Bound 1
Story Vignettes
Midnight
“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Midnight
Bound
I became aware of the term moral injury sometime in the weeks after leaving the hospital where I had terminated a much welcomed pregnancy. Unlike other women who face the heartache of having a fetus die in utero or an abnormality that would eventually cause their born child great suffering or worse, death, mine was “Absolutely, perfectly healthy,” as the medical tech performing a mandated ultrasound announced days before the procedure with a smile on her face. She wasn’t being cruel; she was simply ignorant—ignorant of the fact that the heartbeat, then swishing and pounding in the background through the machine’s speaker, would be the death of me…
Midnight
Hidden
Our house was small and not very neat. My mother tried to keep it nice, but once she started drinking, all her efforts went down the drain. I don’t know which came first: her pulling out the bottle from the closet, or him closing the door to our bedroom…my sister’s and mine.
Cassie was two years older than me and, to my young mind, the prettier one, but maybe that’s just because it made sense why he chose her.
It didn’t happen every night or anything…maybe a few times every few months, and once after grandma’s funeral…
Midnight
Quiet
I used to tell my stuffed, fluffy panda all my secrets—what I wished for, what I was sad or scared about, what I shouldn’t have seen or done.
I lived in a tiny town that hides in the hills of the hell that is Honduras; everyone that lives there wants to hide—because of what they’ve seen or done.
They told me one day that I was pregnant. At 12-years-old, I still wasn’t sure what exactly that meant—or how it happened. My mother seemed to know, but every time I asked, she looked away and got angry…
Midnight
Blind
I’ll never forget that night, although for years it’s all I prayed for: to forget, until life or God or the devil made me see that those kinds of prayers don’t work. There is nothing and no one that can erase what’s been done—like mowing down a young boy on a bike on the night of your high school graduation.
I can still see the scene in my mind as if I’m watching it…