Free Bandit by Molly Brodak Page B

brightness of his white shirt in the sun, chalk in pocket.
    By the time the last event of summer came, the creek walk, I was too thin and fogged over in dreaminess to care about it. Being kept in the house made me feel sealed up, distant from the focus pure labor had first given me. It was hot and numbing in the house and the work didn’t reach into me. Unlike The Dad, who left us to do our chores, The Mom watched me carefully in everything I did, ruining my private feelings most of the time. She couldn’t catch me messing up or cutting corners because I didn’t, not even when alone. I came to hate The Mom and The Dad’s steadiness, the hardworking and loyal kids, even the obedient animals, all goodcogs in the family machine—my simple childish jealousy of a healthy family crystallized into resentment.
    And suddenly it was over. The last day on the farm we ate our breakfast of eggs and toast and apples in the cold dark with more silence than usual. We didn’t have to work that day; we only had to pack and wait with The Dad on the lawn for our parents to arrive while the rest of the Family went on with the chores. Cars pulled into the driveway, and kids ran to them on sight one by one. My mom pulled up in her powder blue Caprice Classic and I ran to it too, saying goodbye to no one. I didn’t look back, didn’t want to see The Dad one last time. In the car, Mom hugged me hard and petted my hair, looking with some concern at my deeply tanned face and wild limbs. She pulled a bag of Sun Chips from the back and showed me the Guns N’ Roses tape I had requested. I tore into the bag and slid the tape in. The chips tasted insanely potent, frightening, and the music sounded mean compared to the quietude of the farm. I turned it way down and smiled for her.

23
    I don’t want to see these words touching these true things. They are all wrong. This whole language I’m using is wrong. Language itself seems to fall to pieces when it touches certain topics. This is demon number one in this book.
    But of course, here I am, already wrestling with demon number one, almost as if I couldn’t help it. Nearby, demon two: storytelling.
    Stories aren’t helpful, are they? There is a reality—this one sliver of universe I’m assigned to—then there are the stories about it, working to “make” sense of it. Stories give Form and Meaning to our formless, meaningless stumbling through time. In stories our minds link, emotional survival techniques are transmitted, moral models are codified, hows and whys are satisfied. I know. But, then, is the story a kind of currency? Narratives are
bought
by readers and … what is sold?
    Growing up as a voracious reader I found stories of pain and redemption on every library shelf I visited. Pain! Apparently pain, I learned, can be traded in. It is some kind of
money,
in these stories, traded in for love, or admiration, or credibility, or wisdom. In books and movies and poems and plays, this sort of redemption is only fair to the reader, after all, who is forced to endure along with the hero or sufferer. Sufferers
deserve
rewards. And it’s so reassuring, the story of redemption.
    Isn’t it true?
    Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true, because the alternative is simply too cruel to accept: that trauma is worthless. Grief has no meaning, it just is. Perhaps we have gained nothing from the psychological rending our dad enacted on my family. What if we aren’t stronger or wiser, just hurt: the end.
    I cringe at the word
deserve.
I just don’t believe in deservingness. It stands a little too close to entitlement for me, uncomfortably close.
    And if that’s true, maybe there’s an even better joy than redemption in knowing that pain isn’t currency. It can be discarded! Maybe it isn’t a raft, it isn’t an identity, it isn’t some grand cosmic test, it isn’t shit.
    Possibly. But could this line of thinking really
work
? After all, often it is this single point of comfort a sufferer clings