It is completely accidental. I don’t mean to find the letter. I’m not snooping, only looking for a clothing website. Why he keeps a copy in his favorites folder I guess I’ll never know. But there it is.
  Rendered in black and white on the computer screen is the thing that has been nagging me. The thing I know but can not name. I can not breathe as I read and reread the letter not meant for me. It is sweet in its own shy way and when I can breathe again I cry. Great big sobs that leave me breathless on the floor and then quietly weeping when that’s all I have left until I am dry.
  I email a copy to him so when he gets home and checks his email he will know I have seen and know.  I cannot think of a better way to confront this without falling apart.
  “What do you want” he asks. He’s sitting against the door, knees to his chest. I’m on the bed, curled up, covered up, looking at him almost eye level.
  “What do I want?” I repeat. I want so much. I want to have never found the letter. I want none of this to have happened. I want him to have not done this horrible thing. I want to stop breathing. I want him to stop breathing. I want her to stop breathing. I want to know how involved it really is not just what he says. I want to know why I am so stupid and why I gave up so much for some asshole. I want to know if there were others. I think there were. I want to know if she’s prettier than me, thinner with longer hair.  Does she know how you hit me in the face and I forgave you? Is she forgiving like me? I want to know what I did wrong. And how I can fix it. And I want the world to just. Stop. Spinning. Just for a minute. And let me catch my breath.
  “I don’t know what I want” I’m trying not to cry but the tears are coming again anyway “what do you want?”
  In the end I can’t bring myself to ask him to leave. I don’t want him to go. He chooses to stay.
  He calls her, every night now that it’s out in the open, with the calling card I bought him when I was still stupid and trusting enough to believe they were ‘just friends’.  He talks to her in the hallway for an hour while I cry on the couch. We still sleep together. I still hold out hope.  And it is killing me.
  I can no longer eat more than a few pieces of toast a day or sleep more than an hour a night. After a week I take up drinking. After two he notices the fifteen pounds I’ve lost and does the thing I’ve needed him to do all along. He leaves.
  “Only for a week” he says, “to give you a break.” And I am relieved and horrified at the same time.
  A week turns into three. And then she is visiting and he brings her over to see the cats. Right in front of me and I want to die. And then he’s getting the rest of his stuff. She goes back to South Dakota or North Dakota or where ever the hell she came from and he resumes visiting and sex a few times a week. I can’t say no. He might still come back. And he says he might.
  Two months later he helps me move. I am alone in the city now. I have no car, no friends, no relatives and now live in an unfamiliar neighborhood. He promises to come help me out, visit the cats.  We talk on the phone once. But I never see him again.
  Four and a half years later I think I see him on the train. He won’t look at me. I can’t tell. He’s only on for one stop. On and off so fast. It only might have been.

  He wears a long jacket. It’s hot out, but he wears it anyway. Jack is only two inches taller than I am, so he also wears heavy boots that give him another two inches. We meet on the street two blocks from the theater.
  I’ve been waiting fifteen minutes in front of a bagel shop. Long enough to realize I’m hungry, and also, the Burger King will be closing soon.
  “Hungry?” he asks, and it’s as if he’s reading my mind. “Burger King is still open.” It doesn’t occur to me that he’s hungry too, only that he knows what I want and need. It’s like magic.
  We hold hands as we cross the street. We don’t talk, drawn like moths to the florescent sign.
  He holds the door for me. He orders for me. He carries the tray. We have the restaurant to ourselves. We sit by the window at a faded table with worn chairs looking out on to the street.
  “Ozzie has a cold.” he says. “He’s sneezing.”  And I wonder how he can tell a regular ferret sneeze from a ferret with a cold sneeze.
  “I’m sure he’ll get better” I say, dangling a french fry over my ketchup . “I bet ferrets catch colds all the time. Just like people.”
  “I think so.” He pulls his pickles off his burger for later.
  “I have a new throwing star. I just got it yesterday from this new shop I found in Blue Ash.” He dips his french fries three at a time into the ketchup. Always three.
  I don’t really care, but he sounds so proud. “You’ll have to show me later” I say, and I smile.
  They’re closing the restaurant and we have to leave. He takes my hand and we walk slowly through the almost empty streets to the theater.  On the corner there’s a bar playing Jazz.
  “Roger is having a party next Thursday night. Wanna go?”
I don’t like Roger. “Sure” I say. I sneak a glance over at him. Jack has the most beautiful blue eyes. I really, really don’t like Roger, but I smile.
  We’re late for the movie, but I don’t care. I’m just happy.

Mom was on the couch again. Just sitting there, rubbing her head with one hand, cigarette in the other. I wondered if she would notice it was noon and I was supposed to be in school. She ashed her cigarette in the too full ashtray and cringed. Rubbing her forehead some more she reached for an almost empty bottle of aspirin.
  She dry swallowed three. I never knew how she could stand to do that. She ran her fingers through her hair, roughly combing it. It didn’t help much. But when the light caught it just right, as it was now, it was this beautiful shade of gold, mess and all, and I wondered how she used to look.
  Then she turned one bloodshot eye towards me. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
  I walked across the room, stepping over a pile of newspapers, and sat down in the armchair. “Sent home” I said “inappropriate t-shirt.” I was only occasionally very good at lying so I didn’t mention that I was supposed to change clothes and go back.
  She ashed again, this time choosing a days old coffee mug with some stale coffee still in the bottom from among the clutter on the coffee table. Cups. An overfull ashtray. A lone spoon gleamed from the far side. Magazines held down by a pair of dirty salad plates, ashes and another too full ashtray. Mugs. An out of place shoe. A few beer cans.
  “Why do you do these things?” she asked as she stood up. And I had no answer for her. I wanted to ask why she did the things she did. But I didn’t.
  She looked at me again. “You used to be such a good girl.” she said, as she left the room. She sounded so tired

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity. - George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950

There are 325 million egg laying hens in the U.S. confined in battery cages. What is a battery cage? It is truly a life of hell. Battery cages are small wire cages, about sixteen inches wide stacked one on top of the other and lined up in rows in huge, overpopulated warehouses. Kept in the dark, the birds, packed four to a cage, accumulate massive amounts of waste. The excrement of the birds in the cages above falls on those in the cages below. They cannot see or stretch their wings or legs. They cannot walk around or be social

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  I was allowed to visit with my brother once. For ten minutes. In the hallway. With a guard. To make sure I didn’t run. I might run off to the drug rehab unit across the hall. You had to be eighteen to visit on the adult psych units. Jared wasn’t old enough. He wasn’t allowed on the unit. Technically, neither was I. Joe was allowed to visit. He was eighteen. Sonja had just turned seventeen. She wasn’t allowed. We talked on the phone sometimes. None of my other friends were allowed. They were all to young to visit me on a unit I was to young to visit, let alone be held on, myself.
  Towards the end of my stay we had Thanksgiving. Dry mashed potatoes, drier turkey and something calling itself gravy. The jellied cranberry sauce was okay. Jellied things were always okay. Although the flavor combinations were sometimes questionable. Jell-O was the one thing that kitchen was able to get right. And thanksgiving was no exception. At least it was edible.
  I was often in trouble for not eating.  They had caught on to my hiding the food between the plate and the silver plate holder thingy. So I had to have the orderly in charge of dinner sign off on my having eaten at least half of dinner or more. If I wouldn’t eat it the doctor would be notified and I would lose my visitation for the next day. One day the meat was green. Actually green. I shit you not, green. So I called over the orderly. It was usually the same guy every night. I called him over. I showed him. I told him I would eat it. If. IF he would take a bite of it first. I never got in trouble for not eating after that. He never told on me anyway. So the Thanksgiving food was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t green. I ate some of it anyway. At least half. Maybe a little more.
  November into December and still no discharge date. My mom and I watched “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” on tv in the dining room with Jeff. Me and him in our hospital robes and slippers. Her all dressed up on her way home from work and fidgety. The tv had a lot of static, it always did, but it was watchable. In my family it was tradition to watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” every year on tv. Right up until they moved it to cable and then took it off tv altogether. And we didn’t let the psych ward stop us. Although my brother wasn’t there.
  After thirty one days, longer than I’d been in drug rehab, they had to do something. By law they had to. Now they want to follow the law? And so something was done. I was leaving. But I wasn’t going home. The found another place for me. Another place to take me. I was being transferred.
  There was some discussion about how to transfer me there. The hospital wanted me to go by ambulance. As if I was going to run away. In the end, that didn’t work out. Probably my mom’s insurance said no. So my mom was the one who would take me. She was to take me right there, no stops. No going home. No nothing.
  I was allowed to have my pants and shoes for the trip that day. And I finally got to wear my trench coat. I got all my t-shirts. I left with more clothes than I came in with. And all of them clothes I didn’t own before my hospital visit. That was a neat little trick. And one I would repeat.
  It was sunny out and much colder than I remembered the last time I had been allowed to wander freely in the world. I wasn’t prepared for it. I had only a t-shirt and a trench coat. Apparently I wasn’t going that far. I didn’t really know where I was going. They gave my mom an admission packet to give to the hospital staff, driving directions and sent us off with instructions to take me straight there and not stop for anything. Where’s the trust? Seriously. And off we went. From Covington to Ft. Mitchell.
  I paid extra close attention, trying to memorize everything, all the landmarks that I could. So I could find my way back. I didn’t know where I was going but I would be damned if I was going to stay there. I had lived in Kentucky for two months, the last month of it was in the hospital. I had no idea where I was or where I was going, but I thought it seemed pretty simple so far. The side streets around the hospital had confused me, but there were signs. And so far we had only taken one major street with no turns.
  And look here. There’s a Pizza Hut. It was lunch time so we stopped of course. It only occurs to me now, just this very minute as I write this, that Pizza Huts and hospital stays went hand in hand for me back then. Or maybe we just ate Pizza Hut a lot.
  Over lunch my mom had a little look-see in the manila envelope will all the admission forms for the new hospital. I didn’t get to see. We didn’t talk much and I didn’t ask where I was going. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t be staying very long if I could help it. Besides, I was busy going over where we had come from in my head. Memorizing the street we had come down in detail, so I wouldn’t forget. And I never did.
  After lunch we continued. I didn’t want to. I felt sick. I wanted to throw up. I didn’t. Up the hill. Left at the four way stop. Left again at the first stop sign. A little ways down the road. There it is. Off to the left is the entrance to the parking lot. To the right of the parking lot is the ugly brick building. What I can see of it is in a U shape. To the left of the parking is a baseball field. In front of the parking is walkway with benches. In front of the building is a large lawn area with several picnic tables. Far out, beyond the lawn and the baseball field, extending all around the fields, just before they go to woods is a very tall fence. And I can’t tell, but it might have a barbed wire at the top. I’m not sure.
  I read the name on the sign as we drive past, into the parking lot. Children’s Psychiatric Hospital of Northern Kentucky.