I breathe my mother’s ‘kill you’ into nothing.

My mother, too, dissolves inside my lungs

and carbons out, dioxide-dies, reborn

as air for leaves. What used to hurt, I breathe.

As she finishes the poem, another piece of mother-hurt surfaces. She scratches it onto the paper.

Trouble, Mischief, Monster, Squirt.

Other girls were Darling, Love,

Precious, Angel, Sweetie-Pie.

I was Beastly. I was Dirt.

A tear arrives, and another. Ever since her mother’s carpet slipper stung her six-year-old head for making that bloody racket, she has squeezed tears back into her skull. Over time, pressure and heat turned them to steam: to a powerful, cog-turning, piston-thumping rage. Never tears. Now, a Tuesday afternoon in November, she can cry. Enough tears to fill an hour.

Dusk begins. A blackbird chooks alarm across the lawn. The cedar hugs an intake of shadows. April is flooded with tears. The water wets her face, but she cries and breathes. Cries like a wave breaking; breathes like the same wave’s water drawn back through the beach, washing it clean. A beach of pebbles, each pebble both a name and its ripples: the distorting effects of her mother’s dark rechristenings. Trouble. Monster. She’d thought she rebelled, yet how obedient she was. Each label her mother set round her neck, she became.

She cries and breathes. The curses slake off, the names lose their power. Soon they are nothing to do with the pale young woman ghosting in the window.

She presses the staff bell to ask for a mirror. She wants to see herself clearly. They bring her the kind she can’t smash. When they are gone, she sits cross-legged on the bed, placing the circular, plastic-handled device on the bed in front of her. Leans gingerly forward, a forest animal meeting its reflection for the first time in a glade’s dark pool. A stranger looks back. Her face is open and smooth as a clean cotton sheet. She searches her eyes for herself. For who she is, beyond the history that has so recently melted: the mother who regretted her, the boys who raped her, the students she killed.

Yes, she killed them. Or maybe not she, but her: that other self, the one with the names. Who is she now? She drills the question into the depths of her own reflected eyes.

Been looking into that mirror all evening.

April glances up: two faces in the observation window vanish, like pond-fish, disturbed. She returns to the mirror. What she has found in the mirror, she dare not say. But there is a word for it.

‌Epiphany

Insane?

Logan is following a harried, keycard-clutching member of the nursing staff down the corridor. You wouldn’t say she was any better?

She’s talking. If that’s better.

Flip-flap, flip-flap: comfortable soles on linoleum.

But insane? Logan presses.

The nurse speaks in time with her steps.

It’s not a clinical assessment, obviously. Not my job.