There was another light in the sky the day I met her. Beside the sun, the moon, the stars and planets, a flame burned an even brighter white. I was a lanky teenage girl. I stood at the bus stop with summer all around me. My stomach was sinking like still water. I flicked and flapped my hands. Dread splashed from my fingers but couldn’t drain the feeling. The bus would not wait for me. I pressed down on my ear muffs and bowed as I stepped up into the bus. Inside, the bus was cold and loud and unsteady. I found an empty blue seat. Sweat dripped from my hair. I was filling up with sensory water- noise, touch, scents, heat, movement. They bubbled up to my eyes and mouth and I could feel myself beginning to spill out. And then I looked at her. Across the bus sat a fat woman with long black hair splayed out. Her round body filled out the seat with a rainbow ribbon skirt. Her beadwork earrings poured down her sides in long sunset tones. In the center of her chest was a beaded medallion of a north star. Her medallion was bigger than even those that my proudest aunties wear. Her cheeks were big and warm against a small calm smile. I rocked in my seat and stared at her colors. The woman was a glittering star. The cut ends of her ribbons swayed along her seams in silky red to violet. Her beads glimmered rhythmically as we bounced through the congested city streets. She smiled at me softly.
Her eyes looked like stargazing alone in a field with the universe pressing her warm palm over your small place earthside. I stared and saw the stars and felt the skin of the sky palming down. And then I missed my stop. The bus dinged for the next stop and then the one after, but I didn’t know what to do. I stared at the woman’s eyes. The woman just smiled kindly at me. Her soft gaze was unbreaking. At the end of the bus route I got off. It was suddenly night time. I stood at the bus stop outside of a long grassy field. The sky was dark but the stars were starting to sprout and leave baby blue auras against the blackness. I stood at the bus stop on the tips of my toes and walked in place. I chanted little sounds, pops, and whispers. The field behind me was silent. The grass billowed without a sound. The black clouds and iridescent stars listened to my chanting. The road was empty and smelled like drying plants and gasoline puddles. I waited until a new bus came. I stepped up into the bus and the inside was white with fluorescents. I closed my eyes as I found my seat. I kept twisting and wringing my fingers. I curled up in my bus seat. My flip-flops screeched on the squeaky plastic. I opened my eyes and she was with me again.
The woman with the colors and the star on her chest was sitting across from me. She was bigger and rounder than before. Her cheeks had a peachy glow around her tiny little smile. Her beads jingled and I looked at her feet. She was wearing moccasins patterned with stars. Her toes were barely grazing the ground and weightless in their deerhide. The bus dinged for the next stop. I looked up and outside the windows the world was rolling by. The city streets passed from night to day over and over again with sunsets and sunrises drifting by. I could see the moon and the sun twirling by each other and mixing watercolors. The world was suddenly quiet. The bus kept going through days and nights. The woman with the colors and the star on her chest was breathing with the passage of the sun and moon. Her silhouette was hazy against the changing light and passed through big buildings and wire towers and long cement patches. I looked at her and she was sitting right next to me. Her stomach and skirt spilled over but didn’t touch. Her eyes had that same starry look. Her little lips still smiled.
“What is your name?” she asked. Her voice was sweet and high like a women’s drum circle singer. I pressed a finger to the small, dull nametag on my lapel. Marie. Her eyes stayed steady. “My name is Anang.” Comets followed alongside the bus and were bursting and spitting rainbows against the sidewalks. Everything was calm without noise and full of color. “Do you want to know your name?” Anang asked. I just looked at her silently. I didn’t realize I was crying until a big tear plopped down my nose. She held out her tiny hands. I put mine in hers and my fingers curled. She pressed her forehead against mine and took a breath. I leaned in and her forehead was cool against mine. I looked into her eyes. The bus began falling away in bits like shooting stars. We stared into each other's eyes and breathed. Our foreheads were touching like hugging planets. The world was falling away and all that was left was the dark sky. We were grounded onto our small blue pair of bus seats hurtling through space. It was as quiet as my dreams. I kept staring deeper into Anang’s eyes. She looked at me with buzzing stars with expanding cores filling up the space between us. Our seat drifted away. My feet floated down and touched the horizon. Anang held out a hand and I took it. We swam past Earth and out into the murky emptiness. We floated out far enough to see the Milky Way and we stood in its path. It was a river of white magic. The spirit of a big sturgeon passed us on the current. There were ghosts in every sparkling star.
“Listen for your name,” Anang said. “Your ancestors are calling.”
I listened. Voices peppered the air. A million ancestors were calling their loved ones home. I listened and I suddenly knew the word for me. My language was spoken by the galaxy. I raised my arms and stretched and felt the weightless mist of every living being on the tips of my fingers. “Let’s light a fire for the travelers,” Anang said. She was swelling and her roundness was filling up her ankles and wrists. We put down firewood on the starry riverbed trail. We sparked stones together and a white flame came alive and warmed our faces. We watched the fire lick the airless space. And then we were floating out and watching the flame become a tiny point of light on the cosmos. Anang was smiling at me. Her eyes were growing bigger and lighter. She held my hand with a gentle fist. I looked into her eyes and she erupted. Her body swelled until it burst into nothing but light and a million stars dying and being born. I held her hand as she birthed a new universe and became nothing. And then everything was clear again. I was on the bus alone. I pulled the blue wire for my stop. I left the bus and stepped out into a sunny summer day. In the sky, a white fire flickered beside the sun and the rolling clouds. I walked home with the generations of before and after. Everything was how I left it and there was another light in the sky.
Zhingobiiwaatigookwe indizhinikaaz. Noongom waa-niboyaan. I wake up to the green and blue shadows of the forest. I’m lying on my back on the forest floor. The ground is sharp with frost and my body is rigid against it. My heart beats soft and fast as the mist of my breath swirls upwards. I look up at the moon. The sky is a deep black wound in the conifer needle canopy. I hear a rasping gurgle below me, like a shallow murky river trying to breathe. It keeps running, whistling with my exhales. I am cold, and I don’t know how long I’ve been imprinting on the mud. In the curve of my neck, a vicious pain is beginning to bloom up. The pain flowers with blinding heat. My body is naked and slick with mud, and a burning warmth is dribbling down my neck. It pools in my chest and under my cold back. I try to call out. The only sound the trees hear is a bubbling rasp. I put my hand to my neck, and against the moon my hand is wet with blood from the touch. I try to yell again. The only sound in the forest is blood sputtering from the straining gash in my throat. I go quiet, pressing my hands to my collarbones. My blood flows, my breath still bubbles through it. I push myself to my knees with shaking hands. The bloody earth and tall pines rock and spin. I tangle my hands in rough, sappy branches and pull myself to my feet. My wrists and ankles are braceleted with deep brown bruises. I step up the rocks and twigs. My vision is clear in the moonlit dark. The forest grows taller. The sky grows closer. A torn shirt hangs from a low, barren branch. My eyes meet a hunting knife resting against tree roots. The roots are old and wizened. The knife is young and bright. I know it is my blood that is dried to the blade. The frozen ache in my limbs meets a harsh twilight wind. I hear sleep telling me to come closer. I know that if I answer, my body is never leaving the forest. Perpetual spring ice and the scent of fir balsam and fresh cuts will be my final resting place. I walk forward. Stinging plants and burrs follow my bare feet. The trees blanket my trail with darkness. I am alone. The rasping blood gurgle of my breathing follows me. The forest is silent. I rip into the evergreen woods with scratched fingers. Faces of forest spirits blink at me through the darkness. I’m alive, I speak in blood and air. I press my fingers into the warm wound on my neck. I feel the shredded vocal chords against soft tissue. I’m alive, I speak again. My words are a hoarse, blood soaked breath. The spirits follow. I come into a burned ashy clearing. The moon is the size of a mountain on the horizon. The opening brings cold air and emptiness. I step on splintering charred wood, and walk into the ribcage of the woods. The forest holds me with long, wrinkled fingers. She is keeping me safe within herself. The forest spirit will bury me softly. The highway, the city, fall further into nowhere. I can only see the moon. It is quilted white fabric against the empty sky. I walk. I push against tangling branches and felled logs. Acorn drums and river stone chimes sound in the distance. They beat against each step I take. Curious ghosts scratch my back and trip between my legs. I can feel myself dying. I can feel the eyes of good and bad spirits. And I cannot scream. I throw myself forward. My arms stretch out into darkness and feel dying ancestors touching back. I scream with the muscles in my face. I scream with a silent mouth open wide and spitting blood. I hear a chant following behind me, made of birds and frogs and women and fruit. And my body is heavy. Tears blur my eyes with burning salt. I push myself from tree to tree, and the hours are draining from my neck. And suddenly, the road is close. A rumbling sound and a flash of light flicker through the trees. I press myself forward. My body is slow. My legs stilt like a baby deer. But I walk. I feel myself tugged back. My hair is held by unborn descendants and undead grandparents, and I walk. My blood has poured down the front of my body like a red dress. I walk until my toes hit gravel and I am staring down an empty road. I tear my hair and limbs out of the forest brush and suddenly everything is silent. The spirits, the ghosts, the animals, the ancestors, the insects, my breath, have all gone still as I take a step onto the road and stare down the dark path. I hold the silence and stand at the edge of the road. The moon is behind me and the road is smooth underneath me. Two white lights approach, running towards me. The car is a shiny black, and as it comes close I step into the center of the road and raise my arms. I’m alive. I’m alive. I can see the shadowed faces of the couple driving, coming for me. I watch the wife’s red lipstick as they approach and do not slow. And I watch the red, smiling tail lights as the car keeps driving past me. My arms stay raised as the car fades from view. All I can do is listen to my breath spurt through the hole in my neck. I am dying. I look across the road. Two eyes open in the dark space between two trees.
When I was 12 years old, I went to my first ceremony. It was at a small lodge on the edge of my mom’s reservation. I remember cutting off all my hair in the back of the van on the drive up. I had jagged bangs across my forehead and a cowlick on the back of my neck. When my mom poured all my siblings out of the van, I came out last. My mom smacked me upside the head and left it at that. At the ceremony circle, I remember the big center fire with a serious looking boy tending it, and the long medicine pipe that the adults fuddled about passing to the younger kids. But before long, dread met cramps in my stomach. I realized that gooey brown blood was staining through my summer shorts. The serious boy noticed first, and walked me out of the circle. He was a few years older than me, and had pretty eyes and a nose that had been broken too many times.
“You have to go away until the ceremony’s over, or you’ll mess up the spirits,” he said. My ears got hot with rage. I kicked the dirt and ran off. I wandered into a wooded patch far out from the lodge and crouched on a soggy decaying log. I rocked back and forth to soothe my stomach and my fuming head. I hated long drives. I hated the seriousness of ceremony. I hated grouchy elders and fussy little cousins. I hated the spirits for embarrassing me. But most of all, I hated that it was all chosen for me before I had even been born. I sat for a long while, blood staining my seat. Boredom rumbles were setting in when I noticed a pair of small black tendrils poking out of a hole in the log. I leaned in closely and watched a fat black millipede slowly unfurl from inside the rotting wood. It stuck out its head and fluttered its insect legs in the air. I grabbed it with a quick fist, but shuddered and dropped it after feeling its squishy body and frantic army of legs. It hurried along through the brush, and I jumped over the log after it. I crawled through the weeds watching for the small scurrying shadow. I kicked off both my sandals as I followed behind it on all fours like a teenage fox. I suddenly spotted a peaking long antenna coming out from the grass and lunged for it. The millipede sensed me and fled under a thick, old tree root as my cupped hands hit the dirt. I shimmied forward on my stomach and put my hand deep inside the creepy hole under the tree. My eyes followed the winding roots and I realized that they formed an arch big enough for me to crawl under, like a secret passage into the underbelly of the tree. I flipped onto my back and stared up at the wise old tree. It was a fir tree with a trunk as wide as my family’s van, and low hanging branches formed an endless sacred tent dotted with baby pinecones. I slowly got onto my knees and peaked my head under the roots-cave. It was dark, and as open as a secret treehouse. As my eyes adjusted, I could see scattering insects and thought I could almost see the swaying tails of small animals along the walls and corridors. I moved inside with careful hands and bruised knees. The mulch beneath the tree was soft and cool. The cavern smelled like fresh soil and pine sap, and the light from outside disappeared as I wove my way inside. Everything was suddenly still inside the tree. My stomach cramps turned dull and achy, and pine twigs and dead grass stuck to my palms. I reached the center of the roots, where two stood like columns to a doorway. Beyond the opening was dark and quiet. My breathing felt loud, and I could feel a low vibration across the dirt.
“Hello?” I whispered, hoping for no response. The movement stopped. In the dark space between root columns, two eyes opened- one after the other, like a toad. The eyes glowed in the darkness, wet with slime and tears. They were looking at me tenderly. The eyes were wolflike, but had the gaze of a prey animal. We stared into each other's eyes unmoving. I could feel a warm breath coming from a face I could not see in the darkness, and it smelled like the steam from a pot of wild rice. Slowly, gently, the spirit reached out a hand. It was big, round and calloused, with gray skin and yellow claws. It held out its palm with expectant eyes. Shaking and sleepy, I carefully put my small hand in the cushion of the spirit’s palm. Its eyes flickered.
Nibimaadiz. My name is Zhingobiiwaatigookwe, and I’m alive. I wake up to sunlight on a white wall. I am in a hospital bed and it is early morning. The blankets are coarse and I feel hazy and motionless. It smells like cleaning spray and gauze, but next to me I smell cigarettes, car leather musk and home. I reach my hand out to my mom, and she clasps it somberly. I look at her face up close for the first time in years. She is old and her face is a washed-out brown, with cracks and spots. Her eyes have gone saggy, but behind watery wrinkles her black coffee irises are unchanged. She frowns, just like she always has, and her breath is musty. I feel like a child with her at my bedside. She leans in to hold me and whispers, “Every year I thought you were already dead.”
I look at my mother’s expression. The furrow of her sparse eyebrows matches the harrowed curve of mine. I feel for the first time that I am looking at my own face- the face of a living ancestor that haunts my bloodstream.
“I didn’t think to ask if you survived when I got the call.”
I look at her with blank eyes. I remember home, and I remember anger and hunger and dirty carpets. I remember missing aunties and shitty frybread and white schools. And I remember why I left. And I remember that it followed me. There will always be pine needles in my shoes.
“Did the attackers cut all your hair off?” Mom strokes my buzz cut with unkind hands. I shake my head, slowly and almost imperceptibly. My head has been shaved since I was 17. I can feel the fresh bandages around my throat, and I put a protective hand against my chest. The bruise around my wrist has deepened. I am silent and I look away from my mother, towards the window. The sunlight filters through spring budding tree branches onto the hospital courtyard. I met a spirit when I was twelve. It met me when I was shedding blood, shedding a reproductive lining that was cursed with ancestral sorrow. And I met that same spirit decades later, when my blood again stained the forest floor. There is a spirit that knows me better, a forest spirit that sees my lineage and blesses it with an end. I feel accepting and rageful. The IV in my hand is cold, and my mom’s cheek is hot against my forehead.
“I thought I would never see you again,” mom says. “I raised you and I know you. But I don’t want to only hear about you when you die. You were lucky, but I know one day I will lose you. Where did my daughter go?” I feel spirits everywhere. The air has always been filled with them, but I guess you only see them when you are a child and when you are going to die. There was no luck for me in the murderer that trailed me. I wear the sign of prey in my heritage colors. But the forest knows me better. I am her daughter. Something else will stay in my blood, and I see it clearly. I push my mother away gently and look up into her eyes. Where did my mother’s daughter go? I don’t know if words will come out, if they will tear my throat apart stitch by stitch, but I speak. “She’s. In. My. Roots.”
Beck’s leather boots smell like a wolf’s hide in winter. She takes care of them, bootblacking against the snow and the scuff of her cane. But today, her boots are dry and unlaced on her lap as she sits in her wheelchair. She waits for the nurse with wrinkled hands limp in her lap. She stares at a woman across the room. Her heart burns with loss and desire. Beck was prepared to die here. She was not prepared to see Shaun. Shaun is an old woman with ash-peppered locs tied back, muscular shoulder hiked at the nurse who gave her the wrong pills again. Her eyes have still not met Beck’s, and Beck is grateful to see her candid first. The way Shaun’s face has aged makes her look like she has weathered every storm since the day they parted. The warm scars of aging line her face like rain carving into stone. Beck would always know it was her. It has been 40 years, but she can still feel Shaun’s canine teeth on the curve of her neck. She needs to breathe the earthy breeze of her old lover’s air. Beck listens to Shaun’s low, honeyed voice without taking a breath. And suddenly, Shaun is dry-swallowing her medication and meeting Beck’s gaze. Everything is still and the window light is amber-colored, and Beck knows that Shaun knows.
When Beck was 19, she stood outside of a lesbian bar in late autumn and stared at the blacked-out windows. Her red curly mane was trimmed short, but even in her denim, she still smelled like a Catholic schoolgirl. Beck wanted to feel fire in her throat and taste what it meant to be butch. But she was still afraid of herself, still flogging her own back with a carabiner. The sidewalk outside the bar claimed her faux leather men’s boots with the mud of a thousand other lesbians. Wearing them, she had everything to lose. A woman opened the bar door and came down to rest her back on the brick wall. Her chest was heaving as she breathed deeply, wearing only a wife beater in the cold. Her skin was smooth and clean, but her forehead had the deep contours of a woman who grieved often. Their eyes met, and Beck felt her face burn with blood against the chill. Shaun’s eyes were dark and knowing, like a hunter with an arrow in her chest. She silently offered Beck a cigarette with two fingers. Beck stepped close and took the cigarette, holding the wrong end against her lips. Shaun corrected her without a word, and brought out a light.
“Breathe in,” she said. Beck did as she was told. A spark lit a small white flame against her cigarette, and the first puff of smoke leaving her throat felt like a first kiss. Shaun was still guiding her, rough fingers holding her wrist. Beck wanted to feel her rage against her hips, to feel her love down her spine. She wanted to take her heat against the icy ground. Instead, she stood silent, letting Shaun feed the cigarette to her mouth. Beck felt hunger for the first time.
Beck doesn’t have to tell Shaun that this is her hospice. She knows she looks sick. She doesn’t care that she is going to die anymore. In truth, her selfishness is happy that she can be the one to die first. But she is still mourning. Shaun was her first true heartbreak, and now she is at the foot of her bed. Shaun looks up at her as she slides a leather boot over Beck’s aching foot. She does the laces slowly, and presses down to kiss her knees. Beck hated her for leaving her alone, for letting her have peace when all she wanted was for her to torment her with lust and shame and longing and bitterness for all the years in between. Beck wanted Shaun to kill her again and again, with the knife strapped between her hips. But now she’s here, with Beck’s boot pressed against her chest.
“Kiss me,” Beck says. Shaun ignores her, pulling on her other boot and breathing in the leather stained with salt from every winter they had spent apart. The rubber sole grinds into her chest as she caresses Beck’s weak, bony knees. The gentleness tears Beck apart.
“Please,” she says. Shaun finally looks up at her. Her face is streaked with tears, glossy with lost time. Beck reaches down and cups her face in her hands. She holds her face still and bends down to kiss her tears. Her weak back strains as her lips press down against wet cheeks, and Shaun sighs. Beck lets every word she’d ever wanted to say imprint into the boot mark on Shaun’s chest. She drinks in every fight that they’d lost with the water dripping down her face. Beck’s sick bones are yearning, and suddenly she knows what it feels like to die.
Beck remembers what it was like to be 25. The curve across her collarbones was bruised with bites and kisses. She smelled like sex and mandarin oranges, and sweat stained through her clothes. Chinese takeout boxes formed an altar around the bare mattress. Fans roared around the motel room, and Beck was screaming. She threw empty soda cans and shredded smut magazines at Shaun, and Shaun stayed silent. Her eyes were stoic, grazing the ground as Beck begged her not to leave. Beck’s fruit-stained hands were frantic, and inside she knew she was already alone. Beck was nothing but childhood loneliness wearing leather boots. Shaun’s head was shaved to the skin, and she sat topless on the bed with her hand covering her mouth. Her spine poked out as her shoulders slouched. She grabbed a fist of Beck’s bright red hair and pulled her down roughly. Beck dug her nails into Shaun’s thighs and cried. Shaun kissed Beck with an open mouth and bit her lip until it split. Beck wrapped her body around Shaun and clung to her, sobbing into her mouth as blood dribbled down their faces.
“Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me,” Beck begged with every breath they took. Shaun never said a word, and Beck stayed laying on the motel mattress, face covered in blood and orange juice. This felt like her final summer alive.
Shaun will hold the leftovers when Beck dies. She will rub the leather boots soft until they smell like a baby wolf in spring. She will touch every photo, every pair of cargo shorts, and every beach rock that her lover cherished. Beck will never be hers, and every little item that marked her existence will never be hers. So Shaun will take her time in the room across the hall, trailing her fingers over shakily scribbled sticky notes and ceramic fishing figures until they, too, must go. Beck will be dead, and Shaun will be alone with memories of scratched backs, death rattling breaths, and a cigarette outside a bar that closed down 30 years ago. Shaun will feel the rain weathering her closer to the earth where her lover lies, and she will know that Beck will never let her mourning burn less bright. But tonight, Shaun and Beck hold each other. Tonight, their bodies are warm together, and there will be one more little death.
I miss the child I used to be. He was tender, softer than the other boys, but blooming with joy. I would do anything to be him again. Now I am just a shackled bolt on my closet monster’s door.
In the 5th grade I saw him for the first time: my childhood monster. He was lurking just out of reach in the school coat closet. Darkness obscured everything but his eyes. Those eyes were a pale glowing purple, and they smiled as if he knew me. The shadowy corner where he lurked smelled like dirt and rotting flowers.
My monster appeared on the worst day of my 9 year old life. At recess, I had been plucking flowers from the community garden. I was full of quiet sunshine, kneeling in the grass. I began braiding the flowers into a crown, and wore it as I ran off to the swings. Just as I had almost swung high enough to touch my toes to the sky, an older boy knocked me from the swing and onto the gravel. My flower crown tumbled from my head, and was immediately crushed under the boy’s sneakers. It was with scraped palms and knees that I realized my crown was made of pansies, pink and purple.
Every day from then on, I would see the monster’s eyes in the coat closet corner. I began carrying my things with me everywhere to avoid setting foot in the closet. I carried my backpack and coat and lunchbox from school breakfast to after-school sports. I carried everything shamefully, as if they were a comfort blanket I couldn’t let go. I became obsessively fearful of the closet monster. Avoiding him desperately, my eyes were still always on the coat closet door. But as much as I feared seeing him, I feared anyone else finding out about him even more.
When I finished elementary school, I thought the monster was finally behind me. And for a while, he was. But in the late autumn of my first year of middle school, I made a friend. He was my first friend. I could never get along with the other boys in my grade. They were always loud, and gross, and rough. But this boy was different, and he saw it in me too. We began spending our recesses together, away from all the noise and chaos of the other adolescents. We would sit on a bench under the biggest tree in the lot, sometimes chatting endlessly, and other times sitting in comfortable silence as we watched the falling leaves. This boy was kind and smart. I saw him as more worthy and beautiful than the other kids treated him. I envied his curly black hair and often stared at his freckled nose while he talked. One day, we exchanged numbers. I could text a friend on my flip phone for the first time in my life. I hid under my covers that night, the only light coming from my tiny phone screen. Having a friend felt like an incredible secret. My heart fluttered as I listened for my parents outside my bedroom. I didn’t know what I was hiding. I texted my friend for hours into the night. As midnight approached, I heard him. A long, snarling laugh came from behind my clothes hanging in the closet. My breath caught in my throat, and I was determined not to look. But his laugh kept growing louder and more knowing. I remember slowly slipping out from the covers. My monster’s bright purple eyes pierced through the darkness of my bedroom. I curled back up under the covers and hid my phone under my pillow. All night, I dreamed half-asleep of watching the leaves fall with my friend. But my dreams couldn’t escape the nightmares of my closet monster. I could smell the monster even as he quieted, now reeking of burning leaves.
I began avoiding my only friend from that day forward, but the monster was already back. Every night, the monster in my closet rang out with laughter. Purple light seeped through my closet door no matter how many things I used to barricade it. His stench permeated all of my clothing no matter how many times I washed them. I never made another friend in school. Years passed, and I went through the motions of high school and college and graduate school, but my monster stayed.
And now, I’m an adult. I have a career and a home and a family, and I am still afraid of the monster in my closet. I have learned to live with the cocktail of fear and shame he brings me, sipping it slowly so that I only exhaust my glass at the end of the day. But after everything, he still makes me feel just as small as I did in my elementary school closet, clutching a crushed flower crown with scabbed hands. I work as an electrical engineer for the local power plant, a path set for me without my input. I am grateful for the life chosen for me. I don’t have any aspirations of my own outside of hanging another padlock on the closet door.
I set out for work early today. The November morning is foggy and dark. I step out of my car and onto the plant’s concrete lot. I look up at the outline of power cables against the dark purple sky. As I look up, my heart yearns for something unknown against my will. And then, a flash of lavender lightning cracks from the sky and buzzes through every cable and electrical tower. The sky erupts with noise and sparks strike me from every side. With a clap of thunder I hear a familiar howling laugh. In my path stands a closet. A glowing purple fog creeps out from under the closet door. There is a radium glass in my hand- a vodka soda with a green carnation. I down my drink and begin to run a circle around the closet, but it follows. I smash the glass against the closet door. I turn every lock and pound my fist against the door with a plea to finally leave me alone. I keep running, and another lavender lightning bolt strikes the ground at my feet and splits the earth. My world falls apart like fragments of a shattered mirror. Suddenly, finally, the only thing that seems clear is the closet door. So I cry. And I hyperventilate. And I unlock another deadbolt on the door with every sobbing gasp, and clutch the doorknob with a trembling fist. And for the first time, I am in the closet.
Sitting before me is my monster. Under the warm light of a single closet light bulb, he doesn’t laugh or growl. The door behind me closes, and the world goes silent. My monster has tired lavender eyes, glowing dimly. His wrinkled skin is green and moss grows across his face and balding head. He wears a purple paisley suit. Pinned all over him are dried sprigs of lavender, green carnations, and pink and purple pansies. He smiles at me, and his teeth are yellow and crooked. He sits on a velvet arm chair. Behind him is a portrait of a little boy. It’s a portrait of the little boy I wish I still was. If only the monster would leave my closet, I thought I would still be him. The monster offers me a seat beside him, and I take it. I look up at my younger self, and in the background I see a monster. But I don’t see a monster made of fear or shame, that hides in closets and rots. I see a monster made of flowers and fresh leaves, who bloomed with me and was watered by my tender effeminate heart. I look at the monster by my side, who silently smiles at the ground. He has lost all his leaves, and his flowers have all withered. But after everything, he is still here. I offer him a drink. He smiles wider as his eyes meet mine. For the first time since the 5th grade, a small ray of sunshine comes up from my chest. A little purple pansy blooms from the top of my monster’s head, and I fix him a cosmopolitan. I sit in the closet with him and glow.