I began the Dark Room as a series to reimagine work from my old notebooks, in collaboration with my younger selves. This month’s guest post brings a fresh twist to that concept, with Louise I. Baker developing a lyrical essay from a poem she wrote just five months earlier, but in a very different state of mind. It’s a dark, wild ride, with a tempting escape hatch, rose-gold.

(Un)medicated

by Louise I. Baker

May 2026

On Withdrawal: An Exchange

Touchdown while the drugs

still worked:

amber light hit me like nectar.

Like embers in a Spring rite. From their colour I could smell

the rain clouds. Nourishing life

in this North. I was blissful with

my blossom problem:

she has been mothering me through

the collapsing of icebergs in my brain.

Deafening. Destablising.

The crashing sounds keep me awake late.

As I lie dizzy, sickened by myself.

Then my fast heart and frantic breathing

rush me through hallucinations, telling me

tales of the thing that I am. Darker,

more reckless,

more nihilistic than I knew.

Shit judgment.

Rage volcanic.

All urges alive.

I can run but not from me.

So Paroxetine Dream,

lift me back up. To those icy rose gold

clouds of respectability.

To my satin violet gown

of soft apathy. To the illusion of my safety

and of me . . .

as someone safe.

*

October 2026

On Feeling: A Confession

Bless me, Father/Mother/Other: I never confess. All I do is pray. (You may remember me.)

Bless me, for I cannot feel, not under this substance that keeps me alive. I feel nothing while awake. Yet my nightmares undo the daylight work of Paroxetine.

You see, the drug I was prescribed a year or so ago disarms my every waking emotion, forms a rose-gold cloud around my daytime thoughts. Makes me peacefully nod and smile at whatever I hear, whoever I face. It has me staring into space, always with a faint caffeine and nicotine buzz. That much I feel in my heartbeat, at least. But all the while I think only this: there’s not much to anything in life, not really.

In my sleeping world, though, a cyclone of sadness and worry whirls from my throat to my head. And the moment my consciousness alters, the dreams begin, draining, sucking, bled of peace. I cling to the faces of buildings, to ropes of hospital sheets. I never know whether I should go up or climb down.

Nothing is fixed as it should be in the sleeping world. There is no communication. Even if I encounter benevolent people, they cannot answer my questions or offer a response. Eventually, I scream at them—“ARE YOU A GHOST?”—and they fade, inevitably, from view.

When the bad people speak, words leave the worst mark. I cannot possibly share these words now. Forgive me. I only meet cyphers. I think I am one, too.

There is the ghastly airport I get lost in, over and over, and its impossible underground train. Last night I was flying to Kazakhstan, fleeing a hostage situation. As drugged passengers were machine-gunned in the gate area, I hated myself for escaping. I boarded the flight. I always board the flight, but it never takes off.

I get lost in other places. The Godforsaken Arts Tower at Sheffield University comes tumbling down once I’ve reached the twentieth floor via the ghastly paternoster lift for some seminar I did not need to attend. The rooms are so crowded, and I am no one.

The dream iterations of city streets and country roads are always familiar, but darkly so. They are never quite right; they never make sense. I fear my nightmares may, with these distortions, rewrite my memories.

Forgive the cliche, but my teeth often fall out, too. Nothing has ever felt more real than my maimed, bloody gums.

Time goes on without me. I can never catch up. I am punished for the calm aphasia of my days, grabbed and shaken.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that, in my dreams, I am faithless.

To whit: I need the drug to keep me alive because I lost my children before they were born. The one child who lived, I can only fear for when I’m not chemically sheltered. When she was a baby, I could not even leave the house with her.

To whit: I need the drug because I lost love and, along with it, self-love. I failed at loyalty. I failed at giving back. Sex nearly killed me, so I hate it now, but I feel that is not allowed.

What is the sum of powerlessness? The tally is all in my dreams.

So tell me, Father/Mother/Other— what prayers could keep the night horrors at bay? Bring my terror into daylight, to be faced?

In the name of You, I am trying to believe.

So bless me. Bless me, please.

Amen.

*

A Note From Louise

On Withdrawal and On Feeling were written by one brain (mine) in highly contrasting states.

I wrote On Withdrawal last May while my brain was undergoing an electrical storm (in a quite literal sense.) I was on a four-day trip to Stockholm, having left my medication (Paroxetine, an SSRI, first prescribed to me for insomnia and generalized dread) at home.

Paroxetine withdrawal causes electrical surges (“brain zaps”) which can take you by surprise, knock you off balance, and leave you disoriented for a half-minute or so.

On Paroxetine, my cognitive functions (such as they are at the best of times) work perfectly well, while my emotional functions are essentially padded. I know what is there, in my emotional self, underneath the padding. I recognise the feelings (“Amber light hit me like nectar”), but I do not experience them.

I wrote On Feeling this October, fully under the influence of Paroxetine. In it, I explore the fact that, in my dreams, by default, the anxiety I am shielded from in a waking state translates to nightmares. In them, there is only discomfort, unfamiliarity, and fear of danger. It is all sensation. Not feeling.

In On Withdrawal, my attention is so limited and my senses so heightened (“shit judgment,” “rage volcanic”) that in the middle of my original post (see link below), I found myself interrupting my own poem with pictures of Swedish blossoms. I described all urges as alive.

Meanwhile, in the dystopian dreamworld described in On Feeling, there are no urges, just dreams governed by dread.

Ultimately, though, whether in withdrawal or in my medicated dreams, this reality remains: I can run but not from me.

Songs from a Cold Kitchen

On Withdrawal

For Nathalie, and for Frolov (whom I bore sometimes re Paroxetine…

Read more

6 months ago · 20 likes · 14 comments · Louise I. Baker

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Songs from a Cold Kitchen

Welcome to my highly self-involved place of dusty domestic poetry and creaky creative memoir...

By Louise I. Baker

Thank you, Louise, for bringing your light to the Dark Room.

(All photos sans the header by Francesca Woodman)

Notes on a Bad Essay

The play Buried Child is powered by a shocking engine, a black beating heart—infanticide.

You do not mention it, not once.

Here’s what’s clear: you’re getting ready to audition for the part of Shelly. You are both nineteen. You are lost. She is discovered. Driving, looking in the mirror, smoking a cigarette—you think you find her in these ordinary acts. You do not chronicle how, deep asleep, you dream as Shelly, mouth agape, opened on command for a violent man. Or how you gag when he shoves in his wide dirty hand.

You can’t write an essay about that. Just look: every sentence is a lie with too many adverbs.

You do manage one true thing: you stop thinking. This is how you realize you are Shelly, always have been, by instinct. Feral.

You do not understand the fertile symbolism of her rabbit-fur coat, her complacent preparation of fresh carrots. You do not register the many ways she is assaulted and objectified in this afflicted house, abandoned by her boyfriend, among his male kin.

You don’t even bother to note it’s the grandfather who murders the child yet points his finger at his wife: You never seen a bitch eat her puppies? You never dwell on how his wife got pregnant by her son. You can’t afford to care.

You can’t explain Shelly’s swings from tenderness to terror. To fury. To be fair, no one’s ever schooled you on madonnas or whores. Lindsay Clancy hasn’t yet been born or longed to die.

But you’ve already done unthinkable things, your own womb lifeless again, an infinite and circular dead end. You know without knowing what women can do. What we are. Givers. Takers. Killers.

Still, your words lie dead, a corpse I flip so tenderly to find its shredded heart.

You didn’t get the part. You got the part.

* * *

Many thanks to my subscribers for reading with such open hearts and sharp eyes.

I’m so grateful for your generosity and talent.

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Share Shadow Works

I started writing as a kid, mostly poems, bushels of them in my teens and early twenties. Then the poetry stopped. Dead. Like its spirit had been surgically excised from my body while I slept.

Soon after, I started falling asleep in the creative sense, too, waking every few years to write, mostly fiction, while telling myself that I couldn’t, I shouldn’t, I can’t, until I fell asleep again. (For the most part, I’ve broken that cycle, or condensed it, at least. Writing novels helped.)

My newest novel-in-progress is based on a life-altering experience I had as a young adult, so I’ve returned to my early writing for the first time in decades. Once I got over the cringe factor, I was shocked by the foreign intensity of my own words, by how many there were, how earnest and proficient. The shock has morphed into lingering sadness.

I am sad for each version of that girl, the left behind, the undiscovered and distrusted, the alone. I am sad for the woman I am now, too, the one so ashamed and afraid of those shadows. The one who scoffs at the phrase “inner child,” yet grieves for her own.

The woman embarrassed to be saying any of this aloud.

But all those versions of me, they’re tired of this unlit maze where I force them to run blind. They want light, the life they haven’t lived.

There’s a synchronicity here I didn’t plan for. My novel is told through two voices twenty years apart—a woman now, and the journals she kept as a teenager—each version informing the other. I rarely keep a journal, and I built that structure before I ever thought of digging through my early work. Maybe that’s why my notebooks won’t stop shouting my name: my fiction has recruited them to teach me what to do in real life.

So I’m listening. I’ll pick a few lines from my lost selves, ask them to breathe along with me. Create anew. See what develops when they get the exposure that was denied to them, the exposure they craved.

Here’s the first Dark Room poem, a partnership with twenty-year-old me, from the notebook pictured above.

PRECIOUS

I do understand the jewel I am.
I’m the removable one
dead center in your crown,

the one to pluck,
an eye, a feather,

or fling away,
unspeakable,
a boiled fertile egg.

I am the stone
that breathes

(almost like organic things)

the air it’s fed,
obedient,

the one so ready

to implode and reassemble
at your whim

(my magician)

a million times,
a million times again.

I do understand, you know.

I am the gem with
the deep agile fault.

Thank you for reading!

Does your early writing ever call your name?

Ever thought of collaborating with your younger selves?

I’d love to see what you develop.

Drop a comment if you’d like to share.

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First, a note about the story . . .

I keep a standing appointment with the squirrels around my house. No one assigned me this. They don’t know I exist, or if they do, they don’t care. Most mornings, I clock their routines: the burying, the digging up, the bickering over one acorn like it’s the last on earth. They chatter at me; I chatter back. It’s all so harmless.

Then they came for me in a dream. They moved wrong — upright, unhurried, nabbing everything they saw with paws that worked like human hands. None of it belonged to them. None of it was coming back. That was years ago. I never shook it, even when I couldn’t say what it meant.

Last spring, Dr. Rümeysa Öztürk — a child development researcher and aspiring children’s author whose work insists every kid deserves to see themselves in a book — was taken off a Somerville street by masked men and held six weeks. She made children visible. ICE made her vanish. And the squirrels from my dreams came skittering back.

. . .and all my living / and all my dead / run up my arms / like squirrels.

— Dorothy Porter, The Bee Hut

*********

THE HOLLOW

Variant Literature, Issue 23

On the afternoon they took my neighbor, my mother had been gone for 13 days. I was scrubbing a crusted pot from another solitary dinner, watching the squirrels outside my kitchen window. One of them dangled from the gutter by a hind leg, head craned at an impossible angle. Another scratched hieroglyphs into the bark of the maple tree, its shoulder blades furless and jutting like vestigial wings. A third perched on the rusted railing—upright on hind legs, tail curled tight around its head like a blindfold, as if it couldn’t stand to see another thing.

I turned the water on full blast to rinse the pot; the squirrel on the railing unfurled its tail. That’s when I noticed it was holding a green card—rectangular, plastic. That girl’s, maybe, the one from Brighton. The squirrel squinted, scanning the card with almost human concentration. It reminded me of the day before, when a woman on the T had sat beside me, flipping through a book with hands so like my mother’s that I nearly wept. Later, I saw her on the corner of my street. She waved as if she knew me, but her voice, when she spoke—it wasn’t my mother’s. I couldn’t understand her. And when I tried to make out her features, I realized I couldn’t see her face at all, as if it had been carefully erased.

I know how it sounds, but I wondered if the squirrels had taken it. In the last month, they’d stopped foraging for acorns and scraps. Instead, they carried off small, vital pieces of people. One squirrel tucked a fingerprint into its cheek, folding it like cash. Another balanced a silver house key in its teeth, a fragment of a photograph clutched in its paws.

The squirrel with the green card turned it over now, scanning the back. My phone buzzed, so I shut off the water. I was reaching for a hand towel when the squirrels scattered and vanished. My fingers were still dripping wet when, under my window, my downstairs neighbor stepped out onto the sidewalk. Same blue dress as always, same pale pink hijab. A grocery bag tucked, like a child, on her hip. She looked jittery, rushed, half-starved.

Me, I was stuffed. I’d cooked my last box of pasta and eaten it all, chasing off my worst thoughts until my belly ached. As my neighbor skittered into the crosswalk, I reached for the towel again, groggy, but I saw them before she did—six, no, seven men in dark but ordinary clothes, slipping in from opposite sides of the street.

She swiveled from masked face to masked face. They flashed their badges, and finally she spoke, her voice cracking like a branch. I caught one word—please—before two of the men yanked her backpack, snagging her arm in the strap and twisting it the wrong way. She yelped, almost doubled over. The grocery bag hit the ground. Three oranges scattered, rolling across the pavement like lost suns. Someone clasped her arms behind her back. Handcuffs snapped shut. I didn’t move. I ate my own shouts, but she glanced up anyway.

She saw me. Last winter, during a blackout, we’d shared my phone’s flashlight in her hallway, pointing and nodding our way through the darkness. Now, I saw we had the same color eyes. I looked away first.

My phone buzzed again. This time I grabbed it. Blank space where my mother’s constant texts used to be. More calls from my aunt in Port-au-Prince, asking where she’d gone, where they might have taken her. As if I’d tried to find out. As if I’d dared. I barely dared to look out my window again. By the time I did, two of the men were leading my neighbor to a waiting SUV, black and glossy as a leech. The bag lay empty on the pavement, its contents spilled out in a pathetic constellation—milk, tampons, something wrapped in butcher paper and bleeding through. A receipt twitched in the breeze as the SUV edged away, confident and proud, like a float in a deranged parade.

I almost called my aunt back, but a minute later, the squirrels returned. The dangling one dropped to the sidewalk last, neck still at that grotesque angle, and scuttled to the oranges. It sniffed, then ignored the fruit and snatched the receipt instead, staring at the barcode. Then it climbed another tree, backward, and tucked the paper, efficiently, into the leaves.

I shut my blinds. Wished I’d never opened them. At dusk, when I peeked out, the bag on the pavement was gone. So were the oranges.

I hadn’t called my aunt back.

Truth is, I don’t go outside anymore. Don’t open my door. My mother’s wallet lies empty on the table like a gutted fish. I found it on our welcome mat, still warm from her hand when they took her. Her half-used lip gloss lies nearby, the color of fresh apricots, and her mangled glasses, missing one lens. I’ve heard they don’t let anyone wear wedding rings in detention, but she didn’t have time to leave hers behind.

The squirrels are still here, though. They never left. Even now, the one in the tree is scratching—not just at the bark this time but at something beneath, something that screeches under its claws. They’re learning, I think, becoming the thieves they’ve seen. Sometimes, though, I picture their nests lined with passports, driver’s licenses arranged like intricate mosaics, birth certificates folded into delicate origami acorns. I imagine the squirrels have built an honest census in the trees, not some bogus database. I long to track it down, find the hollow where my mother sits among thousands of others, each person diminished to the size of a walnut, all waiting to be remembered.

Every morning, the sound of scratching follows me through the apartment.

I should call my aunt back, but I won’t.

*********

Thank you for reading!

If you liked this story, you’ll love the other work at VARIANT LITERATURE. Please give them a visit and some love.

Eli was holding my hand when we noticed her. A woman was standing on the highest rock, the one that looked like an arrowhead. We never went up there. He was too afraid of heights. Besides, it took a good half hour to hike to the top of the falls, and lunch breaks during summer rehearsals were short. The other kids pretty much stayed at the theater, but since I had a hand-me-down car, we could drive to the trail in minutes. That left twenty more once we walked to the woods and stripped. It wasn’t enough.

That’s why I grabbed Eli’s wrist when he stopped that day. I yanked on his arm until he pinched my wrist, hard. He was usually too gentle. I looked up then, like him, and saw the woman high above, small to us because of the distance and overexposed by the sun. We’d never seen anyone out there before, not in the middle of the week. We squinted at the mint-green outlines of her pantsuit, the shiny edges of her white purse and shoes. A mom. A grandma, even. A tourist or something. She made her way to the tip of the rock and looked over the fence, down at the crashing falls. She stepped up, onto the first rail.

I shrugged. She leaned. Eli dropped my hand and broke into a run.

At rehearsal that morning, we’d mostly sat around while the director staged the crucifixion scene with Clay, who couldn’t keep a straight face on the cross. Jesus Christ Superstar was tough to cast with high school kids, even theater nerds like us. We kneeled in the wings on the filthy black floor, watching the cross sway onstage. Kesha, who played Mary Magdalene, pointed at Clay. She whispered to Eli, “That should have been you.” A lot of people said he could have gotten Jesus in a heartbeat.

I guess I should have known why he was running up the trail. Just yesterday, he’d rescued a snot-eyed kitten from a ditch. He’d made miso soup for a fellow apostle with a cold. But we’d already wasted five minutes, at least. Our clothes were still on. When he glanced back, I threw up my hands. His face blanched like milk, and he bolted ahead, vanishing into the trees.

He never even auditioned for Jesus. He was cast as a disciple, and I was Mary Magdalene’s understudy. Right before we left for lunch, Clay finally had a breakthrough on the cross, singing with genuine grief. He even cried. Everyone else was like wow, but it took me a minute to care. Martyrdom seemed sort of like breakfast, a shower. Like brushing your teeth. “Phew,” Eli said. “I’m glad that’s not me.” He felt like a stranger, untouched.

Yet he felt it first, what the woman up there on the rock might do next. I had to look back and stare. She had eyes like two guns shooting blanks and a fading black aura, a slouch. Even now, I sometimes forget not every mother looks like this. Back then, I watched her the way I watched rain.

She put one leg over the fence. She held her purse out over the falls and let it go. It hit the water. She lifted her eyes to the sky.

Eli careened into view, not far from her now. He yelled something I couldn’t make out. He waved and he yelled. She didn’t seem to notice him. She climbed down, straightened her pantsuit, and left.

The sun rises. Women suffer.

Eli came back. He reached for me. Secretly, I’d wished all month that he was Judas because that was the best role. At least that’s what I told myself. Teenagers never think they want what’s most familiar, but they do, just hi-res and screaming, on steroids, in flames, especially when it hurts most. Judas had a rare, raging, kill-you kind of pain that I could get behind.

But when Eli took my hand, I used his face like a mirror, so I could look as if I’d been shocked too. Then I dug my head into his chest like all I’d ever sought was his clean and sacred heart. That white purse was gone. The falls never stopped. For a second, before I forgot, I wanted something new.

Story originally published in Identity Theory: identitytheory.com. Give them a visit!

And photo by Francesca Woodman. Check out her work wherever you can!

NO BABY

We cross the border to Georgia for barbecue goat. Jelly has a Ford Fairmont, powder blue, and we’re all piled in the front seat. No one dares try the backseat. Jelly throws all his garbage back there—french fries, soda cans, bills—everything except cigarette butts.

“I hate barbecue,” his daughter says, loud, like she’s not sitting right on top of us. “It smells dead.”

“Suzanna, honey,” I say, “you eat barbecue every Friday.”

“Not anymore. I’m a vegetarian.”

“Did you know about this, JoAnne?” Jelly acts like Suzanna tells me everything.

“News to me.”

“Well, talk to her, will you?”

“I figure it’s up to Suzanna to decide what she eats, Jelly.”

I am a diplomat. I try not to say a word about Jelly’s bad habits, in or out of bed, except where they affect Suzanna. I pick the ones most likely to screw her up. I figure that’s my sworn duty as her godmother, her dead mama’s best friend.

“What you looking at, honey?” I ask her, because she’s staring hard out the windshield like there’s a show out there.

“My mama.”

“Honey,” I whisper. “You got to get over that.”

“Goddammit, Suzanna, your mother’s not on the I-95 and you know it.” Jelly heard.

“She’s on the I-95 if I want her to be on the I-95.”

“Tell her, JoAnne. Will you tell her?”

“Where do you see her, honey?”

“She got off that exit.”

“She was driving a car?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jesus Christ!” Jelly’s getting all red in the face.

I pat his knee. “Jelly, Suzanna’s just playing her game. Right, Suzanna? You know your mama can’t come back from where she went.” I can hear her mama’s voice, dead out of air—you stick around for Suzanna, JoAnne.

Jelly slaps my hand away. “She’s too old for games.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Suzanna says.

“Well, you can eat yourself some coleslaw.” I pat her knee, like I patted her dad’s. She swats at my hand, and I think I know what she’s all about. I was twelve once too, and my daddy was as dead as her mama. For a while, every man I saw was my daddy.

* * *

BoBee’s is shaped like the letter U, only upside down. We’ve been coming here since before Suzanna was born. I remember sitting in this very same booth when Alice was eight months pregnant, eating up a whole chicken so fast me and Jelly couldn’t believe our eyes. She looked like some kind of bug, what with her skinny neck, arms, legs all poking out of that big belly. When she was done, her mouth was glossy with fat, and a piece of chicken skin hung from the corner of her lip. I loved the way she sucked at the bones, like she wouldn’t have cared if the President of the United States was watching.

Now Jelly’s ribs are all shiny with Bo’s special honey glaze, and Suzanna has her face practically in her coleslaw, stabbing at it with her fork but not eating any. She’s staring out over the aisle.

“What you looking at, honey?” I ask.

“Don’t be asking her that, JoAnne! You know what she’s gonna tell you! My mama! My mama’s in the grocery store, my mama’s cooking barbecue, my mama’s a goat!”

But she’s not looking at her mama. In the booth across from us, there’s a couple with a little tiny baby that has a face like a kidney bean. The baby’s perched on the table in one of those infant seats. Its eyes are wide open little mouths. I start staring at it too.

Then the baby’s face folds in on itself and turns purple. It draws its fists to its wrinkly cheeks and lets out a violent scream, as if someone’s yanking off its teeny fingers one by one. The baby’s daddy sits there stupefied, holding a great big rib and staring at the baby’s mouth, and the mama starts digging through her pink pocketbook for god knows what, and the baby keeps on screeching that slaughterhouse scream.

“Jesus Christ!” Jelly pounds the table. All three iced teas tumble over. I get a lap full of it. Suzanna springs right out of the booth.

“I can’t do anything with this child.” The mother pours her voice like heavy rain right on her husband’s head. “Harlan! Take this child outside! Harlan!”

Harlan doesn’t even look up.

Suzanna’s standing at the end of our table, wiping at her shirt. With her head bowed, she looks just like Alice—that takes my breath away. The fingers long and thin like summer green beans, and the eyelids, robin’s-egg blue, and her round nose, almost like there’s no bone in there at all.

She looks right at Jelly. “You did this.”

“What, honey?” I say. “Did what?”

“Him.” She’s staring at Jelly. “You made that baby cry! You! You did this!”

Before I can move, she turns and marches up to the booth across the way. “Give me that baby,” she tells them.

The mother is holding the baby out at arm’s length, jouncing it up and down. The baby’s almost black with blood in its head from screaming. The mother just looks at Suzanna, the father sets down his rib and looks too, and the baby turns its little kidney bean head, the bad blood floods away from its cheeks, and the screaming stops dead. Suzanna leans over and takes the baby in her arms. She’s cradling it.

“This baby needs some air,” she says. “Some fresh air.” She slings the baby to her shoulder and walks right on out the door. The baby’s got a fistful of her hair.

* * *

The baby’s mother sends me out with a diaper. It glows in the dusk, catching the moonlight as I search for Suzanna, calling her name. She’s nowhere, not on one side of the restaurant or the other. The barbecue smoke still travels all over the sky, like roads on a map. Then a moonbeam grabs the edge of something pink at the foot of a bone pile—chicken, cow, goat, pig, all mixed up together, little pieces of half-chewed meat still hanging on some of them. It’s the baby’s blanket, crumpled on the ground like a deflated balloon. I pick it up and swat the flies from it. It smells of old meat.

I hear a sweet singsong voice, la la-ing. “Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird . . . ” I’m following it around the pile of bones. I’ve never heard this sound come from Suzanna. It’s like grapefruit after it’s been sugared.

About twenty feet from the bones, she’s sitting under the arm of an oak. The way the moon catches her, she looks lit from within, like a jack-o’-lantern. The little baby’s just a blob against her, a dark mark.

“I can’t remember the rest of it,” she says. Her eyes are wet.

“What’re you doing out here, honey?”

“I was wrong.” She cups her hand over the baby’s bald head and holds it out toward me. “You see? I was wrong.”

I step out of the moon’s way. All I see is her and the baby.

“Look at her. Really look.” Singsong-y again.

I look hard. I see the same little kidney bean head, pointy on top, and the eyes with no color in the night, see-through. The Jell-O nose, all flesh. The cheeks silvery pink and around the mouth, pursed like a fish, fine lines folding over each other, loose as an old lady’s neck.

“See her?” asks Suzanna.

“Well, yes, honey, I see her.”

“You were right! She wasn’t on the I-95!” Suzanna sounds so happy I forget it’s Suzanna for a minute. Some other girl’s snug up against me, holding out her baby for all the night to see. I want to keep her here, so I don’t say a word.

She glares at me. “You said you saw her,” she says, disappointed now. Close to the ground, like a burr.

“Well, yes, I see her, she’s right there in your arms.” My meal’s burning my insides.

Jelly’s voice breaks the air. “JoAnne, where the hell are you?”

Suzanna pulls the baby tighter, head flat against her chest.

“Suzanna, you think that baby’s your mama?” I’m hoping my ears have been fooled.

“You know this baby’s my mama! You said so yourself! I see her, you said!” She’s yelling like a crow. “This here is my mama come back for me!” Her hand presses the baby’s face hard into her body, and the baby’s not making a sound.

My heart’s pressing even harder on my throat. This game’s gone far enough.

“Suzanna, you know that baby’s not your mama, honey. Why don’t you give me the child, and we’ll go on inside.”

Jelly’s coming up behind the bones, his footsteps wide apart, like two different one-legged people walking. Suzanna’s backing toward the field, the baby still against her, quiet. Way out, there’s an animal, a goat maybe, standing still with its head pointed up at the sky, solid black in the moonlight.

“Don’t you come near me!”

“Suzanna, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“It’s nothing, Jelly. She just likes the baby.”

“Liar!” she yells at me. “You’re such a liar!”

Jelly lunges. He grabs her arm. She struggles like a cat in water, the baby hard to her ribs. He starts dragging her, and she’s stumbling and kicking dirt into my eyes. I’m pulling at Jelly, but he’s strong. “Jelly, you’re gonna hurt that baby!”

He drops her arm. “Give me the baby, Suzanna.”

“No! Don’t you touch her!”

Jelly yanks at her shoulder, claws his way to her elbow, twists. The baby’s slipping. I reach under Suzanna’s skinny ribs and scoop it up, its skin dry as sand, but slippery too, like a shiny coin. Before I’ve even got it clutched to my chest, Jelly shoves Suzanna away with a slap across her head and grabs at me, snatching the baby. He holds it out in front of him. Between his two bear hands, the baby’s body disappears. It’s just a head, just below the moon. A miniature moon, with eyes, calm as the surface of a swimming pool.

Then it peers real close at Jelly and makes its eyes into little cracks. Before its mouth flies open and that ungodly scream comes out, I swear I hear the same noise in the belly of the earth, like it’s a sound all of us are making at one time or another.

“Not a one of you knows when to shut up,” he says. He swings the baby under one arm, its feet dangling, head flopping. “At least I can give this one back.”

* * *

Suzanna’s lying on her side, face in the dirt, holding her elbow. Quiet as the baby is loud. I get down on my knees. She picks up her head. Jelly’s left a purple handprint on her cheek.

“Honey, it’s time to go. I’ll make you a nice salad. I’ll pick me a big head of cabbage and mix you some fresh coleslaw. Or mac and cheese. You vegetarians eat cheese?”

She stands up without a word, hair all pushed to one side. She follows me like a dog on a leash. Inside, she walks right past me, past the cash register, and gives me a violent look before she disappears into the bathroom.

But Bee taps me on the shoulder before I even sit down. The tips of her fingers are so hard they hurt. “Don’t mean to alarm you any,” she says, smelling of grease, a smear of sauce along her cheek, “but I think you should come on back to the kitchen.”

It takes all my weight to push through the kitchen door. Smoke and fat are everywhere. They run up my nose like they don’t know gravity. Bo’s standing near the pit, a great big pair of black tongs dangling from his hand, his eyes looking down. I follow them past the hill of his gut, over the filthy yellow tile, to the butcher block piled high with fresh red meat.

Suzanna’s crouched beneath it, almost buried in its shadow. She’s clutching a whole side of raw ribs. Her hands and chin are red with runny blood, and the ends of her blond hair are soaked with it. She’s gnawing at the meat, noisy, far away. No more vegetarian Suzanna. No more Suzanna looking for her cold dead mama anywhere and everywhere. This girl’s all teeth, staring at raw marrow, then sucking it up, like she’ll never be full. Like it’s all she has left, this bloody stew that her mama’s not made of, not anymore. If she were mine, I’d want to shrink her smaller than my thumb, and tuck her, warm, inside.

I hold her hair back from her face. I cup it in my fist. With my other hand, I stroke her cheek. If she were mine, I’d know how to set her right.

Somewhere in the restaurant, the baby starts crying again.

“Suzanna, listen.” I kiss her bloody hair and make her look me in the eye. “We have to go.” The baby howls in the distance. “See? Mama’s hungry.”

This Is a Story

It starts in his office.

It starts on the day I was born.

On the day he was born.

No, wait—it starts in a deep wilding dark. The drama came before us, don’t you think? The whole script lives inside us, don’t you think?

But back to his office. The wide mullioned window overlooking a square patch of lawn. Students walking below. Vaping. Laughing, though we can’t hear them, not through the storm glass, already down and shut tight. It’s only September, but winter’s always coming, always right around the corner, waiting to erase you.

What I’m wearing—a black shirt, maybe jeans. Cheap tight shoes. Too much makeup, too much weight. Baby fat. Just plain fat.

“Hey,” he says. “Come here.” He stays behind the desk. Near the window. Looking down.

I come there. He’s holding another book, and I wonder if he’ll show it to me. Give it to me, maybe. They do this here for freshmen in the first weeks of the semester, have these meetings during office hours, get to know them one-on-one.

Call me insert-first-name here, they say, like that’s not weird.

Like they know who we are.

Last week I met with Professor Witte. I think she had a show off-Broadway once. Now she has kids. A podcast, maybe? Anyway, she reminded me to call her Jen. Then she opened an actual book and pointed at a glossy spread of antique black-and-whites, actors from a thousand years ago.

“Let’s talk about your brand.” Jen tapped her finger on a pale, thin-nosed lady, dead by now. “You, you’re a throwback.”

“So . . . like dark academia?”

“God, no.” She shoved a stray pewter hair behind her ear like it disgusted her. “You, you’re old school, but classic. Like me.”

She said this like a compliment, as if she were my future self, my friend. She said it like the two of us were real. Convincing, sure, but all she really nailed was the shame. She wore it like a limp, sentient veil, its tendrils reaching for my throat, recognizing me. In my head, I escaped, sprinted away into the light of a strong, successful sun, and when I really, finally, exited stage left, I shut her office door with extra care, until it clicked into place. I put my hand against it, to be sure that it was solid, that nothing behind it could reach me.

But this is a different office. David’s, the deep wilding dark. Drama, right? Except he teaches dance.

“Come here,” he says, and I come. He puts the book on the windowsill, face down, and points at a student. She’s hurrying across the lawn, head down. “Recognize that?”

I pretend I understand. He must have meant, “Recognize her?”

“That’s Aisha,” I say. “Aisha Jones.”

I add her last name to please him, to show that I’m paying attention, that I know people, that I always try harder than I should, that I am obedient, responsive, alert. Subtext, you know. Motivation.

He smiles, lupine, but he doesn’t show his teeth. “No, I mean that.” He points again at her body.

My mind says, What the fuck? but on cue, I say nothing.

Like breathing. Shame is like breathing.

He slumps his shoulders, droops his head, imitating Aisha’s posture. “The way she walks.” He shuffles a little. “Like she wants to be invisible.”

She is disappearing now, slipping through a stage-right classroom door, but I do. I see. I’ve been here for only two weeks and met a lot of walk-ons I’ve already forgotten, but Aisha has cosmic red hair, and eyes like hot steel marbles, and what felt from day one like a towering, near-preternatural confidence. She’s not an actor—she cues the lights backstage—but in the only class I have with her, she speaks out most. Even when she’s sitting, she seems so monumental, tall, nothing like that small, bent girl on the lawn.

“I hope she’s okay,” I say. “I wonder what happened.”

“She always walks like that when no one’s looking. And listen, how you move when no one’s looking . . .” He faces me. “. . . that’s who you really are.”

The spotlight is on. My body is a secret that I live in.

He moves closer. “You’re like that, too. Like Aisha. But always. All. The. Time.”

His fingers rise, make a slow cascading motion near my hair, the churlish long wave that falls across my cheek, sheltering the corner of my eye, my weak jaw. “Stop hiding, Cass.”

Cass, it’s short for Cassandra. You know, from the Greek myth? She sees the future, no one believes her, and she isn’t even acting. But never mind—that’s not my real name. I am a story, all made up.

The office exists, though. David, too.

“Hide?” I ask. “I don’t hide.”

“Oh, right. Right.” His fingers sweep my hair from my face. Tuck it behind my ear, let it drape down my back.

“I don’t.” I shake my head, free my hair. Improvise. Gather, twist, knot it high.

“I want to tongue your neck,” he doesn’t say.

“May I tongue your neck?” he doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t need to, I suppose. We both know our lines: yes is a bruise; no one says no.

I leave his office door wide open, hoping he will follow, but his wife is in the hall.

She nods, half-waves, and I forget to call her Jen. Did she see my neck, the marks?

No way. Besides, she probably won’t care. Sure, she nailed shame. I mean, who can’t?

That doesn’t make us real.

I ignored Taylor Swift for decades: too blonde, too pop, too pink for a woman like me who wears nothing but black and was bullied in high school by cheerleaders who looked a lot like her. And that glitter . . . glitter gets everywhere. Yikes.

I know, I know—you’d think a writer wouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what can I say? My hair is dark, and so is my soul. I was sure the only way I’d listen to her music by choice was at knifepoint.

Turns out COVID did the trick. In 2020, when the rest of us were trapped, masked, and weirded out, Swift released Folklore, with its elegant, addictive melodies, each song a tiny novel. Evermore crept in like vines behind it, weaving stories with a narrative precision that stopped me dead. Wait now, I thought, so Taylor Swift’s a secret goth princess, an undercover witch in pastel bodysuits and white, knee-high boots, a big-brained savant of a storyteller/lyricist? And no one told me?

How dare they judge me by my looks? That was my job: judging Taylor by her looks.

But during Covid, I didn’t look at her at all: I listened. And listened.

I listened to her tinker with phrases and melodies, morphing them into plot twists and reversals, building songs the way Gothic novels and their modern-day successors, psychological thrillers, build dread: through echoes. A word or image pops up early, wearing its Sunday clothes. Harmless. Sweet, even. Then it comes back later in the song as a sound that has bounced off jagged walls, shredding its Sunday clothes and exposing the flesh underneath, pink with scars.

The melody’s almost the same, and maybe the phrase is too, so your brain doesn’t feel the shift, not straight away—your body does. When your mind follows, you’ve already sensed the emotions deep in your cells. Framing them as thoughts is just the final, if excruciating, turn of the screw.

Gothic fiction understood, two centuries before Jung, that everything echoes: shadows don’t stay buried, but reappear, always altered but wearing the face of the familiar, always more dangerous for having been away. The locked door in Chapter 3 is the same locked door in Chapter 12, but by then you know what’s behind it, and the word door itself has changed species. Now it’s a predator. Now you might die when it opens.

In Swift’s song Ivy, the creeping vine is that door. First, it’s a metaphor for her lover’s passion, pure but forbidden, an “incandescent glow.” But as the story unfolds, the ivy—his ivy—grows and grows, gradually choking her “house of stone.” Every time the line returns, its echo is darker – a war, a fire—and the ivy more claustrophobic, the lovely roots it first put in her dreamland now growing out of control, wild enough to strangle them both.

My novel in progress is about a woman whose body is a living echo of a past her mind has denied. It flinches at the sound of a roaring fire, a low smooth voice, before she knows why. A phrase spoken in what she thought was love surfaces decades later in a different mouth and detonates.

These aren’t flashbacks. Flashbacks explain. An echo implicates, insidious. It says: you were here before, and you didn’t see it. Now you do. Or do you? Either way, it hurts. It makes you ask, will this echo ever end?

But echoes aren’t just repetition. Repetition is a hamster wheel. An echo is a sonic spiral staircase, the same sound returning as you climb but altered on each step, transforming, haunting itself with its latest incarnation.

Swift knows this the way the rest of us know our own names. And the way she tells a full dark story in a two-minute song has me rethinking every page of the three hundred I’m trying to write.

I didn’t expect to learn this from a blonde with sequins. But the truth doesn’t care what you look like. It lives in your body, and it never forgets.

All photos by me, of The Lighthouse Inn and Harkness Park, New London, CT

My first posts here were poems. April was National Poetry Month, and though I write mostly fiction now, verse was my first love. Looking back at the ones I posted recently, I noticed a trend — they all kept returning to the body, to hands, skin, bones, breath, the physical self that tells the truth when the speaking self won’t.

I thought I was taking a detour from the novel I’ve been writing. Turns out the poems were running parallel to it the whole time. Turns out my novel is full of bodies, too, in graves, in beds, and even in paintings of beheadings.

Yeah, beheadings. One man’s, to be specific, though he’s half as interesting as the woman wielding the sword. Her name is Judith, and her Bible story — widow seduces and slays an enemy general to save her people — was a hot topic in the early 17th century. So hot it was painted again and again, most memorably by Caravaggio and Gentileschi, only decades apart.

Judith Slays Holofernes, Caravaggio, 1602

Despite Caravaggio’s famous predilection for graphic violence, his Judith holds the sword at arm’s length. She leans away from Holofernes as if the blood might ruin her dress. She’s pretty — symmetrical features, golden coiffed hair, flawless skin. Only her lovely pearl earring is in motion. The cut in his neck is clean, the blood a disappointing stream. All of it is so beautiful to behold, like a distant fable, a veneer, a tell that Caravaggio may have had no clue about the internal life of any woman, much less one who’s capable of decapitation.

Judith Slays Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1612 (L), 1620 (R)

Gentileschi painted the same scene a few years later, not once, but twice. In both, Judith is in focused, calm control, one hand carving through the general’s neck, the other gripping his head by the hair, holding it in place while she saws. Her maid isn’t waiting, bored; she’s pinning Holofernes down with her full weight. These women are muscled and determined, viscerally alive.

Caravaggio’s Judith is arranged, performative. Gentileschi’s is breathing, murderous.

Why the difference?

Self-portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Gentileschi, 1615

Here’s the backstory: Gentileschi had been raped at seventeen by her father’s colleague. She testified at trial while they crushed her fingers with thumbscrews, a Baroque-era lie detector. She told the truth, and they broke her hands anyway.

So when she painted Judith, she painted herself, literally in that the face of Judith is modelled on her own, and figuratively, in that she herself embodied Judith’s anger and strength. She painted the resistance of muscle and tendon against a blade that might not be sharp enough. The gory mess. The sense that killing a man who deserves it doesn’t mean your own body will forget what you’ve done . . . or that part of you may have liked it.

Look close, closer: see the echo of a smile on their faces?

Despite his own violent past, Caravaggio painted an illusion of Judith. Gentileschi channeled reality, in her hands, which had been crushed for telling the truth, and in Judith’s hands, which grip and saw and do not flinch.

My novel is contemporary, a psychological thriller, but I’ve been chasing the same reality centuries later, trying to channel the body’s truth before the brain catches up: looking at my narrator’s hands as she’s flooring her car, feeling her feet as she sneaks from her bed for a midnight run.

Her body, as though headless, knows the story before her mind agrees to tell it. Her thoughts arrive later, bloodied and grudging, unreliable witnesses who’d rather not testify. But her body is already, and always, on the stand.

REMAINS

1

Way before #metoo

you tell me I’m a forest fire,

and you like to watch things burn,

that this is why you guide

my body to your classroom wall,

your tongue between my lips.

2

You lie about the fire.

Year by year, you

strangle my flames.

Slowly, deliberately,

you give me time

to watch them

waver, die.

3

I’m good and charred

no intact bones,

no phalanx

or femur,

no scrap of

the clavicle

you licked like it

was yours.

4

Now you want me to

ID my own remains,

but no one can.

They would slip

through my fingers

if I still had hands.

THIS IS LEFT

Three long years of

Someone else’s thigh

Pressed hard on the

Dough of mine, three

Long years of your

Hot blame set

Lukewarm by another

Lover’s breath, and

This is left,

This dark film

Of what

Was flesh.

Wardrobing the Bones

You told only when I asked, when I reached,

the traffic streaming by like flame,

and pried from you the truth about

what bred inside your wife, my mother.

Cornered in the driver’s seat,

you said cancer in an obscene

hush, like you say rape or lesbian,

accented by that awkward

tremolo of pain.

You could discuss the weather in that voice,

and still my cells would rearrange,

carving out my cavities,

those laundry chutes swept clean

to ease the sliding through

of your shirts stiff with sixty years

of your own spit.

But this one shirt I’ll sew myself.

I’ll stitch for days, tracing out the arms to

latch them on, fitting seam to collar—

a wardrobe for her bones, stripped so soon,

and warm enough to wrap yours in

when they strip, too,

symmetrically, beside.

The night after we fight

our sleeping brains

unroll

until they’re delicate

as filo dough,

as flower petals dying

and the color

of them, too . . .

so now

what can we do

but hold

their wispy scrolls

on one end

with our lips,

the other with our wrists,

and wish our pulse

could read

the spiky

gorgeous syllables

we’ve lost,

the language

we were fluent in

before we

talked.

Don’t forget,

he said with

his last breath,

the juice of

those black cherries

browns like blood,

the pits rot

in your transient heart,

the trees eat your bones,

the roots your skin and hair.

Nothing on this earth

is yours to keep.

Soon you’ll be

invisible, be air.

Here’s the backstory: last summer, I returned to Connecticut, where I’d lived in my college days, a trip I’ve made dozens of times since moving south. But this time, something shifted. The first night, I dreamed about a man I hadn’t thought about in decades, a secret affair I’d locked away and buried in an airtight vault. By morning the dream had faded but not the feeling, a vibration in my bones, alive with what my mind had filed under dead.

Then the waking flashbacks started. A sudden glimpse of the mullioned window in his faculty office, overlooking the green. A snippet of sound, his low, dark voice inviting me in. A whiff of sweet tobacco, a scent once constantly twined with my hair, ephemeral now, arising where it shouldn’t and couldn’t.

A car, a café, a song on the radio—even ordinary things were shoving me backward through time. In short, my brain was staging a mutiny and was not about to stop until it toppled me.

So I did what I’ve always done when I’m completely freaking out. I wrote. A lot. First in journal form, but then as a story that morphed into my current WIP, a psychological thriller about a woman who discovers, through a series of toxic detonations, that the past she thought she’d sealed away has been shaping her present all along.

The idea arrived half-strangled by the dark, demanding light. Carl Jung called this shadow work — the confrontation with the parts of ourselves we’ve repressed, denied, or locked in our unconscious. In other words, the source of our shame.

In a clinical sense, the shadow is what we’ve refused to examine. But the psychologist Mary Watkins once described it as a ghost in the attic:

We acknowledge that the ghost creeps out from his quarantined quarters when we are sleeping and shows us his art and experience in our dreams. No less surely though does he do his work during the day. In the loom of our moods, beliefs, movements, arguments, loves, loneliness, in the midst of our most mundane tasks, he weaves his own threads.*

That image has stayed with me, because it captures exactly what psychological suspense does as a genre. My favorite thrillers always have a ghost in the attic, a buried secret, a repressed memory, a phantom who is knocking at the door. Their plots aren’t solely driven by investigations, twists, or reveals. At their core, their plots are driven by the return, the moment the attic door swings open and what was trapped comes roaring down the stairs.

So that’s what this Substack is about. Not darkness as aesthetic, but darkness as material, the kind that lives in the body, shapes relationships, and eventually screams to be heard. I’ll be exploring how psychological suspense is built in stories, looking at how writers render women’s haunted inner worlds, and thinking about the real psychology beneath the fiction: how memory works, how harm lingers, how the body keeps the record the mind tries to destroy. Sometimes I’ll share my fiction and poems, my own shadow works.

Like any other place these days, Substack’s already awash with advice, classes, and workshops. I want to talk instead. Read and listen. Discover your stuff and make my own. Share it. Especially if it’s haunting me . . . or you. . . or us.

We have to love the shadows. They can’t thrive without our light.

*Quote adapted from Waking Dreams by Mary Watkins, Spring Publications, 1998.