"Then we are all going to die"

It’s been one hundred and eighty-one days since anyone has touched my skin.

Today, you’ll enter into a completely new world and stay here for two weeks.

Then, we will return to regular programming (my more essayist style, real-life verbosities) BUT….

If you end up liking the novel I’m taking the risk of sharing here… Then I will know that this is an adventure series you like sometimes, if I’m recovering from a surgery or something else akin.

As I mentioned here, I of course wish I could one day have a proper publisher and continue “writing as if I’m running out of time” as I am (I wrote all my Kindle novellas in just 1 to 2 days because of impending surgeries at that time).

I grew up writing fiction (many, many, many a complete book), but have only self-published 3 novellas to accompany each of the stories for my dance company of the last 8 years -currently on pause due to how many surgeries are occurring this fall/winter. This included the books, “Away”, “Across”, and “Nine”, as well as a children’s book for our show “Dreamt”.

I also published a novella called ‘The Details of How We Lived’ many, many years ago, and the beginning of a potential “memoir” called “The Unreliable Ultimate Playlist of a Sometimes Dying Deaf Girl”…. which was a pandemic based experiment where I shared the first few possible chapters during that lonely time, but then was sidelined heavily by a series of back surgeries.

Instead, as you know by now, I’ve essentially “started over” by beginning to write and continue this ‘ongoing memoir project’ here.

Because I write almost every single weekday, I have plenty of words to eventually form into a book, though the hard part for me will be that I always prefer to begin from scratch (I’d rather throw out a dance and choreograph a new one, than backwash the same thing, for example).

Therefor, finding a way to both embrace this spine-saving Substack gift of encouragement for my “creative nonfiction” [as someone was kind enough to call it?] and compiling works that deserve a page (many don’t), as well as the previous un-ending litany of words at my former column ‘Life In The Grey’ (the column I wrote as a teenager for print- ‘Self Proclaimed Girl’- wont make the book, laughoutloud laughoutloud laughoutloud), as well as the inevitable new pieces I’ll want to put in because…

I can’t resist.

But, fighting the urge to do everything from scratch for the sake of my spine IS a fight worth fighting within myself.

Despite that pandemexperiment, I also have written a few complete fiction books that I have not shared with anyone.

One was a YA novel for my eldest daughter at that time (it’s fairly long and will always be kept in the family), and another is what I’m about to begin to share here.

Just two week’s worth.

Now, YOU get to tell me if you think it’s worth self-publishing this because you want to read more.

Or, it gives me something special to do with all the surgeries to come?

Either way, thank you for being willing to go off on a new and unexpected journey and for gifting me this recovery time!

And hopefully you enjoy the special glimpse at a book I otherwise never would have shared?

This novel is very cautiously called: “Senseless”.

I wrote it during the point in the pandemic when we didn’t know what was going to happen (the first couple of weeks of panic and wiping down grocery bags) and kept sending pieces to my best friend.

I wanted to have a protagonist who is an OT like her… in a setting like we both used to work in (a Deaf and Blind school)… and to be a commentary on ableism, and stigma, and more.

BUT….

This was meant to be a little bit “scary”.

It’s a thriller and fairly dark and (at least the first paragraph you’re about to drop aggressively into below): sometimes very R-rated.

I am not going to blur the words, because words are just words and deserve to be stated when they serve a narrative- but please be warned (and then when it’s “my voice” who comes back, I’ll go back to adding a f*cking asterisk in every d*mn word like this, as example).

The main character in this novel has a filthy mouth so… please approach at your own caution.

If you are adverse to R-rated movie content, hopefully you won’t mind granting me the next two weeks of adventure.

Reading some of this back made me cringe… so I am trying to stop and just share. This isn’t a perfect edit (just like my Everyday Writing Promise here) and this isn’t a perfect anything.

This is just… a leap of trust/

THANK YOU and…

I hope you like dropping into this world with me?

It’s been one hundred and eighty-one days since anyone has touched my skin.

This is ironic because there used to be a time where I’d do anything to not be touched.

“She doesn’t like hugs,” my best friend Theo would say, “We prefer high-fives instead.”

Now, a high-five would seem a slow fuck in of itself.

Theo used to be named Thea, but they felt the misplaced “a” at the end would lend too feminine in time. It’s not that Theo wanted to be too masculine either… they just wanted to be a they, in of themselves.

Theo was a toucher, without a doubt. They liked to pat small children on the head and say, “bring it in!” before some awkwardly-cool hand-shake-thing that seemed at once rehearsed and impromptu, only adding to the coolness more so than if they knew they were cool and tried. I always thought Theo should keep the vowel finality at the end of their name, because ending with a beginning felt right.

I didn’t know our beginning would end like this.

I didn’t know that my first job as an Occupational Therapist would somehow be my last, and Theo would be dead a hundred and three days ago, and that no one would have touched so much as my hand in one hundred and eighty-one days, or even that I’d ever want them to.

My last boyfriend used to do this thing where he’d trace the line of my ribs with his left hand when spooning in bed, and every fiber in my body tensed with the urge to laugh. I hate being tickled. The only thing I hate more than being tickled is men who think slow-mo-feathering the side of your stomach is sexy, versus a swift spread to an elbow in the face. But I sat there, holding my breath and halfway biting my tongue to keep from laughing, just hoping he’d hurry up and finger me already because the foreplay felt as bad as the spooning.

I don’t like to be touched. Not normally, anyways. 

“There’s someone at the front!”

The voice was coming from Sunaura. I can tell right away because I’ve always been good at discerning things from their first sound. My Dad used to flip through the radio when I was a kid and see how quickly I could Name That Song (one-second was my sworn average), and I’d watch movies with eyes closed just to see if I could see things through hearing that no one else saw by seeing them. It’s kind of weird that I like captions on the TV even though I don’t need them, but I guess it’s a hazard of the job.

I knew it was Sunaura without having to see her, and I knew she was down the hallway, shy of the corridor.

No one had been to the front for at least two weeks… three, maybe… and I knew it would be like the rest. There’d be no way to let them in. No way to help. And we’d all just stand there hoping it would end sooner than it started.

No one came this time, though. No one but me.

“Rose!”

Now she’s calling me. Sunaura is not one of my students, or in need of my care, but sometimes it freaking feels like it.

“Yep,” I say tersely, standing up from where I’d been sitting in the break room. It used to be the break room. Now it’s where we house most of the medical supplies from the school clinic, because we can no longer get to that part of campus.

I used to sit here and eat a Kit Kat, praying no one would interrupt me with casual conversation… Now, it looks like a field hospital full of dwindling supplies, tables pushed to the side.

“Someone is at the front,” she is still saying, as I approach in the hallway, wondering again why I have to take care of everyone.

Sunaura used to be a Guidance Counselor. She’s only a few years younger than me… not many… but it shows. She never had a real job before starting here. She went straight from living with her parents in grad school to her boyfriend’s apartment. She still thinks he’s going to show up at the front one of these days. Trevor. She won’t stop talking about Trevor.

But I know that Trevor is dead along with everyone else. He’s dead with Theo. He’s dead with my Dad. He’s definitely dead.

“You heard them?” I ask uselessly, not really wanting to go through the routine of this situation again, but knowing I have too anyways.

“Yes,” she replies, eyes wide, cheekbones increasingly thin, “But it sounds like a woman this time.”

I almost sigh audibly from relief. The last time someone found their way to the front it was a man, and (as the coms and video cameras stopped working weeks ago), Sunaura all but convinced herself that the voice that definitely didn’t belong to Trevor definitely belonged to Trevor.

The irony of having to continually guide the Guidance Counselor has not escaped me.

“Listen,” I say, trying to keep my voice as level as possible, “We have already done this before. We cannot let them in. We cannot take the risk. It doesn’t matter who is banging on that door…. It must stay closed.”

The door used to open all the time. It sits at the end of a long stone hall with ivory tile flooring, and had a camera, and a security system, and a keypad you pushed or passed by using your ID on a chain at your side. I used to hook mine above my left boob and pull it down ceremoniously to wave myself in, before letting it snap back as a surprise to no one but me.

“But what if it’s someone like us,” she says in a throaty whisper, “What if it’s someone who just needs a safe place to be?”

Then we are all going to die, I want to say.

“We can’t take the risk,” I say, instead.

We’ve come this far. We can’t risk the students who are here, alive. It’s my job, I tell myself, over and over again, It’s my job to protect the kids first. But is it really?

“They must be so scared out there,” she says quietly.

We stand in the hallway for a second, about three feet from the door. I can hear it now for myself. Someone is banging on the other side with what sounds like their entire body. It starts aggressively at first, but then shifts to screaming instead.

I don’t want to move as the sound of what could only be clawing scrapes down the outer edge of the frame. No one could open this door in the past without a key pass and Sergeant Doughnut… They certainly can’t now.

“Is this really necessary?” I remember asking him when we first started working here; Theo and I. “Won’t you just see me through the camera anyways?”

“School shootings are on the rise, my dear,” he’d reply in kind, the only human on earth who could call me that and it felt endearing, not Weinsteining. “We can never be too careful.”

Douglas was the best. The kids started calling him Doughnut when he realized powdered doughnuts versus glazed could be a Tactile Stimulation Activity, or “Multi-Sensory Munching”, and started bringing in boxes on Fridays. Douglas was supposed to keep shooters out of school, but he really liked talking to the students instead. Douglas is also dead.

“How do we just stand here?” she asked, her voice almost making me jump within the vacuum of intensive listening.

The clawing is slowing down and I’m grateful we can’t see through the thick silver door. I don’t want to know who it is… Who they were…. What they are now.

Sunaura used to be a Guidance Counselor but she never felt comfortable guiding anyone.

“As soon as I finish this year,” she told me once over egg salad and a headache, “I think I’m going to switch to a mainstream school system. Sometimes when I see the students I just… Do you ever feel sad seeing them like this?”

I wanted her to transfer as soon as she could. I think about it all the time now, when I can’t go more than a few hours without seeing her. The world is her own living nightmare, and we are somehow still alive in it.

“How do we just stand here?” she said again.

I stood there… and didn’t say a word.

Continued Tomorrow.

** Thumbnail art Credit: Cameron Weathers **