See this old house atop the steep, steep hill? This is where I lived when I ran away from you, when I was long-haired and vixen-minded. 

I haven’t changed. 

This is where I mowed the lawn, the only one of the six roommates who had ever mowed a lawn before. You taught me how, when I was nine. How to wear long pants and close-toed shoes. See, I listened. I listened to the important parts. The hill as steep as a San Francisco street, covered in dandelions and crabgrass. Our rent was low, the requirement to mow and shovel snow included in the lease. I shoveled, too. Shoveling is harder than mowing. The walkways iced over in January and we didn’t receive mail for a month, not until the thaw.

You didn’t thaw until 1998. The year Daddy disappeared. You still won’t tell me what happened, if he left or went to prison or died. Now you can’t tell me, your mind as muddled as your logic when I first left. 

I tasted freedom for the first time in my life, hard-won freedom in an old house with mice and slanted floors. We kept it clean, swept it out the way we each swept authority out of our lives. Easier to do than we thought. Easier to do than what you warned would happen if I left you. 

See here, on this side? Here’s the window I pressed against, looking at the weather, looking down at the street, the church and its steeple below me, the small homes down the hill. The highway hum beyond, unseen but not unheard. The sirens. The salty scent of Burger King on the corner, fries fried in hamburger oil. The north star, rising beside the moon.

I became an adult there, independent from you. I leaned on my roommates, my job, my education which I gained at night in the portables off the main campus. I am not an island. I was not and will never be. You were wrong.

I know island to you now means visiting Jamaica or Antigua, the Caribbean Sea blue and warm. Can you remember, back between the folds of your soft cortex, how you imposed tough love, stoicism, how you made it impossible to think beyond the parameters inside of which you fenced me? 

Yes, yes, we’ll go now. We’ll go to Red Lobster for lunch, the way we always do. We’ll eat the cheddar chive biscuits and split the catch of the day. I just wanted you to see, Mom, how it was for me. How it was good and bad and everything I needed to become who I am now, someone who can drive you to lunch on Wednesdays, someone who can talk to you, because now you can’t remember who I am.

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Wendy BooydeGraaff‘s short fiction, poems, and essays have been included in Stanchion, Slag Glass City, CutLeaf, Ninth Letter online, and elsewhere. Her middle grade horror story is anthologized in The Haunted States of America (Godwin Books, 2024). Her previous Necessary Fiction story can be found here. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States.