Underwater quiet returns. Everything silent… unnaturally still. The river stops flowing. It sits on top of the earth like a blanket on a dirty mattress. I see someone in the woods to the right of me. A figure in the shadows. Then, a smearing fog clouds my mind. “Hey!” I yell in distress. “Are you watching us?” I dart into the woods, trampling the fear that my body remembers. I run at top speed, determined to put an end to this once and for all. The figure, which looks like a little Black girl wearing a hospital gown, moves unnaturally, easily weaving between trees. We approach a cliff with a steep drop-off. Now I’ll definitely catch her, I think to myself. She has to stop. But she doesn’t. She leaps right over the edge like a fearless base jumper. I am nearly out of breath by the time I make it to the edge. I peer over the side. No trace of her. It’s not possible.

Reality comes crashing down on me. My youngest brother, Demetrius, floods my mind. When he first started seeing and hearing things, we thought it would pass. “The imagination of a child,” my mother said. We brushed it off, but his hallucinations grew more intense and frightening. One night he woke up and said the devil, dressed in a black cloak and clown clothing, was sitting next to his bed, watching him, asking him to do terrible things. My mother knew something had to be done before he hurt himself or someone else. The doctors said it was the onset of schizophrenia. Said he needed pills, lots of them. Said there was still no guarantee it wouldn’t get worse. Said there might be a history of mental illness in the family. “We ain’t mentally ill, Doctor,” my mother barks. “This ain’t nothin’ the Lawwwd cain’t fix.”

“I’m afraid the Lord won’t be able to help with this one. Something is wrong in his brain and he needs serious help.”

Do I need serious help? I wonder to myself. Is Jennifer’s promised land not possible after all? I sit with my feet hanging over the edge of the cliff, ruminating. Maybe this is not the result of Hypnotist Jerry and his spells, which is the excuse I’d been using to explain all of this to myself, maybe something is broken in my brain too? Jennifer said the biggest storm had passed, but this one feels enormous, insurmountable. Sanity has been my anchor in a turbulent world. Who am I without it? Another lost one, nameless, faceless, and irrelevant?