Clean Kills
I’m in the backyard. September now. Michigan. 1980’s. The air is cool and crisp. I can hear much further away than I can in summer. There’s a sound like scorching. Remains of the sound rolling off the spinning tires of the passing cars. The sun threatens to set. I build a fortress of sawn logs and garden rocks.
A toad jumps out from under a log and I lift another over my head and drop it down to kill the toad. I wrestle over the log and see the animal inside-out in front of me. To my right, it’s skin and bones and muscle. To my left, all of its organs: pink-gray and wet. The insides don’t look like they should fit inside that little thing. Living beings are bigger on the inside.
I think about this moment often. It is one of my earliest “flashbacks.” Whenever I get full of myself or cocky, a section of my brain dips its toe in that memory and I feel it: cool humidity of fall, scratchy dirty logs in my hand. Utter silence from the living being that was just a moment ago chirping and hopping home. “Remember, Girl,” I say to myself. “You’re a fucking monster.”
I’m a ghost already. It’s not that I don’t feel; I feel intensely and all the time. It’s that I can’t yet pretend I don’t. That seems to be what bothers people the most. No one likes to see a child in pain.
“Go do that in the other room.”
People keep secrets that shouldn’t be secret and lie about damn near anything else. I get very good at being quiet and being loud—very good at repelling and attracting.
I am a repellent child.
I make the effort to appear wanted, and I do, but I also don’t. I’ve been wanted and I’ve been used. If you answer enough questions in class, the teachers stop calling on you. I’m a good kid because what the fuck else is there to do? I’m a bad kid at heart because it grates over time.
We are having trouble being one person already. I want to become a bird and fly far far away. I want to become a soldier and fight every monster you can line up for me. I want to become a priest and comfort any who suffer. I want to be a wild animal. Some of my shoes still have velcro.
What’s your favorite color? Mine is Magenta. Mine is Black. Mine is blue. Mine is Green. And mine is red. Eyes front, boy. God speed.
I’m six or seven and I’m just staring. Stuck behind my parent’s legs. I am horrified by the leering faces and groping forest of hands above me. There is so much laughter. They laugh at pain. Often not their own.
I am both dehumanized and instructed in the arts of dehumanization.
On the playground, kids whisper secrets and ask questions. I hear funny things. I hear awful things. I say awful things. I am an awful thing.
Too many of us don’t make it past third grade without getting some kinda raped, molested, groped, or otherwise sexually abused. Most of us were also told to keep our traps shut and eyes front.
Good kids don’t ask questions, not until too late. People speak of the early medieval period as a dark age. The 80’s and 90’s were worse. That is why we covered it in neon and dayglo.
School is insane. I am bussed away and beaten, teased, and ultimately lied to about the nature of reality and being. I’m not the only one. There are entire cohorts of us being dipped in vats of madness. God is here, the Blacks are there, and the Jews are in West Bloomfield.
In D.A.R.E. class, the chubby unfuckable cop at the front of the class warns of the dangers of drugs and race mixing and how the one always leads to the other.
“I better not see you south of 8 Mile.”
They don’t.
They’re not here with us. They’re afraid of us. The chubby cops down here are super fuckable 😉
Fear is such an important thing to some people out here in the “real world.”
It’s gross that you guys call this one the real one. The real one is much brighter. Blindingly bright to many.
I don’t know if this is true, and I hope it is not, but an alarming number of law and code enforcement officers have told me that they feel like they have the right, nay, responsibility to shoot a person as long as that officer has been made to feel afraid.
The obvious follow up to that madness is the question of what training they do to control their fear. Usually, they say some version of, “None.”
So there’s a problem right there.
Many people out here are afraid and proud of it because they’re assuming it gives them a pass to exercise that fear. Some will honestly and proudly brag to you about things they haven’t done, who they aren’t. People brag about not being able to comprehend the world around them.
