Shannon Celebi

She was no stripper with a heart of gold, that was for sure. A heart of steel, more like.

It__ not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, __kay, world, today I__ gonna spaz.

Through career fumbles and life changes, she supported me. Through shattered dreams and hopes almost-realized, she supported me too.

It wasn__ as if she__ thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn__ always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want.

You__e worried about what-ifs. Well, what if you stopped worrying?

Let__ call my mood melancholy; let__ call it remembrance. Or maybe let__ call it longing. Yes, let__ call it longing instead.

Amber Rorman had told me too that our third grade teacher, Ms. Lizetti, was really a lesbian, which I thought was a disease until I asked Amber and Amber told me to ask her mother who told me to ask my mother, who said, __esbians are women who like to have sex with other women,_ which I didn__ think was all that weird.

Here__ a random factoid: I like cats. And here__ another: I like red wine.

Mama wasn't dead...exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well that day, and Elma reckoned dead just meant pretendin' you couldn't move or breathe until nightfall when you got up and walked around like you was free.

I__ sorry if...I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you__e trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.

Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I__ known anything about physics.

Her mother always told her, __f he hits you, then you leave,_ but Jack had never hit her, not with his fists.

She fantasized sometimes too about killing him a little: a little poison in his pudding, a little flick-flick-flick with a fillet knife at his throat.

I could say it all began with my mother.

Jeb'd said it was harder for a pretty girl to find work; even white men liked flowers, whether red or pink or blue.

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

Water. Like a blanket. Dark. Intoxicating. Cold.

Of course, I rationalize the fear. I realize it__ not real, that my house isn__ burning down, that the deer aren__ going to kill me.