What did you believe as a child that turned out not to be true?
Date: 13 October 2026
That being male made me evil. And wrong. Any expression of independence or rebellion was labelled chauvinism.
“You and those goddamn balls of yours” was commonly heard in our home. There was no father in it.
I had no idea what it meant to be a good man.
“Men were oppressors, maintainers of a patriarchy built on fear,” my mother recited to me from something considerably more radical than Gloria Steinem.
My sexuality was dissected and despised. Puberty was hard. I did more than think about killing myself. I planned.
When did you begin to suspect otherwise?
Date: 13 October 2026
At the end of my first marriage.
“Sideburns are too masculine,” I proclaimed. Nuala rolled her eyes, glanced at her friend and said, “See what I have to deal with?”
The mild contempt stung. I set out to become a man’s-man-woman’s-man.
What pattern have you repeated in relationships that you would like to break?
Date: 14 March 2026
Riding the pity train.
When Nuala cheated with someone from Reuters, where she’d just started, I went full drama. I fell onto our bedroom floor in a heap while she sat on the bed, still in her work clothes.
“Why?” I asked from the floor.
“Because you’re always like this.” She sighed. “Melodramatic.”
I sobbed.
“You see?”
I could not give her what she wanted. It was fire. I gave her ash. I only got more pathetic; she got more distant, more professional, more gone. The marriage didn’t end because of whoever-it-was from Reuters. It ended because of my weakness. I mistook pity for intimacy.
Six years after the wedding, our marriage counselor asked us to think back to what had been good between us. I had loads. She had nothing.
“There must be something you recall fondly,” I said, my voice fraying. “The wedding. India. The—”
“I remember being young,” she cut in, her voice utterly flat. “I remember feeling inexperienced, overwhelmed.”
The counselor shifted in her chair. I looked at Nuala, and saw someone I’d never actually met. Or someone I had simply never tried to see.
“Did you ever love me?” It came out frail.
I looked at the ceiling. She left it too long.
“I loved the person I thought you were.”
Which was worse than a no. It meant she’d loved an expectation.
“Would you like to have another session?” the counselor asked.
“No.” Nuala reached for her coat.
When did you first notice the shape of it?
Date: 14 March 2026
Nuala started a new job in London Town; she loved to call it that. Her new toy, her flip phone, came with the gig. She was not playing Snake.
I noticed the affair too late. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. I’d stand at the front window for hours, scanning the street for her. I kept vigil at the window until dawn, flicking the curtains. She was seeing someone from her office. She was thumbing through her flip phone.
“Someone from the office?”
“Yes.”
And that was all I got. I’d never met anyone she worked with. She kept that world to herself. Her new life of drinks after work, coming home late, and constrained without actors.
“Lots of omissions,” I told myself.
“Just colleagues from work,” she’d say. “You don’t know them.”
I pictured him, and it made my blood boil. Oxbridge, soon to get a foreign correspondent gig, the kind of “bloke” who could talk about Kosovo over a glass of wine without welling up.
And yet, somehow, I was in the wrong. She had lines for it. “Stop controlling me.” “You’re being insecure.” “There’s nothing to worry about.” “You’re needy.”
After one fight she said it with her back to me in bed. “Suffocating.” Cruelty or truth, I wondered.
Years after we split, she said it again across a restaurant table: “I couldn’t breathe, you suffocated me.”
Twenty years later, my second wife, the mother of my son, reached for the same word. She never met Nuala. They had nothing in common except me. I’d just checked whether her phone had gone with her behind the bathroom door.
“Suffocating.”
That was when I finally saw the shape. The only common factor in both marriages was me. Two wives, one word. And two phones.
List them. The drawer, the bottle, the photographs, the thing on the high shelf. Say who they belonged to if you know.
At my grandmother’s house on South Padre Island, everything she gave to her younger lover was taboo to touch: his cologne, watches, shaving cream, office, desk, VHS, stetson, portrait and cars. Everything that was his was forbidden. Nothing of hers was forbidden to touch, and in effect it all belonged to her.
He shall remain Nameless. Not because we detested him, which we did, but because naming him would make him recognizable. We never asked about the extent of their relationship. He would leave his toiletries in my grandmother’s bathroom. We were never allowed to touch them. My brother loved to apply generous amounts of his expensive shaving foam. One day he was forced to use soap to shave.
“No one touches my shaving cream, claro?!”
We hated him for making such a big deal out of it.
Not long afterwards my brother happily perfumed himself with an oversized bottle of lover boy’s cologne, which was shaped like the chiseled torso of a man. My contribution to the rebellion was to move the bookmark of my grandmother’s romance novel and see if she noticed. She never did.
“I behoove you to stay out of my office!”
One day when the house was empty, I sat at his desk and searched for contraband. His portrait in a giant stetson kept watch on the room. When he sat at his desk he would admire himself.
At the back of a drawer I found a VHS of Scarface. No contraband. He was a man who wanted to be Tony Montana, not one who was.
The stetson never gathered dust on the high shelf in his closet; the maid made sure of that. It was felt, smooth and sensitive to the elements, a hat that had never been out in any. My grandfather’s hat had been out in all of them. His father gave it to him, and the Dust Bowl scoured it matte. It smelled of my grandfather. Prairie and Competence. It protected his head on the ranch and at the bank, and at both places it hung from a nail driven into a wooden beam.
Nameless’s vintage Porsche 911 would leak oil in my grandmother’s garage, next to his 1976 red-striped Gran Torino. He preferred to drive a Lincoln. All of them were “noli me tangere.” It means “no touchey.” Grandmother liked to teach us good words.
We sneered at him. We did not think he belonged in Grandfather’s chair. Nor did we believe he belonged in Grandmother’s house, on the bayside of South Padre Island, amidst the tasteful decor. His plastic-covered couches were endless conversational fodder.
After Grandfather died and before Nameless, my brother and I found, in a dusty drawer at Grandfather’s ranch in Oklahoma, a World War II canteen and a compass from his Marine Raider days in the Pacific. We claimed his old leather chair too. We marched across the ranch on 100-degree summer days with the compass that pointed nowhere in particular.
I sneer less now, but I still resent him. He was excellent at helping her spend money, and she became penniless. I could have used some of that money to go to university.
“I never regretted a moment with him!” she told me shortly before she died.
He kept the cars, the portrait, the stetson, and the watches. She retired to Mexico on her Social Security checks. The chair went to South Padre Island. If I could sit in it, I would wear it smooth.
What did you want to be, before anyone told you what was realistic?
Date: 22 October 2026
Doctor
Lawyer
Teacher
Vet
Architect
Scientist
Librarian
Entrepreneur
Writer
Guitarist
Film director
Game developer
Actor
Sailboat captain
Philosopher
Encyclopedist
Roboticist
AI inventor
Astronaut
Lighthouse keeper
Hermit in a cave
Smuggler
Magician
Master thief
Fallout shelter steward
Misunderstood genius
Vindicated outsider
Buddha
Sorcerer
Psychohistorian
Emotional engineer
Inventor of a world language
I wanted all of them.
Who told you it was unrealistic, and what did they want from you instead?
Date: 29 October 2026
Nobody. My mother did not do many things correctly as a mother, but she never told us that something was out of our reach. The purpose of our generous education was to break down every boundary.
Things You Were Told Not to Repeat Outside the House
Date: 29 October 2026
List them. Say who told you, if you remember.
When Mother returned from France and came back briefly into our lives, I told her about the voices that I had been hearing.
“When I walk to the bus stop, I drag my feet along the gravel, and I hear spooky voices.”
“You must never tell anyone this, is that clear? They will think you are crazy.”
She scared me. It did not help that the tones were hostile. They were twisted. Impossible to understand.
“Let’s not talk about this again.”
I never did. Weeks later she would go into the mental hospital. Not for hearing voices, for threatening our lives.
Describe the room you went to when you wanted to be left alone. Where was the light coming from?
I never had a refuge. No Star Wars duvet, no portal I could seal to protect me while I read X-Men comics. My mother didn’t believe in closed doors. It was a corner room with bunk beds for when my brother visited.
When she left the house, I exhaled. When she was home, I faked privacy the only way I could: immersion in my Apple II and my favorite vice, my collection of pirated games.
During one particularly vicious fight, I fled to my room and locked the door.
“Oh, I see, you’re going to make me break down the door? Don’t you worry, I’ll get you!”
She got a hammer as she belted out her version of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” In her adaptation, she didn’t wash him out. She castrated him.
American doors aren’t doors at all; they’re basically cardboard with a doorknob stapled on. It was a hollow-core door, and I was an idiot who thought I could hide behind it. The hammerhead punched straight through. She tore through it easily. No splinters.
Her arm shoved through the holes, groping for the knob. Then came her face, poking through the ragged cardboard with a twisted grin, hissing, “I’m going to get you and cut those balls of yours off.”
Eventually, as always, she tired. She collapsed into sobs at the top of the stairs. From banshee to broken child in under five minutes. That was my cue to act: play therapist, hug her, pat her back, and whisper whatever lies might keep the peace. I unlocked the door and sat down next to her, listening to her heavy breathing.
Then the voice returned.
“You’re nothing but a loser, and I wish I’d never had you.
“You’re worthless. You think all women are weak? Fine, then, I’ll do it sneakily. I’ll get you. Maybe I’ll poison you. That’s a good idea. If more women killed men, then men would behave.”
She paused for breath. I thought surely it was over. It wasn’t.
“Sometimes I ask myself how you could be my son. You’re a maggot. I wish I could squash you.”
Even though she tricked me every time, it was hard to keep my guard up. I’d believe the storm had passed, that surely we were finally good.
She grabbed a pencil and drove it into my wrist. Clean, fast, deliberate. Left a scar, a perfect little circle. If someone asked about it, I’d say it was self-inflicted. And in a way it was. The injury came from a part of me that briefly believed that I was safe.
The door was never replaced. For years, day and night, the light from the hallway came into my room through the holes she’d gouged in it, every time she went to the toilet. Then we were evicted, and the door stayed behind.
What could you hear from your bed at night?
The house was silent at night. No boyfriends, no late visitors, no phone calls. My mother read. Eventually I’d hear her haul herself up the stairs to bed and let out a long sigh. The day had ravaged her.
Storms were the exception. The trees thrashed against each other all night, and water roared out of the drainpipes. By morning the bayous had burst their banks, and the floodwater carried the city’s trash out to the Gulf. For days afterward, the Bayou City smelled of peaceful rot and belligerent growth.
What part of the house did you avoid, and why?
The kitchen. Dishes leaned in towers in the sink. In the pantry, a sack of potatoes had gone to rot, shrunk and wrinkled inside their skins and furred with dark spores. Their pale shoots crawled down toward the gap under the door, as if trying to get out. The cockroaches no longer scurried away; it had become their domain. There were no drawings on the fridge. Just filth.
At some point we stopped fighting it and surrendered the room. We lived on Church’s, Jack in the Box, and Popeyes.
We moved every two years, and to me it was always an adventure, a chance to start over. You can’t lose friends if you only ever make acquaintances.
So the unfamiliar never frightened me. Home did. Fear that never ceases becomes background noise. It’s hard to remember the first time I was afraid, because I tuned it out.
One moment does stand out. My mother had been abroad for two years, presumably finding herself. While she was gone, I invented her: an idealized mother who gave me all the tenderness I was missing. Then she came back.
Years later I understood that it wasn’t her that frightened me. It was the distance between the mother who walked back in and the one I had made up, and the realization that the one I had made up would never materialize.
How old were you, and where were you when it happened?
I was about nine. MommaPete had just moved into a beachfront condo at the Marisol on South Padre Island. To me it was a temple, and her bedroom was its holy of holies. Sand drifted into every corner. Passageways were tightly bordered by towering brick canyons. The brick was the color of slightly burned bread. In a cubbyhole by the pool, a Coke machine hummed day and night, waiting for my quarters. The dunes came right up to her balcony. I loved to visit. My home was on the other side of the island.
Who else was there, and what did they do about it?
MommaPete drank, and by afternoon I was usually on my own. At the pool I fell into friendships with vacationers’ kids, friendships that ended when their week did.
So when I fell and a stranger picked me up off the concrete, there was no one to run to. She carried me inside to find MommaPete, past the Coke machine, through the cool of the passageways, into the holy of holies.
MommaPete was passed out on the bed. The stranger put me down, sat on the edge of the bed, and let out a long sigh.
Nobody explained who this woman was. “It’s just me” was all she said, and it explained nothing. I worked it out myself.
My first wife, Nuala, and I were living in the Philippines while she researched her doctorate. On the muggy coast of Cebu, on the side of the road, beside a strip of mangroves, we found them. Their eyes were still sealed shut, ribs were poking through their skin, and their cries were so pathetic it hurt to listen to them. We spent hours looking for their mother, asking at stalls where dried fish and deep-fried banana sizzled. No one had seen her. “Sakit,” one woman told me. Sick. The mother had known before we did.
We lined a shoe box with a ragged blanket and bought milk powder. An eyedropper was harder to obtain, but after a lot of asking we got it. Feeding them was clumsy and mostly hopeless, but a few drops went in. Their crying softened. Eventually they curled into one small knot, and for a moment the squirming stopped.
That night, stroking them, I noticed what looked like white dust in their fur. Too small to pinch away.
“Tomorrow, I’ll get a flea comb,” I thought.
At four in the morning, scratching in the shoe box woke me. They wouldn’t take the milk. The white dust was moving. They were maggots. They had eaten holes in the kittens’ skin, and for every one I pulled out with my fingers, more came up from underneath. Dozens, then hundreds.
“You have to deal with it. I can’t. I’m sorry,” my wife said.
No vet. Only fish farms.
I took the box outside. I wrapped all three together in a blanket and hit it with a hammer. Blood seeped through. The blanket was still moving. I hit it again. Still moving. I splashed on lighter fluid and struck a match. The flames spread, and inside them I could see them moving.
My hands smelled of singed fur. I scrubbed them for days. A mongrel nosed into what was left and dragged something out. I tried to chase it off, but it clenched its jaws tighter and ran away.
One question a week, by email, with my own answer: A question a week.
What is the cruelest thing that one of your parents ever said to you?
Date: 29 September 2026
She didn’t say it to me. She said it about me.
I was nine when my mother came back from France. She had been gone two years. We were mourning her father. No one met her at the airport.
At night she called her brothers about their father’s estate. First she pleaded, then she threatened, then she raged. We eavesdropped, which was easy. One night she screamed into the phone:
“I’m going to chop these kids into little pieces and put them in trash bags. Then you’ll listen to me.”
My brother and I took her side anyway.
Not long after, they took her to the mental hospital.
I think I was her favorite. She hated all three of us anyway.
What is something you experienced as a child that you have never told anyone?
Date: 29 September 2026
Content note: sexual material seen by a child.
My brother and I collected monster stickers that came with bubblegum. Every Saturday we patronized the local store and procured as many packs as we could afford. We feasted on the gum and bedecked our chest of drawers with the stickers: ogres with drooling fangs, swamp creatures with tentacles, and lycanthropes mid-howl. We covered every inch. We were proud of it.
Then my grandfather died. My mother went to France. My brother went to military school. My sister went to finishing school. I went to South Padre Island to live with my grandmother’s hairdresser. When the family hospitalized my mother following her threats to chop us all up, a pale, sickly friend of Grandfather’s held all our belongings.
Grandmother
When my mother came out of the hospital, my grandmother wanted us to move into a mobile home in the Rio Grande Valley. It wasn’t South Padre. It wasn’t anywhere nice. My mother wouldn’t hear of it.
“She wants wall-to-wall carpet,” my guardian said.
They stored our furniture in that mobile home, and we went there to collect it. The heat inside was stifling. There was no air, only a wet, heavy fug that stuck to my skin and smelled of mosquito repellent.
They draped a sheet over the chest of drawers. The monsters were still there, curling at the corners in the damp. I ran my fingers over each one and remembered every Saturday with my brother.
Then I opened the drawers. Every one was stuffed to the top with magazines. I flipped through them. I had seen naked people in National Geographic, but that was normal, and this was not. I felt sick. I closed the drawers, one by one, and I didn’t say anything.
The rest of that day I can’t recall anymore. What I remember is the smell of the insect repellent, the air I couldn’t breathe, and the shock.
I was ten. I never told anyone. Not my mother. Not my grandmother. Not even my brother, who had helped me decorate that chest with monsters.
