Check the Pulse

I started this WordPress page ten years ago as a way to document my adventures with the St. Joseph Worker program in Los Angeles. Since its inception, the blog has had its’ starts and stops. My initial reaction is to cringe at some of my previous musings but it’s an homage to who I was and where I am. I couldn’t replicate those early sentiment if I tried and it is a beautiful thing to have this documentation available to me. So much has happened since August 2013: a career switch, a move across the country, a reporting internship, another move across the country, another career switch, venturing into advocacy and organizing — and even a career that taught me how to actually run a WordPress website! All of this within a decade.

In the last year, I made the huge personal leap of taking fiction writing classes. Writing has always been in my blood but I never saw myself venturing beyond reporting or personal essays (despite many, many, many notebooks of fictional characters and their potential adventures). Somehow, those other mediums felt more comfortable than venturing into the world of fiction. Luckily, I had a great friend who sent me this opportunity and took the leap with me; we are now on our third class. Since then, I’ve written 17 different flash fiction stories, which in this case, are stories under 1200 words. Some are character studies, some are mysterious, some are adventures, a lot are deeply emotional, and one piece feels ripped straight from my marrow.

Last month, my first ever fiction piece was published in Whatever Happened to Hansel and Gretel?, an anthology from my first class. Each of us were tasked with creating a ten-year epilogue to the Hansel and Gretel fairytale. It’s been surreal holding my words in my hands. Bound together with other writers. I’m incredibly proud of the work I’ve done in this book and beyond. So, I’m resurrecting this blog to post some of my flash fiction pieces. Some will be posted as they were submitted for class, others I want to edit before they are seen (I have a habit of needing to cut out large parts to make the class’ word limit). All of the stories are responses to specific prompts that I will try to contextualize beforehand.

It feels apt to start with my published piece, Check the Pulse, that also feels like a fitting description for this blog. Check the Pulse explores the tales we tell and who gets to tell their stories. A lot of the details come from the original Grimm’s fairytale. While this isn’t necessarily the story I would’ve chosen to have published, I am incredibly proud to be part of this anthology.

Thank you to everyone who has expressed your support throughout the many, many years of my reporting and writing. Without you, the reader, my words are scribbles in a diary. These words are only fully realized, fully alive when others apply meaning to them.

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By Alexander Zick – Märchen, Grot’scher Verlag, Berlin 1975, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6330122

“There are nights where I wake up drenched in sweat, as if I can still feel the heat licking my face. The fire consumes the oven, flames scorching my fingertips. I struggle to leave but she’s holding my face to the blaze. I can’t escape the smell of roasting flesh. And then the screaming starts, reverberating in my head. On a loop over and over and over.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

How does … that … make me feel? I want to shout at him. How should my repeated nightmares from the cottage make me feel? Should I now feel hospitable to strangers? Adventurous? Grateful to be alive?

These last ten years have been a marathon to outmaneuver a past that always seems to know my next move. I fled those woods, never to look back, settling in a village where no one would know our names. I thought I could outrun it all but everything and nothing triggers a cascade of memories: locks on doors, smoke from a distant chimney, broken crumbs on the table.

A year ago, chatter about a new village psychotherapist made its way through the depths of the forest to my new cottage. With few shreds of my sanity left, I took the dive into therapy thinking assistance would come in the form of meds—like cocaine—the “miracle drug” everyone raves about. Instead, I got fainting couches and open-ended questions doubting my feminine sensibilities. Somehow this cigar-obsessed therapist interpreted my trauma as a fantastical imagination from repressed childhood feelings.

Despite his ineptitude, I found catharsis in talking about those long-suppressed emotions, even if I couldn’t safely share the whole truth of my tale. It was an opportunity to speak the version that will never make it into storybooks. The one that would never be whispered in warning to kids at bedtime. No, I somehow find myself on the side of Carthage versus Rome, General Cornwallis in Yorktown, and Napoleon in Russia. On the side of the losers, the defeated and conquered. As history has repeatedly shown, the past is only kind to the victors.

I was in my late thirties when I found two emaciated children nibbling on a wooden shutter of my cottage as if it was candy. As I tried to take in the strange scene before me, the boy — without a shred of pretense — blurted out “what an ugly, very, very old witch.” As an unmarried woman without children, I was used to witchcraft accusations by villagers. I also knew my advanced arthritis and the milky lens from cataracts didn’t help quell the rumors. And yet those words still struck their mark.

Despite the crude assessment, I couldn’t leave these malnourished, hallucinating children on their own. I welcomed them, fed them, and clothed them. In return, the children concocted a story that I was a witch, hellbent on kidnapping and devouring them.

Why would I want to lure more mouths to feed in a famine? I failed to understand how the children’s history of neglect bred a toxic desire to prove their worthiness. Those children would do anything to earn their father’s acceptance, even at my expense. Even kick a blind woman face first into a scalding oven. Fortunately for me, their desire to be the hero in their own story made them hasty. They forgot the cardinal rule of vanquishing any foe: check the pulse. One must be unequivocally
certain that when you say someone is dead, they are positively dead.

I felt powerless long before those children ransacked my cottage. I am a physically disabled, single, middle-aged, non-conventionally attractive blind woman. I knew what it was to be abandoned to the periphery, whispers of disgust trailing my every move. But now I was left disfigured from scalp to breast, pushing me into social pariah status. And those wandering, discarded, starving children? Robbed me of every bauble and heirloom. Living off my wealth while I sit here miserable, in therapy, pondering how to let go of a past that was never finished with me.

“Hexia.” The therapist’s voice drew me from my thoughts.

“You’ve been here for a year and we’ve made no progress. What do you seek from your sessions? Closure? Forgiveness?”

“Closure?” I laughed sardonically. There is no such thing as closure when your scars speak on your behalf, when every stranger is a threat, and every act of kindness is a ploy. How does one move on from a marred life?

“You ought to find resilience, let go of the hysteria,” he continued. “Take those new villagers in town, the brother and sister. You must’ve heard the terrible ordeal they went through as children. They’re settling in so nicely, writing books. They share their tale of torture, while overcoming it to save the townsfolks. What a resilient pair.”

I can excuse their hunger for food, stability, and family. But profiting off their deceit while I live in squalor? I expect panic or fear to course through my veins at the mention of their names. Instead, an icy calmness descends. A clear vision of reparations. Perhaps fate does intervene, I think to myself.

At home after the session, I look at myself in the mirror for the first time in years: my face resembling the side of a melted candle. Droopy, worn, and bubbled. Why is it that heroes never have to atone for their wrongdoings? Why would they when they’re convinced of their own convictions But now, as a plan starts brewing from within, I am filled with hope, purpose, and meaning.

Surely, destiny interceded to devise this fortuitous encounter between us all. After all this time, fate’s little breadcrumbs bringing back our diverged paths.

I know I will forever be the villain in this story. It is impossible to undo what has already been fabricated. Society will always find a way to recast women as witches. But like Heavens’ avenging angels, I might as well find out if vengeance can beget forgiveness.

Kristen is proud to finally call herself a fiction writer. Kristen works as the assistant director of a national nonprofit and previously worked as an award-winning journalist and a case manager. In addition to her work, she is a disability advocate, fighting to make #insulin4all a reality. In
her free time, she loves reading, embroidering, outdoor movie nights, and being an auntie.