In July 2021, five weeks after my mother died, my husband dropped me off at the emergency room of the small hospital in the Massachusetts town where my father now lived alone.
Rats can laugh, but the dogs aren’t smiling: they’re hooked on oxytocin, which rises when we lock eyes with one another. Oxytocin is not dissimilar to OxyContin, an opioid analgesic which can result in a similar sense of euphoria or attachment.
I wonder. Yes, I’m looking up as I say this, I wonder if I do have a superpower. Maybe I have more than one aspect of attraction, this knack for drawing others in close, almost touching me.
I have found you where I shouldn’t—in the wrong bodies, at the wrong time, and once on a subway platform with my feet stuck to a pool of dried soda taking gum from a near-stranger’s mouth. That night you were spearmint and the 6 train. I have been woken by you, put to bed by you.
There is, in a nearby field, a retired show horse living out whatever days it can win, a white horse speckled with brown flecks. Its limp mane welcomes your hand. On its face,
When reporting on suicide, the CDC advises against including the suicide method or overly positive descriptions of the deceased for fear of causing contagion.
Which gave Reporter Jane a problem in reporting on how her dad did what he did. She can’t mention the means, so readers will be left to wonder:
Was it a gun? A rope? A razor? Pills? Poison? A train? A hair-dryer?
And (according to the CDC), the mildly suicidal among them will begin to salivate.
I fell on an incline, talus, tibia, fibula, calcaneal tendon mangled, red circuits ruptured, body facing east toward a little town named Climax and then New York where I once danced in a circle of girls
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