Side Effects

I witnessed my death three times. I was there, the moment my mind left my body and searched the air to come back in. I waited 11 years to construct the story.

When my father met my mother, he thought she was “eccentric.” She had an untamed afro, and long curly nails. She had just finished a few years of college at Xavier and AU. It was the summertime.

She was then, as she is now, a little headstrong, much too confident and brave. She maced a couple of men in New Orleans, and proclaimed to the New York relatives that she was going to explore Harlem to “get in touch with her roots.”

“You're going to end up getting stabbed,” they said. My father was the same, after serving in Vietnam, and returning home to find his “crew” shotting up heroine. “That was the day I left them,” he said. He got straight, clean, married, divorced. He never proposed to my mother, but they just “agreed” to get married. They wed without fanfare in a small courthouse and I came shortly after. Fathers job at Exxon moved him to Leigh Acres Florida, a small retirement community, small enough to have town hall meetings and town carnivals.

In pre-school a guest speaker came to my class. We gathered in a circle around the classroom rug. We faced the windows and I could see another typical Florida creek.

“What do strangers look like?” asked our guest speaker. She was blonde, outfitted in 80s garb. Massive shoulder pads hid beneath a blue suit on her small frame. She spoke with an artificial diction.

I rose my hand.

“Strangers wear all black, and they hide in the bushes wearing a mask,” I took both of my tiny hands and drew them across my face.

“No,” our speaker said. “Strangers look just like you and me. A stranger is anyone you don't know.” She widened her eyes. “A stranger is anyone you don't know.”
My mother had given me similar lessons, long drills on safety in the afternoons. I came home that day and told her what had happened.

“Ariel!” she said. “You know I've taught you that before.” And she had. She taught me my address, my phone number, how to scream when someone grabs you and how to page her if I ever got lost at the grocery. My sister and I also learned how to cross the street, swim, how to turn down unhealthy food politely, and mother made a song to teach us about the alligators.

When I drove twelve hours to Pensacola, Florida I was confronted with monsters. As a child strangers were always the enemy. But sometimes it's not the strangers at all.

My grandmothers house sits by the interstate and a gulf. It's peeling pink paint and covered in weeds. Seven of her nine children still live at the house. They have become drug addicts, they float in and out of jail performing sexual acts for bags of cocaine. My grandfather, the alcoholic, was like a dragon. He sat all day in the darkest corner of the darkest room, in an easy chair smoking cigarettes. You could only see the glowing ember of his cigarette in the dark, and the smoke floating over him like a hologram. His voice was always muddled like Louis Armstrong.

I was five on this trip, and it would be the first time that I died. I do not remember the season, the weather, or the drive there and back. But I do remember the sounds--”Love and Marriage” on a TV set, blue sheets covering a pair of bunk beds, the wood paneling and burglar bars, and inability to speak, to know that I could speak. I was wearing red polka dotted shorts with buttons shaped like strawberries and a white button down shirt. My sister was gone, and my parents gone too, I was all alone with a cousin five years older, ten or more.

“Don't tell anyone,” he said sternly, and I nodded, being more fearful than I had ever been. “Or I'll burn your house down.”


The next morning my eyes followed the flower print pattern wallpaper in my grandmothers bathroom. My sister sat on the toilet in a towel, and my mother stood drawing a bath. I found myself nervous and stammering for days, and even on that morning. I struggled to paint a picture of the happenings to my mother, requesting to talk to her in private.

“Later,” she said. She ordered me to sit on the couch and my cousin was there, with his arm slung over the back of the sofa. I glanced at him, he was so threateningly close to me.

“What?” he said. I was starring but I hadn't noticed. I said nothing. “What?”

The tale was old news the next day, as we pulled out of Pensacola. We would never be back until years later. I would keep it a secret, and thankfully the monsters of that house would be 11 hours away.

Two years passed, and I attempted again to explain to my mother the event of my death. Frequently, we stood in my pale pink room, and she extracted my strawberry shorts from the closet.

“Do you want to wear these? Why don't you wear these anymore, they used to be your favorite shorts,” she would say. I would hang my head silently and say nothing.

In those days, and still, I turned my head from the TV when “Love and Marriage” came on, and my heart would sink when his mother called on the phone and spoke to me.

“Hello Jennifer,” I would say.

“Aunt Jennifer,” she emphasized.

I began to have night terrors. Ants consumed me in my sleep, a large green bird in a cage turned into a spider. We lived in a split plan house then, and when I ran to my parents room, I jumped over translucent hurdles and road blocks near potholes. Years later I would speak to a psychologist who would tell me that night terrors were common in sufferers of childhood sexual abuse.

One night I screamed so much, the whole family sat in the master bedroom by my side. I couldn't separate dream from reality.

When I was seven, father was relocated to Mobile, Alabama.

“It's only an hour from Pensacola,” she said. “We can go there any time now.” I saw my cousin twice a month. He had grown. He liked baseball and the “Malcom X” film. He acted as though nothing happened.

My parents would abandon my sister and I with him in the dragons cave. I focused my attention on protecting my sister— and felt the stress of the possibility of her death. I sat by the door when she used the bathroom and would not let him sit next to her on the couch.

A photograph was taken that Christmas, when I wore a red poofy dress, frilly socks and paten leather shoes. I stood by the sofa in the cave, which is unusually bright because the door is left open. I am facing my sister protectively, and my cousin stands beside me, looking at my body with a predatory stare.