From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.
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Posts Tagged: hospital
From the Archive: Unbound
It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
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Paying in Time
The contempt the place exuded for the people inside it felt physical, hanging in the air like humidity.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Additional Skills Include
Patience became your lifeline. You almost wrapped it around your neck.
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Save St. Mark’s
It is fifteen years after the renovation, and St. Mark’s struggles to breathe.
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Fool Me Once
The first time I had my breasts removed was hard. The second time, less so.
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When the Healing Place Exploded
Clothes, plants, and broken aluminum doors on balconies—all was inside out.
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Variants of Unknown Significance
My gynecologist won’t stop bothering me about getting a genetic test done.
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A Vocabulary for Apostates
I needed to reshape the definitions of words that were used against me.
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Open Letter to Our Body
The only thing I can count on to be there tomorrow is my body. And yours.
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Coming Clean
Intellectually, I know Gracie’s mom loves her and needs help. In practice, I just want my daughter safe.
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The Medically Misguided Approach to Mistreatment
The definition of mistreatment is so broad that we cannot fully grasp what it is.
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Blue, Blue Windows: On Writing and Helplessness in the Age of Trump
The brain in the jar wants out, you know. It just can’t do anything about it.
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Inappropriate Shock
Over the song, for the first time in three days, we can’t hear the beeping of Q’s monitors. I slip my hands in his back pockets and rest my cheek on his neck. As we spin, medical wires wrap around us like seaweed.
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The Day the FBI Tapped Our Phones
I held an image in my mind of my daughter and me in a small rowboat and I’m rowing, rowing, rowing as hard as I can, away from this sinking ship.
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Safety Nets: On Seeing Movies with My Children
There’s no blueprint for any of this. If there were, I would have read it by now.
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The Night Faerie
We were all free-falling, and there was no one, nothing, to catch us.
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Hard to Kill
Now everything finally made sense. I had practically died and woken up, resurrected. That’s why everyone was looking at me funny. Like its cousin Death, Near-Death leaves a stench that makes people uncomfortable.
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Missing Lorraine
I guess I was somewhat relieved that my aunt realized she wouldn’t survive another day in her apartment, and I cautiously believed that she did want to live, at least for the next ninety days.
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White Noise
People never detail the confusion—the way days feel like years, and seconds like hours.
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The Middle Season
My doctor told me to begin with adding five minutes to my morning walk. During those five minutes, I recalled the life I’d once had—that intense life that ambition gave me—and the man I’d once been.
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Meditation
We looked up as we moved. A handful of stars watched us behind a ripped black canvas of clouds. It started to rain as we all got to our cars. The skies poured down globs of heavy rain that burst out like tiny bombs around us.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Losing at Memory
But I didn’t understand, then, how important memory is, for how do we know who we are without memory? How does anyone else know who we are, but for their memories of us?
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Boy of My Youth
In my desperate attempts to keep my secret I learned to shut everyone out, to become as closed as a fist.
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Past the Break
Past the break lies motherhood as I understand it: the rawest life that lifts and falls and crashes against beauty, and the eternal potential for heartbreak.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Leaving Deficit
Feathers are a gift and flexible protein. Mom put down tobacco and ran her fingers over its exposed parts. She told me the salmon run is coming and this bird would have wanted for nothing.
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Out of Order
In summertime, a small group of white, middle-aged, well-educated men were obsessed with my ass.
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