In Visions

Next to my desk I keep quotes and photographs and my favorite books of visions. Marc Chagall. William Blake. On the wall, a poem about disaster. Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved be at Peace by William Butler Yeats. Next to the computer screen, a poem of hope. The Twenty-First Psalm. On my bookshelves, a much-read Bible from my childhood, with underlined pages in The Book of Revelation. Essay collections. Novels I love. Isabel Allende. Jeanette Winterson. And beside those books are boxes of family photos. There's one of my Aunt Ruby, who saw visions of herself as Jesus, crucified. There's the photo of a house where, I'm told, a great aunt of mine named Stella saw visions and lived most of the years of her life alone. And there are many photographs of my mother. These days, my mother, lives alone like I do, sees couch throws transformed to little girls and the bedroom curtains become groups of boys at night outside her window. And myself? The shadows and wings of my past hover in these rooms, and I write stories, hoping that words will keep me safe.

I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, where visions were as real as the black dirt in the garden beside my grandparents' house. Ghosts walked. Broken mirrors resounded with catastrophe. And in my own home, I read stories of saints and revelation, of Golgotha and ascension. The Holy Ghost, in my recently baptized imagination, was somewhere between John Fox's Book of Martyrs and Sunday afternoon reruns of the Mighty Sons of Hercules. One night when I was nine, I believed I heard God's voice between strong gusts of wind and flashes of lightning. Daughter, the voice said, I have need of you. I dreamed of Jesus walking on my subdivision lawn, his robes like wings.

I needed stories, needed them desperately. My mother, who suffered from an illness I would, when I was grown, diagnose on my own as obsessive-compulsion, restricted much of my childhood. By day, I sat in a recliner chair in the living room and went outside only when she allowed me to go there, and only then to the confines of a small patio. When the sight of other patios was too tempting and I dared to leave our yard, and she saw the grass clippings between my toes, she'd ask, can't you do anything but make a mess? My mother dressed me, combed me, and bathed me until I was nearly fourteen years old. I sometimes still dream of her hands, chapped from washing and dusting and tidying the world. I see them sanitizing me in a tub of warm water, water I'd close my eyes and envision as holy, as anything not what it was—a woman bathing a child-not-yet-woman. In my adult understanding of such abuse, I imagine these rituals of cleanliness kept her safe from some terrible, never-named ghosts of her own childhood. But when I was a child, all those years until I left home at fourteen, it was stories I turned to for comfort and to transport me beyond that too-clean world.

By day, I read piles of books from the public library. Horse books, dog books, books about the sea. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nathaniel Hawthorne, D. H. Lawrence. Books too young, books too old, and any book I'd read for hours in the living room recliner where I led my life. By night, stories were my salvation. Each night before she went to bed, my mother, her white gloves heavy with the lotions that soothed her chapped hands, smoothed me, tucked me, scolded me for kicking the sheets. Stories? Maybe they began at those moments, or later, when there were my parent's voices from the next room. I love you like no other woman. Then why, why? As their words collided in the dark, I went places they never imagined. I made up stories. Captivity tales. Adventures on the ocean. Castles in France. I was a hostage, a magician, and an Indian princess. I envisioned places...