Her dad had said things like: “If those people really wanted money, they’d get up off their lazy asses and work like everybody else.” He said people like being in prison, because they get three meals a day and endless television, all at the hardworking taxpayer’s expense. He said nobody ever gave him anything. He said, “So if you don’t like it, get the hell out,” and that’s what her brother did, and in many ways that is what her mother did, hidden there behind a wall of magazines and ashtrays, and laundry that never got hung up. “How-ma-ny-times-do-I-have-to-tell-you,” he would say, a belt crack with each syllable, and Shelley’s mother would say how doing that hurt him worse than it hurt Shelley and her brother, but her mother never did anything to stop it. “Well, that’s a fucking load of shit,” her brother told Shelley. He told her they were on their own. “It was an accident,” he said the last time she saw him. “An accident.”

In yoga, once she bought her own props and could stop worrying about whose butt had been on the bolster or blanket her face was on, she discovered that the kind of repetition that accompanied her steps and passages all through the day was a kind of meditation. All this time, she’d been meditating and didn’t even know it: rhythm and rhyme, fragments of songs repeated in ways that blanked and swaddled her mind and thoughts. “Meditating” sounds better than “disassociating,” she thought. Words and rhythm lifting her from the scene before her, whatever it might be—escaping boredom in the midst of chatter, seeking safety in the midst of fear. But now, these recent days, the simple I am, I am, I am, calm or strong or peaceful, has turned to Terrified, terrified, paralyzed, paralyzed, and slick red satin damp with fatigue.