The Paper Garden

by Caitlin Vance

  What do you eat for breakfast?

  Coffee. Powdered, chocolate-flavored vitamins mixed with soymilk. Two yellow pills, one pink, half of a white.

  How much do you drink?

  I kind of hate alcohol, but I drink beers at poetry readings because it seems weird not to. They are always holding poetry readings at bars. I feel I always have to pay for the space I take up.

  Do you smoke or use other tobacco products?

  Years ago on the first day of school, the poetry teacher asked each student what we loved most. My real answer was humiliating. I made something up instead. My girlfriend at the time said “reading.”

  Recently I went to a beautiful wedding on a beach. The next day I got a respiratory infection and coughed my way into a lost voice. I slept away the next two weeks. Never have I felt so useless. Never have I been so aware that my body is aging, and that part of aging is sickness.

  I no longer enjoy cigarettes, because of their association with coughing. I don’t even smoke them when I’m drunk. Then again, I never get drunk anymore. My uncle died a few days ago. He hadn’t been able to breathe for a long time. He had a breathing machine like Darth Vader. Perhaps my favorite word from academia is post-human.

  Are you currently pregnant?

  No. I wish, but I need to procure money first and I don’t know how to do that. Plus, several people have suggested that I’m too crazy to have a child. The child will be crazy, too, they fear.

  Have you ever been pregnant?

  No.

  Would you like to speak to someone about birth control today?

  Oh, yes—Congress, the Supreme Court, the White House, extremist religious groups, medical researchers, and all the men who have sex with women.

  When was the date of your last menstrual period?

  I couldn’t be more proud to say that I’m finally synced up with the moon. When she is full and bright, I am bleeding.

  Can you start with 100, then subtract seven over and over and tell me what number you end up with?

  No, thanks. You can just mark me down as impaired, or whatever.

  Do you have any plans to carry out suicide or murder?

  Certainly not. I would never kill myself unless I knew I would otherwise face a worse death. For instance, if someone was about to chop me into pieces and then eat the pieces in front of me (and they’d eat my eyes last), and I saw a gun within reach but the gun was enchanted so that I couldn’t use it to shoot the murderer, I could only use it to shoot myself, and there was no possibility of escaping the scenario, I’d shoot myself in the head because I know exactly the right way to do it so you actually die, you don’t just cause yourself a lot of pain and wake up later in a hospital bed with tubes in all your orifices, and I don’t like that I know the best way to successfully die but I do, someone told it to me. I won’t be the one to tell it to you, doctor, nurse, Sally, or whoever is reading this form. But it would be pretty easy to look up, if you’re curious.

  More realistically, though, say I live to old age and then I’m diagnosed with some terminal, terrible illness like COPD. Rather than just letting the suffering get worse and worse until I shrivel into a raisin and die alone in a hospital while my future grown children are out for a few minutes sitting in line at a Chick-fil-A drive-thru, I might prefer, upon being diagnosed with some shitty illness, to just go to a wonderful beach with all my friends and family (the ones who are still alive) and all their dogs. We could have a potluck party and a poetry reading on the beach, perhaps take some MDMA, light tiki torches, bounce in a bouncy castle, then everyone would go around in a circle and say their favorite things about me. Then I’d take whatever kind of poison is closest to painless, and float out to sea on a little raft clutching a bouquet of bleeding hearts, my favorite flower, and mermaids could eat my corpse.

  Or perhaps I’d also kill myself if I knew I were about to face something even worse than death—whatever death even is. These days they say God’s not real, therefore death is only oblivion, or nothing, or darkness.

  I would never kill someone else unless it was in defense of someone I loved or probably even self-defense, or in defense of the good of the world...I hope I wouldn’t get all French Revolution though. I really do wonder how the world may have been different if the damn French Revolution people had just been a little less sadistic, raping both living people and corpses, chopping off the head of Marie Antoinette's best friend, then parading it on a stick outside Marie Antoinette's window. A murderer on one of those Netflix documentary series about murderers describes “not being able to” kill his friend, but then “stepping past the part [of himself] that wouldn’t let [him] do it.”

  Is the thing preventing us from killing just some invisible wall you can simply step through?

  Have you ever started a fire?

  In Nick’s backyard one summer, near a pile of dry fallen leaves, we held a long lighter in front of a Super Soaker filled with gasoline we took from his dad’s garage stash. That was one incident in our year of pyromania. We, at least I, never hoped for any real damage, it’s just that it was summer—school was out, my mother was at work, my sister was locked in the basement, doing whatever she did all day on the internet. I was lonely, too old to find friends in the stuffed rabbit Daisy or the dinosaur Mary. I’ve always had an inexplicable aversion to technology. This makes me wonder if I’m less evolved than other people. I was too young for drugs and too young for sex. Fire was about right for my age.

  What kind of insurance do you have?

  The cheapest option on the Obamacare website.

  What is the meaning of this statement? “Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”

  I’ve never heard this statement in my life. I’ll suppose it means: being self-destructive does not make you cool.

  Please sign your name in the space below, then kindly return this form to Sally. Thank you.

  ___________________________

  i can tell what's real and what's pretend

  I can tell what’s real and what’s pretend, not like the people in the mind hospital with Mom. She’s in the hospital because when nobody was watching, she went into the garage and tried to cut me out of her belly with a knife. Well joke’s on her because I wasn’t in her belly, I was already born just fine ten years ago. So instead of cutting me out, all she did was twist the knife deep into herself until she scraped her organs and got blood all over the garage floor like the oil from Grandpa’s car. Grandma found Mom half-dead in the garage, then a screaming ambulance took her away. Probably the blood inside Mom shines silver now like the knife’s blade.

  This is not the first time Mom has tried to cut me out of her belly. She just goes crazy sometimes, always in spring or summer. When she’s not crazy, she’s quiet and still like a hibernating bear. In winter, blizzards come. Sharp icicles bigger than me hang off roofs and she doesn’t even look up. Then the snow starts to melt. She’s like a cuckoo clock, quiet for a long time and then BANG, crazy, over and over in a circle. Grandma, Grandpa and I hide all the knives and try to watch Mom closely like babysitters, but we can’t watch all the time. We have lives and need to sleep. A social worker comes to visit Mom once a week when she’s home. Social workers are like guardian angels who watch over sick people, but they’re humans, so they make mistakes. Mom found a way to get the knife anyway and pull the same stunt. I don’t know why she wants to cut me out of her.

  The mind hospital is in the basement of the body hospital, even though in real life the mind is like the top floor of the body. Grandma and I take the elevator down there every night from 6-7, visiting hours. Grandma is always too tired for stairs. She’s not that old for a grandma, only forty-eight. She had Mom when she was twenty-four, and Mom had me when she was sixteen. We have always lived with Grandma and Grandpa. I do not have a dad.

  The mind hospital is the saddest, darkest, coldest part of the building—a maze of grey hallways
with no windows. There’s metal equipment everywhere, and nurses in blue outfits carry paper cups full of pills. The ceilings are too low, which makes everyone look strange, the wrong height. The ceilings make me worry I’m about to be crushed, like the flowers I put between pages of the dictionary. The hospital people try to fix the darkness down here by putting in extra-bright lights, but it doesn’t fix the dark in a nice way. The lights feel fake, not like moons or candles.

  The two ladies at the front desk check all visitors for sharp objects and cords. Nothing dangerous is allowed in here. Lots of the patients are like Mom, trying to cut their own bodies up. Once, a visitor had a makeup mirror in her purse and a patient took it, smashed it, and used the broken glass to cut her vein open. No more makeup mirrors allowed now.

  “Hello, Anna,” says Elaine, one of the smiling ladies at the front desk. “Nice to see you again.” She knows my name because I’ve been here every day this week, plus I’ve been here basically every year of my life, like a tradition. The ladies at the front desk like me, and so do most of the patients. That’s because I am a child. Everyone here is sad, but most adults are happy for at least one little second when they see a nice or cute child. In general, I get a lot more attention than Grandma.

  “Hello, Miss Elaine,” I say, and curtsy like Shirley Temple. She thinks this is cute, so I do it every time I come here. She puts her hand over her heart and says “Anna, you are too sweet! You just made my day.”

  Mom can only stay here three weeks per year. That’s because of insurance, which is something related to money. Adults won’t explain it to me because it’s too complicated. Adults keep secrets from me all the time, but I’m smarter than they think. Grandma says maybe someday we can get a different insurance and/or more money, so that Mom can go to a better hospital, a long-term one. This hospital helps like a Band-Aid, but Mom just keeps falling over and scraping her knee again. Grandma doesn’t know if Mom will get worse. We need more money in general.

  “Let’s go to Mom’s room,” says Grandma. She calls her “Mom” when she’s talking to me, because she thinks if she calls her by her real name I won’t understand what’s going on.

  I blow a kiss to Miss Elaine. She blows one back.

  Everybody gets a roommate here. Inside each room, there are two beds, two armchairs, and two nightstands with drawers. They put a blue curtain in between one person’s half of the room and the other, like they’re trying to keep the sun from shining through a window. But there are no windows here, so really they’re trying to keep one person from shining too much on the other.

  “Hi, Anna,” says Ruth, Mom’s roommate, who is sitting on her bed reading a magazine with a famous person on the cover. The blue curtain is open, because Ruth always wants it open, even though Mom always wants it closed. Mom likes privacy, and she doesn’t like most people. She’s sitting in her chair in the corner, as far away from Ruth as she can get in the little room. She’s not reading anything, she’s just resting her head in her hands with her eyes closed.

  Every spring before Mom goes to the mind hospital, she has to go to the body hospital first so the doctors can fix the wounds she made. They stick some silver tools in her, including knives, but in a helping way, not a destroying way like Mom does to herself. Then, they sew her up like she’s a Raggedy Ann doll. I do not like dolls. They creep me out. They watch me all night with their eyes that never close. When Mom’s strong enough to walk a little, the doctors send her to the basement for three weeks. She wears bandages around her belly, covering the new scars she keeps adding to the old ones. Her stomach is like a red tattoo, copying one of those museum paintings that don’t look like anything and that Grandpa hates.

  “Hi, Ruth,” I say. Grandma says it too.

  “Come give me a hug, Anna,” Ruth says. I look at Mom. She still has her eyes closed, like Grandma and I aren’t even here. I go hug Ruth, even though I don’t like it when adults think they can just get hugs from me whenever they want. Ruth is older than Mom and less crazy. At least, she acts less crazy. Crazy people come in all shapes and sizes, though. Sometimes you can’t even tell.

  Ruth goes back to reading the magazine. I go over to Mom. “Hi, Mom,” I say.

  She lifts her head. “Hi, Anna.” She takes my hand in hers. “That’s funny, I thought you were gone.”

  I shake my head. “Nope.” Here we go again.

  Grandma comes over and puts her hand on Mom’s shoulder. “Let’s not talk about that right now, honey,” she says to Mom.

  “Oh, shut up, Violet.” That’s what Mom calls Grandma, even though she’s her mom. Grandma says this is disrespectful but Mom does it anyway. Mom turns to me. “I’m so sorry, Anna. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

  “Not at all,” I say. I spin around to show her my body, that nothing is broken. “I’m fine.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Good.”

  Grandma asks Mom, “How was your day today, Hailey? What did you do?”

  Mom shrugs. “Same stuff as yesterday. Group counseling, individual counseling, Bingo, yada yada yada.” Mom turns to me again. “Anna, it’s not you I want to hurt. I was just confused. Who I really want to hurt, actually kill, is the bad guy.”

  I try not to roll my eyes. Here we go again. The bad guy is someone Mom talks about only when she is crazy. I don’t know who he is. Probably he’s not even real. One thing crazy people do is make stuff up that’s not real, then think about it so much that they start to believe it. When you’re a child, you can believe in things that aren’t real and people think it’s cute, but when you’re an adult, it’s not cute, it’s just crazy. For example, I have an imaginary boyfriend, Peter, but it’s okay because I’m only ten, plus I know he’s imaginary.

  “Let’s not talk about that right now, Hailey,” says Grandma. Then she mouths the word “Anna” while pointing at me. She is trying to say that I’m a child, so Mom shouldn’t talk about killing people. But I’m used to it. I’ve seen TV before.

  “You never want to talk, Violet,” says Mom. “Not about anything that matters.”

  Grandma frowns. Then she asks Mom, “How are the meds?”

  Mom sighs. “Same as always. They make me tired, so tired.” She rests her head on her chin. “I feel like I’m in a dream.”

  “Well, I guess all meds have side effects,” Grandma says.

  “I guess,” says Mom. She looks at me. “I love you, Anna.”

  “I love you too, Mom.” I hug her. She closes her eyes and smiles.

  Grandma takes a deck of cards out of her purse and we play Go Fish for the rest of visiting hour. Ruth doesn’t want to play. She flips pages of her magazine.

  On the outside of our house, the grey paint is peeling. The paint got so old that it turned into pieces of bark flaking off the wooden house. Grandma says Grandpa should paint it, since he paints houses as a job, but he doesn’t want to, so it just peels more and more, like dead, dry skin. I used to pick off the pieces to find out what was underneath, but then Grandma saw me and got mad. The house is grey but the door is faded red. The snow’s melted now, but the grass in the yard is still dead. There’s mud everywhere, and no flowers. Even in summer, nobody waters the lawn, and our grass is always dead.

  The inside walls are also grey, except in the bedroom I share with Mom, where they are pink. Mom painted them when she was sixteen, when she found out she was having a baby girl. She has lived in this bedroom her whole life, and I’ve lived here my whole life too. The pink room is like a heart or a womb that holds us both inside, safe and warm, but also stuck together too close. There are two beds, two dressers, two desks, and two trunks. There is no curtain dividing the halves.

  Our house has an upstairs and a downstairs. Upstairs is our room, Grandma and Grandpa’s room, and the bathroom. Downstairs is the living room, kitchen, and table where we eat. There’s a backyard where Sally the chihuahua plays. Behind the back yard is the woods where I p
lay. I don’t know what is behind the woods, because they seem to go on forever. A stream runs through the woods, surrounded by blackberry bushes. I’m not allowed to go past the place where the bushes make a wall across the stream. Mom used to play in the same woods when she was a child.

  We have a garage where Grandpa parks his car and Mom cuts herself up every spring. In the garage there is also a bunch of garbage and cardboard boxes with words written in black marker, like “CHRISTMAS” or “VHS.” VHS is something that’s too old to fit in our TV. The boxes take up room and Grandma has to park her car in the driveway, even in winter when it takes forever to dig it out of the snow. Mom doesn’t have a car and neither do I. Grown-ups can get in cars whenever they want and just drive away. Children can’t. Neither can Mom. Mom counts as an adult because of her age, but it’s like she’s not quite an adult, because of her behavior.

  When Grandma and I get home from the mind hospital, we eat the dinner Grandpa cooked. Chicken and waffles. Grandpa visited the South once and now this is his favorite meal. I love this food, but at school we learned sugar and fats are bad, and it is necessary to eat vegetables and lean meats instead, like grilled chicken instead of fried chicken. Grandpa does not think so. He’s fifty. Whenever I disagree with him, about the vegetables or anything else, he says I am older than you, Anna, and to him, this means he is right automatically.

  “Pass the syrup, please,” Grandpa says to me. Sally sits on the floor next to his chair, wagging her tail and putting her paws on his legs, begging for chicken. Sally is nice but Mom says nobody ever trained her to act right, so she acts crazy. Luckily, she is too small to jump up on the table. I pass Grandpa the bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s, which is shaped like a woman in an apron. He pours the syrup on like crazy, all over the waffles and the chicken. I ask for the bottle back and look at the nutrition facts.