How to Survive a Femicide
by Jessie Carson
First, finish watching Mister Ed on TV at your sister Pearl’s house. Give her a hug before you leave and walk the short distance home. Pass the man who would soon murder your family as he passes you in your yard. This is the man who you know is Pearl’s father. Not yours. If you were to draw three lines between his house, your house and Pearl’s, and look down from above, you would see a triangle on the grass. Tell him, no, when he asks if you need anything, anything at all.
Walk through the front door in the house where you live with your mother, your younger brother Brian, and younger sister Patsy. Say goodnight to your mother then go straight to your bedroom. Tuck Patsy into the bed next to yours. Take off your socks as you think how odd it is that Pearl’s father showed concern for your needs because he never does that. And he is certainly never up after dark. He always goes to bed at sunset because he has no electricity in the little shack he built a line away from your house.
When you hear gunshots, two of them, the air moving in and out of your body shortens. Tell Patsy to stay in the room. Run into the kitchen to see your mother sitting at the table with her head cranked back and a bullet wound in her forehead. Clamber past Pearl’s father and Tom, your mother’s boyfriend, wrestling in a pool of blood by the front door. Push out the door and run back across the damp yard to Pearl’s house again. Fall into her arms and tell her that he shot Mother, while you wrap your arms around her big pregnant belly that is firm against your chest.
Both of you hear him coming. And because the TV is still on, you also hear the canned laughter playing every time the producers want to instill a positive response from their viewers. For the rest of your life, when you hear a laugh track, you will think of this night.
Do as Pearl tells you and crawl under her bed even though there is barely space for your body. Feel the weight of the bed so that with each inhale your chest presses against the furniture above you. Stay there, frozen and quiet. Sense the coolness of the wood floor on your skin, and the wire springs of the frame tearing at your hair. The back of your neck, electric. Notice how you feel exposed as if your skin is on fire with icy flames burning away the barrier between your body and everything else. Wait. Breathe only the tiniest amounts of air. Wait.
Sense your whole body telling you to shut up, or die. Not with these words exactly, but through the way your animal body knows things in a non-language sort of way.
More gunshots. You do not hear them so much as become them.
Feel the footsteps through your whole body. Hear the unclasped buckles jangle on his galoshes that he wears because of his swollen diabetic feet. More footsteps as he goes into one bedroom then another until the jangling stops at the bedroom door where you are hiding under the bed. You know he is looking for you. Then, feel the whole house shake, one loud boom, and see him lying on the floor facing you, hands on a gun pointed at your throat. His eyes are open, but it’s as if he looks through you.
Close your eyes and think, I hope it doesn’t hurt.
You will only consider later that he couldn’t have seen you, maybe because he had a wound through his skull from the hammer that Tom had swung at him even with a bullet hole through his own neck. You will forget to thank Tom later, but for the rest of your life will wish you did.
If you need to, leave your body for a time.
Open your eyes and see that he is gone. Wonder, for a brief moment, if you are dead. Or if it is a dream. Realize that you are alive and awake and have not been shot, then flee the bedroom and Pearl’s house. In darkness, run straight into a barbed wire fence where you rip the palm of your hand and with the help of adrenaline, run down the gravel road, still on your bare feet, to the neighbours’ house. Burst through their front door. On the other side, you will see another person pointing a gun at you. Collapse. You have not been shot. This person is a police officer and does not want to kill you. Let them check for a gunshot wound until they decipher that the blood that is soaking your clothes is coming from your hand.
Even though you won’t remember what you say, tell the police what you saw in what you think are coherent words. Tell them, because you think it’s important, about the notes that your mother folded and gave you that day to deliver across the yard to a shack where Gladys, a woman who you know as your aunt, was staying that night because she was visiting your family. This little building was also close to the triangle of houses. Your brother can easily throw a chicken egg from your front door to hers, but you can’t. She was, you know now, trying to help your mother. While you rubbed Toffee’s belly and made him chase his tail, you waited until Gladys finished writing her note for you to take your mother.
Take the drugs that someone gives you even though you don’t know what they are. They are trying to dull reality for you and subdue your shaking body.
Lean your forehead on the glass of the back window of the police car as they drive you away. Wake up in a hospital with your brother Brian in the same room, and with your hand wrapped in a bandage that has bled through. Listen, as he tells you that he has been grazed by a bullet across the top of his head after he left his bedroom and ran to another neighbour’s house. Look, he says as he shows you the blood on his scalp and the gunpowder in his hair. Ask him where Patsy is.
It will be all too close and too much right now. It is normal for your body to feel as if it can’t contain this experience, as if you are a cloud and the air around you is in you and you have also evaporated up from the dewy morning grass. And that every solid object around you will displace you from the space in which you exist in right now. Wonder again if you are still alive.
Don’t try to speak of what happened last night.
Wear the clothes that the nurses give you even though they are not yours and are too big. Look down towards your hands and pull the cuffs of the sleeves over them. Doctors and nurses and police officers are standing outside of your hospital room. Don’t try too hard to listen to what they are saying. They are utterly lost at what to do with you and your brother. Sit up in the bed. Look at Brian occasionally as he looks at you. This kind of eye contact can help you feel as if you are less of a cloud. See Tom walk in the room with a bandage wrapped around his neck. Because it is difficult to make out his words, watch his mouth as he tells you that Mother, Pearl, Patsy, and Gladys have been killed and he is so sorry he couldn’t protect you.
Let all air leave your body.
For a time, don’t believe him because, you know, you feel your mother all around you. She is now everywhere.
Cry.
Give it everything you have because you are almost certain that you are dying too. Because the only way you know you are not dying too, that you haven’t disintegrated completely, is the sound coming from your throat and your nose and the wetness on your face. When you move, whether it be to cover your mouth with your hands or to go from the hospital bed to the bathroom because you don’t want to soil the bleached white hospital sheets, look down at your legs and think, look at my legs. I am walking. The crying might also make you throw up and lose all urge to eat. Even the ginger cookies from the nurse feel strange on your tongue. Sweet, they are just so sweet.
You sleep, and you don’t imagine that decades down the road of your life, your daughter would write about this.
Two days after the murders, accept the nurse’s shoes when you are told that you need to go to an inquest to confirm who killed your family, even though you don’t know what an inquest is. Don’t be embarrassed that your feet are larger than every other kid’s feet in your class. Once you have changed into nicer looking clothes that are still too big for you, accept the nurses’ compliments about how nice you look in the clothes that are not yours.
Duck down in the back seat of the police car to hide from the press photographers out front of the courthouse. Enter through the back door of the building.
Try not to laugh as the judge opens the court session by whacking his gavel on the desk and calling out “hear ye, hear ye!” And what is that wig doing on his head? Do not make eye contact with your brother now, otherwise you will both start giggling.
Take a breath after you hear you are the first witness called to the stand.
Look down at the book that a man holds in front of you. Read the word Bible in bold gold lettering across the deep blue cover.
“Place your hand on the book, miss,” the man has to tell you.
Place your hand on the bible.
Answer their ridiculous questions. Like, who killed your mother?
It is okay that you are the only girl in a room of men you don’t know. It is okay that you are not too concerned about getting everything right. If the man had held out a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, that would be a different story. You simply adore that book.
Sit with your spine erect and your hands in your lap so that people might think you are respectable, rather than an illegitimate bastard, until you realize that they all think that this man that killed your family is your father. He is not. But you don’t need to explain that to them.
Do not fall apart right now. Don’t be a cloud. Be more like the wooden chair you are sitting on.
Watch your brother nod when they ask him questions. Watch him say, yes, after the judge tells him that he must not simply nod but say “yes.”
Sleep.
Try not to dream.
Take your first flight from Ontario to Calgary to live with relatives you don’t know. Give Brian the window seat. At your new school, three weeks after the women in your family were killed, sit still at your desk. Don’t think too much about the test they had you take, one that years later you will find out was an IQ test. You are sure you did poorly and your teachers will continue to be pleasantly surprised that you are not a stupid child.
Tell the boy sitting in the desk behind you to stop after he pulls a few strands of your hair. Tell him again. When he doesn’t stop, swing your fist at him forcefully enough to break his nose. He will duck just in time. Turn around in your seat. He will stop after that.
Never fight with your brother again.
Take the pair of scissors that Ethel, the woman of the couple who adopts you, puts into one of your hands and hold the cardboard triangle in the other. Continue taking old clothes that were not yours from the bag beside you and use the cardboard to cut out fabric triangles. Assist Ethel in making a star flower quilt that you will use on your bed. Decades later, the yellow binding fabric will hang off the blanket in strings and you will keep promising yourself that you will bring it to a seamstress to have it mended. Though it might never be mended and instead, stay in the closet for years.
Walk to school and walk home when school is over.
Some nights, when she asks, tell Sharon, your adopted sister, what you dreamt about. You feel obliged to give some explanation of your night terrors that continue to wake her up too.
Talk to your brother years later and find out about his nightmares as he tried to sleep alone in the basement bedroom having picked up the tendency of bedwetting again.
Because bell bottom pants are in style, save up for a pair and wear them every day.
During your first year of university, don’t feel guilty about splurging on a box of Bridge Mixture from the vending machine every week.
Marry your high school sweetheart, even though it will be a mistake, though not an unredeemable one. Pay for his pilot license and the plane fuel that is used to give flights to multiple women, while you stay at home and prepare your teaching lessons. Then use every last penny you have to pay for the divorce.
Draw swans. A whole sketch book of them. Some in pencil; hues of gray. Some in pastel. Long, graceful necks and broad bodies. Animals that can spend their life in water, on the earth and in the air in seemingly equal parts. Birds that sometimes tuck a webbed foot under a wing to warm it up, or, to cool it down.
Paint by number.
Find a man who thinks you are brilliant and who isn’t at all scared of that. Move back to Ontario, even though you said you would never go back to that province.
Become a mother. Recall how your mother loved being a mother. Miss your mother so much it is as if you are twelve years old and back in the hospital room unable to tie your own shoes because one palm is wrapped in a bandage that is blood-soaked from the night before. All over again, you have no words to ask for what you need.
Without her, be forced to confront the best and worst in yourself. Choose what you keep. Become bigger and let the container of your life be more immense so that you can hold more and really, you and your brother should not have to carry this by yourselves. Revel in how your babies fit perfectly against your chest as you rock them. Hum any kind of tune with your cheek against their gorgeous fragile heads.
Sit at a bar attached to a laundromat with your three children who all have lice. Wait for your seven loads of laundry to finish so that you can transfer them to the dryers. Ask the bartender to change your ten-dollar bill for quarters. Watch your children as they drink Diet Coke and eat Doritos, thrilled that you picked them up from school in the middle of the day. Try not to want your mother more than ever because your husband is on a business trip and you have no idea how to de-lice your children’s hair. Remember how your mother once threw open your older sister’s suitcase and flung her clothes on the lawn in the hot sun and wouldn’t let her enter the house until every part of her body was inspected. Was that lice? Or bed bugs? When you get home, herd your children into the bath and comb through their poisoned hair with fine plastic teeth. Flatten each bug and nit on the edge of the bathtub with the side of the comb.
But, hold it together, damn it.
Catch your breath.
Be delighted years later when your daughter finds one paint-by-number painting that is half-finished. The little plastic containers of paint aren’t even dried up. Remember the tall trunks of birch trees you painted black, white, and shades of gray and brown, that were too tall for the perspective. The light of the sunset peeking through the trees. Years after you started it, watch as your daughter paints the blue, pink, orange, and purple light that shines through the forest.
Forget about the poem that you must have written in your teen years or early twenties that was directed towards the man who murdered your family. Tell your daughter you are not a writer. Wonder why she said that you gave her a piece of paper with a poem on it.
“No,” you assure your daughter. You have never written a poem in your life. You don’t write like that.
Humour your daughter as she tells you that the poem was on a sheet of white paper with black letters from a typewriter. The poem was about ten lines long, she adds. The sheet of paper was folded and mixed up with old pictures or files or other things you kept for decades without revisiting them. You don’t remember giving it to her. You don’t remember writing it. You were going to throw it out, she told you, but she asked for it. She can’t believe that she lost it.
Believe her or not. It doesn’t really matter anymore.
Turn off the radio when you find yourself listening, for the fourth time, to a news report about a man in Renfrew, just an hour west of you, who murdered three women on the same day. You know it is harrowing, but not unpredictable.
Tell your grown-up daughter that your mother played the harmonica, but never around him. It was only when her own brother would visit.
Find the graves of the women in your family and order cornerstones then gravestones to be placed around the small rectangles of earth where their bodies are buried. Take a road trip with your children and grandchildren. Stop at The Big Apple just off the busiest road in North America and find a wooden picnic table in the shade of the gigantic red fruit to eat your lunch. Place your hands on the graves and take a picture of your hands on the graves.
Talk to people you trust. Make this step iterative and defy time because grief doesn’t track the hands of a clock.
Tell your story, even though this will not be how you heal.
You might find that when you tell your children, or the audience at the women’s shelter fundraiser, or the reporter who is trying to redeem the way journalists covered your family’s murders years ago, that you have nightmares like the ones you had as a child. Talk to your brother, Brian, on the phone because he is the only one in your life who will ever understand this fully.
Make apple cinnamon yogurt muffins.
Start to garden. Fall in love with the moon flower because it only blooms at night. In the warmer months, the petals unfurl themselves at sunset then close at sunrise. The next night new flowers bloom all over again. After that fall in love with the lavender bush and harvest it into little bags. Give them to your children. Fall in love with hibiscus; the hardy perennial kind that survives, if dormant, through the Eastern Ontario winters.
Insist you know nothing about gardening and hire two women who come and tell you what, where, and when to plant things. Even though they are younger than you, laugh as they call you sweetie.
Sit on your back deck with your grandson as he takes sliced pear from your hand. Let him run the tips of his small fingers along the V-shaped scar on your palm that has never fully gone away. Feel that there is less sensation where the skin was once apart and has come back together. When he asks how you got the mark, tell him simply that once, you were running and grabbed onto a fence that had pokey wires sticking out of it. Smile at his tender expression.
Then, after he takes the last slice of pear, let him grab your hand in his hands and press his sticky lips to your palm.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Jessie Carson lives in the town of Almonte, Ontario. She is the Creative Director of Almonte Readers & Writers, a teacher, an editor, and the mother of three boys. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Ars Medica, Mutha Magazine, Blank Spaces Magazine, as well as other places. Her writing is most often an inquiry into the themes of motherhood, loss, and how stories live in the body and through generations. @_jessiecarson_ on Instagram. jessiecarson.com