Free One of Us by Tawni O’Dell

these men are being digested.
    One of the puddled faces tries to speak to me, but his words are strangled in the thick, shiny ropes of tar that come spewing out of his cracked black lips. He tries again and this time I can make out his words. He tells me to get him a beer. The voice belongs to my dad.
    I wake screaming, and I’m a child again waiting for Tommy to come rushing into the room where my mother used to sleep, scaring me almost as much as my dream, a haunted scarecrow of pale, skinny limbs in faded oversize boxer shorts, white hair sticking up like straw, and a grimace of toothless terror stretched across his face, brandishing whatever weapon was at hand: an empty whiskey bottle, a flyswatter, a bathroom plunger.
    He’d stumble to the bed, clutching his chest, his eyes bulging, his cheeks caved in since he didn’t have time to grab his dentures, and I’d be distracted from my own fear by having to calm his. We never talked about the content of my nightmares. We both knew I had good reason to have them, although in some strange twist of mental self-preservation, they were never about my mother and sister. I let him believe they werebecause I could never reveal to him what they were really about. They were shameful. I was afraid of the mines.
    The moment passes and I sense the grown man’s body I inhabit now. I know I’m not a child, but the rest of my disorientation continues. I don’t know where I am. I can’t see anything.
    I flail around in a blind panic until I realize my head is buried beneath several throw pillows and Tommy’s afghan. I sense Fiona staring at me from across the room. I close my eyes again while waiting for my heart to stop thudding and my hands to stop trembling. My chest is slick with sweat.
    I used to have this dream all the time but my father has never been in it before.
    Tommy limps into the room, the tap of his cane heralding his approach. He apparently didn’t hear my screams because he says nothing. He’s dressed to go outside in his coat, cap, and wellies.
    “For someone who only eats rabbit food you look damned terrible.”
    “I fell asleep on the couch,” I offer as an explanation. “Where are you off to?”
    “A lot of talk flying around about Simon Husk. I thought I’d go contribute to it.”
    “What kind of talk? Don’t tell me you’re going to encourage the avenging zombie coal miner theory?”
    He gives me one of his winks, which are as much a part of his mode of communication as his words.
    “I’m keeping an open mind.”
    I close my eyes again and listen to his departure. I’m still shaken by my dream, but I can’t allow myself to dwell on it. I’m about to go see my mother and I need to put all my energy into mustering the courage I need to face a completely different kind of nightmare, one I can’t wake up from.
    SINCE HER RELEASE FROM prison almost twenty years ago, my mom has lived off and on with Tommy, but he can’t make her stay with him and I can’t make her stay with me either and I wouldn’t want to attempt it. The thought of my nomadic, delusional, kleptomaniac, bipolar mother being anywhere near a city is a terrifying prospect.
    She’s been in and out of civil psychiatric hospitals over the years, but the doctors can’t force her to stay there either. Like many people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, she believes she’s perfectly sane, and those who think she’s crazy are the crazy ones. Even more than that, they are her enemies.
    She’s sick but not sick enough in the eyes of the law and the medical community to allow her family to commit her. She would have to physically harm someone or herself in order for that to happen, and she has never hurt anyone in her life, except for killing my sister, for which she spent twenty years in prison.
    Each time she’s been admitted to a hospital—usually after disappearing for weeks at a time, showing up in a random town where she’s been arrested for some petty theft or act of