Amnesia
       

Discussions of gaslighting always presume a sane victim. The person wrongly made to feel delusional. We don't talk about the person who is already delusional and yet wrongly made to feel so. If you think, how is this possible? you are not my reader—at least, you are not who I am speaking to now. My reader and I know the tectonics of our realities and we also know which ridges have not quivered in ten thousand years. In the open lightning field we receive the voltage, where we were placed to receive it. The shoes fly off the feet and a man says, "You threw them." A man may not be a man, of necessity, perhaps a doctor or teacher or mother or law enforcer. The veins explode and sear branching ghosts in the skin, and a man says, "You have carried on indecently with a tree spirit." The hair is singed to feather down and a man says you might have trimmed it in a less conspicuous fashion. You go about your life in the field, which is infested with sense memory. Your crops succumb to its fury, monotonous and sopping. Even the window plants bend away from your touch, shivering with the spark of proximity. The only undeterred life is a family of mice expert at avoiding your charged gaze. When you finally catch one, you drive her two miles away to another field, to keep her from coming back. She says "It was a good graveyard while it lasted" and you say yes. A man tells you something terrible has come to live in your house, and it has, but it is a different terrible thing than what he tells you. You eat breakfast with it each morning. A man says you are starving to death.

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Copyright © 2020 Liz Bowen All rights reserved
from The South Carolina Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission