I want to know what love is. 

There’s a place within me where sun grasses grow from damp wood, a small pocket of sunlight at the bottom of a marsh. I wander through sticky things, fluffy things floating around me in the heavy heat—dandelion seedlings, spider web threads, translucent wings flashing indigo, and monarchs fluttering low to the ground in search of fruity milkweed. But there’s also nightcrawlers burnt to a crisp. And poison hemlock clutching the shadows. And goldenrod being choked out by the guard rail. I step around smashed glass on the side of the road glinting like emeralds. I almost want to touch it, lick away the blood. The muggy air becomes laced with exhaust from a passing truck that pulls over to the side of this hometown road. The wind picks up. The air turns cooler. And a dark storm cloud inches its way across the sun, blotting out the heat, however briefly. I eye the truck, lingering by the curb. 

All I know is what love is not: a black snake, up ahead, coiled in silence.

​I’m out walking and crying for my friend’s loss and about how hard it was for her to watch her sister slowly disappear, and how the last time I saw my friend, when we had dinner in New York with industrial chic tables and large glasses of wine, she said, we treat animals better than we treat the dying, and all I think about is death: when I wake up, when I fall asleep, when I’m working, and I know what she means and I cry for myself and for all the losses around me, and the people driving by must wonder what’s wrong with me, if they look up from their own problems—and why should they?—and I turn into Lakota Oaks, the conference center that’s going to be a school but used to be a monastery, and you can see the monks’ graveyard at the top of the hill from the long beautiful pond around which I now walk the remaining stations of the cross, an unbeliever amidst the incomprehensible universe, and I think: the universe is big enough to hold my grief without getting hurt itself. I don’t have to carry it all, and the man who was running the trail in the opposite direction passes me again, saying, beautiful day, and it almost is.

On my birth announcement, my mother wrote my full name in green ink next to a black and white infant photo of my disembodied head. My two middle names are those of my maternal and paternal grandmothers, since my parents did not want to choose one and offend the other. At the bottom of the announcement, my mother has written “She is a doll!”

I’m in the process of remaking my baby book. Sometime in the 1980s, my mother collected all the old family photos she had and distributed them into adhesive albums representing each of my brothers’ and my respective childhoods. By the late 1990s, “scrapbooking” had become a verb in the English lexicon. Craft stores exploded with scrapbook supplies, and it was announced that everybody’s old picture albums with the sticky-back pages were slowly poisoning our family photos. Our matte and glossy prints needed to be rescued from these toxic books and preserved in acid-free, lignin-free environments before the images disappeared completely! My baby book is one such time bomb.

As I use a piece of dental floss to carefully extricate the photos from the book to remount them in an archival safe album, I’m getting increasingly irritated at my deceased mom for her practice of closely cropping the photos around the people. The book is full of imperfect circular photos and little people-shaped cutouts, leaving unseen any possible contextual information in the background that might create a fuller picture of my life, such as a house we lived in or an exterior landscape. She wrote notes in the margins such as “In the house on the golf course” or “On a trip to Lake Powell,” but I question the usefulness of any of those identifiers without the visuals that would have given them meaning. It’s frustrating to try to reconstruct my own history when I can just see the corner of a sofa or the toes of someone’s foot next to me, toddler-sized, on the floor. 

I want to be grateful to my mother just for making the baby book. I should be content to have these photos of me at different ages, some including her, my brothers, and our pets. As far as I know, there is only one photo that was ever taken of my entire nuclear family, and thank goodness, she has not cropped that. It is a 2x3 color print of me in a baby stroller with my brothers squatting on either side of me, and my mother and father are standing behind me with their hands on the stroller. My mother is looking at the camera, my father and my brothers are looking at me, and I am looking at my oldest brother, who is making me smile. It appears to be a casual, pleasant family moment. I have no memory of my father, who died when I was a baby, so images and stories are all I have to go on. My mother always painted a rosy picture of him as I was growing up, and it would be many years before I would learn that what was going on in our lives was anything but harmonious.

Apparently, my father’s sister knew there was discord between my parents, but she loved them both and chose not to take sides when they battled. When I asked my aunt for more of the details that had always been muddied for me, she said in her slow and gentle way, “Sometimes two people just aren’t meant to be together, you know? What’s important is that we remember the good, and with a breath of kindness, we blow the rest away.”

I can see in the picture now that my mother and brothers seem to form a protective triangle around my stroller, while my father is off to the side, just one hand on the handle. If my mother had cropped this photo, it’s possible only his hand would be left. Perhaps her penchant for cutting out the backgrounds of photos was her breath of kindness, erasing any visual cues that would tattle on the pain. By cropping and saving the people, she was choosing to keep the focus on the good.

Probably she was just trying to fit more photos on the page.  

“Literary Mimesis; or Plagiarism Pays.” Karen Craft. Product Description: It’s only cheating if you get caught. We’ve never been caught. What we do is you. We do your style. You send us sample copies of papers you have actually written in the past. (We require a minimum of 5 papers and two weeks to plan our approach). Ideally, please and thank you, send us your packet four to six weeks in advance of your essay’s due date, adjusting accordingly for difficulty and length requirements. We charge 0.09 USD per word ($450 for a 5,000w. paper). Our employees are frustrated, MFA holding novelists sick of rejection on the open market who’ve made a nice living for themselves in this peculiar industry catering to lower-level undergraduates— those from money/of money/with money (to burn) at elite public and private American universities. These people, our “fixers,” possess an uncanny ability to sound like you, fast, getting you the grade you need while saving you valuable party time that would otherwise be wasted in writing papers. We scrupulously avoid even the hint of foul play, hiding all misbehavior from schoolmarmish professors.

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If you’re a D student, we will make you sound like a D student. We save you time writing papers you don’t want to write, WE ARE NOT MIRACLE WORKERS. Plus, consider, lowkey and just straight up FR: if you are a D student and we turn in an A paper for you that kind of, like, um, ya know, defeats the whole purpose of our service. It’s like some scumbag election fraud specialist who deserves all he gets in terms of fines and punishments and punitive reparatory measures measured out to the final inch and centimeter deciding to stuff six hundred fake ballots in one mailbox as if the people picking up the early voting would take this and nod, ‘sounds good, looks like 600 voters do live at this address.’ Idiot. We are not idiots. 

Here’s a two-pronged, AB sample from one of our best, ‘007,’ writing for the aforementioned D student on the following topic: The Secession Crisis during the American Civil War. Look and see for yourself how effortlessly 007 is able to sound like a student who barely passes via two distinct styles: first, the classic jackass frat moron and, in the B sample, the over-eager virtue signaling present-imprisoned speech puritan. 

*Option C included for the rarely ordered but elite-pricing ‘true F’ paper. 

1. “The North was, like, nah, dis bullshit, yeah? That the South was, like, bein’ all unconstitutional and shit, yu-heard? Like, peep this, did we the people, the United States of America make somethin poppin or no? Did we all agree we be ride and die no matter what back in 1776 or no? The North was like, nah, hole up! Yeah, of course, you make a country, you make a Union, yo, for the purpose of being together forever, like a marriage and no, I mean no one, nah, gets married while at the same time being like we probably gon get divorced. And so the North was obviously tight in their arguments. The South did not, nah, never, they had no right to do like they done did.”
2. “Within current paradigms of historiographical analysis a propos the rebellion of patriarchal, sexist and racist slaveholding white men what is often unfortunately overlooked is the intersectional and overt sexism and oppression of female-identifying citizens in the Northern United States of America. Abraham Lincoln is patient zero in this regard. If they, Lincoln, really cared about equality and egalitarianism why, in the wake of their belated Emancipation Proclamation regarding of African descent African-Americans in America following the anti-pacificism, potentially pandemic seeding protest at Antietam did they not also (politically) emancipate female-identifying citizens? We can sadly see the portends of this gross oversight during the entitled white cisgender toxic male revolt of late 1860, early 1861.” 
3. “So, huh, the war. Civil. Kay. I, my TA, Jenny, bro, right, amirite tho? I remember her saying last week son it was like in the 1830s no wait the 1380s. Prof, she was also talking about hitting the club all weekend w/ her boyfriend Chad at the club. Also TBH I was on the bong a bit too much the last few days and my dog ate all my edibles, so…but don’t worry it’s all good. Okay. Abra-hammered Lincoln (get it?) once upon a time…”
   
   

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You turn away from the screen. You half-shrug. Time for a cliché to cut the tension, guaranteed to make everyone grunt and shake their heads in pseudo-profound melancholy. This has happened before, you begin, it will happen again. Suddenly she’s shaking your arm, yelling at you to shut up. Who cares about before, who cares about again? She screams. It’s happening to my sister, damn you. It’s happening right now. Everyone squirms. Everyone glares at you, as though you had flown the plane, had pulled the trigger, had dropped the bomb that pulverised her sister’s neighbourhood in a land far enough away that no one really cares, even when - well, even now. All over the world, someone is shaking a sputtering stranger, screaming, it’s happening to my sister, damn you. It’s happening right now. ​

Here are the fuming chairs of a round table made rectangular by gilt-edged name-plates. Here is the world that promises sanctuary to strangers like me, that promises to live and die by the truth. Here are the words that arrest you, first when this world makes that promise and then when it breaks that promise. Here is a pen, announcing and denouncing things, until the fingers holding it are twisted in the darkness by shadows with muffled footfalls. The pen is your pen, the fingers are your fingers, but you cannot / will not / must not tell the story thus; so you say instead: here is the pen that ... The pen stops, hovers over a blot for one flicker of the guttering candle, then rises and moves away from the page. A massacre vanishes from history. ​