A Beautiful Concept

By Amelia Black

I hold a buzzer in each hand. There's a pillow propped behind my back because the couch is too deep to sit comfortably. My heart hammers a hundred beats per minute, tears pool in my lashes, and for a moment I am embarrassed. I don't cry. I was told I would, but part of me didn't believe them. I didn't believe anything would change, not really. But I was told I would feel better when I was done.

"Ready?" The woman sitting across from me has a little gray machine in her lap that's connected to my buzzers. She isn't my primary therapist and only knows pieces. She looks at me expectantly; her faith is enormous, but she's seen this before. I take a breath, feel it rattle deep into my lungs, and my voice cracks like the snapping of damp wood.

"I'm ready."

The buzzers pulse first in my right hand, then in my left, then back again. I close my eyes and picture myself looking through a window at an interrogation room. It's soft beige and warm, and there's a low light. The glass is foggy and difficult to see through, but I still avert my eyes to what's going on inside the room. Every movement is as familiar to me as if I were going through my morning routine.

"I don't want you to relive the memory," the woman told me when she explained the process last week. "If you do, it will be more difficult to reprocess. Watch it like it's a movie, like you're a bystander, from a safe place." I didn't want to watch it, and I still don't, even though I know no one can see me. So I stand opposite the glass and try not to think too hard about the girl I see inside, a rag doll draped motionless over the shoulder of someone she thought she knew.

#

When I was twelve, my Youth leader approached our Sunday School lesson on chastity with the "licked cupcake" analogy. She was a young single woman whom everyone adored, a converted member of the church. Her recollection of this analogy made her sad, downward pointed eyes grew large and somber–those days were different, how people talked about sex was so different then. She explained the object lesson: she and the other Young Women in her class were given a cupcake, told to lick the frosting, and then try to hand off their cupcake to someone else, unanimously to no avail.

"I was taught that sexual transgression meant a person was tainted. That no one would want me if I messed up. I never want you girls to feel like that." She was so heartbroken that I wondered, for a split second, what she had done to feel so bad; a quick judgment. Still, the thought lingered, and so did those cupcakes. I'd barely had my first period, just six months earlier. But the image of icing distorted by someone's tongue felt like a bad omen.

#

In Primary I was taught the gospel was the same everywhere. Every month we got The Friend, a Mormon magazine for children, and I remember reading about a little boy who moved to a different town. He was nervous, of course, but when he showed up for Sunday school, all the other children sang his favorite songs. When my parents announced we were moving, I thought it would be the same for me.

The December after we moved, my mother taught a couples’ class as part of her Marriage and Family Science degree. She taught first in Moscow, Idaho, the small college town where we had lived for over a decade, and then the Lewiston valley the next day, our new blue-collar home. My brother and I played volleyball in the chapel with the children whose parents were sitting in and afterward drove home in the backseat of our green minivan. My mother cried angrily all the way.

"I think it's fine if a woman has goals," one man had remarked during her lesson. "But I just don't know why she'd ever want to run a marathon! Not the kind of woman I'd expect to find married." My personal aspirations as a runner had been received very differently back home than they were that night.

"I've never wanted to be a feminist more in my life," my mother avowed, gurgling. And at that moment, so did I. They were used to very different songs in this town, and I found it hard to sing in their key.

#

When my boyfriend David and I pull up to the curb in front of my house, the neighbor's cat is stalking a half-paralyzed squirrel across the road. The squirrel's back legs and tail are as stiff as our hands, which we hold loosely atop the center console of his car.

"Oh." I drop his hand. Thank God. "Oh, the poor thing." I step out onto the street and walk, slowly at first, and approach the cat, which scurries off. As I move forward, I tug the waistband of my shorts closer to my waistline and tug the front of my shirt down over them. My clothes don't feel right on my body. They itch, and I want to rip them off.

The car door slams behind me.

David is by my side as we bend over the squirrel's body; it's still moving, still lasting, but not for much longer. There's an indent in the fur where saliva and blood have slicked its coat at an awkward angle. We follow it cautiously as it drags itself limply across the asphalt and dart glances at one another, back and forth, avoiding each other's gaze. But the squirrel is too tired, and once it reaches the gutter, it stops. Its quick, labored breaths are like sandpaper. David puts his hand firmly over its body to hold it still, and then I feel him look at me again. I hyperfixate on the squirrel.

A spattering of incoming notifications vibrates from my back pocket unexpectedly, and I jump. As David struggles with the squirrel, which is spazzing in distress, I pull out my phone.

Two missed calls from my mother and a text: Are you coming home? I quickly hit speed dial.

"Hi, I wasn't getting notifications earlier. I'm sorry."

"No, we're here. There's a squirrel."

"In front of the Jeffersons’ house?"

"We were at Walmart, no, Ma, I don't know why, I wasn't getting notifications, I just saw these."

"Kill it?" David looks up at me, imploringly. I nod. "Okay."

I hang up and feel my pulse begin to race. How long were we gone for her to have been worried? I don't remember. We weren't at Walmart that long. Were we? What happened after? I remember the car, climbing into the front seat from the back and waiting to reach home. I remember David's hands felt clammy and stiff. What happened? Sweaty palms.

My brother comes outside with a hunting knife while we are contemplating smashing its head in. I tell David that my mom said we should have let the cat finish the job, and he looks sorry. His red hair and the back of his t-shirt are damp with sweat, and the skin beneath his eyes looks darker in the fading light by the curb. We are only sixteen.

I have the knife clutched in one hand as my father drives by in his truck and sees us crouched in the sun over the limp figure of a paralyzed squirrel. "Smashing its head in will probably make a bloody mess all over the sidewalk," my father says, sounding disappointed, and tells us about wringing the necks of birds, like chickens. I grip the knife tighter.

David flips the squirrel over so I have easier access to its neck. It's a female. As he turns her, she lashes out with a free claw, and he curses and draws his hand back, flapping his wrist. Red pools around his finger and drips another stain onto her fur. Her beady eyes are scared, frantic, darting back and forth between the two of us and the sidewalk behind her back. I look at him now and say his name. "Babe, go inside. I can hold her down. Get a bandage." He refuses and growls at me to get it over with. His breath is thick on my neck.

I try the knife against its throat, against the grain of the hairs, then complain that it doesn't penetrate. In his pain, David's begun pressing his hold on the squirrel's spine. She gasps for air in little puffs, nearly unable to breathe, and I am suddenly aware I've been holding my breath all afternoon. I don't stop now. Instead, I watch the grass on the other side of the sidewalk, which is glossy like it's sweating as much as we are.

"Use the rock." I say this, and then again, more firmly. "Use the rock."

And so I watch as David grips a stone from the driveway and comes down hard on her skull. We sit there for a moment, unsure if she is dead or just coughing up blood. And then the moment is too quiet, so I tell him to do it again, and this time it's harder and drops of scarlet spew from her nostrils and her gaping mouth and from her eyes, which haven't quite grayed. A little rag doll on the side of the road, draped over a curb she thought she could climb over.

He doesn't comfort me, nor I him. Instead, he marches around collecting the carcass, dumping it in the trash, and cleaning the blood from the concrete. Then he follows me to the bathroom inside, and I watch as he scrubs his hands with soap. I squeeze antibiotic ointment onto a bandage for his finger, avoid his skin as I wrap it around the scratch.

When David leaves, he turns to me and promises that we will be better. We. Then he hugs me; I pull away and kiss him quickly. David tells me he loves me on the way out the door, which I shut before he's turned away, then slide my back across its frame all the way to the tile beneath me.

#

After I've heard his car pull away from the house, I go to change my clothes. My skin is sticky and crawling, and crude. I bring a new pair of shorts and a clean shirt into the bathroom with me and try not to look at the twin thumbprint bruises on my ribcage, or the others on my breasts. They look dark under the dim bulbs over the mirror. I sit on the toilet seat gently, and when I wipe to try and clean myself there comes back a bright stain on the tissue.

I don't cry. Not now. I sink my head to my hands, retching at my whirring thoughts, naked and numb. I cower for what seems like an eternity, shocked and paralyzed under the cold blow from the air vent above, but my mind is racing, trying to remember what I did. I race through the afternoon looking for what I let happen and find nothing. No rationale other than what I can piece together on my own.

I never thought this might have happened. It shouldn't have happened. The goosebumps on my arms are a ghost of the memory I don't have, and I know I am broken, and I think I know why and I don't want to. I was better before. Now there's a lick in the icing. I remember his gaze running up and down my body. I remember his breath and how I don't remember breathing at all.

But the rest is gone, and so is something sweet that I tried so hard to not let anyone touch.

Another drop of blood falls to the water beneath me and I weep.

#

There's an orange futon in our basement that always slumps out of its frame, so the only comfortable way to sit is wedged into my mother, so we can each support each other's backs. We sit there, sometimes, usually to watch a movie between the two of us and to eat ice cream or fold laundry. Moments like these promise solitude. My father and brother were out of the house; our conversation would have been too dangerous to contemplate in their presence.

Up to that point I'd always had a plan; I was going on a mission, right after high school. I'd cycled and cycled through career paths and future plans, But that two-year devotion had been a constant since I was a little girl. I was going to be a Mormon missionary. My mother had never questioned this. If anything, she was a loud supporter. Women weren't required to serve, unlike men. Going on a mission was an act of strength: all power to the girl as worthy as any young man. And above all, a mission was redemption. I had told almost no one about what happened with David that summer. Serving the Lord might compensate for that transgression. I knew my mother would approve of my future more than she’d approve of my past.

"You know I'll support you in anything you choose to do," she remarked, which struck me as odd. "I want you to know for sure that this is what you believe in, inside and out, before you devote nearly two years of your life to it." Her voice implied skepticism, as if she were controlling an outburst of thoughts from leaking through. I simply sat and listened, trying to understand. "And I give you permission," as if to say, please! Please find out! "I give you permission to learn for yourself. To do the research. There are things that I think you should know, things I think you will find disturbing." I only nodded, and she never brought it up again.

Acquiring Spiritual Knowledge was the foundation for a strong testimony. You were to pray, you were to look to divine sources, and you were to avoid outside resources because those were of the devil. But now I had permission to evaluate my testimony, in a way I had never been allowed before.

I looked, and I learned, never wanting to go too far because there was so much I didn't want to leave behind. But the more I read, the more questions I had. I'd stay up, late nights after my parents were in bed, reading testimonials on my laptop in a different Chrome window, so I could switch it quickly if I heard any noises behind me. These articles sported headlines like There is a Dark Side to Mormonism, Why I Left the Mormon Church, and Criticism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They spun a worldview I'd never imagined could have been as bright, or as thoughtful, or as researched as they were. I read the Gospel Topic Essays and excerpts from the C.E.S. Letter, feeling myself falling into a gray area I already thought I resided in; I knew I was tainted, and sexualized, and that made me unworthy, and there was no one I could tell. And part of me knew I shouldn't be reading what I did, then, because the permission came from my mother, not God, nor one of his prophets. There was a crack in my reality, splitting logic from faith. I hid it from my mother, but also my father and brother, who I knew might disapprove. The things I scoured over those nights strengthened my changing ideologies, sharpened them to a point, and drove them deep into the heart of my faith.

A few months ago, my mother and I were discussing religion and its effects on a person's world views. Neither of us could fully separate ourselves from the idea of spirituality; it wasn't plausible. We agree, still, that humans are wired for spirituality by nature. Nearly every civilization in history has sought to explain life, death, and natural forces by connecting themselves to some greater power. On another level, my core values are based on my religious upbringing; these values have likewise crumbled that foundation. My mother and I are critical thinkers, and researchers, and zealots for the truth. Such an organization does not become us.

For such a long time, I had tied my entire existence to something I was spoon-fed, a blind doctrine I testified of without question. It took gentle promptings–a car ride with my mother, an invitation to look out at what was around me–to find my own way. Once I stepped out, I began to see things in a way that excited me. I could suddenly make my own decisions, and the possibilities were enormous. I have nearly grown used to this worldview, and yet I often find myself holding onto old faith. It has become a kind of keepsake, an old photograph placed on a new shelf, replacing what once had broken it.

In our conversation, my mother recounted an experience she had at our old church in Moscow. During one Sunday school lesson, a lighthearted debate broke out on the subject of the gospel and of a glorious Heavenly Father. A woman in the room contemplated the logistics of such an idea aloud: of a saving grace, of everlasting life, of perfection in Heaven which we can never hope to achieve on Earth. And to this, she had but one remark.

"It's just such a beautiful concept," the woman said, and left it at that.

#

Gwyneth, my best friend, is sitting next to me at my dining table. It's late and dark out for a summer night. I shovel sausage and sweet potatoes into my mouth while we talk about the conference we've been attending all week, and we laugh about the funny people on our Zoom calls. We're exhausted, both of us, and the stress of our conference has turned to absent-minded humor in the late hours of the day. I grin at her, guffawing over something our director said, while I reach next to me to glance at the notification that just came through my phone. It's a text from an unknown number:

"Hey, I've been hearing some rumors about why we broke up, and I wanted to clear the air a bit. Don't want anything getting out of hand."

My heart plummets. I stare unblinkingly at the screen in one hand, and the fork in the other slips loose, clattering onto the half-eaten plate of sausage. Gwen asks what's wrong, and I drop the cell phone like a hot coal. She slides the phone across the table towards her. I let her and tuck my elbows close to my body, fixating on the grain of the table. Something has pressed its heavy hand on my chest and is pressing inward, but I make no attempt to breathe. Instead I make myself small. I don't want to be seen.

Gwen tries to talk to me, but I can't seem to make sense of anything. The force of the hand has grown sharp, and I can feel the acidic gurgle of vomit tingling the back of my throat. Clear the air, he wants to clear the air, he said. I stand up sharply, pace around the room once or twice, then walk outside.

It's June but it's warm. I could see the moon if I bothered to look up. I didn't put on shoes, so the sand and gravel dig sharp into my toes as I march up the little path in our backyard, which leads to a hanging swing. I'm wearing a thin tank top and a gray sweater, which I hunch around my shoulders as I sit down, knees pulled into my chest. And I just sit there. After a while, the nausea has stopped, and I think about breathing. I let myself go, just enough to think about what happened. Just enough.

I burst.

I stand up and kick the stones beneath me, then walk down the path and scuff the dirt and stomp my heel into the ground. It's been a year. A year and he finally says something, anything, and it's about him. Goddammit, how dare he. How dare he speak to me. How dare he accuse me of telling my story. He couldn't even say a word to his own. He's trying to cover his own ass, how dare, dammit. I groan and shout into the silence, and then I stomp inside. Gwen is still sitting there, at the table, and doesn't speak when I slam down into my chair and try to stab the prongs of my fork into the remaining food. I miss repeatedly, the jabs clunking against the ceramic. I feel her take my arm cautiously, pull the plate of food away, and then let my wrist rest on the edge of the table. I know she's talking to me, asking me what's wrong. Why is he texting you? Who has he talked to? Who's spreading rumors? What rumors? I answer automatically, not thinking about the responses, but nodding instead and giving her what she wants me to say. She does her best to comfort me, but makes no effort to touch me, respecting my space; I've made myself small again. Then my mom walks into the room.

"What's wrong?" It's as automatic as my own responses, and her brow is scrunched. Panicked, I turn to Gwen. She didn't know me a year ago, but she knows me now, and knows what I need perhaps more than I. She nods, her eyes wide.

"Tell her."

I babble and choke through the words. I avoid telling details, and she asks anyway, and I'm met with the same feelings of embarrassment and guilt I felt sitting in that bathroom alone, just a year earlier. My mother remembers that day, with David and the squirrel, and remembers being worried when I didn't know why. If I don't say something outright, Gwen is there to fill in the gaps. When I do get it out, though, I'm not met with shame. She sits in another chair and reaches across to me while I shake and try to answer her questions, holding my hands in hers. I haven't done something wrong. It's okay I don't remember. It's not on me. I let Gwen hug me before she leaves, and I thank her.

After Gwen is gone, my mother and I continue our conversation in her bedroom. I've calmed down and deleted the text message by now, but she is in tears. My mother doesn't cry in front of strangers, but she's broken down now, just a little. I worry I've said too much all at once.

I kept this from her for a year, hoping it would keep me safe and my mother safe. By now, we've already discussed leaving our church, and we've talked about sex and its nuances and its taboos. And yet I kept it knowing that I could still be ruined, tainted, that maybe this would keep me from everything I knew before. I let her cry, as I did. She knows too much, now, to put it back into hiding.

#

The more I watch what goes on inside the interrogation room, the more the scene inside seems to simplify. What once was a horrific, detailed cinematic experience is now a series of motions, which come and go quickly. The girl and the boy sit in the car, he moves towards her, she wakes up in pain and in his arms, and they drive away. It's rhythmic; sit up, come down, wake up, drive down. Up, down, up, down, I feel the pace of my heart slow as the scene pulses to what I realize is the pace of the buzzers, which I've forgotten about. They've pulled the memory down to its bare minimum, and I don't have to worry about looking through the glass. It's clearer now.

As I've stood by this window, I've started to step backwards. The room's walls, which once felt small and contained, now stretch out for miles behind me. I step slowly: right foot back, then the left, then right. The buzzers pulse out a waltz and I dance backwards through the room. The window becomes smaller, the image between the frame inside becoming more ambiguous by the second. Up and down, up and down, dancing until my back reaches a wall behind me and I stop, squat down, and level with the floor.

I look away to see people coming in from all directions. It's my family, my mother there in front, holding out her arms, and friends. I don't think I wished them there, but they come

to sit with me anyway. My mother is closest, knowingly watching as her daughter falls into place and pulls together her pieces. The warm brown light feels close, feels safe, feels like something beautiful that may be in reach. I want to stay.

#

I know that when I open my eyes, I'll just be sitting on a couch in an office, and the woman across from me will ask me how it went and I'll tell her. Then I'll reach for a tissue - I'm now aware my mascara has smeared from my crying. But for a moment I just think I'll stay, hoping. Something's changing; I have a new idea now, of how this will end.

I squint my eyes and think about going there.

All names other than the author's have been changed to preserve privacy.