I used to have nightmares about demons. Red-eyed monsters in my closet, under my bed, hanging in the shadowed corners of the ceiling of my bedroom. I’d wake up screaming, thinking they were still there, watching from the darkness. Waiting.Growing up in the church made it worse. Because they tell you an eternity of demons and…
It’s impossible to ignore a red flag when it trickles down your legs.
I was at a meeting in the office when I sensed the familiar stabs of a thousand tiny knives skewering my cervix. My inner thighs were sticky, and I knew I was living through a menstruating woman’s nightmare: bleeding through clothes and leaving biological imprints on boardroom chairs. The pain escalated, and my breath grew shallow as I felt the shredding of my uterine lining. I desperately tried to concentrate on the document in front of me. The staccato updates faded in the background as I focused on the only available anchor in that spinning room: my panicked inhales and exhales. This will pass, I told myself as I pretended to complete my notes while the executives shuffled out. I needed to deal with the bloody evidence still leaking underneath.
***
Some people invite you to their childhood homes, show you their memorabilia passed down through several generations, and point to faint pencil etchings on a door frame that mark the history of their growth. I can’t do that.
I grew up in the Middle East, the daughter of a Mediterranean and Eastern European pairing, and later came of age on Turtle Island, where I continue to live. My house contains no bequeathed trinkets or surviving mementoes from the many addresses I had. Instead, I carry the tales and beliefs I’ve collected along the way. They are my cultural inheritance.
***
The week-long hemorrhaging that arrived every month for the last five years, accompanied by dizzy spells, three-inch clots, and crippling abdominal pain, was nothing to worry about, said the family doctor. All women experience this; try stressing less, he suggested. Yoga perhaps, and some meditation? Longer walks will alleviate the pain.
The moon was my confidante, a constant companion on evening strolls. I diligently tracked her phases along with mine and repeatedly promised that by the time she renewed, I would feel restored—effervescent.
Months passed, and the closet and its contents shrank, along with my appetite. Despite a caloric deficit, my arms and hips inflated, and the dresses that fit comfortably weeks ago now suffocated my bloated belly. The mirrors in the house grew distorted, reflecting a shape I did not accept, so I took most of them down. I developed a habit of concealing my midsection with my hands, crossing them in front to cover the visible part of my unexplained pain, absent-mindedly tapping the area with my fingertips, and reassuring myself and the organs within that this, too, shall pass.
A sign of aging, said my doctor. Women entering their thirties experience reduced metabolic processing and rack up the pounds, paving the way for second chins and a loss of definition. This is life.
***
Where I was raised in the Middle East, the women living on my block regularly gathered in the communal garden, obscured from the roads by thick shrubbery and enclosed by sprawling grapevines. They convened at a large rectangular table, trading recipes, advice, and gossip while jointly prepping dinners before their husbands and children returned home.
Next to the main table was a small plastic kids’ table. The teen girls were given knives and peelers to help while the younger children ran around playing hide-and-seek, thieving sliced carrots and squinting from snacking on acetic grape leaves. Some evenings, a folding table was pulled out to make room for the husbands to enjoy the freshly ground and brewed coffee along with the rose water-scented desserts that had been made earlier in the day.
I tailed my mother whenever she joined the group, crawling under the women’s table to draw on the ceramic tiles with my chalk. The oilcloth above my head held the full spectrum of human emotion. Laughter, grief, excitement, worry, and pride poured over chopped parsley, diced tomatoes, and crushed garlic.
I loved the stories the women told as they rolled and stuffed cabbage and grapevine leaves, and stacked them into large pots. My little ears sponged up their facts of life, like the importance of gifting gold to girls and brides—a woman’s financial safety net that’s hidden in plain sight. Through their anecdotes, I understood that love was not blind; it sees the added pounds on a body and it leaves. You can’t get or keep a husband if you can’t keep your figure, chortled the women as they passed fresh figs around.
***
There is no yoga pose for a downward spiral.
In the wee hours, I was jolted awake by the twisting sensations in my belly and the loss of sensation in my lower extremities. The longer the numbness went on, the harder I meditated and sent prayers to entities I had no business summoning. The movement returned not long after, as I learned in time, but not fast enough to prevent fear and panic from setting in and wreaking havoc on my mind and body.
Once my composure returned, I’d pull the phone out from the nightstand and send an “I will be late this morning” email, then yank the blood-stained sheets off my bed to soak them and my hands in cold water.
Raw vegetables and most meats stopped adding nutritional value to my body, causing instead severe discomfort to my abdomen as the intestines shifted and contorted to pass what felt like knots down to my colon. But there was no relief. Neither my bowels nor my kidneys seemed to empty.
Advil became my sixth food group, with Costco-sized bottles stacked in the pantry. But what was meant to bring temporary relief brought further deterioration to my digestive tract after years of misuse. When I could no longer identify the source of the bleeding in the mornings, I called my doctor, sobbing. No, I couldn’t wait a few months to see if things improved; I wasn’t sure I could last the week.
***
The women in the garden seldom agreed on any matter, be it the suitability of thyme in a summer salad, the degree so-and-so’s child ought to pursue, the rankings of local vegetable vendors, or the performance of the current Minister of Interior Affairs. On one topic, though, there was no room for debate or alternative opinions: Children are a blessing—more than a blessing even—they are a necessary investment in one’s future.
They will be the ones to take you in when your knees weaken and your hips pop. They will fill you with their love and later of their little ones, gifting you a third act in life. Your daughters and your sons’ wives will ease your burdens. You’ll be taken care of by a village of your own making.
Of the children who were born and gone in one day, or the troubled ones who inherited prostrating illnesses, or the women whose neurosis and psychosis arrived when they pushed their babies out, they never spoke. Everything in life was a gamble, but choosing to be child-free was the riskiest one of all. It was an absurd notion: what was the legacy of those who leave nothing of themselves behind on this Earth? It reeked of ingratitude and disrespect toward those who fulfilled their natural role and were ready to pass on primeval wisdom.
***
The waiting area in the newly assigned gynecologist’s office was unlike any other I’d encountered. Next to the 3D models of the female reproductive system were jewelry stands with silver bangles and folded textiles, their price tags neatly dangling.
The consultation was brief; no examination or pap smear. She reviewed the data on my period tracking app that went back five years and suggested that I try a gluten/sugar/dairy/alcohol-free diet while ingesting herbal supplements prescribed through her exclusive vendor. Every month, four hundred dollars left my bank account in exchange for bottles of evening primrose, ginger root extract, and Diindolylmethane (DIM)—a supplement claiming to support estrogen regulation. After several months of faithful adherence to the regime, my skin was glowing, and I was half a pound lighter. But the monthly carnage persisted as the heavy bleeding remained unchanged and was accompanied by the piercing cervical pain that preceded the passing of sizable clots.
***
Traditional remedies were exchanged at the garden table to prevent and cure common illnesses. Wild thyme and sage, collected in the fields and dried, were miracle cures for most ailments. Pigeon foot was for men’s health, and raspberry leaves or fenugreek were for women.
Lingering sickness was a sign of personal weakness, a choice, and its evidence walked around the neighborhood. The man with the brown car got rid of his diabetes by eating salmon and rice for a year. The hapless engineering student lost fifty pounds in her second year of university and promptly received an offer of marriage. The butcher’s father walked home from the hospital after his heart attack and returned to work the next day. The secret of health, so said these supermen and women, was mind over matter. Control your thoughts, and your body will follow and become impervious.
***
Relief came with the onset of the pandemic and remote work. I was no longer worried about excessive bleeding in public or the possibility of fainting on the bus. My coping tools were close at hand: heating pads, the medicine cabinet, and the floor for the days when curling into the fetal position was necessary. The world was fearful, masked, and hidden behind Plexiglas partitions. A time when social distancing meant keeping a moose’s length between each other. As we swapped in-person gatherings for virtual contact and doom-scrolling, I, too, spent evenings snacking on comedy shorts and serving up “stay home” and “clap for healthcare heroes” messages. Between memes and funny dog clips, I happened upon a video by Amy Schumer describing an upcoming surgery to help with an illness. I felt my throat tightening as she listed the symptoms she’d been experiencing. I had to remember to inhale as I heard an itemized checklist of my afflictions. I recognized every single marker described and knew its address in my body.
“Hello, I think I have something called endometriosis. I googled the specialists in town who list that word on their site. Can you please help me get a consultation with one of them? Just send the referral. Please just do it.”
The voicemail I left my doctor led to a consultation with a new gynecologist four months later.
***
My all-girls school was across town and a world away from the conversations in the communal garden. An impenetrable, fenced-off fortress with a significant international student body, it prided itself on raising independent, spirited, and remarkable women. The charismatic principal, fully embodying those traits, used to drop in unannounced on our study groups, frequently reminding us that a good education opens many doors for us. “Be the wife of a CEO, be the CEO, or be both of those things at once. All of those choices are valid so long as they are yours,” she’d repeat.
***
The new gynecologist’s office was covered floor to ceiling with photos of him clutching freshly delivered newborns atop thank-you cards flashing words like miracle, dream, and complete. A figure entered, sizing me up yet hardly making eye contact. He gestured towards the examination table as he pointed to my arms, midsection, and the sides of my hips, “This looks like endo.” He left without explanation, returning a few minutes later with a nurse to assist him in collecting a pap smear. As my feet hesitated towards the stirrups, he told me he was also performing a biopsy. “I don’t like to tell people in advance so they don’t worry.”
My white linen dress was already pulled up and crumpled at my waist, and the cold speculum was inserted. I stared at the pictures of ethereal landscapes that were crookedly taped onto the ceiling, like a screensaver meant to distract you from the agony as chunks are carved out of you with no anesthetic. “It’s OK to scream,” said the nurse as I felt the second deeper, harrowing extraction. My eyes welled up, and I audibly cursed, but I had no energy left to scream. I’d spent the last decade muffling the cries of my viscera.
The nurse took me to a smaller room to clean up the aftermath of the unexpected procedure. She offered what she imagined to be a hopeful tidbit: Endometriosis can disappear after childbirth.
I stumbled out of the clinic in a daze, legs apart, avoiding the trauma site and waddling penguin-like to my car. Holy shit. Was endometriosis my fault? Did I do this to myself? Was it retribution from an unemployed and unfulfilled uterus?
I slumped over the steering wheel to collect myself and noticed a parking ticket on the windshield—a $90 fine for the nineteen minutes that exceeded the allotted time.
A polyp was removed during that visit, I learned later.
***
One summer during the school break, while visiting my grandparents in Russia, I joined my grandmother on an outing to the textile market. We took the trolley bus to the central station in town and had to wait for the connecting bus to cover the rest of the way. She went to buy the tickets while I leafed through a magazine. A flash of orange flickered across the glossy pages, and then a dark-skinned hand lifted my elbow and traced an imaginary line all the way down to my palm. The hem of the papaya-hued skirt was threaded with gold and mopped the station’s floors. “You, my girl, will have a life of adventure. Across waters,” said the woman with the black eyes. “You won’t have children. You will be a force, standing before crowds and commanding.”
A moment later, my grandmother’s arm, recognizable by the constellation of age spots, shot across to slap the woman’s hands away. A crowd looked on as my grandmother charged at the fortune teller in the way that only Eastern European grannies do, purse tucked under the arm, shuffling brown leather shoes beneath, and an index finger en guarde. “Charlatan! I’m not paying you a single penny to lift your curse.” I stood embarrassed, as any eleven-year-old would be, and watched as the woman vanished into thin air.
***
The torment that plagued me for a decade now had a name: endometriosis. Diagnosis spelled relief for my mental health, the equivalent of sitting down for the first time after a long day of standing. I felt validated; my concerns were justified. Now, I needed to know why I had it.
“It may be genetics,” said the doctor. “It could be hormonal; things misfire. Some girls get it from their first period, and others get it later all of a sudden. Sometimes, you’re just dealt a bad card. Accept it.”
I wanted to tell him that I had accepted the prevalence of the regular physical anguish I had experienced for years. But what of the repeated embarrassment I felt when I abruptly left social gatherings as menstrual havoc arrived ahead of schedule, mimicking stomach flu? What about the good men I pushed away to avoid the intense pressure and soreness that accompanied sexual intercourse? Did acceptance mean quietly crying in the shower as fistfuls of golden hair fell towards the drain?
***
“Be nice to the childless woman,” growled my father back home. “She came by to give you and your sister sweets and wish you a happy new year.”
The childless woman was a relative and the town’s walking Greek tragedy. A known beauty in her youth, she was respectably married but never had any children. Her frown lines told of longing and a lack of belonging. She was one of the rare ones who didn’t have tiny helpers trailing her to the grocers, carrying the bags home. She cooked for two. Her clothes were finer, but you knew she’d happily unravel every last thread to shod a babe of her own.
She carried candy in her dress pockets and a purse full of medications for her heart, anxiety, sugar, and other ailments. She pulled us aside at social gatherings to ask if our teachers were friendly or the neighborhood kids played nice. Upon hearing of our good grades, she left us cards with money inside. As we devolved into restless teenagers, her questions became intrusive and annoying, and the candy tasted sickeningly sweet.
Sometimes, her face was puffed, and her eyes were bloodshot. I knew she’d been crying. I didn’t know much else about her. I heard the women at the table talk about her with tenderness and pity. What a shame, such a nice woman, with more education than her frightful husband—a figure so disliked you couldn’t pay anyone to throw a kind word his way.
A while ago, I learned that she had died not long after her sexagenarian husband left to take a much younger bride. He never had any children; it turned out the problem was him.
***
When my old family doctor retired, I was automatically enrolled under the care of his replacement. I hoped the young new doctor would help me navigate the complexities of this disease. I wanted to know which organs had endometrial tissue attached to them, habitually ripping healthy cells out and forcing the creation of lesions that never entirely heal. I wanted to see the impact of this whole-body disease on my immune system. But the requests for tests that identify hormone and blood abnormalities were declined. The system, she told me, isn’t designed to indulge everyone’s self-diagnosed niggles.
On the advice of a friend, I approached the doctor from a new angle: I’d like to have a baby before my birthing days are over. It felt surreal to say that, and I was sure she could spot the fiction. My fabricated partner was one of the most despicable characters I’ve conjured up, threatening to walk if procreation was off the table.
To be heard, it seems, all I had to do was morph into a woman who wanted what they expected me to want.
The story worked. My performative tears flipped a switch in the doctor, who now adopted a novel, compassionate tone. She blasted the necessary requisition forms for blood work, regular ultrasound appointments, and a fertility assessment. With the prevalence of infertility and frequent miscarriages among endometriosis sufferers (an estimated 10 per cent of all women), difficulty in conceiving was to be expected. But I never went ahead with the examination offered by the fertility clinic; I refused to waste their time and take away valuable slots from truly hopeful women. Besides, I already knew the answer.
***
One building over from ours lived a flight attendant—a stewardess, as was the term then. She was the cool single aunt, gifting her nieces and nephews exotic goods from the magical land of the duty-free. Her bookshelf resembled a souvenir stand: A glass pyramid of Giza here, a paper dragon from Shanghai there, and a snow globe housing a miniature Sydney Opera House just below. The walls were a museum showcasing her adventures. In one frame, she was atop a camel shuffling towards the dunes; in another, she plucked out the Eiffel Tower; and there she was again, squeezing between her fingers the sun over the Pacific Ocean.
I saw her some mornings when I left for school. She’d hail a taxi across the street, hurriedly wheeling her airline-issued carry-on. She proudly wore her spotless uniform, taming frizzy hair into a perfectly knotted chignon. Her signature carmine lipstick was applied with precision. Her confident and carefree mannerisms were striking.
I couldn’t say whether it was envy or admiration that kept her name on the lips of the neighborhood women. The roasting took place as soon as her silver Fiat left the garage. “She has to find someone soon. She’s nearly thirty-four and could end up alone. She needs to put those French cosmetics and short skirts to use,” vocalized the choir of misplaced anxieties. Her recent promotion to the First-Class cabin and her fluency in several languages were of no interest to them.
On my last visit to the neighborhood, I learned that she’d finally married at thirty-nine. Her husband was a divorced pilot with two children. They had none together and lived in an apartment close to the airport. She’d left her job, and no one knew what she was up to anymore.
***
You make all sorts of deals with devils and deities when you’re lying on your side, writhing in pain and growing shallower in breath. See me through this, you say, and I promise never to take a day for granted.
I heard the ambulance outside but couldn’t tell how long it took since I choked out a “please help” to the 9-1-1 operator. The first responders administered morphine between the questions, conferred, and deemed the urgency warranted. I was wheeled from one bay to another. No, not the kidneys. No, not the appendix. But yes, a few specialists agreed, an “abdominal event” had occurred.
In the early hours of the morning, the attending gynecologist informed me that a large cyst had ruptured on my right ovary, likely twisting it out of place. A sympathetic nurse shared that ruptures like these rival childbirth in pain. I thought of all the evidence I’ve birthed over a decade that went unseen, unexamined, unbelieved.
***
My grandmother was and remains my biggest champion. Nothing was beyond her granddaughter’s grasp, she boasted to her card-playing chums. When their expected rebuttal brought on questions about my procreation plans, she shrugged them off with a logical argument: who in their right mind trades a respectable position to bring children into a world on fire?
Privately, she’d ask me if our water was safe to drink or if the men we chose were of sound mind, because she couldn’t understand why none of her granddaughters who lived abroad had children. “Is there no part of you that feels sad whenever you spend time with your cousins’ babies?” she once asked. I pointed to the window in the general direction of town. “If I ever want a child, I’ll get one from the orphanage. God knows those kids are the only ones who’ve truly known sorrow. Besides, with the way dating is these days, I’m just one mistake away from parenthood.” She clicked her tongue and swatted my pointing finger away, calling me a pest.
***
I had another ultrasound scheduled after the rupture of a new cyst. My lower belly protruded as I walked into the gynecology clinic, perversely mimicking the carry of an early pregnancy. I called these appointments reverse ultrasounds; I wanted a hollow, clear, and empty womb.
I grew to despise the sight of the brown foyer, the vinyl-lined staircase, and the clinic’s orchid-colored rooms. I wanted to tell the gynecologist to replace one of his baby accomplishment walls with pictures of women going about their days and profoundly enjoying their lives. Be the mother, don’t be the mother, be a different kind of mother, or don’t be associated with that word at all. I wanted to read thank-you cards from endometriosis patients who were heard, diagnosed, and treated. What were their miracles and dreams? Do they feel complete without the arresting pain, having relegated this whole-body disease to the past?
Or I could offer him my own time capsule as an embellishment to adorn a door or two: here are the parking stubs from all my appointments over these many years trying to prove that I was suffering, bleeding out, and decaying in every way.
***
Women are taught to hide their naturally occurring biological “shame” and mask their pain; their bodies are understudied, and their ailments are hastily dismissed. This surely has to be some sort of prolonged punishment for Eve’s alleged shoplifting.
***
“You’re forty. You’ve already made your choice. We’re going to operate to decrease the hemorrhaging. But you understand, no children.”
Looking around at the gynecologist’s scrapbookish office decor and the hundreds of pink babies wrapped in newborn hospital blankets, I thought about choice. The choice. My choice.
I chose to think of myself as an actualized person with no obligation to fulfil a biological imperative. I chose to explore the world, create art, make mistakes, and cram three careers into a decade. I chose to support my family when our circumstances drastically changed in my teen years. I chose to be the primary breadwinner and a parent to my young sister. I only exhaled when she was well-employed and married, and my mother was retired and travelling. I chose to be ambivalent about motherhood because I have raised a family, albeit in reverse. I chose partners for whom fatherhood was not a priority. All these years, I believed I had sovereignty over my body and the right to exercise my reproductive choices.
But sitting between the posters of the exceedingly cheerful Winnie-the-Pooh and a chart illustrating the stages of embryonic development, I saw that I ceased to have a choice the day I hit puberty. Whether hiding from the male gaze, physically defending myself from unwanted sexual advances, or seeking medical help at the onset of endometriosis, my choices centered on protecting myself and preserving my life from what men wanted me to want.
I understood that my reproductive choices were significantly reduced once my deteriorating symptoms were declared normal and when my fluctuating BMI was used to dismiss most health concerns. And I understood that my request—to this very man sitting before me—for a more serious surgical intervention, a hysterectomy that would have stopped the progression of the disease, was denied because I might change my mind about childbearing.
I signed the release forms for the surgery—a hysteroscopic polypectomy and myomectomy, D&C, and endometrial ablation—and left. I wonder if the traffic camera clocked my tears along with my offending speed.
***
On hot summer days, when I pour olive oil over crushed basil leaves and slices of feta or deseed a pomegranate to sprinkle atop mint rice, I think of the women in the garden and hope the table is still there. Do they tell the story of the family that once lived on the top floor and what became of the two little girls they nurtured, fed, and loved as their own?
I recently found a couple of the women on Facebook. Though I rarely message, I feel profound joy when my feed shows a photo of them smiling, surrounded by the happy faces of the villages they’ve created.
***
Tea biscuits are the only memory I have from the surgery. Once the anesthetic mask was on, time stopped, and then leapt to the moment when I heard a voice asking me to keep breathing. I opened my eyes to a nurse cleaning the blood between my legs and off my thighs with a warm cloth. She offered me biscuits to break the 20-hour fast. I was delirious, weightless, suspended in the air by the lingering sedatives. “WOW! BISCUITS!” I screeched, and laughter echoed from the recovery ward. An hour later, I was sent home with a lacerated uterus, morphine pills, a Naloxone kit, and a bagful of biscuits.
The bleeding improved after the surgery, but the sharp pains persisted. Each stabbing sensation was a betrayal. The heating pads I stashed in the linen closet resurfaced. The gynecologist prescribed progestin to alleviate the cramps. An MRI later revealed the presence of endometriomas, ovarian cysts that are indicative of an advanced stage of the disease. Their location was already known to me; the throbbing pangs alerted me to their presence. When I thought of the unpredictability of their rupturing, my health anxiety shot up. I began to map the proximity of hospitals to my intended destinations before leaving the house. I increased the number of therapy sessions to stop the paranoia from progressing.
Once the recovery period was over, I flew to the South of France for a change in scenery and a chance to process the last few years in solitude. On my way to the airport to fly home, the taxi driver and I bantered about my recent excursions, the state of the global economy, his favorite parts of Paris, and the accomplishments of his many children. The subject inevitably changed to my childless existence and the love and joy that was surely missing from my life. Looking at the Virgin Mary statue bolted to his dashboard, I gave up on pleasantries and told him that I never wanted to have any, and should I wish to now, I couldn’t. I’d hoped the silent remainder of the trip meant the intrusion was over. As we arrived at the departures terminal, he unloaded my carry-on and handed over my sun hat, which had freed itself and travelled to the depths of the trunk. “Miracles do happen, madame. Don’t give up.”
I am twelve years old, and I am standing in the master bedroom. The bedroom my grandfather shares with his wife, the woman who is not my grandmother. The room with the bed they sleep in.It’s a very tasteful room. My grandfather’s wife has exquisite taste. No bright colors. Not even any deep, rich colors….
Creative Nonfiction winner of the Spring 2023 F(r)iction Literary Contest.
Because no one did anything, it became something I had to deal with.
During the spring of my fourth grade, arise with the bright seven o’clock sun, when I turned on this little asphalt road between an overgrown lot and an office building, I would see the body. When it started decomposing, it became a home, a colony, a system. It became breakfast. As I rode my bicycle closer, I couldn’t look away from the vibrating surface that was made of maggots moving in and out of its wound.
The first morning went like this: when I saw an animal lying in the middle of the road, I gasped. As I rode my bike closer to it, I saw that it was a fat hedgehog, the size of a soccer ball, marks of a car tire neatly printed on its flattened belly. Dark blood and body insides tumbled out from a hole torn on the side. The blood was dark and shimmered under the morning sun.
Later in life, I would study artists who were drawn to a single subject seen during different times of the day. Like Monet with Rouen Cathedral, which the artist painted in elegant violet in the morning, transparent white in midday, and suffocating orange in the half-light of the afternoon, never missing the fragments of shadows in its rose window and the ornate indentations all along its facade. Each day, each hour, each time the artist looked, the subject in question appeared minutely transformed, forever departing from the previous moment. And that’s how I felt about the body, each time I looked it turned, transcending its own time of death.
I just learned to ride a bicycle the year before, after I transferred to a new school as a second grader. I’ve been getting used to this route, after moving into a new housing complex with my parents. We lived a few years at my grandmother’s apartment, while she stayed in America with my aunt, all the while the place we lived in since I was born was demolished by the city for being structurally impermanent. I was told that the new housing complex we moved into was built on top of the place we used to live in. So it’s really like living in the same place as before.
Where we used to live was called a farm. I didn’t know whether there were many places like ours in Tianjin back then in the ‘90s, but I knew that they were all gone by the time I was in middle school. It was a loosely connected camp made of tiny brick row houses. Hundreds of people lived there; the trash that heaped in the entrance of the neighborhood proved our existence. Before you saw the people, you saw our things: formula cartons, beer bottles, menstrual pads. You smelled our shit, collecting in the bottom of the dark little brick building, a latrine that served everyone, old and young. As the children of this place, we played with dirt, we ran around with no shirt on, we stole garlic from thick garlic braids that hung on people’s doors. I loved living at the farm. I never thought I would stop living at the farm. One day, I thought, someone would help us build a bathroom in every house, and we would get some tiles on our floors, and plant flowers in our yards, and our lives would be better and better.
So I was shocked, when my parents came home one day and told me that we were going to move. That the entire farm was slated for demolition. They would tear down the houses, fill up the pond we used to play in, and turn this land into a new district. I was only five, and I thought that a home was forever.
The day after I first saw the hedgehog, I rode to school and turned on the same road. It was still there, round and plump, its blood still moist, dark, and flowing. The hole in its side was still open. A few flies buzzed above it, but besides them I was the only one here to gawk.
When I entered the road on the third day, another car had run over the hedgehog’s corpse, this time across its entire body, flattening out the other side that used to be plump. More blood gushed out and coagulated on the asphalt. The fourth day, another car drove over it with its dirty tires. By the end of the fifth day, the fuzzy skin started to lose its animal color and turned into a generic gray; the hedgehog spikes dried up and looked like pine needles in the winter. The blood had finally stopped flowing.
I rode past the body every morning, tried to look without staring, never holding my gaze for long on the gaping holes, the intestines, and the now small family of flies. I took a big gulp of air before I turned onto this road and held my breath, because I thought if I let down my guard, I would know how it smelled.
I used to wake up to my mother still sleeping in the bed in our old house. It would be a Saturday, and I would stay in bed with her for an hour, just talking. Want to go to grandma’s? She would say, her voice rose like a song. We always went to grandma’s on Saturday. My grandpa did not have cancer yet, and while my mother chatted with grandma he would chase me around the apartment like the bad guy on TV because I asked him to. He kept one nail long on his pinkie.
My mother let me ride on the back of her bike back then. The roads were unpaved and bumpy; I looked down to watch my feet hover above the ground, quickly fleeing underneath as we went forward. Sometimes we saw other kids riding on the backs of their parents’ bikes. Look, that kid’s too old to be carried around like that, my mother would point out, when we saw a student wearing an elementary school uniform with his arms around his mother’s waist.
One time when we rode to grandma’s, my mother rammed the bike over a step newly installed at the end of an unpaved road, and with one bump I fell off the back. I remember tumbling on the ground, landing face first, and felt a sore pang in my nose. Sitting up and feeling a sharp sting starting to spread on my face, I saw my mother still on the bike, both her feet on the ground to steady herself. The melons we bought for grandma rolled towards me, and the last time I had fallen felt like a long time ago. You should learn to ride a bike yourself soon, my mother said, after checking my face to see the big red hole in my skin where the ground had taken a lick.
I hadn’t thought about how soft hedgehogs were on the side that wasn’t covered with needles. They were like water balloons, filled with the good stuff they find in trash heaps like the construction lots near my new home.
The body of the dead hedgehog swelled. It was even more plump than when it was freshly dead. It looked like a bouncing castle, the kind you would find at a fair when they’ve just started inflating it. Its dirt-colored fur hardened with dried blood.
Each day, I rode my bike to school. On Mondays, we saluted the flag and sang the national anthem. On Fridays, we were let out half a day early. We were already given the sex talk, and the girls got free sanitary napkins. Everyone was given free toothpaste. I didn’t have a crush, not yet. Each day, more cars ran over the body. The blood turned maroon, then a bluish-maroon, then black, then white. The flies swarmed like when someone’s thinking really hard, their thoughts were zooming around in their head. The cars couldn’t kill them. Maggot bodies were elastic; I have seen them in the public latrine. They could become flat when pressures were applied to their boneless body, and bounce back. They moved slowly, but they lived.
All these different cars—the yellow minivan taxis, the 1997 Santanas, three-wheeled motorbikes—they all turned onto this narrow, badly-paved road, bouncing left and right over its ditches and hills, over the body. No one said anything, did anything, no one took it away or covered it up.
One day, as if they decided in a collective meeting that the body was not suitable for a home anymore, all the flies disappeared. There were a few lone stragglers picking over the body, now like a half-open felt hat, nestled on the ground, as if its owner would come back to pick it up any moment. No longer a home for maggots, now small troops of ants took the stage, busily forming a pattern around this monument of what flesh there was left.
After my mother dropped me from the bike, my face took a month to heal. Don’t pick at it, you’ll leave a scar, she reprimanded every time I fingered the edge of the itching, purple scab. When I peeled off its last morsel, I looked at my new, raw skin in the mirror hanging above the washing machine in our bedroom. I still remembered standing in the green machine’s open-top cavity when it doubled as a bathtub, but now I was so tall. The fresh skin was a slightly different color, but nothing other people would be able to detect.
It was around then that we had to move out. This was my home, I wanted to say to someone, but no one was a good audience for that sentence. Not even my parents. Why do you want to live in this garbage dump your whole life? We will move into a building, with hot water and heating, and electricity that stays on all year long. When it’s all built you can come back to visit, when this neighborhood is even better. You won’t remember anything, you are still so young.
So many other things happened around that time; my grandfather died. I was drawing in the next room at grandma’s when it happened. Then at the funeral, my mother and my grandma lifted a corner of the cushion on the bed and revealed a big wedding photo, and told me that the man in the suit was my real grandfather. When I was a little older than you, my mother said, he committed suicide. You know what that is? He died in the Cultural Revolution. You know what that is?
After the funeral, my parents, my aunt, and grandma sawed to pieces the old couch grandpa slept on when he was sick and tossed the parts out from the window, because it was too big to carry down the three flights of stairs.
Sometime after that, my aunt got married and went to America. Then after that, grandma went to America also.
I will remember, I thought in our old house, I will remember everything about this place: every blade of grass, every hole in the ground, every baby tooth my mother tossed on the roof for good luck.
I would never forget the grease that stained the ground. Morning, bike ride, dead hedgehog, main road, school. During that spring in my fourth grade, seeing the hedgehog eventually became a routine. I felt like I had transformed every time I saw it and left it behind, only to be greeted again with a new chapter of its decay. Months later, it was still lying in the same spot, only now much flatter, as if a photo of the hedgehog was pasted on the surface of the road. I tried to recall my memory of the freshly dead animal with flowing blood, and questioned whether it could have all been a dream.
My parents taught me to hide my key, to tell people I was going to the deli and my parents were at home waiting for me when in fact I was going to school and coming back home by myself. Our new home was really clean, there was no more trash, and everything was painted white, but I could not understand how it was built on top of where we used to live. My mother and I did a fun project where we recorded the temperature and weather of a city in the south everyday for a month, then at the end of the month she asked me if I would be okay if she went to that city, just for a few years, to get her doctorate. She told me to be strong, you’re not a kid anymore.
On the road, the photo became a shadow, and the shadow oozed fat from its edges. It once again shimmered, a small dark patch of liquid pooled around its blurry contour. The cars that drove over it left dark tracks further down the road.
By the time my fourth grade was almost over, the grass in the lot on the side of the road was just as tall as the kind I used to run around in, but now it suddenly felt too deep for me to explore. I never knew that hedgehogs could live inside a city like this, until I saw one die. All there was left of the body was an oil stain on the asphalt the size of a dinner plate. I could still see it even when I was in fifth grade, even though no one else would know what it was once before.
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The lights are dimmed in the sports bar that my friends and I sit in. We’re at my typical booth—to the right of the door, in the far corner, where I can look out at patrons and remain undetected. I love this table, and I love the solitude. It is separated from other tables and gives…
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The Veterans Writing Project provides no-cost writing seminars and workshops for veterans, service members, and their adult family members. It publishes their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in a quarterly print journal and online. You can learn more about the Veterans Writing Project at veteranswriting.org, and read O-Dark-Thirty online at o-dark-thirty.org.
if they wanted me
to collect a check
buy expensive
shoes wear a tie
pay taxes sleep
at night raise
a son teach
him how to be
a man if they
wanted me
to live
why did
they give me
this gun
This war can’t be all bad. We sing karaoke on Mondays and Wednesdays and sit by the pool behind Saddam’s Presidential Palace after work and smoke cigarettes. By midnight we are watching others smoke cigarettes and drink and jump off the high dive naked. Jokes that any teenage boy would roll his eyes at explain the meter-wide butt- shaped flattening of the sandbags behind your buddy’s trailer. It’s another episode of “Operation Green Card Get Me Out of Here Sex,” and today the happy contestant was the Kurdish woman who works in his office. By dawn KBR, that American multinational corporation providing support services to our war, is doing our laundry, and by day we go to meetings where the Iraqi employees cry with fear over the sentence of death imposed on them by the insurgents for the crime of working for us here at the Embassy.
This war can’t be all bad. We get visited by senators, representatives, and university professors who arrive by night to write books, collect hazard pay, and earn their sand cred. We acknowledge their positions and provide thank-you notes for the well-meaning people in their districts who send us collections of the worst books and magazines ever published. We get mail from the trailer behind the palace and buy paintings from the PX whose creators rarely sign their work. We buy rugs made by children imported from somewhere else and purchase Saddam Hussein watches at the Hajji Mart from the smiling man in the washed-out dishdasha until the whole thing was blown up by that suicide bomber on the same day that other suicide bomber blew up the Green Zone Café and all the people in it. We always get our hair done in the palace by three liberated Iraqi women in tight jeans and a KBR employee from San Diego. We play piano and guitar for parties and eat Chinese food at the “Bad Chinese Food” restaurant until it was closed because of the chickens hanging in the toilets and that guy who got hepatitis. Nobody notices the massage place above the kitchen but everybody knows that there are no happy endings there. And yesterday afternoon the general’s translator told us over lunch that the young female translator who helped us in Mosul was shot dead outside the gate on her way home from work.
This war can’t be all bad. We get good food, except for that week when the delivery trucks were delayed by too much death, that week we ate MREs and multi-use potato dishes. Now we get yummy food; we get mint chip ice cream and avocado salads and made-to-order omelets and lattes by our Pakistani cooks, and catered parties with martinis at noon and beer and wine and music under the awning and pizza in the parking lot and steak and crab on Thursdays. We only have to hide under our tables and desks when rockets land in the courtyard.
We get to hang out of windows celebrating football and soccer and gossip about who is doing what to whom and how. We go on dates at the Blue Star Café and talk to friends a million miles away on our cell phones and have screaming debates about fixing the country. We watch the Academy Awards and the Grammys and The Daily Show and we get up early to watch the election and stay up late to watch the game and I got cake on my birthday and flowers when I sang, and I always haggle over prices with the black-clad ladies minding the bathrooms and everyone always politely listens when an old Iraqi man tells us he is afraid for his life. Two weeks later someone asks me if I have seen him.
This war can’t be all bad. I got here by showing up at my Army Reserve center in California in time to jump aboard the Baghdad bus with my unit and here I am, a thirty-something Army broadcast journalist with an M16 on my back and a Sony video camera in my hands, doing television stories for the American Forces Network and the Pentagon Channel. I live in a trailer behind the palace, take a Blackhawk to work, and get to hang out with reporters from the Western and Iraqi media. Members of our group operate cameras at press conferences with Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor and military spokesman for the Coalition Forces General Mark Kimmet, and when we were under a credible kidnapping threat we got to walk around the office with our M16s loaded.
This war can’t be all bad. We watch DVDs on huge TVs and roll over and go back to sleep during alerts. We get to eat at the outpost restaurants in the Green Zone and laugh at that guy in the gorilla suit and buy toys and jewelry from the locals and feel good about ourselves for spreading shoes and pencils and candy and democracy and by sending emails and keeping blogs and taking pictures. Sometimes, one of us, in a fervor of hopeful, democratic consumerism, jumps the fortified fence to go shopping in the Monsour district. And sometimes the shopper even comes back and sometimes that shopper even shows me pictures of their field trip and feeds me sweets from the shops. And the music at the embassy memorial services is always beautiful and the deceased always looks so happy in the memorial pamphlet picture.
This war can’t be all bad. Because of it, all of our résumés look great and will find us high- paying jobs back home and everyone here thanks me personally for giving them their freedom and everyone at home thanks me for my service and I get to mourn in silence. We get to drive cars and pick up journalists at checkpoint three and every American wants a pet Iraqi and every Iraqi wants a pet American and it is not even strange anymore when you know someone who has been killed, kidnapped, or kidnapped and killed.
This war can’t be all bad. The pundits should know that God is taken care of here. We have church on Sunday, synagogue on Friday, prayer groups on Tuesday, witness services on Wednesday, a Muslim prayer rug lives behind a screen in the chapel under the ninety-nine names of Allah. Buddhists meditate alone and the Wiccan stays indoors on Saturdays with her boyfriend. Someone said to someone in the bomb shelter next to the parking lot during an attack that Mormons do their best work in war zones, and I believe it. The fun of it all is that we all get to boss the Iraqis around and feel important by telling them what we are going to do for them and what is good for them and we never have to take no for an answer and we always assure our diplomats that we have Iraqi buy-in and our diplomats always assure their secretaries that they have Iraqi buy-in and their Secretaries always assure the President that they have Iraqi buy-in and the President always assures the American People that we have Iraqi buy-in and the American People don’t care. And the Iraqi who works in your office and thanks you personally for granting him his freedom from Saddam Hussein plants IEDs on the roadways by moonlight while the movie theater downstairs plays Ocean’s Eleven six times a week and Breaker Morant twice and later in the Big Office someone important takes notes for the eventual PowerPoint presentation as a man pleads for us to do something about the Christian genocide and mentions in passing that there are only 85 Jews left in the country.
This war can’t be all bad. Big men growing weapons from their armpits give us protection when we go on missions in the Red Zone and we get to feel like celebrities in large white SUVs as these hunks and their guns open our doors and scan sectors while we gather phrases for government documents from obsequious Iraqi officials who become glorious resistance fighters after we go home. On our days off we play volleyball and horseshoes and Marco Polo and on the Fourth of July we eat too much and feel good about ourselves, sing in the chorus and tape together empty water bottles for the “Empty Water Bottles Taped Together” raft race. We also hide in the basement or under our beds or not at all during rocket attacks on those days. We can’t be the ones to die, not on those days.
This war can’t be all bad. The President’s plan for success in Iraq is working and we don’t even need to know what that plan is this week and Zal once stopped me in the hallway to tell me he saw me perform last night in the Baghdad Idol semifinals and what a talented singer he thought I was and I shook hands with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, John McCain, Senator Barry Obama, Senator John Kerry, Governor Jeb Bush, a beauty queen, Geraldo Rivera, an actor who used to play Superman on TV and some folks with earnest smiles that I had never heard of. I also exercised in the same gym and ran on the same dusty track behind the palace with Dave Petraeus and waited in line to see President Bush when he came to Baghdad and the soldiers assigned to AFN, who had to clean the blood off of Kimberly Dozier’s cameras, didn’t know who she was.
We all had cameras and took pictures of people around the palace and Iraqis around the rubble and ordered clothes from Gap.com and condoms from Drugstore.com and DVDs and yoga mats from Amazon.com and partied at the British embassy, enjoyed pizza night at the Italian Embassy, danced with the Ukrainian Ambassador and laughed at the Iraqi women who wore all the makeup ever made all at the same time all the time, and men who thought we were in Washington and wore dark grey and black wool suits and went to redundant meetings and car bombs went off in the middle of Iraqis waiting in crowds to get in to see us and the pictures of dead Americans hanging from a bridge frightened little children alone at night watching television.
This war can’t be all bad. Once you’ve been there you’ll be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and then Iraq will live in your dreams and be the most exciting horrible thing to ever take over your life and then you will have the right to declare with a clear conscience and a steady mind and the moral sense born out of 9/11, and YouTube video clips, and statements from the Dixie Chicks, and Sean Penn and Ted Nugent’s guitar and Cindy Sheehan’s campground and the Occupy movement’s rants, and Obama’s mother and my mother and your mother and all mothers, whether or not, all and all, with all things considered, in the conflict between good and evil, lock, stock and barrel, under the eyes of the Global War on Terror, the mind of God, Osama Bin Laden’s ghost and the sinking economy, this war can’t be all bad.
At the violet hour, you found azure icicles hugging
The bathroom vanity—diving, splintering bodies
Resonating with D minor’s deep blue when they struck.
You picked up their shards,
Constellated them into shapes of dying stars,
And pinned them together like an antique wedding dress.
At the violet hour, they sang unrivaled eulogies
of beauty and felicity, the tonic and the subdominant
of black and grey.
This is cactus land
At the yellow chirping of the fail-safe alarms
You awoke to a dappled snow.
Cinder-speckled drifts incompletely refract
The dim light of a put-upon heaven
You began this vigil two anemic weeks ago.
Weeks when moments of indigo still seemed
To drift between ash clouds
You awaited the shadow like a guest.
He’s as skinny as I ever saw him
in that black and white photograph
Shirtless against a handwritten sign
B’s Chicken Farm, Korea Division
On a hill that never had a name or
he was never informed of the designation
Running radio wire, not so
different than chicken wire except
for the guns and dysentery and
frost biting bitter and black-hearted
Back home, he worked his family’s Jersey farm
he knew how vicious
the chicks could be
ready to pluck one another’s eyes out
for an extra spike of grain
When my parents divorced in the late 70s, I was an only child. But during the 80s—that legendary decade of excess—and through a complicated string of remarriages, I accrued a grand total of twelve stepsiblings. When I explain this to people in my generation, they often say, Oh yeah, just like the Brady Bunch.At which point I…