Trauma Note

Can I tell you something? I was getting a manicure when the van ran over my brother.

You think this is like a simile flexing.

The locks jammed up on my beat SUV. It's just what happened. The alarm went ballistic.

A needy young woman slouched on the asphalt. If I could lean on that HONKING the doors would fling open, a Ford Explorer flying across Orangethorpe Blvd to the scene. Red toes with little paper towel strips weaved between.

Within 15 hours our brother died.A siren's red white and blue tracers.When I was 15 my boyfriend was 28, and I was getting so punk.

15 years old is really 16 years of life, and that's what he got. Your opinions don't really matter here.

Who is he? A flare where I flattened out. A brother.

There's a room in the hospital built with a million iron rods that vibrate red with heat. This is where we wait to be told what we already know. I pull people in off the street and fling them up against the rods, burning their skin with a thousand death blisters, yelling, THIS IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO DIE. We're all already dying one victim says, shrugging and admiring her new marks.

I put on all the nothingness and have nothing left to take off. Look at all these jewels beading off my skin into the asphalt where he landed. Look at this skateboard shredded across the pavement.

It's still sitting in the garage 18 years later floating in the Guerneville flood of 2019. My sister and I smeared with oily mud, brown clay with black spider veins. The Red Cross drops off a white bucket with a red cross on it.

Alarms seed inside the stomach and sound their way up the esophagus to the brain. An alert so constant that its branches feel smooth. We're still picking up the deck. A trunk of his sopping clothes dragged delicately to the driveway pile.

Where are the rods, I ask my enemies. In the grief tree's root, which wrap around you like a hot dress. They really show off your figure, the enemy replies.