Issue 17 — Spring 2024

Creative nonFICTION

Caretta

Sheree Stewart Combs

We missed the sign to Caretta and crossed another mountain into War, West Virginia. The man we stopped to seek directions from asked, “Why on earth do you want to go to Caretta?” I explained my grandparents once lived in the coal camp and he pointed us back across the mountain.

My husband, Don, and I had come a long way to find Caretta, a now unincorporated community that once thrived on the backs of miners. I love the way Caretta rolls off the tongue, but the name’s more lyrical than what we found in 2016. One church, the shuttered Caretta Coal Company Store, an old school, and a small number of homes. Two-hundred homes stood here in the town’s heyday. Named for the Carter Coal Company owner’s wife, Etta. George Carter put ‘Car’ in front of her name and Caretta became a town. The only place in the United States that bears this name. I wondered if Etta ever set foot here.

My Papaw and Mamaw, Obie and Hettie Stewart, stepped their feet into the coal town in 1929.  Papaw had worked in the mines since age fourteen. By age twenty-two when he was hired by the Carter Coal Company he was a seasoned employee. Caretta would turn out to be the only place they lived outside the southeastern KY mountains; both more comfortable in the steeper hills of home.

 Married on February 1, 1928, my grandparents started their life together on the brink of the Great Depression. They’d known poverty all their lives and didn't have a thing to lose when the banks failed. They first made their life in a McRoberts, KY coal camp, and a year later caught the bus to Caretta when Papaw got wind of a better job with a company that offered decent housing. I’d read that Caretta was an ideal coal camp when it was built. In addition to better housing, it boasted an electrical and sewage plant.

 We drove past the tipple and coal preparation plant on our way into Caretta, but they were not the rusted out mining structures I’d seen online and hoped to photograph. Built in 2015, painted an optimistic blue, they stood in sharp contrast to the mountains that surrounded them. They spoke of the future, not the past I’d come in search of. The red-bricked company buildings, once scattered throughout the town, no longer stood. The photos I’d found online were made in the 1960’s. Much had fallen into ruin since then, but the history of the coal town gathered itself around us. I blinked away tears and trembled as the air grew thicker. Don reached for my hand.

We lost our baby thirty years before this trip to Caretta. The loss stirred in my heart on the February 6th anniversary date, and haunted me into the fall. I got it on my mind to find Caretta and visit this place sacred to Mamaw and Papaw. It’s where they buried their firstborn, a son named Herbert. Stillborn. They buried him in bitter February, far from family and friends. Only a few miners and their wives bore witness to the grief etched into their faces.

An irreparable hole opens in the fabric of the universe when a baby dies. Frozen into grief-struck statues, Mamaw and Papaw heard the angels cry on Herbert’s burial day, as legends of parents of lost children wailed in a mournful chorus. Weakened from childbirth, breasts tight with milk, Mamaw bowed her head and shivered in the cold. Papaw gripped her tighter when she lost footing. Their breath fogged the air.

Mamaw was twenty-three when they buried Herbert. I was thirty when our baby died. I’ve no grave to tend in the family cemetery. No grave site to leave behind. A surgical team at UK Medical center in Lexington saved my life when my Fallopian tube ruptured.  An ectopic pregnancy would have meant a slow, painful death in 1929. Caretta had no hospital, but maybe a company doctor or Granny Woman attended Herbert’s birth. Saw how blue and still

 he was. Met my grandparents’ eyes as the truth swam to the surface in Papaw’s brown eyes and her baby blues.

After we drove through the community in a failed attempt to locate the cemetery, we stopped at the Big Creek People in Action Community Center to ask directions. Their offices were located in the yellow-bricked school, the only place open for business in Caretta. The employees hesitated to talk with us until I told them the reason we’d come to Caretta, and they heard the mountains echo in my voice when I said “Mamaw” and “Papaw”. The director told us, “The coal company put up a ‘Keep Out’ sign.  We’re not allowed in the cemetery. I’ll show you where the road to it used to be. You can do what you want.”  Her assistant encouraged us to stop back by to look at photos of the community, many of which dated back to the time my grandparents lived here.

Whispers of voices from Caretta’s past floated in the air and blew around us in the wind.  My heart pulsed in my throat when we arrived at the cemetery. I hesitated at this intrusion into my grandparents’ private grief. Felt the same disquiet I experienced as a child when I walked in on an intimate conversation and disrupted the current that flowed between them. The full reality of Herbert's death slammed into my core. His death no longer just a story I’d been told.

 We trespassed on the land where Caretta’s dead lay buried. The mustiness in decayed leaves filled our nostrils as we pushed through a thick undergrowth of briers and brushes in search of the older section of the cemetery.  Vines snaked around scattered tombstones like a possessive mother. “These are mine now.” We broke off vines to read the names on the few stones we located, but found no grave marker to record Herbert’s death. I imagined a smooth rock with his name, date of birth and death carved into it. Perhaps by a stone mason among the miners. Italian masons were recruited through Ellis Island by coal companies at the turn of the nineteenth century to help build mining towns. We’ve seen testaments to their work in

Lynch and Benham, Kentucky, where buildings constructed of quarry stone and red brick in the early 1900’s still stand. But the face of a rock crumbles and can’t mark time forever.

We stood among the brambles, the October sun warm on our backs, as a soft breeze played with our hair. I heard a soft murmur. The sound of beating wings. Caught the milky sweetness in a baby’s breath. 

“Mama! Daddy!”

“Your baby’s safe here with Herbert and the twins we lost before Glenna was born. You should see the four of them play together. She’s a sight, just like you as a little one.

It’s alright, Child... We’re tickled you came to check on Herbert.”

Mamaw’s words echoed between the mountains as a love song. 

“Mama.”

A knot loosens in my chest, and I lose footing. Don catches me before I tumble to the ground. A calmness seeps into my bones. Replaces the grief I’d labored under. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and we linger in the stillness. My grandparents’ blood sings through my veins.

It all started here in this coal camp. When Caretta flooded, and they walked five miles through the mine, and down steep steps to come out in Coalwood, West Virginia, Mamaw carried Aunt Blanche, six months old, on her hip. My mother would be born six years later.

Coal companies robbed the Appalachian people of much. Their mountains, minerals, land, water and health. A company can fence it off and put up signs, but can’t remove the peace found in a mountainside graveyard. I glanced back as we made our way out of the cemetery. The evening sun painted it golden. I reached out and caught a last echo of giggling children and placed my hand over my heart.

 My grandparents’ spirits remained close as we drove back to the old school. My eyes blurred and steps faltered as I walked past stacks of bottled water and nonperishable food, and up the stairs to the assistant’s office. I sat on a bench in the second floor hallway amid echoes from the past. A bell rang, followed by sounds of hurried feet. Squeals of laughter. A teacher’s call to order. I caught the whiff of a chalk-choked eraser and sneezed. Dust swirled in the sunlight that poured in from a tall window. Through its shimmer I met the eyes of a young girl. Then listened to her footsteps fade.  As I photographed pictures that captured the community through my grandparents’ eyes, my shoulders sagged underneath the weight of their regret that they hadn’t shared more about their life in Caretta. My heart fell heavy because I hadn’t asked.

“A little ways down the road from here is the three-bedroom house we rented. We raised a little garden out back. The company store sold everything else we needed. The mine entrance stood up the road past our home. Obie headed that way every morning with his lunch bucket in hand and a kiss on his lips for good luck.”

 I imagined this schoolhouse awash with children. Their daddies at work. Mothers home with brooms in their hands or hunched over washboards to scrub coal dust out of their husbands’ clothes. Some with their faces blurred by steam as they ironed shirts and dresses for their children to wear the next day. Hopeful for the better life an education would provide their sons and daughters. I pictured the kids headed home after school, excited to tell their mothers about their day before they started on chores and homework. Watchful for their fathers to make it home from the mines.

I’d come full circle on this trip to West Virginia. Found peace in the place where Uncle Herbert rested in between mountains that bore my grandparent’s sorrow, eighty-seven years before. I’d gained a reprieve from the grief that clouded my days. My feet stood on firmer ground, deeper rooted into our family history. I discovered the kinship my grandparents and I shared ran deeper than parent and child or granddaughter. We were bound forever by the umbilical cords of the babies we’d lost. They’d tend to my baby until I got there. I’d remember Herbert until I drew a last breath. Babies linked the generations, even those who never lived outside their mothers’ bodies.

Caretta remains the prettiest name I’ve known for a coal town.

Sheree Stewart Combs lives with her husband on a small farm in central Kentucky, but travels 'home' to the mountains of southeastern Kentucky as often as possible. When not writing, she enjoys photography, gardening, walks along her country road, and the Argentine Tango. Sheree has been published in Heartwood Literary Magazine, Beyond Words Literary Magazine and Potato Soup Journal.

Grounded 

Myrna CG Mibus  

The windchill is 20 below zero and I’m walking across the near empty parking lot outside JoAnn Fabrics to my minivan. I have been on a wild-goose chase in search of metal thimbles, of all things, on one of the coldest nights of the year. My parents live just four miles away and although I’d normally stop by for a short visit, it’s already too late in the evening to do so. I get inside my van, settle in behind the wheel and turn the key. In that fraction of a second after I turn the key and hope that my normally reliable vehicle will start despite the cold, I think, “Well, at least I’m close to my parents’ house. If my van doesn’t start Dad can come help me.”

He’ll drive up, I think in that split second, in his green Pontiac Montana, with his stocking cap on, work gloves, boots, warm jacket. He’ll hop out of his van, wave hello then grab his jumper cables out of his box of tools and supplies in the back. He’ll walk, purposefully, looking big and strong even though he’s slightly built, to the front of my van. I will jump out and walk to him, smiling, happy that I get to help my Dad.

“Pop the hood, Myrna,” he’ll say. So, good daughter that I am, and knowledgeable when it comes to jumping a vehicle (after all, I was taught by the best), I will open the hood.

He’ll tell me to sit in his van to get warm while he jumps mine. But I’ll insist on helping him and stand in the cold. Right next to him. Where I’m supposed to be.

We will work quickly, efficiently. Dad and daughter. Side by side. Working on a car. Dad will hand me one end of the jumper cables while he hangs on to the other. Like clockwork, we’ll clamp red cables to positive terminals. My nose hairs will freeze. My toes will start to go numb so I will stomp my feet to warm them. I’ll look at Dad’s cloth-gloved hands; he isn’t feeling the cold because he’s got a job to do. 

“Okay Dad,” I will tell him when I get my negative cable in place. But he, always watching, already knows. He will clamp his negative cable to my engine’s block to ground us even before I get a chance to say, “Let’s give it a go!”

I’ll climb back into my van. Dad will climb into his and rev his engine a bit to charge my battery.

“Okay, try it,” Dad will yell out over the sound of his engine.

I will turn the key and the engine will roar to life. “You got her going!” Dad will say, as if I got my van started on my own.

We’ll be all business then, both of us smiling as we work together. Dad will unhook cables, wrap them neatly, put them away, shut both hoods then walk to my driver’s side door to say, “All right, Myrna, you’re good to go.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I will say as I shift my van into drive. “Good night.”

Dad will walk to his van and climb inside. He’ll watch me drive out of the parking lot, safely on my way and he will follow me, just a few car lengths behind, until it’s time for me to turn. He’ll give a wave as I turn, and he continues straight. I’ll wave back. And then we’ll both drive home.

This is how it’s supposed to be, I think. My Dad, big, strong, undaunted by cold and quick to drive out to help anyone in need, especially me, his daughter.

I shake my head to clear my daydream. I am in my van. It started a fraction of a second after I turned the key, despite the cold. Dad’s van is not parked across from mine. No, Dad is at home, probably resting. I’m in the parking lot outside of JoAnn Fabrics and I am doing my best not to cry because I have just remembered that Dad doesn’t drive anymore.

It’s not supposed to be like this. But it is. At first, Dad couldn’t drive because he fell off a ladder and hit his head. “Six weeks in the rigid neck brace,” the doctor said, “and no driving.” So, Mom took Dad’s place behind the wheel. We were relieved, my mother, brothers, and I, to get him off the road because we had noticed Dad’s driving wasn’t as good as it used to be. We had noticed that at 74, Dad’s once-quick brain wasn’t keeping up as well in conversations. Perhaps this “slowing down” is the cumulative effect of several falls resulting in concussions. Perhaps it’s because dementia runs in the family. At this point we don’t really know the cause, or causes. We just know that Dad is slowing down, and that after the doctor-prescribed six weeks, Dad still rides in the passenger seat instead of behind the wheel.

It’s not supposed to be like this. No, Dad always drives and he’s strong and fit and tall as Paul Bunyan even though he’s only five foot seven. Daddy can leap over a fence in one smooth motion, flying over magically and safely landing on the ground. He races me from point A to B and somehow, even though I know Daddy is really, really fast, I always beat him to the finish line and he grins from ear to ear when I win. I’m tagging along at his side, handing him tools as he teaches me how to change the oil, struggling to keep my cool as he teaches me how to drive, smiling big when he hands me the keys to my first car, a car he found just for me, a well-used but extremely safe 1976 Pontiac Sunbird two-door coupe.

It’s not supposed to be like this, I think. My van’s engine rumbles at idle; the heater feebly kicks out air, but it does not warm me. I pull off a glove to wipe away my tears. I’m in my van. Dad did not jump start it. My minivan started without a problem when I turned the key.

It’s not supposed to be like this, I think as I put my van into gear, slowly drive out of the parking lot and wave good-bye to the darkness where my Daddy is supposed to be. 

Myrna CG Mibus is a writer and bookseller who lives in Northfield, Minnesota. She writes articles on topics ranging from aviation to afternoon tea and essays on family, motherhood, and life. Her work has been published in a variety of publications including Under the Gum Tree, Feminine Collective, Wanderlust Journal and Manifest-Station. Myrna is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing through Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop. Find Myrna on the web at www.myrnacgmibus.com.

An Index of Transition

Elias Joel Donstad

A

Alcohol, my substance of choice. The thing that when I stopped, started my transition.

Always, as in always knew they were different. Always felt sure they weren’t a girl. Always certain. Not like me, always afraid, always unsure, coming out at 24, well past puberty, vacillating between hyper-femininity and experimentation with masculinity for a decade before putting language to my feelings of being an outsider.

Anesthesia, what they use to put me under when I get top surgery, changing my body radically, removing breasts, a main source of dysphoria, and giving me a male-contoured chest.

Anneliese, the name of a Barbie princess, but also the name that my parents put on my birth certificate. The name I discard and change.

B

Be a girl.

Be a good girl.

Be a good girl or you won’t get ice cream.

Be a good girl or you won’t get into heaven.

Be a good girl or you won’t get to hang out with your friends.

Be a man.

Be not afraid, what angels say to humans in the Bible. I doubt that line works. 

Bible, a weapon wielded by parents, pastors, friends, acquaintances.

Binder, what I get from the internet and have shipped discretely to my address so I can compress my chest and pretend like I don’t have breasts. Three years before I come out, I only wear it when I’m alone and stare at myself in the mirror for hours.

Breasts, the ones that start to grow in late elementary school before any of my classmates do. A symbol that I’m alone, growing too fast, growing wrong.

Breathtaking, how wearing a binder feels, especially when I can’t go out in public without it, when the effects of compressing my lungs and ribs start to become constant.

C

Change, as in change genders, change lives, change everything.

Change my clothes to attempt to masculinize myself, signal my gender.

Clock, like telling the time or being able to tell that I wasn’t born a boy.

Clocky, how I feel, how I’m described by another trans man who’s been doing this longer, who can tell I don’t know how to pack or walk or talk or dress.

D

DDD, the size of breasts, a measurement only useful for ordering clothes online, or a measurement for how much you want to surgeon to take off, how much of your body you don’t like.

Double-incision mastectomy, the name of surgery, the operation I undergo to feel more at home in my body.

Doubt, a feeling I’m asked if I have by a friend the first time he sees me after surgery, like he doesn’t think someone can radically change their body in this way without doubt.

E

Elias, the name I chose after scattering all the letters from my first name onto a table, rearranging them, googling baby names that contained the same letters. A ritual, an alchemy, another step in becoming me.

Endocrinologist, as in the doctor who is making me a man.

Endocrinologist, located in the Women’s Reproductive Clinic.

Envy, as in gender envy, as in wanting to have skin that fits, wanting to know what it would be like to be at home without renovations.

F

Fuck.

Fuck me.

Fuck this.

Fuck up.

Fucked.

Fucked without consent, the event that my father uses to ask me why I would want to be man if I was raped by one, like what’s done to my body defines it, like any crime done by a member of a gender would make the entire gender denounceable.

Fucking tired of justifying myself.

G

Gazillionaire, what I would have to be to afford the transition I want, with surgeries and gel testosterone instead of needles.

Gynecologist, or the doctor I see in a center designed for women, reminding me of the incongruence between my sex and the sex I want.

H

Hyperaware of my body.

Hyperaware of the way I walk, move my hips and hands.

Hyperaware that I don’t pass, that going into the men’s restroom would get me odd looks.

Hyperaware that someone in the women’s restroom sees me as too masculine to be there by the way she studies my flat chest for evidence of breasts that were chopped off months ago.

Hyperaware that the cashier clocks me as female before I’m even called ma’am while my groceries are scanned.

Hyper-feminine before coming out, owning more dresses than pants, growing my hair out for four years, cutting it as a way to ease myself into a presentation of masculinity, a world I didn’t feel certain that would accept me, not sure if I would ever find belonging.

I

Identity, as in gender identity, the labels I impose on myself to explain my body, my mind, my experiences, my need for medical care.

J

Judge, the person I have to go to for a name change, who has the power to deny me identification.

K

Kill, like “I’d kill to be seen as a boy,” or “I’ll kill myself if this gender thing gets much harder.”

L

Love, as in self-love, as in the point of all of this.

Love, like same-sex love, like I can even know whether my love is same-sex or not with the complication I’ve given my sex by trans-ing it.

M

My body, my choice.

N

Name change, as in the legal process of changing my name. First having to publish it in a local paper, then presenting an affidavit to the judge, pleading my case, hoping it becomes law, hoping it becomes real.

Name, Elias, made legal October 25, 2023.

Name, not given but chosen.

O

Other, as in not like the others, outside, not on the inside, not feeling like myself on the inside, outside myself.

P

Penis, as in envy, as in I guess I have penis envy.

Phalloplasty, a surgery my endocrinologist says is nearly impossible to get.

Q

Quiet, as in keep quiet about your deviance, don’t tell anyone why you aren’t allowed out of the house, under our control because you are a minor. Stop being quiet when you’re an adult and away from your parents.

R

Risks, like risks of surgery, like high risk, high reward.

S

Scars across my chest, replacing my breasts.

Serenity, as in “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Serenity, as in “God grant me the serenity to accept the vagina I cannot change, the power to get surgeries and take hormones I can, and the wisdom to wait for bottom growth.”

Silas, the runner-up for names after Elias. My friend Mike once accidentally called me Silas, and I like to think in an alternate universe all is the same except I chose the same “Silas,” and Mike accidentally called me “Elias” in that universe, and then we had the same conversation.

Skin grafts, like the one I see on Jack’s forearm, recognize the evidence of a phalloplasty.

Suicide rates, extremely high among the transgender population.

Suicide, taking trans youth before they have a chance to grow up.

T

Testosterone, a Schedule III drug, the golden liquid I stab into myself every week to deepen my voice, grow hair in places there was none, and feel like myself.

Therapist, glorified letter writer to get me the surgery I want.

Tip, as in just the tip, or tip of the iceberg, tipping over the edge.

Tits, chop them off.

Top surgery, the slang for the a double mastectomy, the surgery I waited for, jumped through hoops for, went into medical debt for. The surgery that allowed me to look in the mirror again.

Too much, what living in this body feels like some days, less days than when I had breasts.

U

Under, put under for surgery, the best nap I’ve ever had.

Underboob sweat, a sensation I didn’t have for the first time the summer after top surgery.

V

Vagina, marking me as female, still bleeding every few months while testosterone fucks with my hormones, not quite stopping the cycle, just changing it.

Viagra, the drug for erectile dysfunction a trans male friend took to try and increase his bottom growth (it didn’t work).

W

Waking up after surgery, seeing dull yellow lights instead of the bright florescent lights of the operating room where I was anesthetized for surgery. Seeing a nurse watching my vitals and there to give me Jello and wheel me back into a waiting room.

Waking up for the first time without breasts. Waking up able to lay my hand flat against my chest.

Want to be seen as a man, want to be gendered correctly.

Want to be seen as me.

Wish I didn’t have to justify my gender to doctors and strangers who feel entitled to my medical information because I’m trans, a social anomaly. 

Wish I didn’t need such radical intervention to feel like myself.

X

X, the gender marker, distinct from M or F. A trans woman asked me if I was changing my gender marker to X or M. I want to be recognized and simultaneously inconspicuous, so I choose M.

Y

You, who I have sometimes replaced for “me” or “I” in the index. And I don’t always know Y.

Z

Zero chance I’ll detransition.

Zero chance I’ll regret my surgery.

Zero chance I’ll regret my transition.

Zero, the amount of fucks I give about approval on my gender choices.

Zero, the chances of my parents calling me my real name and using male pronouns and language to refer to me.

Elias Joel Donstad is a second-year PhD student at the University of South Dakota. His poetics involve the body and the way it is perceived by the self, family, and medical professionals. He is the recipient of the 2022-2023 Wolfe Scholarship and 2023-2024 Standing Proud Scholarship.

Totally Conscious:
A Fainting Story

Marcia Chamberlain

I.

The Ritual

I was 12 the first time I fainted in a hospital. I remember studying the white sheets covering my neighbor’s leg as I smiled and joked with her. With each minute, the banter in the room became more muffled, and the silence inside me began to pulsate.

That was the first of many hospital faints. The clamminess would overcome me like clockwork whenever I stepped into a hospital. A slow throbbing. Roaring waves. A fall into the abyss.  

Hospitals were familiar places during my childhood. The children’s hospital where my sister lived and received care for a rare neurological disorder. The regional hospital where my mom was helicoptered after her car crash. The general hospital where my dad had multiple ear surgeries. The cancer hospital where my friends Allen and Julie got their chemo.

Before every visit, I breathed deeply and willed myself to remain conscious, but fainting became a hospital ritual.

Once my body memorized how to do it, I could not unlearn it.

I became obsessed with figuring out why.

II.

The New England Journal of Medicine

I turned to the world of science for an answer. With a handful of faints under my belt, I went to our local library, and the librarian showed me The New England Journal of Medicine. She taught me how to look up information to jot down in my fainting journal. My mom bought it for me to use as a daily diary, but I never felt compelled to record what I ate for breakfast or wore to school. I was 13 and wanted to fill my journal with important, substantial, life-changing information.

I ditched my curly lettering in favor of a neat, professional script and wrote in my journal:

1.       Children with heart murmurs are more likely to faint.

This was the first fact I recorded. According to my pediatrician, Dr. Milanovich, I had a heart murmur. I assumed this heart defect must hold a clue to my fainting spells.

2.       Children with blood sensitivity are more likely to faint.

I was blood-phobic, so hospitals posed a particularly scary threat for me because blood seemed to be oozing out of every corner.

3.       Children with the congenital long QT gene are more likely to faint.

Did I have the QT gene? I didn’t know. I wanted to ask Dr. Milanovich to test me, but I worried he would think I was a hypochondriac, so I just put an asterisk next to this fact and added: 90% sure I possess the QT gene.

Due to the clinical setting in which my faints happened, I acquired lots of unsolicited knowledge. Medical staff informed me that most fainting occurs due to low blood sugar, anemia, dehydration, standing up too quickly, severe pain, blood pressure drops, and emotional trauma. Nurses kindly instructed me: If you feel lightheaded, eat something, lie down, elevate your legs, loosen your clothing, and apply moist towels to your face.

Unfortunately, as my brain lost oxygen, it didn’t function as sharply as I would have liked. I would feel a flush of heat and then hear roaring in my ears. Once that began, it was hard to pull back, much less follow instructions to apply towelettes to my face.

During one hospital visit, when I started to feel woozy, a PA told me about a gadget called a Reveal Insertable Loop Recorder (RLR). When inserted beneath the skin, it registers signals that may occur too fast for the fainter to recognize. It can give doctors valuable information and help develop treatment plans for people who suffer from syncope, the medical word for fainting.

I desperately wanted to see what this machine would say about me, but no one besides me seemed to think my fainting was a big enough deal to warrant the RLR. As my best friend at school told me, “Fainting’s not exactly fatal.”

III.

God

When I couldn’t settle on a definitive medical reason for my fainting, a pesky alternative crept into my brain. What if the cause of my fainting wasn’t medical? What if it was religious?

I was a United Methodist preacher’s kid. Everything—everything—came back to God. Once the question occurred to me, it wouldn’t disappear, looping around the track inside my brain, buzzing without end.

So, in ninth grade, I launched phase two of my fainting investigation, which involved—what else?—Bible study. While my peers collected and memorized The Cure lyrics, I busied myself compiling all the Bible verses about fainting that I could find.

Job 23:16

God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me.

Isaiah 51:20

Your children have fainted; they lie at every street corner, like antelope caught in a net. They are filled with the wrath of the LORD, with the rebuke of your God.

Galatians 6:9

And let us not be weary in well doing; for in due season, we shall reap, if we faint not.

Luke 21:26

Men will faint from fear and anxiety over what is coming upon the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

This research project took an excessive amount of time. I would pick a random book, like Leviticus or Job or Lamentations, and skim it, dragging my finger over each line, searching for any mention of faint, fainting, fainted. It was not an effective research method, but I did find more than half of the 62 references to fainting by carefully combing my Bible night after night.

Whenever I found a new verse, I would feel a jolt of satisfaction. My favorite one was an Old Testament verse directed toward the Israelites who were worn out from living for so many years in exile.

Isaiah 40:31

But those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not faint.

This verse comforted me with its imagery of renewable energy and soaring eagles; most of the fainting verses I found focused on God’s wrath and the end of the world.

This Biblical phase of my research was less public than my bio-medical phase, but it was revelatory. It taught me that there are plenty of non-medical reasons people faint, at least in ancient Hebrew times. I carefully divided the verses I stumbled across into categories, such as “fainting from lack of faith” and “fainting due to sinful behavior.” To my teen brain, these reasons seemed like secret contenders for the fainting episodes I experienced in hospitals.

IV.

Jane

At the same time as I was doing my Biblical research, I was reading the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, hiding it under my pillow and sneaking in snippets when the house was dark.

At night, I’d read sections of Radclyffe Hall’s novel and shiver, worrying that fainting was God’s punishment for my lesbian desires. Even though the novel’s main character, Stephen, begs readers to see her “sexual inversion” as God-given, the storyline makes it seem like God is dead set on punishing this woman for her “masculine” name and tailored suits. I cried at the end when Stephen did not end up living happily ever after with Mary, the love of her life. She ends up alone in a “well of loneliness”—not exactly upbeat reading for a 14-year-old lesbian.

Secretly, I worried my story might not end well either, but I just couldn’t stamp down my feelings. I was bedeviled with Jane, the girl in my Latin class. I drooled over how she dribbled a basketball between her legs. I daydreamed about her acid-washed jeans and pink polo shirt. While my friends obsessed over posters of boy bands, I had eyes only for Jane and her pixie cut. Every school morning, my heart raced when I saw her walk into Latin class, and I imagined kissing her in a stall in the girl’s bathroom.

I didn’t want to turn my back on religion, but my 9th-grade heart was already telling me that there would be no contest if it came to a showdown between Jesus and Jane.

V.

Opossums

Once I gave up on religion as supplying the answer to my fainting problem, I shifted my attention to the animal kingdom for insights. As an introvert who believed she could communicate with fireflies, I’m not surprised it occurred to me that animals in my own backyard might hold the key to my fainting rather than the QT gene or God.

I grew up in rural Virginia, so this phase of my research literally entailed walking out my back door. I already knew opossums were fainters, and in my neck of the woods, there were so many opossums that they were the featured ingredient in stews and pot pies. Near my house, it was common to see “dead” opossums on the road with drool running out of their mouths and their front feet curled into stiff balls. What did they have to teach me about fainting?

When an opossum faces a dangerous situation and can’t escape, it faints, and this involuntary response causes it to go into shock for up to four hours.

As I jotted down animal observations in my fainting journal, it occurred to me that maybe I was shutting down in hospitals because my body felt the best way to get through a stressful situation was to check out, like an opossum.

There was some wisdom in that.

The nurses had mentioned that one cause of fainting is emotional trauma, and for sure, it terrified me to hear my sister scream when the therapists at the children’s hospital manipulated her legs during hydrotherapy. Seeing my dad emerge from the ICU, his head covered in white bandages, was upsetting. How could I blame myself for trying to escape the best way I knew how?

I put stars in the margins of my notes so I’d know I’d made a particularly noteworthy discovery: the animal kingdom had revealed to me that stress—not girls!—might be at the bottom of my fainting episodes.

VI.

The Victorian Era

By the end of 10th grade, I considered myself an amateur expert on fainting. I hadn’t gotten to the bottom of why I fainted, but I knew a lot.

This knowledge came in handy when I took a class where we read Victorian literature. Novels from the 19th century feature many swooning women. Like me, Victorian women fainted a lot—in ballrooms, courtrooms, city parks, and sitting rooms, but figuring out why Victorian women fainted was as tricky as figuring out why I fainted.

Was it the corset that made some Victorian women faint? Tightly laced corsets can squash the lungs and constrict breathing.

When I was 12, my mother gave me an underwire bra that made it hard to take a deep breath, much less climb a tree, and she showed me how to wiggle my hips and squeeze my tummy into a girdle before a piano recital or church service.

By 16, though, I had ditched these constrictive undergarments and filled my closet with boxer shorts, sweatpants, and oversized t-shirts. Since I still fainted when I visited hospitals, it was clear clothing wasn’t the culprit.

Studying Victorian literature was how I discovered that arsenic might have contributed to the fainting spells experienced by Victorian women. Arsenic, a metalloid that affects the nervous system, appeared in the wallpaper of many Victorian homes, and some researchers think it may have contributed to fainting spells. My mind ruminated on the flowery wallpaper in my bedroom, wondering if it contained traces of arsenic and was slowly poisoning me.

An anxiety-prone child, I spent my free time in the living room. We had a stiff, uncomfortable couch in the living room, which I pretended was a Victorian fainting couch similar to the ones in novels. Daybeds were often found in fainting rooms where middle and upper-class Victorian women would retire after bouts of “hysteria.” I was sure that a fainting couch—with its raised back, curvy frame, and tufted cushions—would be the first furniture I’d own as a grown-up.

I remember one book with a picture of an unconscious woman in a corset, with pale complexion and rosy cheek, gracefully draped across a fainting couch while a midwife bent over her with smelling salts and performed “pelvic stimulation.” As a budding lesbian, the imagery of the midwife “helper” came as a surprise. Fainting couches became fixtures in my fantasies.

VII.

La Petite Mort

By the end of my high school years, I had decided that fainting might have something to do with the over-the-top way I experienced life. My world shimmered with 24/7 intensity.

The week after graduating high school, I boarded a plane for Europe. The trip was supposed to be a glorious celebration, a solo adventure before heading off to college.

After eight hours in the air, I landed in the Netherlands. The melancholy in my jaw and cheeks had shifted down into my legs. How would I drag the world’s sadness, like a bag full of rocks, through the streets of Amsterdam?

It was too early to check into a hostel, so I rode the tram to the Basilica of St. Nicholas in the Old Centre District. In the cathedral, it smelled like incense and dust. I sat down on a pew. Above me was a tapestry of saints looking at one another across a dome of geometric splendidness. Alabaster, emerald, crimson, and azure danced in the light.

Sitting in St. Nicholas’s, I knew I wanted relief from the bags of rocks and the domes of splendidness. It all felt like too much.

Psychoanalysts sometimes say fainting is like la petite mort, a state of unconsciousness sometimes experienced after orgasm. The term can also be generic for any feeling of unconsciousness that follows transcendence or deep melancholy. I knew exactly what that felt like and wondered if fainting allowed me to briefly transcend the “too muchness” of life.

But, as the French would say, fainting was la petite mort, a little death. I wanted the big one, the real deal, the whole shebang.

That night, I stayed in the busiest section of the Red Light District. When I checked in, I had a timeline for how to end my life and a bottle of pills that I thought would end it.

As evening descended, I didn’t count on sharing my room with a friendly group of international tourists. Austrians, French, Italians, Germans, and Poles were in and out of the room all night, plopping down on my lower bunk, smoking cigarettes, and chatting in mixed languages about cheap drugs and sexual escapades. The angel of death refused to visit me in this bunkhouse. At the break of day, I had barely slept and only taken a handful of the pills.

VIII.

The Oncology Floor

Many years later, I was living with my girlfriend—later-to-be wife—in Texas. I had been religiously avoiding hospitals for some time and had not fainted in years.

To everyone’s surprise—most of all,  my own—I got a job in a hospital.

I wasn’t employed as the doctor I imagined I’d become as a 13-year-old. Instead, I was a roving writer who did bedside creative writing with children diagnosed with cancer.

The day I began working in the oncology unit, I was nervous for a lot of reasons. The biggest one was that I hadn’t mentioned my phobia of hospitals or my history of fainting when I interviewed for the job.

After washing up, I slipped on gloves, gown, mask, and shoe covers, hoping I was following proper protocol. Inside, I was panicking. What would happen if I ended up face-first on the floor while a patient was dictating her poem to me?

The first child on my list was José, a boy from Mexico getting treatment in the U.S. I didn’t know his prognosis or his treatment plan, and it didn’t matter. I was at his bedside as a writer, not a doctor. I invited him to tell a story.

His eyes were bright and his voice animated. The next twenty minutes flew by as I got down his story just the way he wanted.

As he read it aloud to his mom, a switch flipped.

I could enter a hospital room and leave on the same two feet.

IX.

The Gift of Fainting

When I reflect on my fainting years, I’m still unsure what to make of them.

What caused my fainting? Was it the heart murmur diagnosed by Dr. Milanovich? The underwire bras? The despair of seeing those I love in the hospital? The wallpaper in my childhood bedroom? A congenital long QT gene? God?

And the flip side: what caused me to stop fainting?

Recently, I made a helpful discovery: the word faint is a distant cousin of the word fiction.

I’m starting to accept that narrative may be my best option for understanding the ambiguous world of fainting. My pencil may offer more clarity than a Reveal Insertable Loop Recorder.

Novelist Tim O’Brien writes that when confronted with the unknowable, we must turn to fiction to fashion something that makes sense: “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”

This makes me wonder if I should leave the world of nonfiction and try my hand at a novel. I could write about a girl who faints over and over and over for no discernible reason and then inexplicably stops. I could make it a coming-of-age story. Or a coming-out story. Or both.

If Tim O’Brian is right, I might learn something new and surprising about my own fainting through my fictional character’s eyes.

In the meantime, I am thankful for what my history with fainting has given me: the chance to be more fully here today, alive and totally conscious.

Marcia Chamberlain is an educator who teaches creative workshops in hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, museums, and juvenile detention centers. She is an advocate of narrative-based medicine, working to center storytelling in healthcare. Marcia has published essays about medieval nuns and Chicano revolutionaries and is putting the finishing touches on a collection of personal essays. She lives with a plethora of plants and a cat who enjoys sardines.