If the forward force is too great, the wooden fibers split vertically up the trunk and kickback toward the operator in a snaptrap called
the Barber Chair.
↟ I used to hide Lime-a-rita cans behind the couch.
You were in the bathroom when I cracked each one.
I shouldn’t have been driving that night.
↟ We were fifteen and didn’t belong in that house. I never told anyone about that night.
The invited boys we didn’t really know. The crinkled hundred dollar bill they stole out of my wallet, the one my dad gave me for my birthday. The way they dropped the liquor off and left, only to return after we finished it.
I asked if he had a condom because that’s what you’re supposed to ask. And he said, turn around.
↟ Love made me unable to function.
At the kitchen table, the fibers of my abdomen splitting apart over Frank Bidart’s Half-Life, I counted all the ways I am nothing: unpretty, unfeminine, unpetite, my ugly jealousy always bubbling up in the cracked foundation of my body.
Once you reach what is / inside it is outside.
↟ The next day, Sarah tells me I was lying on the pool table. Aaron carried me to the car and drove me home. In ten years, he will be driving around xanned out with his three small children in the backseat, and I will side with his wife in the divorce.
↟ I tell the visiting author about my classmate who is better than me in every way possible. He says, in the beginning, he was the worst writer in his cohort at Syracuse.
I think real danger is being in the middle.
↟ The blue plastic steel body of my Kia Rio crunching against a tree trunk. The tree made contact with the telephone wire and burned to the ground.
↟ When I saw her for the first time, standing there with her symmetry, her effortlessly cool, black layered clothing and metal jewelry, and—worst of all—the ethereality of her inner goodness radiating outward, I thought to myself, why does she need this? She already has everything.
↟ The pendulum always swings. You will hurt others, and you will hurt yourself. People will remember, then they will forget.
Rachel Carson writes, there is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter,
winter never seems to end.
↟ To prevent the tree from splitting into a Barber Chair, the logger cuts a hinge in the wood. The tree falls in a controlled direction.
↟ I would drink only on the weekends, I told myself. Then I said I would drink on weekdays but no more than three.
↟ Sitting at the kitchen table, I tell you I’m thinking about ending things. You say leave if you want, like it doesn’t make any difference.
I go to Halftimes and order a cherry bomb. The evening sky quickly turns black.
I remember the rest like the afterimages of a lightning storm. Crying in the shower after you get me out of my puke clothes. Saying I will kill myself and you begging me not to. You repeatedly asking me how much I’d had to drink.
↟ Regret is a hinge in a tree of less than forty five degrees closing before the tree has fallen even halfway to the ground.
↟ I know things are really over because you’ll never let this go. You already think I’m not in control.
↟ The condition of a tree will become apparent in its fruit.
↟ I never made it through the program. I keep the 24-Hour chip in the center console. After I totaled my car, I moved the chip to the new car.
↟ I go to the church. At this point, I am so ashamed that the only thing left to do is tell everyone about it.
There is an old woman. She has seen some things, I can tell. When I ask her if she is there for the meeting, I’m already crying. She puts her arm around me, her cigarette smoldering in my face,
and says, oh I remember. I remember how it is, in the beginning. It hurts.
↟ I remember peeling strips of rough, brown bark from a tree, exposing the smooth, pale complexion underneath. My mom said, how would you like it if someone peeled your skin off?
↟ We lived in a rough, brown house, with a white windmill in the front yard, spinning itself into deterioration.
Jackie Donaldson
Jackie Donaldson is a writer, Instructor, and a PhD student in English at the University of Connecticut. Her creative work has been published in The Ana, The Candid Review, Loud Coffee Press, and elsewhere. You can connect with Jackie on Instagram @jacquiverse and @insidethots on Substack.
