Free Dropped Threads 2 by Carol Shields

know I made things difficult for you at first, Shirley, but look at us now.”
    I hear from him more often now that he lives on his own. “Shirley, I haven’t seen you for ages,” he’ll say over the phone. “How would you like to get together for supper?” What this usually means is that he would like a home-cooked dinner and has an essay due that could use a proofreader.
    I don’t have a copy of the family photograph taken at Greg’s high school graduation. Neither does he. Perhaps it didn’t turn out. I don’t know how to view my experience as a stepmother. Was it a success or a failure? At the time I left my marriage, I would have described it as a failure. I’m no longer so sure. The fact that I have a close relationship with my daughter and her brother validates the time and energy I put into trying to create a home and family. It felt like family the other night as I massaged Greg’s feet in front of my fireplace while he and his sister visited. He left with the remnants of our Sunday dinner for Monday’s lunch and suggestions on how to improve his essay.
    “Do you still think of me as your stepmom?” I asked him recently. “Of course. Who else would I say you are?” he replied. “Besides, you didn’t divorce me.”

Hiding
    Pamela Mala Sinha

for Jule
    I try to forgive myself for pulling the covers up over my head. Not every day. But in the time before the Blacks—so that maybe I can stop them from coming. The dictionary defines black as the absence of colour. I see it as a colour.
    Almost fifteen years ago, I heard a terrible crashing sound. Are they demolishing the building next door? No. It’s nighttime. I’m sleeping. So much noise that someone’s going to call the police. Another enormous crash. Someone’s here. Inside . I’m being robbed. What happened next, I’ve been told, if it had to happen at all, occurred under the best possible circumstances because I had not done, nor could be accused of doing, anything “wrong.”
    What’s incredible is that it almost bores me to write this. I have lived these thoughts so long that everything seems tedious. Redundant. Difficult to imagine as something you would even care to read. I don’t want your pity. Everything I need to be here writing this is already mine; otherwise I would be dead. It’s that simple. What do I want, then? I must want something from you.
    He made me eat his shit. He sat on my face and suffocated me with his ass until I did.
    I want it to matter. That’s what I want.
    I did it. And during that time, I believe there was a moment when I was not there . Not passed-out unconscious, but not in my body. It was possible to remain present until that point. I couldn’t see with the pillow over my face, but I could think, and I didn’t stop thinking. Obeying. Pleading. But when he flipped me onto my stomach I got confused. I didn’t know what he was doing pushing my face into the mattress. I was on my stomach. Why my stomach? oh no. That’s when I left. I left myself behind to be raped that way , left my body there in that bed and walked over—with my nightie on —to my little altar that was set up in the corner and asked God to come out of the picture and burn him. I just stood there, in front of God, repeating, “Burn him” over and over, demanding that what was happening in the bed should end in flames NOW. For a long time I left her to that torture while I stood in front of my God. I was busy begging so I left her there.
    When I met Jule, my therapist, I saw in her eyes someone who didn’t fit in the world the same way I didn’t. It wasn’t true, but when she looked at me that first day she made me feel not alone, and for a single suspended second … I felt like maybe I could live. That maybe we would be able, with that torn fragment of my spirit, to seek out what it was that hated me so much to want to kill me.
    During a session of therapy more than a year later, she showed herself to us. She called herself