Peanut butter on whole wheat, no jelly

When I stay home sick from school as a child, sometimes sick but other times not, I make myself a peanut butter sandwich and eat it on the floor in front of the television next to my dolls. I animate them in erotic fashion. My mom doesn’t let me have Ken dolls so I only have Barbie and Ariel. I make Barbie and Ariel rub against each other as they wear their sexiest dresses. I always spread too much peanut butter on my sandwich, and I imagine a curl of blond doll hair becomes stuck to the peanut butter. I choke on the thick peanut butter as it melts and joins with the imagined hair in my mouth, now too full to open. I breathe through my nose.

Chocolate milkshake

On Saturdays, my sister and I ride our bikes with my dad. I don’t enjoy heading out into the hot sun at 8:00AM on the weekend and I fear running into someone from school but don’t want to hurt my dad’s feelings. As a treat, we stop by the gas station before we head home after riding through the desert. He buys us each a chocolate milkshake from the dispenser by the bathroom. I can hardly keep the thick, creamy concoction down in the 100+ degree heat, but I never think to tell him I don’t want the milkshake after a long bike ride, to bring up my lactose sensitivity.

Bologna sandwich, dry

My first boyfriend who isn’t a cartoon animal lives across the main road so we walk or ride bikes to meet each other after school. This makes us sound younger than we were. He loathes me but I’m too naïve and inexperienced to differentiate loathing from loving. He asks me to pop a pimple on his back. He says his mom used to do that for him. My first brush with non-familial intimacy. I’m repulsed but do it anyway. One day on our walk, he breaks down and sobs, incoherently tells me I used to be like you and that I remind him of this.

He offers to help me lose weight. We don’t have access to a gym so he has me work in his mother’s backyard in the midday southwestern sun, pulling weeds from the dirt. When I come inside from my chore, my back and arms are purple with sunburn, plum skin grotesque against my lemon-lime striped bikini top. For lunch, he prepares me what he considers a diet meal of ingredients pulled from his mother’s fridge: a round slice of bologna between two pieces of white bread, no condiments. He demonstrates how to press a paper towel to the meat to absorb any excess juice. The color palette haunts me: the purple-pink flesh of that bologna slice pinned against bread.

Slice of deli turkey with mustard

After school, instead of the entire bag of Doritos with two Ding Dongs I’d down a year or so prior, at seventeen I eat a single slice of turkey with yellow mustard. I know the mustard has few calories so I treat myself, allow as much as I want, eating it like it’s a main course. Afraid my mom might notice my recent weight loss, I crumble the edge of a cracker onto the placemat left in my spot at the kitchen island for her to find when she gets home from work. I leave little tableaus like this around the house: food scraps as evidence of eating, my backpack and textbooks arranged in the living room as if I’ve been studying and not staying home sick from school. My estimation of a functioning young adult. If anyone notices, they don’t say anything.

Beef Stroganoff

Once I live with my partner, I try to cook dinner. I never learned to cook, only to eat or not eat. I try to make beef stroganoff, a meal I remember my mother making when I was a child, only I’m too impatient to use many ingredients. I don’t sauté onions and we don’t have many spices. I was disgusted by the dead cockroaches I found in the kitchen cabinets when we moved in and refuse to store anything there, so I buy and assemble a small storage hutch for our plates and cups, piling layers on top of unnecessary layers around me instead of tidying up what’s already there. I use the frozen Schwann’s pre-portioned beef my mother gives me when I visit home, and for a sauce I mix an entire container of sour cream and blobs of butter in the single pan we own. It tastes good to me, salty, though it looks limp and one-note on our plates.

When we break up after five years, my ex becomes angry with me and writes whore across the white front of the hutch with a Sharpie. My mother comes to our place to help me clean out the last of my things, and before she arrives, he smashes the hutch to pieces with a hammer and throws the pieces in the dumpster so she won’t see what he’s scrawled there. I move back home. I’m never really hungry, until I’m so hungry that I stop at a drive-through on the way home and eat tacos and burgers in my car while parked in the lot down the street before joining my parents for another dinner, already full but still wanting.

Soma Café, Phoenix

The only time I live alone—no roommate, no partner, no parents—my apartment is a few blocks from a healthy foods café that no longer exists. They list the calories next to each item on the glowing menu. Everything is clean and uncomplicated, no calculations required. The veggie wrap with hummus and the turkey cranberry roll have the least number of calories, so I alternate ordering these for dinner. I can’t afford the apartment which I’ve signed the lease on during a sales promotion, and don’t have a kitchen table, so I eat my wrap or roll while perched in my bed. I know none of this can last since I’ll have to move within the year, and the café will close down too, but for a span of time I feel full.

For a long time, I thought about Ruth every time I saw a body of water. She was wearing pink shorts and a lavender t-shirt. It was the first time I noticed that she even existed, and there she was. Face-down at the bottom of the deep end of my backyard kidney-shaped pool. I thought she was a doll; her body was so small under eight feet of water. I turned back to the large party of other high-schoolers and their parents on the deck, not realizing that I had seen the body of a friend’s four-year-old sister. How long did I look away? How many crucial minutes passed before another of our friends saw her body too, only this time seeing the truth? What would have happened if my brain had made the connection, and I had been the one to leap off the deck, diving into the pool? Could I have saved her?

My mother doesn’t remember this, but as a teenager, I used to go swimming late at night in our pool. It was heated, and the moonlight, the lights in and around the pool made it glow. When the night air got chilly, steam would rise from the water. Even after Ruth drowned, I swam with her ghost. I found out later that my father would sit out on the screened-in back porch, watching me from the shadows. This is how I know he loves me, in his own way—hidden in the dark of night so that I couldn’t see his emotions.

When I went off to college, my dad warned me about gaining weight. As a result, I went on a diet my freshman year, eating salads from the salad bar, apples, and drinking Slim-Fast shakes. When I told him I’d lost eight pounds, my dad said, “Well, you could stand to lose five more.” And when I did, he came to see me at school and as soon as he saw me, he said, “Well look, it’s Kate Moss! You look like a little waif that’s going to blow away.” The message that I got was that nothing was good enough, I would never win. I would never measure up.

That first year of college, I read Louise Glück’s poem, “The Drowned Children.” Memorizing the dark words, I let their ghostly rhythm spill off of my tongue, out of my lips, and into the air to release their spirits with my breath. I tried to come to terms with my long-held guilt. I imagined Ruth in the water’s “manifold dark arms.” When I read the words,

What are you waiting for

come home, come home, lost

in the waters, blue and permanent.

I felt a sense of deep peace, like a shadow passing over my face on a sweltering day. A respite. Relief. Maybe she just needed to go home.

Then, the summer after my junior year, I worked in the Admissions Office on my college campus, and I would go swim laps in the indoor pool after work. Trying to wash away my heartbreak after the end of my first relationship, I did the breaststroke, counting each lap until I reached twenty-five. My body was tired, so very tired, but the swimming refreshed my dry soul, even if just for those moments. It was the healthiest thing I did for myself that summer.

I remember the day towards the end of the summer when they emptied the pool to clean it, and without those cleansing breaths, I sunk deeper into my undiagnosed depression. Then, in mid-August, my dad called with the news that my Aunt Carol had died of a heart attack while swimming in a pool in L.A. She was fifty-two. I imagined her heavy body feeling weightless, peaceful at last. I felt a part of myself die with her, even though I’d only met her once. I’d always related to her, when my father looked at my body and told me that if I wasn’t careful, I would become fat like his sister. As I would soon discover, I already had her bipolar genes, so it seemed inevitable that I would have other physical traits. The weight struggles, the health problems, the lifetime of being misunderstood, the emotional rollercoasters, were mine and hers, and they died that night.

It’s been nearly thirty years since Ruth drowned, over twenty since Aunt Carol died, and now I’m at the point where I don’t like to swim. While I used to love feeling submerged, I don’t even dip my toes in. I can’t remember the last time I was in a pool, or even in the ocean at the beach. I stay on land. It’s been a gradual slipping away into fear over the years, as I’ve moved into motherhood. There’s more than just fear—there’s deep shame. As my father predicted, my body has spread over time. My thick pale thighs hardly see the light of day. I loathe bathing suits. I cover up—I hide. And maybe if I don’t swim, I’ll never drown.

At the lake every Labor Day weekend, I sit on the dock, wearing a billowy caftan, floppy hat, and large sunglasses. I watch my young son swimming, splashing in the water, and I hold my breath. If he were to go under, I wonder how fast I could move to retrieve his body from the lake. I imagine my own screams, locked in my throat. I picture the smallest of caskets, a funeral, feeling the rest of myself dying, my body drowning in the watery depths of depression, and how I would blame and blame and blame.

I am fourteen. In Grenada. Up in St. Patrick County. Visiting from my home of Trinidad for a week. Visiting my mother who, for a year, I have not seen.

I am fourteen, visiting my mother’s birth country. Where she has planned a festive reunion. A week’s holiday together for all her left-behind children.

I am fourteen, permitted this trip. After my father pounded the centre-table he then flipped. Permitted after my father slammed down the phone on my mother’s long-distance call. Permitted, after my father yanked the cord out the wall. Permitted after my father threatened his daughters with his fists. And warned we not going nowhere at all.

I am permitted this trip after my over six foot tall, construction foreman, girlfriend-spending-all-his-salary father relent. Permitted to see my mother after my father curse his children and yuh-fucking-modda vent.

I am permitted, finally, to see my mother again after my foaming-mouth father examines my two younger sisters and my tickets for the plane. Examines the stapled papers for terrorising hours and days. Upside, downside, in every single way. To make sure they contain no secret keys. No discrete visas allowing us to exit the Caribbean bowl. Making sure we stay under his empty-cupboard roof’s control.

My father making sure we cannot board an international Liat or BWIA flight. My father making sure we cannot go to Brooklyn where Smiley, my mother, now resides.

My father making sure that we cannot go to New York City, unbeheld. To that cold country my mother lives in now after she secretly fled.

After my mother secretly told a thirteen-year-old girl she’d be alone in this world. To lovingly make me prepared. So she said. After my mother left her three daughters in Trinidad with the man who she feared would take her life. After my mother left me at 13 to mother an 11-year-old and an eight-year-old near catatonic child.

Now, I am here in Grenada. Here in the isle where my mother left her first child. Here in the country where my mother abandoned her first baby. Here, visiting the village in which this first child still lives. The parish where she, with an aunt, resides. Here, meeting an unknown older sister for the first time.

Here we are, all five. Each pregnancy with which my mother was fertilised. Including the baby aborted just in time. Another daughter conceived in this isle. All five. Together in the place that sprouted such a mother we have to survive.

And I – while the first priorly-unknown daughter is being maligned, while my new older sister is being deemed evil, bitter, and full of spite – drift over to the hill to take in one of Grenada’s most famous sights.

From this distance, I cannot hear the last daughter’s whine. The last daughter regressing to babyhood with the mother for whom she pines.

With my back turned to the rest of the excursion, I cannot see the third daughter’s anxious, flitting smiles. Wanting to be mummy’s favourite, while Smiley ignores her first unloved, silenced child.

While Smiley cuddles the last. And gossips with the third who is eager to agree with everything her mother asks. Lest they, too, be forced into the iron mask. Of unfavoured daughter.

All while the unborn foetus, dealt the earliest desertion from our mother, is tasked with having no face, no name, no claim to a future. Bound only to her mother’s past.

And I – dressed in all denim my mother shipped to her barrel children, bounding care in a cask – step away from the jovial family group. The family troupe who boarded Cousin Ashley’s bus early this morning for his escorting of all of us. Up, round, and through Grenada’s must-see destinations. Sites of familiarity, nostalgia, newness, and recognition for my mother and all her visiting cousins. Play cousins from their shared childhood my mother returned home to see.

The real reason for my mother’s trip from Brooklyn happening to be not wanting to miss out on the gathering of her England, Canada, U.S. scattered family. Bringing her children together an added amendment after a cousin inquired, and what bout yuh pickney, Smiley. As this cousin laughingly tells me in our holiday verandah filled with family. Generations renting vacation houses on a hill whose name issues this collective’s command, Happy.

And the noise and the rum punch jokes and the cigarette smoke of my mother’s cousins is getting to me. So, I step away. To examine the hill my textbooks say is called Carib’s Leap. The hill my soul remembers in agitation, anger, and sorrow deep. The hill over which my remembering spirit shudders, dreams, and weeps.

Finally in Grenada for myself to see. I stand on the hill that witnessed jumpers leap into the open-armed sea. The hill that saw jumpers fly over its steep 340 years before I appear at its ledge. In this town of Sauteurs. Named by the plundering French who made them flee. Named jumpers for these indigenous people who came before me.

I stand on this inherited shelf, peering into the wealth of blue who received undeafeated troops. And families. My Kalinago ancestry. On Carib’s Leap. The hill that keeps hold of their screams, their flails, their dives, their lives. Their dignity.

I am fourteen, here to stand on the cliffside hill from whence Carib Kalinago arms flailed. Here in the town of Sauteurs to see where my mother was born and raised. And all the mothers who before her came. And the first mother, who before me comes. Today.

The first mother watching eyes pressed right up in my space. In my taken aback face. In my who-is-this-looking-directly-into-and-at-me line of sight. In my field of vision where she is so close to me I can see the whites surrounding her jet-black pupils intently, silently focused.

And the locus of any control I wield slips. And in my swift horizontal tilt, I realise it is bogus to believe it is only me who longed to see. Only my desire that drew me. To Carib’s Leap. From whose rocky, beach-washed feet, she rise.

This mother mother mother mother. The first. And extends her hand to right my gravitational confusion. Extends her come-with-me head inclination. To invite, to guide, to walk astride. To provide me with sight. And answers to my questions. Into what my spirit feels. But my witnessing must now for itself see.

As I turn now to walk, and follow upon the first daughter-deserting mother heels.

Before she was a girl, she’d been an elephant. She wasn’t supposed to remember that, but somewhere in the reincarnation system, there’d been a glitch. Her memory had come with her. Now nothing in this life could satisfy, as she had a whole other one to forever measure it against. When she was an elephant, she remembered longing to be a girl, as they seemed to have things better overall. Now after an excruciating stretch in this human body, she wasn’t so sure. The past held a promise of a better future, but this present seemed eternal and fixed.

It had been a hunter and his hunger for ivory that ended her life as an elephant. Now it was a man and his greed for her body that made her life as a girl just as precarious and intolerable. What she’d done to deserve male lust stalking her as prey across two lifetimes, she was sure she didn’t know. She was determined now that the ending would not remain the same.

She wouldn’t be conquered, she wouldn’t be owned, and sold in parts—not when given a second chance. Her soul had stayed intact for a purpose. Freedom lingered just beyond the barred windows of her current cage, a shed in the man’s backyard, so like the one her elephant body had inhabited after it shuddered its last breaths and collapsed with seeming finality upon the dusty earth.

Her skin, a cracked and rough grey, was now a smooth and soft brown. Yielding yet resilient like tightly coiled springs.

The hunter had not allowed for a fair fight. He’d followed her first in his jeep, built for the terrain, and then on foot. He stalked her for some time from a distance before positioning his rifle just so and aiming for her wide, unprotected back as she bathed herself. She remembered the quiet. She remembered the peace. She wondered how long he watched her before firing the shot that brought a life full of beautiful possibilities to an abrupt end. If he’d contemplated what all came before that moment for her and what all could have come after had he changed his mind; if he spared even a sliver of thought for how she deserved to live and flourish for herself rather than die and be used for his pleasure. The feeling of the bullet penetrating her, the burning and tearing sensations, the slow agony, the merciless pressure, the shock building into horror, the pain, the fear—it had come coursing back through her every nerve ending the first night in the man’s shed. His ugly face looming in the darkness, the weight of his knees, his hot breath so close, the terror of today’s brutal reality and the fear of tomorrows with no hope.

She’d been on a bus with her high school debate team when the man began following them, first in his car and then on foot at the gas station rest stop. She’d never forget the music that played that day now, echoing for eternity—the explicit lyrics, the pounding bass, the cacophony of her classmates’ voices singing along—imprinted upon her soul as the last moments of her freedom and innocence. Just like the man’s fingerprints were tattooed into her flesh now as the enduring bruises of her imprisonment and all he’d taken from her since.

But today, as he stumbled into her shed, he was intoxicated and she could smell weakness on him. Vulnerability emanated from his pores intermingled with bourbon. His foot caught on a crooked plank that he usually knew to sidestep, and he tripped. It was now or never.

She reared back and charged at his fallen figure with terrifying speed, the hardest part of her skull focused on the point between his eyes and her nails outstretched and curled, ready to pierce his flesh. She’d been attacked from behind last time, so her curved sharp tusks had been useless as weapons and were preserved instead as the hunter's prize. This time, the man would know defeat. She felt a drunken rush of power surge through her when his face contorted in fear at her fast approach. There was nothing very intimidating about her slight frame. She was slender with a doughy tummy, all pointy knees and elbows, where her skin was the darkest brown and dry like puckered raisins. But there was no time to concern herself with how he could be afraid of a girl like her. She rammed her head into his and his eyes rolled back. She reversed and stampeded him again. Her strength swelled as he lay crumpled flat on the ground. She could feel ribs and bones cracking beneath her tremendous feet as she trampled and stomped with a delight she hadn’t felt in years.

It was only then that she caught her reflection in the small, dirt splattered mirror above him. She was enormous and grey, her ears billowing around her head like sails in a warm breeze.

She coiled him up in her trunk, lifting and slamming his near lifeless body to the ground. Over and over she did it, to be certain. She released him more out of curiosity than anything and waited. As he staggered up to meet her, the look in his eyes as wild and frenzied as it was afraid and hopeless, she allowed her tusks the victory they’d been denied before. Dark red, almost purple, flecks of him freckled her grey shell, but she plowed on. She watched the man shudder his last breaths as his body collapsed to the earth below him. A translucent, dark puddle of his blood formed around him, sparkling with his sweat like diamonds.

She trotted out into the sunlight, letting it bathe and bake her tired armor. As she settled herself in a position comfortable enough for rest, she raised her majestic head and looked all around her for any potential predators. Reborn, she closed her eyes and slept.

This story was originally published in Jellyfish Review and is an excerpt from TURMERIC & SUGAR: STORIES © 2021 by Anna Vangala Jones. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Thirty West. All rights reserved.

We stood around the bonfire, warming our hands at its glow. I could tell Samantha was fretting about something, but I didn’t ask, trusting her to tell us in her own time. I guessed it had something to do with the ropes Raj was handing out. “Pretend you’ve got to reach a drowning man,” Raj said as he gave each of us one heavy coil of coir. The roughness of the rope against my palms awoke butterflies in my stomach. I knew something that transpired tonight would involve digging.

When Raj turned away, Samantha dug an elbow into my side. The flickering light of the bonfire accentuated the concern on her face. “We were supposed to be hunting nocturnal butterflies,” she whispered. I fingered the rope’s coils like frets on a guitar. I was afraid of drowning in mistrust if I looked into her eyes. “He’s got to have some reason for the ropes,” I told her.

She glanced down at her rope. “I’m not digging this,” she said. “Better than drowning,” I said with a smile. She looked away from me, turning back toward the bonfire as Raj called for our attention once more. “Those of you who are wondering what this is all about,” he announced, “don’t fret. Tonight is indeed about hunting butterflies—but not as you thought.”

“Nocturnal butterflies have long been a scourge in our city,” he continued, striding back and forth in front of our group like a general. “These ropes have been donated by the city council, who send their regards for your courage tonight.” Courage? I wondered, beginning to fret. But I waited to hear more, nervously digging the outside edge of my boot into the dirt. I scanned the nervous faces around the bonfire. Everyone looked like they were drowning on dry land.

Raj tried to drown out our worry with visions of valor. “Tonight we will beat these butterflies into submission!” he roared. The bonfire danced as though activated by his courage. Samantha bravely raised her voice to ask, “But why ropes; why not nets?” Raj glared at her with eyes that could dig graves. “We don’t need that kind of fretting in our ranks.”

My fingers fretted the rope, but I gathered the courage to speak up. “What was that about the drowning man, then?” I asked. Apprehension dug away at my gut. “The butterflies,” Raj said, leveling his death gaze at me, “have metamorphosized again.” The rope jittered in my hands. The bonfire crackled.

And now we’re digging the trap, fretting it won’t be large enough. And now we’re setting more bonfires to lure the prey, drowning the darkness in light. And now the butterflies are coming, wind from their wings whipping the flames, and we can only hope the ropes will hold.

A noise wakes us at 2 a.m., and when we open the door to Zoi’s bedroom, rather than spotting the five-year-old tucked under blankets, Stefani and I are greeted by Zoi’s small, padded frame wrestling with her pink down jacket, for she must already be wearing three pairs of pants, six shirts, four sets of socks. A plum-colored magic eight ball sits on the floor. She surely knocked it off her bureau while hunting for clothes. Its bang on the hardwood is probably what roused us. This is the first time I have spent the night, and when Stefani informed Zoi of the sleepover after dessert, Zoi gave me the stink eye before she threw a pair of unused butter knives at the wall and stomped up to her room. It’s funny, since during dinner, Zoi told me the carbonara I prepared was the best spaghetti ever and asked for seconds. She even laughed when I pulled a face behind Stefani’s back. But presently, she freezes next to her stuffed backpack when we flick on her bedroom light. The scene looks ridiculous, the three of us standing there. I almost laugh until Zoi declares that she is taking all of her clothes and moving in with her father across town, and since I know that there is nothing I can say at this moment that will get me back in bed any sooner, I return the magic eight ball to its bureau perch, step into the dark hallway, and listen as Stefani patiently tells her daughter that nobody makes rational decisions in the middle of the night. I hear the rustle of fabric as she pulls layer after layer from the girl, much to Zoi’s frustration. Their voices rise, so I retreat to the living room downstairs and turn on the television. What they say above me I cannot decipher, but on the screen, I see that the network is airing 13 Ghosts, a black-and-white film I have not watched in probably 25 years. I am just in time for the early scene where the lawyer tells the married couple that they have inherited a new home, only that it is full of ghosts. When the couple try to chuckle off such a declaration, the lawyer turns serious. “They go with the house,” he says, stony-faced, before he leaves them alone to consider their future.

Dakota leans against the stop sign, hand outstretched flipping off driver after driver. Kids in backseats meet his eye, and he smiles, beckons them to join him. The ones that turn in their seats, heads popping up in the glass as the car retreats. These are his favorites. His fellow revolutionaries. They'll grow up remembering him—a scarecrow of capitalism. He is twelve years old and accepts his allowance in Bitcoin, taking Christmas gifts in other cryptocurrencies. Financial freedom is how you fuck with the status quo. Twenty-five cars pass before the sheriff rolls up. He doesn’t even roll down his window anymore. A flash of the lights, a blip of the siren, and Dakota walks off, already scrolling on his phone.

Dakota has bigger plans for the community pool. He loves walking through the neighborhood at night, street lights placed haphazardly. Their arms hanging over him like a scolding adult. He runs from pools of light to the shadows and back again, hopscotching on the cracked and gritty streets while the blue glow of TVs pulse in the corner of his eyes. He screams, chest tightening, waiting for the pulled-back curtains before slinking off. But here is the pool, surrounded by a chintzy eight-foot chain link fence. He vaults over it with the ease of youth, spray paint cans ratting in his jacket pockets. He loves how the little ball rattles around the inside of the canister. The spray comes out fast and irregularly, but the words are clear enough for a quick pic. Southfield sucks deez nuts. Stupid, unoriginal, but the challenge is complete. A few hashtags and he’ll go viral. Leave this wasteland behind.

Cameras everywhere. Infiltrating. Surrounding. Dakota walks through the high school hallways with an unfurled umbrella. He found this particular tactic on TikTok. As he approaches each corner, he flops the umbrella upward, blocking the camera and masking his movements. He hasn't heard of a revolution starting in school, but he is bent on becoming a #trendsetter. His classmates laugh and jostle the umbrella, cursing and calling him #lame. He flips them off and sneers into their phone cameras. Welcome to the fucking Revolution. Don’t say you didn’t know.

This lasts two days until the gym teacher stops him, the man's red face looming over the top of the umbrella fabric. Dakota jerks the umbrella back, but the man wrenches the material toward him. "Dude. Don't be an asshole," Dakota says, wishing he was in one of those karate movies, or an Avenger, whipping the metal of his umbrella across the man’s face. But, instead, he loses his grip and falls to the floor, the grit gathering on his palms. He lays there quivering, the teacher standing over him, saying in a low voice, “Get up now. Don’t make this a scene.” On the way to the office, the teacher's hand gripping his shoulder, Dakota dances and squirms for the cameras. Fist raised high. Flicking his hair out of his face, shouting, We want Freedom, We Want Freedom.

Senior year. Dressed in cap and gown. A concession for his mother. The night before, she promised him a two-drink maximum. And still, he witnesses her stumbling, falling into the lap of another father. Dakota has planned for this. Her failures have become his license to do something unbearably embarrassing. He’s thought of violence. An assault rifle hidden under his robes; a barrage of bombs left under the stage. But these thoughts leave him breathless, a bit giddy, frightened by how easily they come to mind. His anarchy arrives in softer forms. He wants them scared by his potential. But he hungers for change, too. He isn’t that fucked up. Not yet. So he waits until his name is called, waits until he has shaken the principal's hand, has gotten the required photo, his smile a little smirk he’s too proud of before flipping open the app he developed to coordinate with the school’s sprinkler system, the water splashing from the sky, the fire alarm ringing. He unfurls the umbrella secreted underneath his ropes and walks out the back gym door and into the gloaming.

CW: mental illness

- title taken from Science girl(@gunsnrosesgirl3) tweet on 25/10/2022

They say that no other whale can hear his 52Hz cries of solitude. The blue whale being heard at 10 – 39Hz; the fin whale being heard at 10Hz; they can all hear one another. No one can hear him. No one has ever seen him. We’ve just heard his elusive calls of soothingly lonely pleas. Some say he could be deaf. Some say there are others just like him; more than just one lonely whale, wallowing in 52Hz solitude. No one really knows, though, but we can still hear him. In the expanse of the ocean, away from the masses of schools of whales, no predators, no preys, no enemies, no friends, no family, no mate; just him, Mr Blue, Mr 52Hz, Blue 52.

Whale J35, also known as Tahlequah, is an Orca that has given birth to three calves now. Her second calf, her middle child, Tali, died almost immediately after being born. J35, in an unprecedented and unexpected display of motherhood and grief (and maternal grief) carried the lifeless body of her offspring for 17 days, across the ocean, until she felt that she had grieved sufficiently. Other maternal orcas in her pack helped her carry the hefty corpse when she tired of carrying the burden of grief.

When sperm whales tire, they commonly sleep for 15-to-20-minute power naps. Usually, they sleep upright (or longitudinally/vertically) with one eye open, usually very close to the surface of the water. This is usually done in their packs and looks somewhat like massive sacs of alien eggs, just waiting to be released. All whales sleep in this manner to keep their guard up, in case any predators attack them, but also because whales cannot breathe underwater.

Whales (despite living in the ocean), cannot breathe underwater. They usually come to the surface of the water every 20-to-90 minutes to breathe. How strange it must be to live in one world and breathe in another.

I lapse, usually every few minutes, into an intrusive thought. I wander, just below the surface of normalcy, to dwell on the intruding theory. I count…till 9…till 12…till 15. I do something elaborate with my fingers. I touch my chest (where my locket used to be), say a silent prayer. I do it once more. I do it thrice more. I come back up to the surface; for air, for sanity, to breathe.

Oh, how strange it is to live in one world and breathe in another.