The last moment I remember before succumbing to darkness is hearing Margaret’s scream. Shards of glass sinking into my skin. It’s not what I want to remember. A tragedy took her life, but somehow leaves me alive. Bruised. Bloodied.
I’m alive to remember what I cannot forget. Pieces of a memory. The bruises will eventually fade. But the memories spark embers of fear. Longing. Pain.
Penelope squirms in my arms. She’s the only connection I have to Margaret. A one-year-old toddler with wide saucer-like eyes and round cheeks. A wisp of soft curls, brown and wavy.
“You look so much like your mama,” I whisper, bouncing her on my lap. “I hate that she’s not here to watch you grow up.”
Penelope gurgles as a string of drool falls down her chin. I grab the cloth next to me and wipe it away. Memories of my older sister come flooding back like a tidal wave careening into the shore.
Making s’mores by the campfire, my fingers sticky with burnt marshmallows.
Building sandcastles on the beach, wet sand crushed between my toes.
Playing in the park with the familiar red and white picnic blanket around us, an array of food spread over the soft cotton.
Reading books in the library together, a welcome reprieve from the chaos of the outside world.
“Lucy?”
I jolt out of my reverie. Penelope is still on my lap, her eyes droopy.
“In the living room.” My voice doesn’t sound like my voice at all. It sounds scratchy and dry. Tired.
My aunt Hazel enters the room with a dramatic flourish. Graying hair curls into a bun atop her head. Inquisitive blue eyes and a slim figure. She used to be a professional dancer until a knee injury sidelined her career. She still moves like one.
She twirls toward me like a ballerina, not quite the finesse of the dancers in the Nutcracker, but her body anticipates the movement and glides across the floor with a practiced ease.
“Hello, dear. And my little darling.” She gazes down at Penelope who gives her a gummy smile. “Is it time for this little one’s nap?”
“Yeah, it’s about that time. I should go anyway. Grad school papers don’t write themselves.”
Hazel takes Penelope from my arms, cooing at her softly. I flick a switch on the controller of my power wheelchair. Curl my fingers around the joystick.
People always ask about the accident that took Margaret’s life and could’ve taken mine. That’s not how I became disabled. But people always assume, and it grates my nerves. Waves of anger burn underneath my skin.
I have cerebral palsy and scoliosis. Since the accident, I’ve developed severe chronic pain. The emotional ache in my heart throbs dully. Two types of pain clash against each other, exploding through my body like rivers of lava and tendrils of emptiness.
It’s easier to hide the physical scars. The scars I can escape from. I can’t escape from my mind. My soul.
Tears roll down my cheeks when the flashbacks persist. The pieces of a memory that shatter my heart.
Several months pass, and I numb the pain with alcohol. It burns, slow and satisfying down my throat and makes me forget.
The forgetfulness is temporary when the memories come rushing back. Slivers of memories. The day of the accident is still a total haze, fractured and incomplete.
Margaret had been the driver. I’d been the passenger.
I think it should have been me instead. Not her. Penelope has no mother now and I should not be the one to fill that role. Margaret was a single mother. Her partner was… well, we never talked about him much. Only in whispers that tickled the backs of our throats. I am not ready to be a mother. There are many things I am unprepared for.
Cramped in the small seminar style English class, ten graduate students sit around a long rectangular table. Laptops open in front of us.
The professor speaks in a warbled drawl. He’s lanky with wire-rimmed glasses and a sharp jaw. Rounded shoulders and a mop of neatly combed blond hair greying on the edges.
I can’t focus on anything he says. His words are hollow and meaningless. Instead, I listen to the sounds around me. The clicks of laptop keys. The whispers of my fellow classmates. Some look attentive. Others look tired. The guy dressed in a gray hoodie across from me seems bored as hell.
There isn’t a clock on the wall and my phone is turned on silent, tucked away in my purse. I usually prefer to keep to myself than engage in class gossip. This week’s assigned reading is The Bell Jar.
I still do the homework, but without the same vigor as I had before Margaret’s death. Everything is subdued and faded without her.
Grief does that to a person. Zaps their life force. Drains their adrenaline. Suffocates them. Suffocates me. Chokes me.
“And the bell jar can be seen as a representation of what?”
The professor gazes at us over the thin frame of his glasses, holding a faded copy of The Bell Jar in one hand. The question pulls me out of my reverie and back into the reality of the classroom. It’s claustrophobic, a stifling cluster of warm bodies.
“Esther is being suffocated.” I speak up for the first time since class began forty minutes ago. “She has a metaphorical bell jar around her, altering her surroundings. It represents her ache from freedom, grief. She can’t escape the pain. It’s everywhere. That’s why she kills herself at the end. Maybe that’s why Sylvia Plath killed herself, too. She wasn’t just experiencing severe depression. She was grieving. It fractures your memories. Distorts your thoughts.”
“Very good.” The professor nods at me and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Does anyone have anything else they’d like to add?”
I broke up with my girlfriend after Margaret’s death. I am alone now. The only people I see regularly are my aunt Hazel and niece Penelope. I’ve pulled away from my friends. I am wrapped in a cocoon of mourning and desolation.
When I gaze into Penelope’s eyes, I see glimpses of Margaret. My sister whose life was stolen from her in an instant.
Maybe I, too, am living in my own metaphorical bell jar. With colors muted and joy ripped from my soul.
I don’t know how long this will last. Drowning in a lake of my inconsolable grief.
The bruises and scratches have completely faded now. It’s the memories which still haunt me. Her scream. The sudden whiplash. My descent into darkness.
Pieces of a memory will always linger.
Lara Ameen is a screenwriter, novelist, short fiction writer, sensitivity/authentic reader, and holds a PhD in Education with a Disability Studies emphasis from Chapman University. She received an MFA in Screenwriting from California State University, Northridge. She is a 2021 alum of the Tin House YA Workshop, and 2021 and 2024 alum of the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop. Her short fictioin has been published in Prismatica Magazine, Disabled Voices Anthology, Drunk Monsters, just femme & dandy, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and elsewhere, including as a contributor to the 2024 Lambda Literary finalist multi-genre anthology, Being Ace, published by Page Street YA.
