“Coffee. Mama coffee. Hot. Burn baby,” my toddler says to me while pointing at my plain white mug. “Mama’s coffee,” I respond with a smile. He often pretends to drink coffee from his older sister’s pink Barbie mugs. My almost-two-year-old associates me with hugs, kisses, cuddles, and coffee. This is not a surprise really, because […]
I’ve been listening to Ella Henderson’s “Ghost” on repeat. I keep going to the river to pray ‘Cause I need something that can wash all the pain And at most I’m sleeping all these demons away But your ghost, the ghost of you It keeps me awake Throughout the day for at least two weeks, I
I’ve been thinking about monsters. Not the zombies I usually research and write about, but the language of monsters that lurks in our everyday speech. The rhetoric of horror is so pervasive and so present. It comes to us when we have something to speak that seems unspeakable. It is deployed to justify violence and harm.
Sophie the dog died last week. She had surgery to fix her bladder. The surgery had complications. Sophie had to be put to sleep. These are the facts, but as is often the case, the facts leave so much unsaid. My mother-in-law called my husband to let us know, and he told me. I cried (and I