Can I buy a vowel?

When the mechanics of the everyday, like a mouth that doesn’t speak, grinds to a halt.

Today, at the grocery store, what made me cry wasn’t:

The empty glass doors with no milk left, one shattered and taped up from people pushing to get theirs.

The elderly woman pulling her hand into her sleeve and eyeing an Asian woman as she passes her with her cart.

The errant lettuce leaf and rows and rows of empty fruit bins, streaked with rotting juice.

The glaring emptiness of bleach, baby wipes, children’s medicine, baby formula, gouged like eye sockets.

What made me cry was:

A mother holding up a 12-count box of Crayola Metallic Crayons up to her child, who couldn’t have been older than 2 or 2.5, pointing to a crayon in a row and asking him:

What color is this?

“Silver,” he said.

“No,” she said. “That’s GOLD. How many times have I told you this, why can’t you get this right?”

She put the crayons back.

“We’re not getting these.”

I turned as though someone slapped me. My face was purple.

As the mother of three nonverbal autistic children, I would give my kidney, ten years of my life, willingly saw off my own hand, to hear one of my children say one word.

Mama. Or crayon.

I would cry tears of joy as my child said every wrong color ad infinitum, as I gleefully pulled crayons out of every available box.

You may be thinking:

So this is how it feels when the bottom drops out.

When what you had always taken for granted, isn’t there.

When food doesn’t show up on shelves like it’s supposed to.

When people stare, with suspicion and fear, and complain, out of inconvenience.

When the mechanics of the everyday, like a mouth that doesn’t speak, grinds to a halt.

And isolation and voluntary quarantine is a way of life.

And keeping your children safe, and alive, is on your mind.

But don’t you get it? We’ve been living this life all along.

Autism: A Surrealist Still Life

If I could paint you a picture of autism it would not be neat and tidy, or digitally photoshopped into a vectorized, seamless pattern.

There would be gnarled tree trunks mangled by lightning strikes and re-established root systems twisted onto themselves from too many barren winters.

There would be entire forests annihilated by raging fires, and my throat choking in perpetuity from the smoke.

There would be tiny lizards scampering up brick walls, Arizona pink sunsets and sudden hail storms that turn into scathing summer days.

There would be lemonade stands and an ice cream truck’s dissonant melody echoing from inside of a bomb shelter of my own making.

There would be toilets clogged with PJ masks figures, the ball of hair my son ripped out of his head, and the lump in my throat.

There would be sheets missing from the book of time, and time itself would be nothing but a melting Dalian construct cooked up for exactly 1:55 in the microwave to avoid scalded or frozen chunks of amorphous, breaded meat byproduct.

There would be doors being unlatched from their safety locks and my will to live wandering from its home until it drowns in two feet of water. But being pulled back to reality by a blowout needing to be wiped off the walls.

There would be graffiti others scrub in repulsion that you realize is prophecy after it’s half erased.

There would be walls and walls of picture hanger hooks, like hanging gallows, stripped of life’s masterpieces and mundane, indiscriminately.

There would be a nonverbal little girl twirling her hair in a room where it is always 2 o'clock.

There would be life and beauty waiting in the gore of the commonplace, not yet born, coated in a layer of vernix.

There would be gifts born to us en caul beneath the onslaught of blood and massacre of fluids, not yet breathing, between this life and next, waiting for us to reach in and pull them out with our bare hands.

There would be tiny acts of sustenance growing from impossible situations or even strangers.

They would be like dandelions rearing their heads through the cracks in the concrete until they became mutilated by the sheer will to survive.

Cornelia and The Pine Torch

Illustration is complete on Cornelia and The Pine Torch! This is probably my favorite page for so many reasons...a heart within a heart within a heart, literally and figuratively. The next step is formatting the text and then we'll be ready to wrap it up and publish! I cannot wait for you all to see the whole book. xo