After
by ANNE GUDGER
Katie Collins-Guinn, Bloomed, Rooted & Scarred, Ink on Paper to Digital Drawing (Procreate), 11 x 14 inches, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
AFTER
ANNE GUDGER | JULY 2023 | Issue 25
Annie, want to introduce yourself? Emily repeated as I sat in the widows’ circle.
Sandpaper tongue, the ceiling of my mouth, my teeth. I swallowed hard. Swallowed my uncertainty.
I’m Annie, I said, and the blondes and brunettes bobbed their heads Go on. We’re listening.
My husband died in a car accident.
I wanted to say he was alone. Crashed his car on black ice on the way to go night skiing. I wanted to say I was pregnant. I wanted to say I’m a single mom now to my darling boy.
I wanted.
Me: dizzy. Untethered. A tangle of feelings wadded up with duct tape. I breathed deep and steady to stay rooted. I shook my head No to Emily’s invitation to say more.
***
Who can you think of? the chaplain asked.
I won’t leave until someone gets here, he said and scrubbed the edges of his graphite eyes.
Me underwater.
Ears flooded as the river gushed by.
Icy skin. Lungs packed with curing concrete.
Heart blazed. Black fire. Sizzling at the edges of a fire ring with the river swirling above.
***
When I was six, I was stuck in an orange life jacket since I wasn’t a real swimmer. It crowded my ears and smelled like river and shadows and something deep and sour. One sticky summer day at the swimming hole on our family ranch: cousins in the water, my aunt with her Jackie O sunglasses reading Valley of the Dolls on the shore, her Marlboro red cigarette ash curving into a J, I peeled off the soggy too big life jacket. Peeled it from skin with the certainty that I could swim good as the big kids.
My big sis yelled, Whatcha doing?
Maybe she yelled, Wait! Stop! as I curled my toes into bird claws, put my hands together like praying and flopped my girl self into the churning river.
When I sank straight down, lungs burning, when I screamed under water, when I pushed off the slimy river bottom, pushed hard, when I broke the surface, squinted at sun before dropping again with all the weight of me. I swallowed more river, pure and sludgy. I must have passed out.
I woke up coughing then throwing up, water dripping off my aunt’s curly dark hair, her normal soft face not soft, more like a fox with darting eyes. Her voice high and tight. Her words: What were you thinking?
***
Who’d like to start then? Emily asked in her maple voice with a raspy timber, that undertone of east coast poking through.
I dug my nails into my palms. I could feel eight crescents whiting up in the flesh of me.
A blonde (maybe Maddie) brushed crumbs off her skirt or rubbed them in. Hard to tell. She races here during lunch, she told me. Eats in the car. Next time she’ll rub egg salad from the corners of her mouth even though the smell of egg and mayo will linger.
I’m single and going on a date, Maddie announced, leaning in so far I thought she’d tip over.
My thoughts spun: What the fuck? Single? Date? My head squeezed where a ponytail would be if my hair were longer. Whites of my eyes circled my irises. Brows tented. What the fuck. WhatTheFuck. What. The. Fuck.
I was here for oceans of tears, add hurt, anger, regret. I was here for stories about broken dishes, burned lingerie. How they slept during the day and couldn’t sleep at night. How they ate too much. How they didn’t eat. How they drank too much. Or didn’t. How they couldn’t see past today or even this minute. How they missed their husbands with every body cell.
Not moon-faced, curly-headed Maddie announcing independence from grief. Single. Dating.
Holy fuck of everything.
When? Asked a brunette (Sarah maybe) in a cocoa-colored pantsuit with a pale pink blouse. A high ruffle framed her kind face.
This weekend. I’ll tell you all about it next time. Maddie with her grin and Raphael cherub cheeks.
I hated Maddie. I didn’t feel inspired, like I could be Maddie someday. I felt pissed. Resentful.
I eyed the others, wondering what kind of I’m single bullshit would spill from their mouths.
I breathed deep and drummed fingers to thighs, studying these women, secretly wishing to see a little of me reflected. They looked so. Regular. Hair fixed. Make-up. Clothes ironed and matching. Not me in the Grab What’s in the Dryer or Wipe the Baby Crud Off and Go. Even with fall pressing on, I didn’t wear socks. One less thing to wash.
I hid my fists. Pressed nails into skin, in the map of me with my two marriage lines, with my bean-shaped pink scar at the headwater of those lines. I wanted grievers. Widows struggling to breath. Widows whose biggest accomplishment might be turning off the bedside lamp before passing out or putting soap in the dishwasher.
I wanted the Widowed and Fucked group.
***
Who can you call? the chaplan asked again, palms pressed into the saffron colored kitchen counter. His hands grey from the cold.
Who?
My relationships with my parents were prickly. I’d twisted and shaped an imaginary barbed wire fence between us—see-through with spiky warnings—as I forged my own identity. A me separate from the unlucky parts of my childhood: their epic divorce, Dad’s drinking, Mom’s depression, our family motto: Everything Looks Better on a Silver Platter.
We were close if we kept our truths on low volume.
And yet. I knew they’d show up. We gagged hurts to be there when being there mattered. Even with me wrestling with what does Family First mean now that Kent was my first family, my parents and sisters wouldn’t hesitate to be the heartlines we’d always been.
Do you have family near-by? the chaplain asked, his TicTac breath turning sour.
My tongue wandered to a back molar.
Bare toes beat against the fake brick linoleum.
Snow inched up the deck rail just past the kitchen window.
I wished I’d put on socks.
You have to call someone, he said.
All my air trapped between collarbones that were icing up. Lungs petrifying.
My sisters. I loved them hard. And if I called them first, my parents would be pissed.
I rolled my hand over my belly. The tiny kick of a tiny baby part pressed into my fingertips.
A neighbor? he asked when I wedged myself in the corner of the kitchen counter.
I silently willed him to leave. Get out.
If I didn’t call anyone, if I could get him gone, none of this would be true.
Do you know your neighbor’s number?
Fine, I half-hissed. All pissy like this whole mess was this guy’s fault.
I picked up that lead phone and called my mom and stepdad. Then dialed my dad. I said words through the moss in my mouth.
We’ll be right there, Mom said.
Call your sisters, Dad said.
Call them now, he said to my silence.
Fifteen minutes later Mom and my stepdad J. showed up in trench coats and hats and flannel pajamas and clogs and boots. My sisters and brother-in-law came next, stamping snow off tennis shoes under the fuzzy porch light. They wrapped me in arms and disbelief, holding me when all my form melted.
Dad came first thing in the morning, joining our sobbing gang who’d watched night turn to day in the longest night of my life.
What do you need? Dad asked before he drove over.
Kent to live a little in a box, I said, my voice a question.
Oh, he could never do that. And I’d give you that if I could, he added, his voice trailing off like smoke.
Anything else? We listened to daughter/dad breath. Umbilical of silence.
He was a good man, Dad said.
I choked on was.
Tears flooded my throat. Swamped my ears. Busted out. This gush of thunder tears that split me.
I’m on my way, he said. I’ll be right there.
In my blackest black my family wrapped me up. A love wrap. A We’re Here wrap. A We’ve Got You wrap. Like the messy orange life jacket from girlhood. Too big and just right.
Wrapped. Snapped. Snugged.
Katie Collins-Guinn, Scooped Out, ink on paper to Digital Drawing (Procreate), 11 x 14 inches, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Anne Gudger is an essay/memoir writer who writes hard and loves harder. She's been published in The Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, PANK, Citron Review, Sweet Lit, Cutthroat, CutBank, Columbia Journal, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She's won four essay contests and has been a Best of the Net Nominee twice. Her debut memoir is forthcoming with Jaded Ibis Press September 2023. At the start of the pandemic, with her beloved daughter, she co-founded Coffee and Grief: a community that includes a monthly reading series focused on grief in its many outfits. Everybody grieves and when we share grief we feel less alone. More at Annegudger.com, Anne Gudger on IG and fb. Coffee and Grief Community on fb.
Katie Collins-Guinn (She/They) is an artist, mother of blood and non-blood daughters, designer, illustrator and writer, spouse, flower gardener, North Portlander and lover of the beautiful.
Her adult coloring book The Stoner Babes was published in 2018 with Microcosm Publishing, which celebrates diversity alongside the transcendental and medicinal qualities of cannabis. She’s spent time as a contributing freelance writer for the Portland Mercury and has been published in Pacific Stone Zine, Call Me [Brackets], Entropy, Nailed Magazine and others.
In 2015 Katie attended the very first Corporeal Writing collaborative workshop with Lidia, not knowing a soul in the room when she walked in, and knowing she'd finally met her artist family when she walked out.
Katie now oversees design elements, merchandise and other creative and logistical happenings at Corporeal Writing, and leads the young mammals collaborations. She cares for 21 roses and counting.