Fire

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Fire” by Jacky Grey. Jacky (she/they) writes memoir, essays and criticism and lives in western Oregon. They won The Sewanee Review Nonfiction Contest judged by Alexander Chee. When they are not writing, they are working as an architect and get outside as much as possible.

---

1

Our home in Elgin Oregon was built in 1887. It didn’t have a foundation, and its walls were packed with newspapers. This construction was discovered at the same time as my habit of lighting matches and stuffing them into a knot hole in the paneling in my room. While remodeling, Father removed the wallboards and found a pile of burnt matches nested in the century-old newspapers.

The welts on my ass burned for a week.

I wasn't trying to catch the house on fire. I was banished to my room for being rebellious. I would lay flat on the wood and listen to my siblings and family below, eat dinner without me. Feeling sorry for myself, I hoarded the beauty of a single match in the dark room. I raged at my inability to be good and fumed as I let the match burn till my fingers flinched and let it go, or I would let it singe my skin and nail then toss it down the knot hole. It was a ritual, a flicker of power. I could hold in my hands something elemental and uncontrollable and extinguish it.

At that time in my life, I had other dangerous secrets. A man I loved was molesting and raping me. I loved him because he paid attention to me.

My childhood goal was to physically challenge and beat the boys my age in running, climbing, wrestling and similar. I had developed a bespoke understanding of feminism born out of my stepmother’s adoration of my dumb younger brother. My stepmother believed the Bible taught that girls were less smart, strong, and spiritual than boys, and that’s why God had set up men’s dominion over women. I was set on proving them wrong. A favorite Bible passage of mine was of Jacob wrestling the angel—if he could change God’s mind, I could change my stepmother’s. Our house was very Old Testament: doing your chores wrong could bring on a punishment you might not survive, like the chasm that swallowed the rebellious Israelites.

Bill started out as an ordinary forgettable adult, until he was interested in the gopher snake I kept as a pet and gave me a butterfly for my collection. He told me I was smart. He would let me sit in his lap during Bible study. He would let me run as fast as I could and jump up on him to give him a bear hug. I would squeeze my arms not able to close around him with all my might. He laughed and then would squeeze me back until my ribs smashed and my eyes lost focus and I couldn’t breathe. He asked me if it was too hard. I never said yes.

It was a spring evening after Bible study. It was warm but had recently rained, the yard was tall soft grass, and the driveway puddles were full of rainbow-topped water. Some men were standing and talking. I ran at Bill, surprising him. I jumped on him, excited and mischievous, and clung on like a spider monkey. As he constricted his arms, I felt loved, then scared, then panic, then dark. He had hugged me so hard I passed out. When he opened his arms, I fell off into the mud. I remember the taste of the gasoline-tinged water, the gravel in my hair—the men laughing at me. Bill picked me up. Being carried almost made me feel better about how embarrassed I was about being laughed at.

Bill put me in the shower with all my clothes on. I was still lightheaded and stumbled, so he took his clothes off and got in to help me.

He found ways to help me every week at church or Bible study. I began to try and avoid him.

I would climb to the top of a tree and hide—he was too big to climb the small branches, which would break. When I thought it was clear, I would come down and he would grab me, tickling me, saying “gotcha!” like this was just part of the game we played. He tickled me until I had an asthma attack, or I peed myself.

He would help me clean up and change my underwear.

If you are feeling anxious, I am too. I am not going to recount what being raped by an adult man when you are seven years old feels like. That is a door I don’t open. I know she’s in there, smothered face down into a bed and I won’t look. I remember what it feels like to be hunted and caught. Even at the time, I blocked it out.

I tried to get better at hiding. I wet the bed and burned things and couldn’t concentrate on my homeschool work or chores. I refused to comb my hair or wear shirts under my overalls. My parents tried to correct me with escalating punishments. The more they whipped me, the more feral I became. The more alone I became.

Telling them what Bill did to me was never an option.

When I was eight, we saw a black plume of smoke hundreds of feet tall. Its ash flakes tumbled into our yard. Father jumped in his truck and let me come with him to see the fire.

It was the old flour mill, which was being used as a furniture shop. The fire was too hot to put out. The water from the fire trucks evaporated before they hit the flames. The walls had burned away, and you could see the skeleton of the structure. On the upper floor, there was a claw foot bathtub. The steel must have protected the floor; it was the only spindly portion left. The tub swayed like a boat rocking in a soft tide above the shore of embers. I watched the wood buckle, and it splashed sparks down to the story below.

The kids in the neighborhood whispered that an intellectually disabled kid burned it down because he was being molested by the man who owned it. It was the first time I had ever heard the word molested—I understood it immediately. I thought of my secret matches. I thought of Samson, the strongest man in the Bible, chained to the temple pillars. He pushed them down and crushed his captors in his suicide. I thought of burning down the house with me in it. Fire was not hell—it was escape.

……………………………

In architecture, a desire line is an unplanned path made by the repeated erosion of traffic—the diagonal packed mud trail cuts across a courtyard rather than the sidewalk. My body has been used by others with such habit that I have mistaken it for desire.

Desire and pain are entwined feelings. Both can flash hot for microseconds then smolder out. I have very little shame that isn’t bound to touch, desire and pain. I am a geography of pain.

The same nerve and neural pathways carry electric pulses to the brain—my lover’s caress and Bill’s trespasses. Does my cunt crave fullness with such ferocity because when I was a child, I felt split open like a ripe stone fruit? Bill pressed me into the bed and cleaved me. He ripped me in two at the gash between my legs. My body and mind separated. Do I crave pain and oblivion when I fuck because this experience carved a path from my cunt to my mind, like wheel ruts compel your direction?

……………………………

At 28, I was again under a man against my will. I lay there like a seven-year-old. I rolled over when he told me to roll. As he raped me, my body had an orgasm. When he finished, I suggested we go outside to smoke a cigarette. A small fire was my escape.

I am afraid the monstrous things done to me have made me monstrous. I flinch away from intimacy worried it will kindle the memory of hot skin of men I didn’t want. I shy away from pleasure because when I cum, I remember being raped. Every time.

My skin blooms with the ink I pay others to etch, small controllable searing lines that map images of birds—free untethered creatures. I want my body covered in scars I make, not scars I survived. A quilt of barely survivable violences, stitched together by the hope that one day I will be loved.

One day I will see this mess as lovely.

2

Dear A,

As your stepmother, my not birthing you has spared you a measure of struggle in your life. I am not saying this to diminish the misfortunes your own heritage has handed you. I am saying I know your whiteness shields you from many dangers inherent to me. I am saying you are growing into a beautiful able-bodied, blonde, blue-eyed woman with fierce intelligence and a playful presence. My brown body, brown eyes, and slouched body are different than yours. There have been times that your adjacency to me and my brown body has put you at greater risk.

When you were 12, I was afraid you had appendicitis, and I took you to the emergency room. I was asked three times who I was to you. When we were checking in, they ushered you back, leaving me in the triage room. I was panicking because in my rush to the hospital, I forgot the piece of paper your mom had signed years ago to give me power of attorney, the only legal clout I have. I followed you back as confidently as I could act.

We were waiting for you to get an ultrasound; they opened the sliding glass door to your room and said, “I need to get a verbal that it is ok for you to be here.” It was unclear to which of us they were asking. I saw two pairs of black tactical boots under the window film strip that offered privacy from two to six feet off the floor. I knew those boots belonged to hospital security. We answered yes. I was imagining what might happen if they didn’t like how we replied, scrutinizing my tone and yours. Each person in the hospital treated me as someone who they might need to intervene between us for your safety.

When I ran away from my fundamentalist family as a teenager, I thought I had escaped. I thought I was liberated from being the property of men. Free from a future of being a good wife in an arranged marriage, submissive to my husband and all other men. Things are not so different out here.

America is raging a war of control over our bodies. Our bodies fertile territory to be won in conquest. The battle lines reach inside us.

This rampant entitlement and pervasive abuse brought forward with the #MeToo movement, with Trump’s election, with Brent Kavanaugh’s confirmation, with the relentless silencing and discrediting of women who have the audacity to speak out about crimes done to our bodies has authorized men and boys to vandalize us. Your body can be taken from you too. How do I prepare you to live with joy in a world like this?

……………………………

When I first became your parent, I was terrified. I was worried the superfund site of my childhood would seep into yours. The responsibility and gift of you compelled me to face my past in a way I didn’t know I was capable of. I learned how to parent the both of us. Loving you is teaching me how to love myself.

When you were six, I had an impossible choice. I loved you more than I loved anything in my whole life, and I could not be with your mother. She didn’t want to be with me. You were starting to notice the cracks and fissures in our constructed family. I was failing to hold it all together. I was prioritizing making it look like the right family on the outside at great cost. This outward-facing impeccability was to ward off comments about how raising a child in a homosexual household was abusive or unnatural—I felt we had to be perfect. I didn’t want you to have a broken home. I grew to realize I was showing you how I debased myself. When I moved all my belongings into a storage unit and took up an air mattress on a friend’s office floor, it felt like dying.

……………………………

When you were seven, I was raped. I did not know the man. I did not know where I was. The next morning, he gave my body back when he was done with it. I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t know how to live in myself anymore. I didn’t think I could.

I loaded my .357 Magnum and counted, one, two, three, four, five brass and lead answers, exits, from a struggle I did not feel capable of bearing. I was hungry for a void, I wanted to be nothing, to erase it all.

Then I remembered you and how you still believed I was the tooth fairy. How you would be waiting Monday afternoon for me to pick you up from school. You would be waiting to tell me how your weekend with your mother was. You tried to bridge and weave the two halves of your life back together by telling me everything you had done while we were apart. I thought of how my disappearance would rip a hole so big you would bleed from that wound for the rest of your life—and I would be responsible for putting it there. I put the gun away, and I set myself to be your rock, even when I was shattered.

Four weeks later, it was a beautiful July morning, and there were dozens of Sphinx moths coating the CMU blocks of the Albertsons, attracted to the fresh paint. We had stopped on our way to school to get a bagel and orange juice. A tradition for the mornings when we got out of the house early enough to spare the short bike ride and eat them on the bridge over the Amazon creek.

We had moths on our handlebars as we unlocked our bikes. I was delighted by the beauty, equally warmed by your joy and the heat of the sun. I felt maybe life could return to normal. Then from behind us, I heard him. He called after me, called after you. The dull, lazy voice of my rapist stopped my heart. I did not know his name, but he knew yours. I did not turn to face him at all. He knew your name, he walked close enough he could have reached out and touched you, reached out and taken you. I was filled with panic.

……………………………

When we were at the playground, I saw the children playing on the swings and slides. I counted them as they raced past, one, two, three, four, five, six. One in six women will be raped sometime in their life. One, two, three, four. One in four girls will be sexually abused before they turn 18. Five, six…

Every 73 seconds an American is sexually assaulted.

Every 73 seconds is a prey’s victory. A respite. This time it wasn’t me again and more importantly, it isn’t you. I can hold my breath for 73 seconds if I have to. Sometimes I feel I hold my breath every time you are away from me. When I do not have the opportunity to throw myself between you and the world, between you and who might take your body. I know your long golden hair and blue eyes will not protect you, both of us are below men, both of us prey. I know the police cannot protect me, cannot protect you. There is no justice for crimes against the bodies of women. I am terrified to admit my powerlessness.

I count, one, two, three, four, five, six. I pray four and six aren’t your numbers, anyone just please not you, darling. Please not me. I feel ashamed that I pray for another sacrifice rather than safety for all. I hate that my prayers are directed to the mercy of those that would take our bodies without consent. I know this responsibility is not solely mine to carry, it is not up to us to assure our safety. We were never responsible for the danger. I do not want to tell you to be careful, because I do not think it will make a difference. I cannot promise you safety.

……………………………

Legally, I am as substantial as a ghost to you. No judge would say that our relationship deserved to be protected, that you are my kin. We don’t get to decide when or how much time we get to have together; we get to decide what to do with the time that we are given. Together we learned how to find joy in the moment-— you learned quicker than me. We listened to the song Home by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros on repeat. July when you were six, we drove around with the windows down, and you tried to whistle with the chorus but couldn’t because you didn’t have your front teeth grown back yet. Ah, Home, let me go home, Home is when wherever I’m with you.

I hope I am Home to you.