Marin/Spencer Madden

I.

I step out of the classroom and close the door. The word [—]

rings in my ears as I slide down against the wall, a child

in heels and a princess neckline. I text my mother:

Proof of life, please?

and she sends back a picture of her smiling, my mother,

who hates taking her picture for anything. I save it and heart it

and stare at it until it’s time to go back inside.

I don’t tell her she’s beautiful enough.

**********

My mother died in a car accident. (Knock on wood.) It happened on her way to work, on the commute she takes every day. I didn’t know for hours, because I don’t answer unknown numbers and neither does my father. They came to our door with her purse and her earrings. My father dissolved. I stood there in the doorway and wondered the quickest way to kill myself.

**********

I was three years old when my grandfather died of stomach [—]. I don’t remember much of this, and what I do remember I may’ve made up when I was six to deal with the unexplained absence.

I remember feeling an emptiness where there should’ve been grief. Three-year-olds don’t understand death, not really. I knew my grandfather had gone somewhere. I knew I wouldn’t see him again. I knew everyone else was deeply, deeply sad. In every memory I have from back then, the sky is grey. But I doubt I knew my Papa’s name. I doubt I knew much of anything about him, and I know even less now. What I do know doesn’t ever feel like it’s about my grandfather, just a stranger I was supposed to love one day, except one day never came.

My father says I sat down on my Mimi’s lap and told her it was okay. I told her not to worry, don’t be sad, because Papa was in heaven now. And she held me and she cried and I remember none of this, but I make it up in my head sometimes to feel like a good person.

Here is what I know for sure: in front of my old house, there was a mossy stone wall. We always went in the back door, so I never really had occasion to pass it, but whenever I did, I kept my hands by my sides. I used to climb the wall and walk along it, holding the iron bars of the fence. But my grandfather was dead and this wall was to blame. He had caught his sickness from this wall, I was sure of it. And so I did not touch the wall. I did not want to be sick. I did not want to die.

**********

II.

I have not heard my mother’s voice in eons.

I called her last night.

I clutch the phone in my hand and call again

because I cannot walk anywhere alone.

She says,

“Hey, sweetie.”

I buy a bouquet of flowers at the grocery store.

She says,

“What’s this for?”

I say, “No reason, Muzza,” and mean,

If you die tomorrow I want you to know I love you.

**********

We are a house of readers. My parents used to put me to bed every night with a story. At school I devoured books and sat raptly for storytime. I remember once I threw up in my lap while the teacher was reading from a picture book. I was nauseous for a week. This was not normal, then. It’s normal now.

My parents learned very quickly that you couldn’t tell me certain things. They wanted me to know so much, they said, because I was so smart and so capable, but it is hard to feel smart and capable when you can’t watch Tangled with your cousins because your brain has convinced you that the terror the characters are feeling is your own. Their pain your pain, their death your death. I could not watch Scooby-Doo. I could not watch The Goonies. I could not watch National Treasure. I could not watch The Princess Bride. I could not watch Jumanji. It is hard to make friends when you can’t watch any of their favorite movies.

So I gave myself to books. In books, people lived forever. When they didn’t, they had afterlives. I told myself I could always become a ghost. I could find Hades in the Underworld. I could go up to heaven and stay there with Papa for as long as I wanted. I made friends with characters who didn’t care what movies I watched. My best friend was named Severus, and we spent my afternoons sitting together in the quiet of my room, convincing ourselves we didn’t see the thestrals roaming outside in the yard.

Books were doors out of the world that could kill me, until those doors started spelling REDRUM in my blood. Madeline taught me there was an organ in my abdomen just waiting to burst. Hatchet told me if my left arm hurt, my heart would seize and give out. The Art of Racing in the Rain whispered in my ear that what killed my grandfather could blossom in me anywhere at anytime; if it wanted, it could bury itself in my beautiful mind and take it over bit by bit.

My body reacts to every imbalance with a sick twist of the stomach. Too full, nausea; too hungry, nausea; too tired, nausea; too stressed, nausea; too much sun, nausea. I once threw up on Christmas morning. My insides eat each other and I have to spit them out.

What ghost is gnawing at me, I wonder. Maybe I touched the wall.

**********

My mother was murdered in a park near our old house. (Knock on wood.) Somebody shot her and she bled out in the parking lot. Every time I passed the park I saw her there, choking on the pavement. My father dragged me there after a week. “Get over it,” he said. “It’s not real.”

**********

I am eight when I ask why women’s bellies grow. I think maybe they have ghosts in their stomachs too. My father hands me a book and my mother tells me what it says. I keep checking it out for a year. Maybe the ghost is a baby. Maybe there is a baby inside of me. (Knock on wood.)

Then I learn how the baby gets out. I decide I’d rather die and kill the baby too.

I don’t think I am afraid of dying, at least no more than anybody else is. I think I am afraid of my body, and the things living inside it, and what they could do to me. You are supposed to be able to choose what happens to the house you live in. Whether to repaint the walls, refurbish the windows, oil the hinges. I should get to decide if my door creaks. But blood pours from me without my say; my vision has blurred to nothing; my stomach churns and bubbles over. If a baby can grow in me, so can a parasite. Where life can grow, so can death.

The sun coaxes flowers from buds and leaves from branches. It turns acorns into trees. And it drops spots on your skin and blossoms those into tumors.

We learned about skin [—] in sixth grade. They played us a video that ended with a montage of teenagers who had died from it. My head floated off. I walked around for the rest of the day half-dead, skeletal hands on my ankles, dragging down. I stopped my friend in the hallway. “Hey, did that video in health class freak you out?”

“What video? The skin [—] one? No, why?”

“No reason.”

“Did it freak you out?”

“No.”

There are things that are supposed to scare you and there are things that aren’t. I’ve always confused the two. I ducked my head down and shut my mouth. I lasted the whole day like that before the terror tumbled out of me at bedtime. My mother held me while my father kneeled in front of me, his hands on my knees. I told them I was going to die. I told them the sun was going to kill me. I told them this over and over for two hours until I finally passed out, my cheeks still streaked with fear.

For a year I wouldn’t take hot showers. I stopped playing outside. I stayed in my bedroom with Severus, and I told him stories about people who couldn’t die. Outside my window the thestrals gathered. I felt Papa in my stomach, holding on too tight.

**********

III.

Since I left for college, I cannot get back to my mother.

I see her almost every weekend. We text every day.

We call at least twice a week. I cannot get back to my mother.

When I touch her I’m not touching her. When she holds me

she’s not holding me. I cannot get back to my mother.

Muzza, can I have proof of life in the morning, please?

I text at two a.m., then roll over and try to fall asleep.

I have been trying to fall asleep for two hours.

I think I have [—]. I think my father has [—].

I think my mother has [—].

In the morning, there is a picture of my mother on my phone.

I tell her she’s beautiful. She tells me I’m okay.

**********

I read Smile in middle school, just before I got braces. When I was little they said my mouth was too small and they tried to make it bigger with a palate expander. I remember I wouldn’t ever pull my baby teeth out. If they were loose I didn’t touch them. They were supposed to fall out, my mother said, and I thought, since when are bones supposed to fall out of you?

I’ve never had a cavity. (Knock on wood.) My father has so many he needs to get two teeth replaced. Some of them are broken. His jaw clicks and pops out and clicks back into place. So does mine. I brush my teeth twenty times a day. Before I eat. After I eat. In the morning. At night. Before class. After class. When I go to the bathroom. When I wash my hands. When I drink something that isn’t water. When I drink water. I brush my teeth so much they start to feel fuzzy.

The dentist said I might have to get my wisdom teeth removed. I start praying. I don’t believe in god.

In Smile a girl loses her two front teeth. She trips at a gas station and splinters her mouth against the sidewalk. I am afraid to climb curbs. I am afraid to walk up stairs. I am afraid to cross uneven streets. I run my tongue along the inside of my teeth. I am running my tongue along my skeleton. I stopped wearing my retainer and now one of my teeth sits behind all the others. I wish I hadn’t stopped wearing my retainer. I had to stop wearing my retainer. Every day I woke up with a mouth full of spit and spent my first thirty minutes hunched over the toilet bowl. I had to stop wearing my retainer. I wish I hadn’t stopped wearing my retainer.

My body is a mess of folds and crooked bones. When I was a baby I broke my head trying to walk. When I tell my friends this they tell me it explains a lot. I wonder if that is life: we break ourselves trying to live, until finally we break the thing we can’t afford to break.

**********

My mother died in another state. (Knock on wood.) She went away on a business trip and didn’t come back. I crawled into my parents’ bed and waited there for her. My father rubbed my back. Something is wrong, I thought. Something is very wrong. The lights were off. My mother died. (Knock on wood.) The lights were on. My mother died. (Knock on wood.) The lights were half-off, half-on. My mother was never coming home. (Knock on wood.)

**********

IV.

I tell my therapist that I will not survive my mother’s death.

She says I will, of course I will.

I say to her,

I don’t want to.

She looks at me very sadly. She says,

That’s life, Marin. We all lose everyone, eventually.

I talk to her for another half hour. I close the computer.

I go to find my father. My mother is at work. My bones itch.

When is Muzza coming home?

I say. My father shrugs. My mother pulls into the driveway five hours later.

I hug her extra tight. There is some part of me that knows

I am lucky to love her this much. I tell her

she looks beautiful today. She smiles at me.

I will not survive my mother’s death.

**********

When we all went into quarantine, I stopped watching the news. My parents didn’t tell me much of what was going on. I knew people were sick. I knew it was called coronavirus. I didn’t know how it killed or how often. My parents had learned not to tell me these things. I stayed in the house with Severus and for the first time in a very long time, my brain was completely quiet.

I started to wonder if my brain would be this quiet all the time, if my grandfather had not died when I was three. If I couldn’t see the thestrals outside my window. If I’d grown up thinking of my body as myself rather than a ticking time bomb meant to turn on me.

One day my boyfriend at the time sent me an email with a Spotify link: This song made me think of you. “Body Terror Song” by AJJ. It goes: I’m so sorry that you have to have a body / One that will hurt you, and be the subject of so much of your fear / It will betray you, be used against you / Then it’ll fail on you, my dear. I cried at my desk and played it on repeat for a week.

When a deadly disease sweeps the world, you learn to wash your hands. I took the lesson to heart a little too hard. I wash my hands like I brush my teeth: compulsively, enough that they crack and bleed. In the winter my knuckles are red and splitting. I write poems with blood dripping down my hands.

The thing I love about my fucked-up hands is that I can see them. They’re the only part of my body I can drag right up to my eyes and examine like Victor Frankenstein did his Monster. The rest of me is an unknown burial ground holding graves I can’t read the names of. My parents have become used to calls of four sentences:

“My head hurts.”

“You don’t have brain [—].”

“Okay. Yeah. Are you sure?”

“Yes. Go to bed. I love you.”

To fall asleep I tell stories. Severus sits up with me and listens. So long as I’m thinking of the story, I’m not thinking of my body. When I think of my body it starts to hurt. I have phantom pains so often I forget how to tell them from the real thing.

Here is the story I tell most often, when the aches begin: We are okay. We are healthy. We are going to wake up tomorrow and so is everyone else.

I pick up my phone and text my mother. Muzza, I say. Proof of life, please.

**********

V.

I keep my mother’s notes obsessively, even her to-do lists.

I collect them in boxes, in water bottles, in drawers.

I use them as bookmarks and scatter them across my desk.

She tries to convince me to throw them away, but I can’t.

I don’t tell her why. To say it at all feels like an omen.

Muzza,

I say instead, as my grandfather’s ghost twists my stomach.

I love you so much.

**********

My mother sat me down on the couch and told me my grandfather’s ghost was inside her too. “I have [—],” she said. (Knock on wood.) That was it. Over, and over, and over. “I have [—],” said my favorite person. (Knock on wood.) “I have[—],” said my whole world. (Knock on wood.) “I’m going to die.” (Knock on wood.)

                                                                                                           **********

I wake up. I roll over. I get up. I pad down the hall to my parents’ bedroom.

My mother jumps when I touch her. “What’s wrong?”

My stomach is heavy with grief. I am twenty years old.

“Nothing,” I say. (Knock on wood.) “Can you sit with me?”

 

—

Marin/Spencer Madden lives in a boring town called Framingham,Massachusetts, and occasionally works at the local Barnes & Noble, where she spends half her paycheck before she’s earned it. The winner of the 2025Academy of American Poets College Prize, he’s been published in magazines like Stork and Palette, and is currently earning a Creative Writing BFA from Emerson College. When she’s not writing romances about dead gay people, she’s online window-shopping to stave off the existential dread.
You can pester him at marinmadden@gmail.com , and he’ll probably answer.