirdly smooth, like it’s been sandblasted.

“Do you have Advil, Tylenol, something?”

He regards me for a moment, then flips the sign in the window back to “open.” “Right over here,” he says, and I follow him.

Here’s the thing about opossums: They’re committed, stubborn creatures. For months they scraped and slunk behind the closed door of the former sewing room, dozens of opossums proliferating through the space they’d adopted as their generational home. Occasionally I’d find my mother at night, nudging a shallow bowl of milk through the gap beneath the door. “Hungry babies need to eat,” she’d say in the strange, clotted voice she used the rare times she ventured out of her room. “Hungry babies get big and strong.” By then, she’d dropped almost 50 pounds, and her nightgown hung from her frame like a magenta parachute.

Gradually, the opossums migrated to the bathroom, then my bedroom, then took over the upper level entirely. When they expanded their territory downstairs, we moved into the unfinished basement, where we had an open-air bathroom configuration known as a Pittsburgh toilet. I came and left through the rusty cellar door, sleeping on a bag of fuel pellets, never entering the main part of the house. The house wasn’t our house anymore. The house was now—the words dissolved into view like a movie title—The House of the Opossums.

“That’s crazy,” Derf said when I told him about The House of the Opossums—he was still Fred then, before we started messing around, before he started stealing more than Kias. “Why didn’t you call an exterminator?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. Actually, the question had never occurred to me. An air of inevitability hung over the opossum situation, as grim and impenetrable as Midwest cloud cover.

“We did,” I lied, “They sealed the place off and did some kind of gas bomb thing, and all the opossums died.”

“Damn, that must have stank when you came back.”

“It wasn’t that bad. The team was very helpful and efficient.”

“You must’ve been pissed at your mom, though. For letting it get like that.”

“She did the best she could.”

Now, Derf is asleep in the passenger seat, his breath forming islands of condensation against the window. When he’s unconscious, it’s easy to see him again as Fred. His face has that slack, puppyish look, like he hasn’t quite grown into his own skin. Even the centipede-shaped scar has an innocent quality, like a playground injury instead of Geno P.’s Macedonian handiwork. Without thinking about it, I reach over and push his hair out of his face.

We pass a Hampton Inn by Hilton. We pass a Hilton Garden Inn. We pass a Hilton Extended Stay Homewood Suites. We pass a wastewater treatment plant. SHE DID THE BEST SHE COULD reads a billboard at the end of a sorghum field. LET BANKRUPTCY MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS HANDLE THE REST.

In moments like this, I don’t mind so much that we’ll be driving through Pennsylvania tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. As in The House of the Opossums, there’s a brittle comfort in knowing what the future holds. Tomorrow, there will be more opossums. Tomorrow, there will be more Pennsylvania. I will drink flat root beer. I will visualize Scottish hordes. My eyes will track the words written on the faces of mile markers as they glide into view, each stamped with the outline of a tiny palm tree:

KEEP

HER

ALIVE.

EAT

THE

NOTES.

ARE

WATCHING.

There’s this one song by Fillmore Dave and His Tru-Vettes where they sing about a guy named Bill, who drives a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. In the song, Bill has a girlfriend named Sally, who’s always hanging ’round the alley, which I took to mean the arrangement between Bill and Sally is not so much romantic as transactional in nature. Anyway, Coupe de Ville Bill takes Sally from the alley to a drive-in movie, and after that they go to some kind of soda fountain/diner/non-alcoholic teen hangout-type place, where Bill catches Sally—the song assumes his version of the events—quote, “making eyes” at another man. So while Sally is in the bathroom, Bill decides, in the heavily sanitized language of early “beat” music, to kidnap her (“take her”), non-specifically violate her (“shake her”), and dispose of her body in an old oil drum (“dispose of her body in an old oil drum”). The song ends with Sally walking back to their table at the soda fountain, innocent of what the coming hours hold.

By the way, the name of the song is “Fun Times USA.”

Years ago, listening in my room, I’d go cotton-mouthed with dread as the song progressed from verse to chorus. By the time it reached its bridge section, the anxiety had become almost too much to bear: “Get out of there, Sally,” I’d scream in my mind. “Sally, he does not have your best interests at heart.” And I’d hit the skip button in anticipation of the song’s ending, unable to suffer the terrible knowledge of Sally’s fate. (The next track was called “Cheeseburgers,” and it was just about cheeseburgers.)

Now, though, I wonder: What if Sally knew something bad was coming? What if she sensed, as she studied her reflection in a cloudy bathroom mirror, that the world had quietly coiled against her? What if, though—what if she just didn’t care?

“Do you want a scratcher?” Derf says as he wanders out of a liquor store, his hands full of lotto cards and airplane bottles of coconut rum. “I just got a butt-load of scratchers.”

I don’t, but I take one anyway, not asking what he’s doing with six sheets worth of Double Buck Blowouts when we haven’t had to spend our own money in weeks, then realizing I’ve just answered my own question.

“Oh shit,” Derf says, rubbing a coin over the scratcher. “I won five dollars.”

MAINTAIN AMBIENT TEMPERATURE 70–73 F, the text reads on the card’s underlayer, after the wax has been rubbed away. MINIMIZE INTAKE: TERT-BUTYLHYDROQUINONE, PROPYL GALLATE, ANTI-CAKING AGENTS.

The Advil helps for a day or two. I crush it up with the palm tree charm and sprinkle it into cups of strawberry Ensure. For a few hours Trunk Girl’s color returns to normal, and the cold film of perspiration on her skin evaporates. She sinks back into her dog bed, deflating further with each exhalation, until finally she falls asleep.

That night, though, she goes feverish again. I sit on the lip of the trunk outside a Kwik Check, holding the straw up to her maybe-mouth as the wind bites my ears. She draws on it ferociously, glomming the stuff down with abandon. Then I feel something close around my wrist, and when I look down, I nearly drop the drink: not just fingernails, but fingers, attached to a hand, attached to something like an arm. “The core of ‘wow,’” I think. Her grip tightens, then releases. Her one blue eye stays fixed on mine.

“I’m telling you, something’s off,” I say to Derf. It’s late now, and we’re winding our way through another sawed-off foothill, the guardrail on the left side of the road punched open where a vehicle must have crashed through it to the valley below. “To be honest, it’s kind of freaking me out.”

“I promise you, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Actually, I can,” he says, suddenly defensive. “Are you trying to piss me off? Because it’s working.”

He presses down on the accelerator. The engine groans, and the glove compartment’s bad latch rattles.

“Listen,” he says, a contrite note entering his voice. “I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just saying, I’ve got the situation under control. The situation is my bitch. Okay?”

I almost say: Enough of the bullshit. I almost say: I think you’re lost here too. But instead, I drop it, and we drive in silence the rest of the night, both staring directly ahead at the next dim stretch of road. It’s dark enough that the dashboard casts the ghosts of our reflections against the windshield, and I’m reminded once more of the invisible wall and the 1992 Dodge Viper. Maybe, it occurs to me now, there would be no great eruption upon impact. Maybe I’d hit the wall months ago without even realizing it—before Fred became Derf, before the gray, wordless morning I left my mother to herself in The House of the Opossums and boarded an eastbound bus. I’d fallen asleep with my head pressed against the window, the sound of some kid’s iPhone game invading my dreams. When I woke up, I was in Ohio.

“I have to take a piss,” Derf says eventually, and eases the car onto the berm.

Moths flit back and forth in the twin beams of the headlights. I watch as he struggles over the guardrail and unzips in front of a half-collapsed farmhouse. He’s left his phone in the cupholder, and when a text comes in—ping!—dozens of bats erupt from a hole in the roof. For a moment, against the thin light of the moon, it almost looks as if they spell out some kind of message. But they don’t. They’re just bats.

It wasn’t so much that I made the active decision to leave. By the time I finally walked away from The House of the Opossums, I was on emotional autopilot—sleep-deprived, subsisting on boxes of expired breakfast cereal, ears ringing at a high-pitched marsupial frequency. If the Pittsburgh toilet wasn’t enough to produce lifelong trauma, there was also the reality of my mother’s diminishment, her physical and cognitive decline having finally intersected on the line chart of total collapse.

By then, she was almost entirely dwarfed by her nightgown, which lay around her on the cement floor like a fried egg. She rarely spoke. When she did, it was in response to whatever was playing on the ancient CRT TV I’d dragged out of deep storage and set up on a card table. I’d wake in the middle of the night to find her face awash in the screen’s hospital glow, murmuring over the sound of a “Jeopardy!” rerun.

Then I walked out of the house in my pajama pants, crossed the street, and never went back.

“What is tarmac?” she said. There was a strange urgency in her voice, a vinegary rasp of accusation. It was only when my pupils adjusted that I realized she wasn’t looking at the TV, but past it, straight at me. “What is tarmac?” she said again.

Instead of going back to sleep, I got up and wrapped her sweater around her shoulders.

“I’m up $200,” she said, her expression softening.

I rubbed her back. Her spine felt like a string of pearls. Then I walked out of the house in my pajama pants, crossed the street, and never went back.

The background image on Derf’s phone is an enormous, pixelated photo of Kevin Costner’s head. He has two browser tabs open, a porn clip (“Apolitical White Girl Sucks for SBA Debt Relief”), and the same taste test livestream he’d been watching three days earlier. “Please,” says the guy with the bib, still blindfolded and wiping barbecue sauce from the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The text message reads ENJOYING THE SCENERY?, followed by a series of photos, taken at a distance: Derf at a gas pump, smoking a cigarette. Derf in a Taco Bell, squeezing hot sauce onto a chalupa. And then, a Derf-free shot of the hood of the car, with a lone matchbook balanced on top.

I scroll backwards, past a series of increasingly arcane directives (41.19683731741196, -75.93131217837407 MISTY), past the note about Frisch’s Big Boy and the silver Corolla, to the start of the conversation. CONFIRM: TWO (2) PACKAGES, it says at the beginning of the chain. There’s no response from Derf, just an appended thumbs-up icon in the corner.

Two.

I see the same desolate warehouse, with the biker and the duffel bag. Derf stepping out of the car, opening the trunk. I picture myself staring straight forward while, in the background, the wet, throaty sound that’s almost like laughter slides a step higher, into a pitch that’s more like a scream. And then—

I don’t tell Derf I’ve looked at his phone. But as the days pass, I begin to have more reservations that the situation is, in fact, his bitch. He disappears into restrooms for extended periods and returns in a sweat, nervously scratching the back of his head. He leaves the radio on scan mode without noticing, letting it climb repeatedly to the snowy heights of the FM band. When we wake up in a Holiday Inn Express with the TV on and the words WRAP HER IN BLANKETS flashing against a palm tree background, he becomes agitated and throws his sneaker at the screen. It bounces off the edge, leaving a brown tread mark, and tumbles beneath a curtain.

“Could you get that?” he says. His phone buzzes again. He turns it upside down on the bedstand, groaning.

“Get your own fucking shoe,” I tell him, and walk off to the bathroom. Behind the door I hear him whining: Why do I have to be so mean to him, can I please give him a break, please? Then he starts to cry.

There was a time when I could overlook these moments. I thought about how, after the Geno P. incident, Derf sat in a bathtub with his knees tucked against his stomach, holding a fistful of sodden medical gauze against his jaw. “You’re gonna stick me with that thing,” he’d said, smiling, then grimacing as I held a lighter beneath the needle.

“It hurts to smile,” he’d said.

“Well, lucky for you,” I’d replied, “You won’t be smiling long.”

Now, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, I kind of wish I’d stuck him after all. I hear him moving around outside the door, groaning and grunting. I turn the water on, and after a minute, I don’t hear him anymore. The lights buzz. The room fills with steam. I don’t hear anything at all.

After a few hours we leave the hotel room, take the stairwell down to the parking lot, and unlock the car. As we approach, I’m overcome by a sweet, chemical smell that burns my nostrils, and I rush to open the trunk.

Overnight, the not-limbs have resolved into actual ones: two arms and two legs, each terminating in a fully formed hand or foot. A flat purple scab has appeared a few inches from Trunk Girl’s eye, sealing over what had previously been a fold of skin. The sound of her breathing is no longer pinched, opossum-like. It sounds like mine.

Quickly, the sweat-soaked dog bed is discarded and replaced with a vinyl inflatable pool float shaped like a pineapple. In the afternoon I take the pineapple out of the trunk and hose it down at a truck stop, where a jellied buildup sloughs away and gathers in clumps around the floor drain.

Across the street there’s a squat, windowless medical building next to a Honey Baked Ham. I consider pulling into the pavement-patched cul-de-sac by the drop-off area, popping the trunk. “We’re gonna get you some help, okay?” I’d tell her. “I’ll be right back.”

Instead, we keep going—through service depots and toll roads and drive-thru windows. Through small towns. Through gridlocked traffic where, when we reach the choke point, there’s a nude man with a pillowcase over his head wandering blindly between lanes, holding his hands out in front of him.

“This is yours,” Derf says as he drives, handing me a greeting card with a picture of a winking cartoon gopher and the words Gopher it! in sparkle-foil letters. When I open it, a piece of paper falls into my lap. It’s blank, no note.

I stare at it for a long time.

“Are you going to eat it?” he says, and I sense him trying not to look at me.

“What happens if I don’t?”

“Well,” he says, putting on a dopey action hero affect. His Costner voice. “I’ll have to kill you.”

I think of the texts on his phone, and it occurs to me I’ve never seen what happens when Derf is cornered. I notice now how firmly he’s gripping the steering wheel, how tightly he’s clenching his jaw. I fold the paper twice and put it in my mouth.

The night before we left for Pennsylvania, in the vinyl-planked darkness of the Duct Avenue Comfort Suites, there was a moment—not even a moment, a matter of seconds—where I fluttered awake—not even awake, briefly, liminally alert—and realized Derf wasn’t asleep anymore. He was sitting in the overstuffed floral-print chair where, hours earlier, we’d thrown our two duffle bags in a pile. He was fully dressed even though it was the middle of the night, and he was looking at me the same hard way my mother had looked at me in the basement of The House of the Opossums. But unlike my mother’s, his gaze didn’t soften when he saw I was awake. “Go back to sleep,” he’d said instead, and after a few seconds I did. When I woke up again, he’d slung the duffle bags over his shoulders, and I remembered it was time to go.

It’s beginning to get dark when I notice we’re no longer on the highway. To our right, there’s some kind of vacant industrial site. RESIDENTIAL INFILL NOTICE: MISTY OAKS SUBDIVISION, a sign reads, zip-tied to a chain-link fence. A PALM TREE COMMUNITY.

Derf nudges us past the sign and around a pile of rebar, pulling onto a dirt track surrounded by the frames of unfinished one- and two-story homes. With a chill, I think once more of the imagined warehouse.

“Hey,” I say, and it’s then that I realize Derf looks edgier than I’ve ever seen him before. He’s drumming the fingers of one hand against the side of his seat, digging his nails into the soft part of the steering wheel with the other. When he turns his head toward me, I can’t tell if he’s about to throw up, or start crying, or both, and I almost—almost—put my hand on top of his.

“Where are we going, really?” I ask him, and as he opens his mouth the centipede scar twitches above his throat.

But then: a sound from the back of the car. Thump.

Thump thump.

“I’m not stopping,” Derf says preemptively. “So before you say anything—”

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump

thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump.

There’s a hollow thwank! as the latch of the trunk tears open, so loud, sharp, and sudden that I feel it in my teeth. I hear metal grind against metal, then a shriek from the car’s tires as we come lurching, swerving to a stop. As my head snaps forward, I shriek too.

I look at Derf, but he’s not looking at me. He’s staring, his eyes impossibly wide, at a faint outline about 20 feet behind us, near the mound of rebar. Or actually, two outlines. One is an inflatable pineapple. One is something else.

The core of “wow” is a dream of the house you grew up in, with its crabgrass lawn and spent shingles and portable TV playing “Judge Mathis” on repeat, and in the dream it’s late at night and you’re tiptoeing down the hallway, leaving a shallow bowl of milk at the foot of the bedroom, the bathroom, the narrow stairs leading to the attic. The core of “wow” is knowing your mother probably died in that house, alone, not understanding what was happening to her, while you were asleep in a motel three states away. The core of “wow” is realizing you never really woke up.

“Son of a bitch,” Derf says, stepping out of the car. It’s not just the rear latch that’s been destroyed. The entire trunk has been obliterated off its hinges, bent and steaming at the foot of a tree. The pineapple pool float slides listlessly along the road, still inflated, buoyed by the wind.

The something-else has vanished. I can see, in the light of the car’s emergency blinkers, a row of dark smudges in the dirt, headed toward the skeleton houses. Handprints.

“Son of a bitch,” Derf says again. I barely hear him. In my mind there’s only the idiot gallop of “Fun Times USA”—slap backed guitar chords and Fillmore Dave. Somewhere far away, Derf’s phone rings, rings again, and on the third, he slowly brings it to his ear, the color draining from his face.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, cupping the phone with his palm. And then, glancing at me: “Yeah, she’s here too.”

I don’t hear what he says after that. In the distance, at the edge of my vision, there’s a murky figure, not much taller than myself, slowly moving towards us.

Dark hair. Long, pale arms. With each flash of the car’s emergency lights, a clearer image forms in my mind. Shiny skin—still fresh, still fragile. A pair of bright blue eyes. A flicker of something like recognition.

I don’t speak as she silently places herself behind Derf, who’s bent over the trunk, still talking on the phone.

The emergency lights flash.

A shadow, a smeared thumbprint.

An opossum, a magenta parachute, the “Jeopardy!” theme song.

As she looks at me, moving closer to Derf, I realize there’s more than recognition in those eyes. There’s a question. One I already know the answer to.

A mouth, maybe, or many mouths.

“Wow,” I hear Derf say, ending the call. “I never realized, there’s like barely any storage in here.”

I take a step back. I look straight at Trunk Girl. And I think: Hungry babies need to eat. Hungry babies get big and strong.

“You must’ve been pissed at your mom, though. For letting it get like that.”

“She did the best she could.”

“Hell yeah, she did,” Fred says, turning on his elbow across from me. And then, to an imagined audience: “Let’s hear it for all the moms.”

Hear what? I almost ask him. Do you hear something?

I’ve been driving through Pennsylvania for nearly 22 hours. At first, I drove in silence, watching the rearview, holding my breath with every passing vehicle. Once, a white pickup truck hovered behind me for an exit, two exits, and I was seconds from flooring the gas when it pulled into a police turnaround and started heading the other way.

Eventually, I stopped glancing over my shoulder.

I take Fillmore Dave out of the disc player and turn on the radio, scanning through a jumble of pop and country before landing on an oldies station. After a while, I turn the music off and just listen to the high, hovering sound of the car’s wheels as they move against the pavement.

I pull off the interstate, drive a quarter mile past a strip of boarded-up pet stores, and double-park next to a hair salon. I reflexively walk back to check the trunk, held together with bungee cords and duct tape, before remembering there’s nothing in it. “I’ll be right back,” I say anyway.

It’s a cool evening and I feel like walking, so I follow the sidewalk one block, then another, until I arrive at a convenience store at the end of a cracked parking lot. Inside, I walk from aisle to aisle, pick up a bag of chips and a bottle of A&W root beer. I take my time, perusing each row. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the beer fridge and briefly mistake it for someone else, mirroring my movements. But no. It’s just me.

“Twelve bucks,” the cashier says. She’s around 19 or 20, with a two-tone dye job and tired eyes.

I’ll take a scratcher too,” I say, nodding toward the back. She slides one across the counter and I take a dime out of my pocket, rub it against the thin wax coating.

“Look at that,” I say, holding the ticket up to the light. “I didn’t win anything.”

These Poets Are Writing Queer Afterlives

Posted on May 25, 2026May 28, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Steven Reigns and I had been emailing for months. As I prepared for the release of my debut poetry collection, writers and editors from multiple regions of the queer writing universe strongly encouraged me to reach out to Steven. This was partially due to the similarities in our work; Steven and I are both writing around queerness and AIDS. My collection DEAD BOYS IN SPACE uses speculation, sci-fi and space travel to think about the AIDS crisis, generational grief, memory, sex and sickness.

Meanwhile, Steven’s 2025 collection Outliving Michael is both memoir and memorial, and is written towards Steven’s close friend Michael Church, who died of AIDS in 2000. Now, of course, I’ve come to realize that people pushed me towards Steven because he is generous and warm, as well as talented and prolific.

So we emailed. I asked for advice and, more daringly, a very last-minute blurb. The conversation kept rolling and we dreamed up an interview to formally bring our words together. But I never expected to meet Steven in person, at least not any time soon. He was on the West Coast, where I essentially never venture, and I was in New York City. So you can imagine our mutual surprise and delight when we spotted each other at the Publishing Triangle Awards this month. Since 1989, the Publishing Triangle has championed and connected queer writers and publishers.

Afterward—and once again back on our prospective coast lines—Steven and I discussed how the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s has shaped our work and lives, generational memory and the beauty of the dance floor.

Sara Youngblood Gregory: I was so moved by Outliving Michael and there are so many moments of emotional and thematic overlap between our two works. Tell me how Outliving Michael came about.

Steven Reigns: The poems in Outliving Michael, like most of my work, came out of my trying to make sense of things. I realized I had lived longer than Michael, something I, for some reason, hadn’t thought possible. The poems were my reminiscing on his friendship and its lasting impact on my life. This book feels like a personal companion to my previous collection A Quilt for David. I spent over a decade researching and writing about a dentist who was accused of transmitting HIV to his patients. I didn’t know David and so, for the next book, I focused on and honored a best friend, Michael.

I actually have a similar question for you because I thought of it when I first had your book in my hands. DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is more than a meditation, the GRID series of poems is a perfect example. I imagine some of your poem’s creations were quite intense.

SYG: Oh, I’m glad the GRID poems stuck out to you. Those are a series of three poems in the collection, and they all follow the same format—literally a four by five grid on the page—and each column works to define or capture or snapshot the feeling of a specific word. Words like “bird,” or “mother,” or “apology.” You can read the poem straight down, or straight across, or I guess even go tic-tac-toe style.

I was writing in this confined form and all along that containment was already built into the history and language of AIDS and homosexuality.
– Sara Youngblood Gregory

Originally these three poems were pretty pastiche. I was playing around with the form of one of Franny Choi’s poems—I think it’s from Soft Science. I wrote some poems in this grid format, but they weren’t fully formed. Then a few years later, I was at the point where my heart was set on writing a manuscript fully dedicated to thinking about the AIDS crisis. I was reading a lot of different books about AIDS and I learned an early name for the virus: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. GRID. There it was again. It was like lightning struck. It felt eerie, almost. Here I was writing in these small boxes and columns—in this confined form on the page—and all along that same containment was already and very explicitly built into the history and language of AIDS and homosexuality.

Now, as I ask you questions, I am thinking of your poem about working on a different interview for a different magazine. Michael had advice for you: Respond as if your soulmate will read it. Were you writing directly to Michael with your poems? Was he your soulmate?

SR: Not at all. In every reading, I stress I never had sex with Michael. We were friends. I’m not offended by the suggestion but what gets lost is the concept of nonsexual connection and friendship. Gay men, particularly in straight people’s imaginations, are wildly sexualized. It’s also an important point to stress because we don’t have as much art about friendship. I was probably 22 when Michael gave me that advice. At the time, I was overly romantic and believed in soulmates, in some cosmic connection with one other person.

SYG: Yeah that’s so true—the sexualization. I didn’t even think about it, though of course as a lesbian that sexualization certainly, and unfortunately, informs my own interactions with straight people and heterosexuality.

SR: Exactly! I think this imaginative sexualizing by straight people is why there’s so much discomfort with queers around children. Drag queens reading to children is scrutinized for that exact reason. The data far from suggests that queers are the issue. If facts were prioritized over fantasy, gun violence in schools would be the biggest conversation point, not drag queens with books.

SYG: It does feel particularly sharp that it’s drag queen with books that are under such fire. Plus all the queer book bans. They hate when school kids know us, and read about our lives and relationships on our own terms, which is what Outliving Michael does so well . . . It felt really clear to me when reading how grounded and how deep-running your friendship was, and also that it was firmly platonic, firmly a friendship. I do think sometimes about friends I’ve had and how strongly they’ve impacted me and how fated it’s felt. I can get a little bit woo-woo though. [Laughs]

SR: I’m not opposed to woo-woo. I have a poem in the book about me during an insufferable New Age phase and how Michael teased me about my seriousness. Did you have a reader or certain audience in mind?

SYG: Not at all. In my day-to-day as a freelance writer and journalist, I’m constantly thinking about the reader. What do they need to know? Do they have enough context? What’s the takeaway? But when I write creatively, the exact opposite is true—I don’t want to write for anyone, or with anyone in mind. I actually have to banish the people in my mind and the possibility that the work might one day be read by others. Otherwise, I feel distracted or self-conscious. Like someone is reading over my shoulder.

SR: Keeping one’s vision the primary focus in writing creates singular work. Writing with a committee in your head creates too much caution and fear of experimentation in disclosure or structure. What I want to do is create the best work I can. I’m asking readers for their time and attention. I’m not going to create fluff or phone anything in. I want to honor the time they’re giving the work.

SYG: In DEAD BOYS IN SPACE and Outliving Michael, nightlife, dancing, parties, sex and desire are strong throughlines. You mention a few times the feeling that the party would never end, the fear that the party was already ending, knowing and not knowing that AIDS “was already in the room.” Tell me about what it felt like to be young and gay during the AIDS crisis.

SR: I didn’t know gayness without the threat of death or sex without the threat of seroconversion. I was so young and gay and sexually active that I didn’t know any other way. I did know, even back then, how loaded and charged every moment was for me and my friends. It was only in 2010 when reading Alice Walker’s poetry book Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, that I reflected on all that time we spent on dancefloors and in beds. It was our release and shared expression of joy.

The times I’m referencing were before you were born and yet it has its own draw to you because you have a beautiful poem “The center of the universe is a small-town gay bar” where dancing and finding rhythm are part of it.

Gay men, particularly in straight people’s imaginations, are wildly sexualized.
– Steven Reigns

SYG: It is interesting. The durability of dance, the dance floor, how strongly so many people associate queerness with nightlife and music. There’s also a ton of dancing and music in Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva and Natalie Adler’s novel Waiting on a Friend.

In my poem, the speaker’s desire is focused on a single person—a butch lesbian to her femme—but that desire also goes in every other direction too, tossed around and toward all the other queer people around her. Not a sexual desire, but this broader erotic gesture towards these different generations of gay men, trans people, lesbians, homosexuals . . . For me, the dance floor is a place of reunification and memory and remembering. It is a chance to look around and wonder who should still be here, but isn’t, and who might still be here moving and sweating and laughing, just out of sight.

SR: Community is how we’ve survived. For many of us, the gay bar is the first place we encounter queer community and witness unabashed queer joy. The sacredness of queer clubs is hard to describe. It’s why there’s a mourning of clubs that close and another reason why the Pulse Massacre hit so deeply.

SYG: I was born in the late 90s so my coming of age as a lesbian was really in the late 2010s and early 2020s . . . You remember and have to live with those memories of the AIDS crisis, which I imagine is a blessing and a great grief. I don’t remember and have to live without those memories, which is a blessing and a great loss.

I want to ask you about memory—specifically generational memory. When I was writing DEAD BOYS IN SPACE a lot of my grief and frustration stemmed from my complete lack of memory. The inability to recall, to know, to learn and feel connected to the history of my people and the history of my family. What’s been lost and found between the generations “after” and “during” the AIDS crisis?

SR: I had a fake ID at age 16 and was befriending and having sex with men older than me. I had such an early exposure to it. I don’t see myself as active or engaged in the height of the crisis. Queer women played a big role during the AIDS crisis. This is sometimes under-represented by the media, the connections between LGBT people.

SYG: I think about this, too. Sometimes, I felt a little strange or self-conscious being a lesbian writing about AIDS when there’s such a strong association with gay men. But all women—trans, queer, cis, heterosexual—are bound up in the history and active, ongoing reality of HIV/AIDS . . . The main narrative I’ve heard, or been exposed to, is that lesbians were caregivers. For example, the San Diego Blood Sisters who organized blood drives to support people with AIDS. And that’s an incredibly powerful and important history to uplift. That solidarity. But when the story starts and ends there, it falls flat. There’s this mother-izing that happens.

Then and now there are active, reciprocal relationships with gay men full of solidarity and love and strife. Keiko Lane’s memoir Blood Loss is an example, so is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s novel Terry Dactyl. . . I’ve been reading the anthology Sister and Brother all about gay men and gay women and their relationships. It was published in the 90s and I read an essay from Jewelle Gomez there. She mentions speaking at the Gay Pride rally in Central Park when the New York section of the AIDS quilt was dedicated and writes: “I think it is fitting that a womanly art—quilting— has come to embody a memorial instigated largely by gay men. When we try to discern what ‘gay’ culture is, it is often found in the combination of things that highlight an irony or a difficult truth.” There it is. The connection, the layers, how interwoven—quite literally—we are with one another.

SR: I love these books you’re mentioning. Sister and Brother has this incredible story “The Night Danny Was Raped” by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. It is a perfect literary example of storytelling, insight, compassion, and coming of age. I feel for Lucy because I mention that 1994 story to her every time I see her at conferences. That anthology is the only place it’s been published and that’s reason enough to get it.

What was fueling your pursuit in this collection?

SYG: A main pursuit of my collection was imagining and creating a world in which gay men did not die of AIDS, and instead were able to live in new worlds. I used sci-fi and speculation and space travel to do that. I didn’t fully realize what I was getting at until Bryan Borland, the editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry, put it to me simply: I wanted to re-arrange the universe around this generational absence. Around queer loss and joy and sex and anger.

So I was incredibly moved when I read the following from Outliving Michael:

Michael had feet in both worlds, yet now

he’s not in any world except my memories

and this writing—that is neither

Holleran not Sheindlin—but the compulsion

to write about him, honor him, memorialize him

is the only way I can give back an ounce

of what he gave to me.

Writing with a committee in your head creates too much caution and fear of experimentation.
– Steven Reigns

SR: Thank you. Grief causes such a strong nostalgia. We want the world we had with them to last forever. In some ways, I’ve captured Michael and our friendship. These ways I find satisfaction in, and I’m pleased more people get to know Michael because of my book. In other ways, no one can fully capture a person or relationship. There will always be a gap, some slippage. Since Michael’s impact was so great, attached to my appreciation for him is also a sense of debt. What I’m noticing in the excerpt you pulled of my poem, is the form.

I’m curious about the topography of your poems and the format. “BLOODSHIFT,” the GRID poems, and “If You Ask Me Why I Read Science Fiction” come to mind. This collection is experimental in many ways.

SYG: I love to play with format and form. I’m one of those people that never imagines their work will be read out loud, ever. [Laughs] That’s how I often end up with dramatic and strange poems like “BLOODSHIFT,” which uses long lines across the page and between words to force a feeling of submersion and depth and of going deeper and deeper underwater. Then with “If you ask me why I read science fiction” the idea was something windy and loose on the page, your eyes sort of move all over the page as you read, back and forth like a swing.

GRID was, as I mentioned, about containment. Later on in the collection, I sort of put this image on its head and draw parallels between cages, grids, and the look and beauty of quilt squares. Which also brings us back to the AIDS quilt.

SR: While you’re talking about that, can you say something about the structure of the book itself? It’s divided into four sections. How did you arrive at this format?

SYG: Structuring and ordering the poems was the hardest part of the manuscript. My editor, KMA from YesYes Books, and I went back and forth a lot. So there was a lot of re-ordering. But what always felt clear to me was the middle section—also called DEAD BOYS IN SPACE—as the creative and speculative center. That section is one long play that can be performed with a few people. It’s one of the only times I actively thought about the work being real aloud. It’s also where the sci-fi is most present, and the world building is the most concrete and specific.

I always meant for world building to be taken very seriously, at face value. It’s not metaphor. To me, the speaker really does live in a very real universe where her brother didn’t die of AIDS, but escaped the Earth, escaped forced displacement to the moon colony, and very much outwitted the United States government. Her grief is no less real because her brother isn’t dead. It isn’t even more complex. It’s just a different grief for a different, slightly more righteous world.

7 Books in Which Obsession Is the Plot

Posted on May 22, 2026May 23, 2026 by EL Assistant2

All writing, at some level, grows out of obsession—the need to get our most intense and unwieldy feelings down on paper so that we might begin to see them clearly, or persuade others that our passions matter. But sometimes the obsession is right on the surface of the plot—is the plot. An obsession makes a strong engine for a novel, engendering intense prose and risky choices.

All of the books on this list were on my desk and in my mind when I wrote Mare, a novel based on my own experience—and my own obsession. In Mare, the protagonist takes on the casual, part-time care of a horse, in part to avoid thinking about a future in which she will not have children. When her feelings about the horse turn into affection, and, later, obsession, she struggles to explain their strength to herself or others. After all, as another character insists—the mare is “just a horse.” Sure, in pony books girls are obsessed with horses. But once you’re past the age of about 16, you’re expected to move on to more adult obsessions. I failed to find any other books about a woman obsessed with a horse. What I discovered is that the quality of obsession in literature is transferable across objects. The books on this list spoke directly to me as I swam in the dark waters of infatuation, trying to work out what kind of story I was in.

More often, the female protagonists of novels are obsessed with other people, often men. Of course, there are Tolstoy and Flaubert’s famous novels of the affair, in which Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary’s obsessions with their respective male objects reach tragic ends. But for this list, I was interested in female obsessives written by women. At first the list seems to be sameish, with many of the narrators fixated on an out-of-reach man. But when you look closer, it becomes evident that even apparently similar obsessions can take very different forms. What is fascinating in most of these books (no spoilers!) is how the obsessed woman, appearing at first to be powerless, is ultimately empowered by her obsession. To be obsessed is to have a mind, a heart, and a body—to actively want something—to be, in other words, centered in one’s own story. In the grip of obsession, a woman’s gaze is returned to herself.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is one of the most obsessive books on love ever written. Like the love it chronicles, it is itself uncategorisable—a memoir that reads like a novel, a letter, a sermon and a prose poem. Divided into ten breathless sections, By Grand Central Station tells the story of the unfolding love between Elizabeth Smart and George Barker. Smart had chanced upon a volume of Barker’s poems while in London in 1937 and fallen in love with his writing. Her book brings to life the affair which began when she flew Barker and his wife out to stay with her at an artists’ colony in Big Sur, amid the drama of redwoods, thunder and canyons. It shows us a woman in the depths, and at the heights of, her obsession—one that led not only to social castigation but, at times, actual imprisonment.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

When Keiko begins her job at the convenience store she becomes what she most wants to be: “a normal cog in society.” Not only has the store supplied her with a personality, a purpose, and a behavioural code in the form of the store manual, it is literally the stuff she is made of: “When I think that my whole body is made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.” She thinks of the store on her days off; she even dreams of it at night. When the novel begins, Keiko has been working at the convenience store for 18 years. What follows, as the events of the novel threaten to dismantle her obsession, is not the whimsical comedy we might expect from a story set in a supermarket, but a provocative investigation into societal pressure.

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North

It is never quite clear why the narrator is obsessed with the Woman in the Purple Skirt. Maybe it’s because she reminds me of my sister, she wonders aloud, or someone from school. Perhaps it’s because she’s striking, or is it because she’s boring? Likewise, the narrator herself remains obscured, hidden within the margins of the story. “I observe her from a distance,” she writes, “a silent spectator in the drama of her life.” But when documenting turns to string-pulling, the narrator invisibly manages to arrange for the Woman in the Purple Skirt to get a job at the same hotel she works at, setting in motion a chain of events leading to a dramatic conclusion. And yet, as the novel closes we are left with no answers, nothing that will put to rest the obsession with the Woman in the Purple Skirt, so that it lingers on within us, becoming our obsession, too.

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel

I’m a Fan plays with all the conventions of obsession, both traditional (stalking, creepy letters) and contemporary (endlessly refreshing instagram stories). “The woman I am obsessed with” is what the narrator names the woman that “the man I want to be with” has left her for. Yes, the narrator of I’m a Fan is obsessed with the man with whom she is having an ill-advised affair. But it is this foundational obsession that carries the more interesting one: the painfully perfect object of his obsession: a pretentious Californian influencer whose fans fawn over her online. “She would be complimented for farting,” thinks the narrator, “someone would write, ‘I usually hate farts but when you do them, my god, so floral and unusual!’” Over the course of the book, in short vignettes that criss-cross time and space, the narrator sharpens her scalpel and gradually dismantles the woman she is obsessed with.

The Possession by Annie Ernaux, translated by Anna Moschovakis

Even more so than I’m a Fan, Ernaux’s short memoir is monotropically focused on the woman she has been left for. She embarks on a quest to discover the identity of the woman who has replaced her, each new piece of information causing a shift in her attitude towards the entire world. On discovering, for example, that the woman is a professor, “I discovered that I hated all female professors—though I myself had been one, and many of my friends still were.” The obsession is of course painful, a boil that needs to be lanced, a problem seeking resolution—and yet, one of the beautiful surprises of this book is the energy Ernaux gains from the obsession. “This woman filled my head, my chest and my gut; she was always with me, she took control of my emotions. At the same time, her omnipresence gave my life a new intensity.”

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

Reading I Love Dick sometimes feels like listening to a very clever, very funny and very drunk friend going on and on about her crush, showing you what she wrote to him and what he wrote back (if at all), when she called and whether or not he answered. Chris Kraus’s passion for Dick, a boring “English cultural critic” who she has only met once, appears entirely unjustified. But it is his blankness that allows her obsession to become a kind of enlivening game. In fact, Chris, an artist and filmmaker, might be more in control than she first seems: far more interested in the project of obsession than in Dick himself. On the surface the novel is about a woman’s infatuation with an unworthy man. What it’s really about is who gets to be obsessed with whom. “Who gets to speak and why,” Kraus writes, “is the only question.”

My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan

My Husband tells the story of a different kind of obsession: here, the object is within reach. There he is, with a wedding ring on his finger, already committed to a life with the narrator. So why is she still so “lovesick,” as she calls it? Yes, she admits straight away, her obsession is both unlikely and unusual. Her love hasn’t followed the “natural” progression from infatuation to something milder. She has no fictional heroines who can show her “how to behave.” The unnatural intensity of her feelings towards him feeds the sinister, gothic atmosphere of the book, the sense of something brewing, about to boil over. In My Husband, obsessive love is the monster looming in the shadows of the house. But as the plot twists towards its conclusion, we discover that there is more to her obsession than meets the eye. Is there one monster in the house, or two?

A Beloved Teacher’s Casual Homophobia Still Hurts

Posted on May 21, 2026May 20, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

“The Last Analog Childhood,” an excerpt from My Bad by Hugh Ryan

Señora was my favorite teacher for the first half of seventh grade, one of the few who didn’t seem to hate spending her wild and precious days getting tweens to care about something. She had us write skits where the characters from Beverly Hills, 90210 inexplicably found reasons to discuss our vocabulario words, every girl doing her best Shannen Doherty (RIP), pulling on a scrunchy and asking, “Don-DE ES-ta el presiDENTe?” Our other teachers were old, ancient, forty; Señora did a Mariah Carey impression that was fully off-key but got the essence of her. (In that, she was my early training for understanding drag.)

It was 1990 in Irvington, New York, a sleepy town on the outskirts of New York City where my parents and their extended Bronx Irish clan had landed post White flight. My middle school Spanish class had maybe fifteen students total, and we’d all known each other since kindergarten, to our great regret.

In elementary school, I mostly had incidental friends—neighbors, classmates, or the children of familial acquaintances. With the transition to middle school, they peeled away. I remember sixth grade mostly as a procession of phone calls where embarrassed parents made obvious excuses for why their sons couldn’t come to the phone right now, or ever again. It was a little like being dead, and I haunted our cold, brick middle school like a scrawny ghost in a ginormous Ocean Pacific T-shirt that read, “Surf Legend: Gateway to the Sun.”

(Why did I own that shirt? The closest I’d been to a surfboard was getting tangled up in a buoy and nearly drowning on the Jersey shore when I was ten.)

Other kids were rarely mean to me because the school punching bag—Booger—was in almost all the same classes I was. When that mob energy whipped up and the playground became a school of piranhas looking for something to eat, we usually turned on Booger. Yes, we; I’d have done anything to be part of something. I kicked that kid because he was lower than I was, a smudge on my soul that will never come out. But it got me nowhere, because shared hatred is not the same as friendship; it just sings in the same key for a minute.

So perhaps I was particularly open to Señora’s kindness, but we were all a little ensorcelled by her. Other teachers wanted us to like them, but we all wanted her to like us.

She listened to us—not our feelings; it was 1990, no one cared about that shit. But Señora eavesdropped on our conversations and found ways to work Nintendo and Vanilla Ice into our lessons (“Yo, yo, yo means I, I, I”). That’s how it all started, on a gray day in late fall or early winter. I have a hard time remembering the rest of that year, and as I’ve grown older, that block has worked its way backward, devouring the seventh grade quiz by quiz and week by week, leaving a few unforgettable moments bobbing unmoored in an indistinct ocean.

Shared hatred is not the same as friendship.

It was cold, I remember that, and Stevie C. was being a little shit. He was one of those kids who never came at you directly but was always talking smack just loud enough for you to hear. As we settled into our metal chairs with desks attached and waited for the bell to ring, he kept up a steady string of gay jokes directed at the air around me: “Know what GAY stands for? Got AIDS Yet?!” etc. And he and his friends all laughed.

I don’t think he came up with any of them; he was just a hateful parrot who hadn’t yet graduated to edgier racist jokes. Like most Americans, he understood AIDS as a disease that infected only homosexuals and Ryan White, the apple-cheeked poster child for the “innocent victims” of the crisis, who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion when he was thirteen.

The bell rang, and we all quieted. Stevie’s last fusillade rang out in the silence, a homophobic riff on the tagline for Trix cereal: “Silly faggot, dicks are for chicks!” Then he barked his signature manic laugh, a highpitched parody of Woody the Woodpecker. “HahahaHAha, hahahaHAha, hahahahahahahaha.”

Stevie and a handful of boys like him (it was always boys) were my primary education up until that point in what it meant to be gay. They taught me that my light blue sneakers were gay, that skipping was gay, and that if you looked at your nails by holding your fingers out instead of curling them in, you were definitely gay.

It was an odd but undeniable paradox of the time: Everything could be gay, but no one actually was gay. Not in my family, not in my classroom, not on sitcoms, not in books, not in the past or the present or the future. AIDS had put homosexuals on the news, but they were vectors for disease, not people. Occasionally, you’d hear a fag joke about San Francisco, but that might as well have been Oz. And in the absence of real queer people talking about real queer lives, boys like Stevie got to define our existence for us. I think Gen X queers placed such a high priority on visibility because we grew up in a black hole of representation. George Michael wasn’t gay, and neither was Ellen, or Peewee Herman, or Doogie Howser, MD.

Just me.

And somehow, boys like Stevie all knew it. Or half-knew it. My sexual orientation was invisible, unclockable, and frankly a little confused, but my gender was a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper: bright, weird, and obvious. Not feminine exactly, but not masculine, not boy, not straight, not right. And while some adults might pretend that gender and sexuality are unrelated—that being gay and being trans are entirely separate phenomena—children, bullies, and the Republican Party instinctively understand that the line between the two is porous and unimportant. I’d learned in elementary school to hold my tongue and never mention the inchoate feelings I had about other boys, but my body was ungovernable. When Stevie called me a faggot that day in class, it had nothing to do with whom I was fucking (no one) and everything to do with my limp little wrists that flapped like broken wings when I got excited.

“Stevie!” Señora snapped at him, and in that last instant before everything changed, I loved her more than I ever had.

We all waited for the hammer to drop, which in our small, suburban public school meant at worst being held for a day’s detention. But Señora seemed unsure what to do once we were all staring at her. She had a high-key sensitivity for that oily, mocking tone children use to signal an insult, but she couldn’t tell whom Stevie was making fun of. I wouldn’t even look in her direction in case I somehow intimated I was the butt of the joke. After a long moment, she shrugged.

“Cómo se dice faggot en Español?” Señora asked, in that chipper voice she used to hype her fun lessons.

It was an odd but undeniable paradox of the time: Everything could be gay, but no one actually was gay.

I’d heard adults use the word faggot before. I had both an older brother and access to my parents’ cable, so films like Blazing Saddles and Eddie Murphy: Delirious entered my life very early. I liked the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” because they said faggot—or, more specifically, because they described what a faggot was: “See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup? Yeah buddy, that’s his own hair.” And I loved the comeuppance in the next lines: “That little faggot got his own jet airplane / That little faggot, he’s a millionaire.”

But this was different—official. Sanctioned. Like the pope when he spoke ex cathedra. We were in uncharted territory, and none of us knew if we were really supposed to answer her question (also I just don’t think any of us knew how to say faggot in Spanish). Shock faded quickly to numbness, a sense that I should have expected this. I wasn’t angry at Señora, just disappointed in my own vulnerability.

“Pato!” Señora announced brightly. “Pero . . . ”

She held up one cautionary finger, walked to the front of the class, and unscrolled the vinyl map of the world tucked at the top of every chalkboard. (Remember those? Old and rarely used, with an unpredictable number of Vietnams and Koreas.)

Spanish, Señora explained, was spoken in many places. Each had its own peculiarities, but we were learning textbook American Spanish, which would sound a little stilted to native speakers, so today she was going to teach us about Spanish slang. Words we knew already—like pato, which meant duck—had other connotations in other countries, and we had to be prepared for that.

For the next forty minutes, she pointed to different Spanish-speaking countries and explained their words for faggot—where I would be a pato versus a mariposa versus a maricón—with a bonus lesson at the end on dyke. I noted with a glazed and mild interest that truck driver, when combined with a female pronoun, meant lesbian—as did crazy person.

Years later, I’d discover for myself how easy it is to fail as a teacher, so I have some sympathy, but Jesus Christ, what the fuck was she thinking?

Sorry. I’m not sure why I’m writing this. Doing this is like channeling. When I open my mouth, dead selves come pouring out, each a poppet made from memory, using my tongue to repeat the only story it knows, the one it whispers constantly in the back of my head. Or maybe I’m just a cat with a hairball, horking up bits of myself I’ve never been able to digest. This isn’t a thank-you letter or an accusation. I thought this might be an exorcism, but the ghosts haven’t gone anywhere. They can’t go anywhere. That’s what makes them ghosts.

So call this a recognition: Señora taught me that day that the nicest motherfuckers I knew could accidentally curb-stomp my heart at any moment. I don’t think Señora disliked queer people, and if she’d known Stevie was making fun of someone specifically, I don’t think she’d have taught that lesson.

Señora was simply engaging with the world as it was, and as it was, the world was dangerous for me.

I get it: This was 1990—homophobia was funny! And mean. And everywhere. There was not one out student or teacher in our town. We played a game called “smear the queer” at recess, a sort of reverse tag, where one person was the queer and everyone else tried to tackle him. Until the end of that year, the World Health Organization still categorized homosexuality as a mental illness, and US immigration law still saw being gay as a “psychopathic personality disorder” that was grounds for deportation. There were two high-profile antigay murders just in New York City that year alone (but also: until 2009, homo- and transphobic violence was not included in federal hate crime legislation, so who knows how many murders went unmarked). Señora was simply engaging with the world as it was, and as it was, the world was dangerous for me.

I wanted—want—to believe she didn’t do this out of cruelty, but on some level, she felt this kind of hatred was trivial or acceptable, and without an apology, I can never forgive that. It’s a small stone, but it’s one that’s been lodged in me since the seventh grade. Maybe I’m writing this so that if she ever reads it, she has to carry it too. For all I know, she already does. But that doesn’t lessen the burden. Someone I trusted hurt me in a novel way, and that still hurts, no matter how many candles I light or jokes I crack.

And maybe, I’ve come to realize recently, I’m writing this because Stevie and all those other boys are still out there. Gen X went harder for Trump2024 than any other age group. But it’s not just us. If there’s one thing that growing up queer in the Nineties gave me, it’s an antenna for danger, and it tells me that bad days are here, and worse are coming. A week ago on the subway, I heard one high school boy call four others faggots in the hateful-playful way I knew so well in the seventh grade. “You can’t say that,” the other boys gasped, and he yelled back, his face wide with joy, “It’s 2025, FAGGOTS!”

And they laughed they laughed they all laughed.

Who am I kidding? My ghosts aren’t even ghosts; they’re cops, fathers, doctors, monsters, and sons. So maybe I’m writing this as a warning and a promise to the queer kids of today: We’ve made it through before.

The Gothic Is a Gateway to Literature’s Most Enduring Themes

Posted on May 21, 2026May 20, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

The Gothic is a genre with recognizable tropes: witches and vampires, haunted houses and cobwebby tombs. It’s eerie, it’s morbid, it’s campy and over the top. When I was writing my novel Immersions, based on the fairy tale “Bluebeard,” I wanted to write into this Gothic tradition, so I included a big creepy house, a mysterious older man, and a sister who disappeared.

In early drafts, I kept escalating these elements, making the disappearance more mysterious, the house more menacing. I worried that if my novel wasn’t melodramatic and shocking enough, it wouldn’t count as Gothic. But in my reading life, I was beginning to see that a novel didn’t need a bombshell revelation to count as Gothic. In fact, a subtle, pervasive Gothic-ness occurs in all kinds of novels: lyric, realist, and satirical. These novels don’t have literal ghosts, but they do have hauntings, doubles, and uncanny inklings. They understand that, even absent its overt props and set pieces, there is something in the Gothic and its ability to convey the consequences of repression that makes it essential for engaging with some of literature’s greatest themes: knowledge, history, the return of the past.

What’s more, through my reading I began to see that the Gothic is not only the terrain of personal terrors. Historical atrocities live there, too. Even in nineteenth century British classics, the Gothic is used to express the racism, sexism and colonialism we’d rather not see, the painful history—and present—we’d like to keep locked in the attic. Jane Eyre’s Rochester, who makes a fortune from the enslaved laborers on Caribbean sugar plantations, has a mad first wife in the attic—a symbol not only of his troubled romantic past, but the corruption and violence at the root of his fortune.

The haunting at the heart of the Gothic is the unbearable truth at the heart of empires: they rest on slavery and genocides, land theft and resource extraction. The lords and ladies in English manors and Southern plantations would prefer not to think too deeply upon this. But the violent truth insists. Repressed, submerged, it bubbles up in Gothic form.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

That Beloved is a Gothic novel is a fact both obvious and ignored. Nearly 40 years after its publication, Toni Morrison’s masterpiece has the status of a classic, something too revered to dwell in the lowly realm of genre. Yet to tell the story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her anguished decision to save her baby from slavery, Morrison employs a haunted house and a baby ghost; there are uncanny doubles and inexplicable magic. On the surface, the novel is about Sethe’s individual grief, but Beloved is more broadly about what slavery does to people. The house and the ghost are not only symbols of a specific murdered baby and a specific anguished psyche, but manifestations of our damaged nation. With its bold reckonings, Beloved asks us to take the Gothic seriously.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, which takes place in a house that forcibly ejects anyone non-white, is bracingly political. This racist house has been occupied by four generations of the Silver family, who are all white. The last woman in this line, Miranda, falls in love with a Black woman, Ore. When she brings her home, the house begins to torment Ore, who eventually flees, forcing Miranda to reckon with her hateful matriarchal home—and herself. Here, whiteness is a troubled, even self-destructive state. Miranda wants to believe she does not bear direct responsibility for the crimes of her home. But knowledge, insidious, imperfectly ignored—that is to say, Gothic—insists otherwise.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, her feminist, post-colonialist prequel to Jane Eyre, after nine years of labor and 27 years of literary silence. It tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a young white Creole woman in Dominica whose family is pushed into poverty after the end of slavery. Her opportunistic marriage to Mr. Rochester, meant to save her family from destitution, brings misery to all. He disdains her Creole identity; she mocks how poorly he understands the people and land around him. Rhys’s prose is lush, dark, and gorgeous. By giving literature’s famed “madwoman in the attic” a (new) name and a voice, Rhys showed that behind every fearsome Gothic monster is a wounded child bearing the mark of difference. Wide Sargasso Sea takes the subtle colonial critique of Jane Eyre and makes it explicit.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

After the death of her more talented, successful friend Athena Liu, June Hayward, a young white writer, steals Athena’s work and passes it off as her own. A withering satire of cultural appropriation and a bravura channeling of white grievance and entitlement, Yellowface is also a stealth Gothic novel. As June’s guilt and anxiety mounts, she begins to see Athena’s double everywhere, and starts chasing Asian women down on the street before admitting that they look “nothing like” Athena. At the novel’s climax, June finds herself alone on the “Exorcist steps” of Georgetown’s campus, screaming her confession into the cold dark night, convinced she is communing with a ghost.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

First published in Australia in 2023, this novel centers on an unnamed white protagonist who has devoted her life to do-gooder causes. Tired and shaken after a divorce and the death of her mother, she makes her way to a convent. Though she’s secular, she finds herself drawn to the rituals of prayer and communal living, and soon a brief retreat becomes a permanent living situation. But the convent proves anything but quiet. A plague of mice reaches foul proportions and the bones of a murdered young nun return to the convent’s care. Finally, a woman whom the narrator teased horribly when they were both children comes to stay. In other words, the mess and violence of the world arrives. There is no peace. But unlike most Gothic heroines, the narrator of Stone Yard does not panic. In Morning Prayer one day, flooded with strange heat, she thinks, “This is either a ghost, or it is God.” Here, the divine and the Gothic touch.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

This novel (and now movie), which portrays the brief life and untimely death of Shakespeare’s only son, is a weeper, more likely to make you cry than cower. But O’Farrell sprinkles the Gothic throughout: Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, can read the future in the stretch of skin between one’s thumb and forefinger; her work with herbs earns her the reputation of witch. And at a key moment, the doomed young boy at Hamnet’s center performs a bit of Gothic magic, tricking Death into taking him, rather than his ill sister. Rolling her aside, he implores Death to “turn away…close your eyes,” before thinking that, if only one of them can live, it must be her. “He wills it . . . He, Hamnet, decrees it. It shall be.” Though the boy is only a small child, vulnerable to his grandfather’s fists and his father’s absences, he finds agency in the Gothic realm.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

For those with courage, the Gothic world can offer surprising power. Nowhere is this more splendidly demonstrated than in this 1926 novel, which tacitly argues that to secure her freedom, a woman must become a witch. For 20 years, spinster Laura Willowes has been treated like doting “Aunt Lolly” by her family. But then she becomes moody. Visiting church graveyards, wandering by the river, she courts “loneliness, dreariness . . . a kind of ungodly hallowness.” Soon she is buying extravagant bouquets of chrysanthemums, then a house in the countryside. One day, she finds a small black cat in her kitchen, and understands that she has metamorphosed into a witch. In a long final speech to the Devil, she explains that she became a witch not to perform mischief, but “to have a life of [her] own.” For Laura—and countless others, dispossessed and delegitimized—what has been hidden is knowledge of their own power. In the Gothic, they can seize it.

“Women, in Color” by Neela Vaswani

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Heaven Being All Ice Now, Sing Me, Sister, Your Little Song of Fire

The first nature poem where white is good/night bad—but fear not, there are no ghosts in this one

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Negroland by Margo Jefferson

Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by Charles M. Blow

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership by Brea Baker

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

If your favorite song is “Last Nite” by The Strokes, read Nevada by Imogen Binnie

If your favorite song is “A Better Son/Daughter” by Rilo Kiley, read All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews

If your favorite song is “Fell In Love With a Girl” by The White Stripes, read Mrs. S by K Patrick

If your favorite song is “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, read A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane

If your favorite song is “Modern Girl” by Sleater-Kinney, read The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

If your favorite song is “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by The Darkness, read Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth.

If your favorite song is “Boy From School” by Hot Chip, read Bellies, by Nicola Dinan

If your favorite song is “Party Hard” by Andrew W.K., read Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran

“Driving Through Pennsylvania” by Mack Gelber

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel

The Possession by Annie Ernaux, translated by Anna Moschovakis

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan

“The Last Analog Childhood,” an excerpt from My Bad by Hugh Ryan

Beloved by Toni Morrison

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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