Pest Control

One day you are twenty-three years old, perhaps tremulous in the environment of the inner city, but young, fickle, still able to squeeze in denim, you strut in in that power chair, no ass, no hips, but men can feel you swivel, that you are willing to sexually take risks, and then in the blink of an eye, you are fifty, and realize you predicated your entire life on a mistake, your best years behind you, beaten by repressed duress, repressed dysfunction, white suffering lodged up against over-weening black matriarchal collective censure, even when orchestrated by white Protestants. Depression is one thing, but I sit here in a moon night shirt with a profound sense of loss, biting my tongue not to spearhead you with a sharp ugliness, what lifelong public housing has done to a woman like me, the sheer poison of it, crying out for god's sake, what have I done?

And you realize that most of this damage has come through the exterminators, the mandatory federal insistence on killing insects, mice, juvenile rats, carriers of plague reverberating in our collective memory. Brandon was able to attack me because the exterminator was due the day I took off from work to prepare my transition to the next employer. That Henry was a pest control technician, a freelancer and a poseur both, has only recently struck me in terms of its grim significance, especially after 27 years of pressure and counter-rebellion between me and Presby after visits from the guy with the chemical hose. That this is a necessary exercise misses the emptiness of my energies it has left behind, periods of plateau and escalation. I threw down the gauntlet with manager Trudy yesterday, and the travesty is that it does not matter. My strength dangles from a paper clip. My father put me away when I was nine, nine. What freedom have I in all actuality had? I never applied for a mortgage, can never lose the rehabilitation hospital leash. What has all this been for? Not one person from Liberty can or will answer that, nor will Linda ever take responsibility for what she did, the disastrous blow it was, the causal link to so many subsequent defeats. My aunt mentioned the Empire shooter this morning. We were trying to figure out where I might go. "What's wrong with this country?"

"That's what happens when you lose your job."

And so many of you think I am unstable for not letting the bad things go.