Today I’m Susan B. Anthony, grateful that I’ve not added twenty-five pounds of undergarments.
All tagged fear
Today I’m Susan B. Anthony, grateful that I’ve not added twenty-five pounds of undergarments.
They brush past me and my child in his wheelchair. Hurrying, scurrying. I try not to recoil.
Big mistake, I think, treading rough surf on an unguarded beach in Maui. The water’s too deep for a little boy, too wild for a grown woman who still doggy paddles.
The driver was trained for this, and I was high in the back, protected. But then, there it was.
We’re scared of waves slinking up the shore, with each salty breath gasping and spitting foam …
I climb aboard the giant orange pillow, socks sliding on the rubber, and find my spot in the jostling hordes.
When I was eleven years old, my Dad took me to a meeting in a smoky, crowded union hall.
He drops me at a bus station and speeds away. I don’t know where I am or how to ask.
On my first time down as a certified scuba diver, I marveled over an extraordinarily large manta ray with its twenty-five-foot-wide wings until it aimed for me head on, its broad mouth open.
It’s called sewing-machine leg, that quiver in a calf that borders on cramp. I’m clinging to the rock face like a limpet, fingertips raw, adrenaline coursing.
Relief licks my bones. Our infant son will not die.
I have been afraid of water since I was six.
How long has he been watching me? This is what I wonder when I spot him too few paces away, peering at me through a tangle of branches.
He says it never happened. The airport, his arms dangling me over the railing.
Spiralling, up, up, my anxiety levels. Sweat, hot, dances down my back.
The floor thrusts towards the ceiling. Walls splinter and pieces of plaster crumble around us.
On my last night in Trincomalee I couldn’t sleep. I lay frozen on the hard single bed, wide-awake and petrified.
I wake up early. Stomach churns. Panic. A gust of terror that has no language to support it.
I am a block of marble, heavy and stuck as I watch Melinda throw Becky’s extra-large underwear outside. Night swallows them. Melinda jeers.
He was pale, gothed up, and fanged as usual when we stopped by Target for some black hair ties.