Xmas Constellation
Let's workshop this Christmas vignette that explores trauma, memory, and coping mechanisms typical of creature as fragile and desperate as humans
Xmas Constellation
The sudden reoccupation of her childhood position, that was it. She had flown north into the snow globe of her family home, opening onto a blast of carnal heat in her face: the same couch and plates, the same smells, the same bubble lights in the tree—everyone prepped, she suspected, not to bring up UFOs or boyfriends or when she was planning to have children. Distant relatives, not seen in who knows how long, called her little-princess names that titillated hollows they should not have—shoebox photos in living-room circulation: “Look at Susie-Pie, always so somber and serious.” She stood smiling at a distance in the threshold, only to disappear like a dawn star into kitchen tasks alongside her mother.
The abrupt concentration of it all augered through layers of icy resolve. By the time her mother said “Goodnight” and she closed that familiar door, its Sailor Moon stickers peeling only at the surface, trapped skepticism had risen to the back of her throat like acid from the red wine (altogether perhaps a full bottle to the face). To think it was extraterrestrial experimentation (clinical, devoid of intimacy)—isn’t that more comforting than to think a guardian, someone you trusted and depended on, wrecked your insides into forever-barren tangles?
A vague feeling became a figure that sharpened into Uncle Rick. His eyes had met hers, earlier, across the candied yams. He had moved closer to her, as she knew he would, in the transition to dessert. Seated beside her with his same musk (tobacco and leather beneath cardamom), he stroked the hirsute backs of his sausage fingers along her spine as if it were his instrument. Her sweet potato pie was underbaked, doughy and paler than it should be. But he insisted there was no need to give it more time. He cut her slice—dug out the wetness—and topped it with cream: “Oooh yeah, look at that Susie-Pie!” It was much too much cream, but she took each thwack in silent reception—Aunt Betty’s eyes, everyone’s eyes, acting like they did not see (no one intervening, despite the frenzied creaks and groans of wood). She gagged it all down even though it felt like it was going to ooze out from her nostrils, even from under her eyes.
She brought the curtain panels together in the silence of bedtime, shutting out that nuclear light of the real stars glaring off the snow and onto the wall (almost like a tractor beam). Pupils dilating on her back, the plastic stars emerged in their green glow. Her father had stuck them on the ceiling to surprise her when she came home from the hospital after the resistant infection had risen higher (like her hallucinogenic fever) until it reached her kidneys, a stay she remembers only through IV photos.
She understood what the rehash of doubts suggested. But her response scattered the face of her uncle, which had been piecing together in a corner cluster of neon, like a sand mandala suddenly met with a gust of chaos.
UFO abduction is worse, though. People think I’m crazy. People keep a distance. Why would I choose a life of alienation? Had it been a human, especially someone in my family, I’d have all the support in the world! Who in their right mind would resort to aliens to handle the trauma? For all I know, I’m tagged like a bear, like some shark. They could be tracking me, planning future visits. Maybe they’ve already visited. And who’s to say they won’t kill me if there’s a next time? It makes no sense for us—so many of us—to be making this stuff up. How the hell could that be cope?
