BRITTANY ACKERMAN is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, HerStry, Write or Die, and Lighthouse Writers. She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in The Sun, MUTHA, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now with Vintage. Her Substack is called taking the stairs.
My brother smokes a cigarette on our parent’s balcony in Delray Beach, the same condo where they’ve lived since I moved away from home. The balcony overlooks a pool, but it’s too early for anyone to be out for a swim. It’s also too cold, one of those Florida mornings that carries a damp chill, but will eventually blister into a heat that feels like punishment.
My brother wears his work uniform, a black t-shirt with the tutoring company’s name across the chest tucked into blue jeans, a pair of sneakers. He brings a backpack to work, a black Jansport. In the bag, he packs a spiral notebook, a package of BIC Xtra Smooth mechanical pencils, a lemon-lime Gatorade Thirst Quencher, his wallet, mom’s car keys, and a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds.
On weekdays, he shares the car with our mom. When she’s off work, he’s free to take the car himself, to play his own music as he drives across Linton Boulevard to I-95. When she’s in the car, he listens to her talk about all the bullshit happening at Macy’s where she’s worked for almost fifteen years. Her feet hurt, her co-workers are idiots, she wants to quit, she wants to go on vacation, she wants to know what he’d like to eat for dinner. Sometimes my brother regales her with stories from his job, the overbearing helicopter parents, the kids who can’t seem to master their times tables, the entitlement of his students, the bad attitudes, how his boss wants him to take on more hours, more responsibility. He doesn’t need to say that he’s the best tutor they have, that he’s the only one who’s consistently booked. He’s so busy, he barely has time for a smoke break between sessions.
And today is a Friday, so he’ll drive to her place after his shift ends. He’s scheduled to work from open to close. He’ll stay to tidy up even after his boss packs up and leaves. He’ll turn off all the computers, push in all the chairs, wipe down all the tables with Clorox disinfecting wipes, lock up the front door, leave through the back entrance, and then he’ll be on his way.
My brother loves these early morning hours best when the quiet of the day spreads out like a thick sheet over his life. He shares the balcony with no one except his thoughts and his cigarettes. Smoke curls up toward the floors above, then dissipates as it climbs.
*
Sometimes I look around this house and wonder whose house it is. Birth is so jarring, like being shaken into existence. Or maybe I was jolted out of reality and into something else, into another timeline. In this life as I understand it, I have a newborn. I am her mother. We live in Nashville in a house near campus where I work. Work feels so far away, to stand in front of a classroom and teach students how to write. I had to end the semester early. The department sent me flowers. They didn’t ask how I planned to continue working until the end of the school year. I assigned independent work, a longer paper, and passed everyone who turned something in on time.
When I am recovered enough to walk, I put the baby in her stroller, and we head to the park. As long as she sleeps, I continue walking. In this way, all the walks become one walk, a monolith, the walk that traversed space and time and seasons. Sometimes I had to wear a hat and gloves. Other times I sweat through my socks. Once I had forgotten to bring water and went thirsty. The baby’s sleep became more important than any other urge. And then at the end of the walk we return and the baby wakes up as we cross the threshold, the wheels rolling over the raised space of the doorway brings her back.
*
Sugar Sand Park sits on 132 acres off of Military Trail, a road that, as a kid, always seemed endless, like Mom was driving in a video game with parallax scrolling. The park opened in 1998 when I was nine years old. I first went for a classmate’s birthday party where everyone spent most of the time running races against invisible animals: a wall with lights where you chose a cheetah or a gorilla or a bear and raced against them. Or the Blast-Off chair suspended by ropes and whose voiceover narration guided you through a mission in outer space. The splash pad and the swings and the soft ground beneath our feet, that rubber mulch and engineered wood fiber. And the iconic face that greeted all us kids at the center of the park, the towering structure made of slats, those blue eyes, his mouth open in a smile.
At nine, at ten, even eleven, we were becoming too big for playgrounds. But we loved Sugar Sand Park. But also, we loved our desktop computers and our home telephones. We loved The Sims and Snood and Napster and AOL Instant Messenger. We were moving away from play dates outdoors and onto hangouts that involved gathering around a computer screen to ride digital rollercoasters, forward chain mail, record ourselves dancing in the eye of a camera. We didn’t want to play. We wanted to be seen.
I once asked Mom to take me to the park alone. We went after school, and it was dead. I raced against a cheetah and lost. I spun myself into space and got dizzy. I climbed up to the wooden face and got behind his eyes. I looked out at the park from his point of view. The magic was fading. It all seemed very stupid now. My childhood was over. The sound of car doors shutting. The warmth of a CD player, spinning in my lap.
*
I press the button for more drugs. I press it again. I press it again. I lose track of how many times I press the glowing green button. Was I trying to keep track? If the hours in that room fold into themselves, then what does it matter? When I sit up in the hospital bed, it is only to see the green button, to make sure it still exists. I have become an infant again and object permanence escapes me. And now I am about to deliver my child into the world. I feel so outside of myself. But maybe it is because I am so deep within. I have gone inward.
An epidural is a combination of local anesthetics and opioids delivered through a catheter into the epidural space, a potential space outside the spinal cord. An epidural contains local anesthetics such as bupivacaine, chloroprocaine, or lidocaine as well as the drugs fentanyl or hydromorphone.
The pain has traveled to my back. Back labor. The worst kind. As if there were a good kind of pain. Hard to describe the feeling. Like a sky opening up. Like a Florida hurricane ripping the roof off a home. Like a flood that surges, its pressure enough to kill you even though it’s only water.
At 9cm, a piece of my cervix is in the way. I will need a C-Section. It’s pitch-black outside. It’s the middle of the night.
*
I dream that everyone is trying to leave the planet. The issue in the dream is about figuring out what to pack and what to bring. And I offer my opinion, but I know deep in my heart I’m not going. I’m not leaving. I’ll die with the Earth if that’s what it comes down to. In these dreams I’m alone in my choice. Everyone departs with big streaks of light in the sky above me.
*
My grandma called me her pussycat. In a recent Reiki session, my healer touched the back of my left thigh and opened up a portal to a deep pain. She had these expectations of me, I think. Something about my grandmother, I tell my healer. She wanted me to be someone. We used to have Passover dinner at her house, and it was always a big production. She couldn’t cook, but she had someone to prepare the food. She loved the color orange. She loved tea. She used to send me bookmarks so I would read. She died before I published anything. The ache wanes.
*
My brother arrives for work early. Instead of going in, he returns to the car and gets in, drives to a gas station. He buys a Budweiser tall boy and drinks it in the driver’s seat. He unzips the front compartment of his Jansport and takes out a vial of Oxycodone. But the thing that does not go according to plan is that the pills are cut with Fentanyl. I won’t pretend to know how much he takes, but it’s enough to knock him out in the parking lot.
Oxycodone is a drug used to treat moderate to severe pain. It is made from morphine and binds to opioid receptors in the central nervous system. What does it feel like? For my brother, it feels like a controlled dizziness, a drowsy euphoria. The muscles that were restless become relaxed. The body pixelates and dissolves in waves. The brain nosedives into a black hole.
My brother sinks into a dreamless sleep for six hours.
*
Act II is the hardest act to write. It is the death of the self, and a willingness to die must be present. Think of Westerns, the old man who’s not a gunslinger anymore but has to go back and fight. He has to pick up his gun and go back. You have to be willing to sacrifice yourself. You’ll always be a tree shedding leaves, but sometimes you need to shed them all.
*
I wake up in the recovery room. Another hospital bed behind a blue sheet. My nurse, Amber, hands my daughter to me. She latches right away. This will all be easy, I think. “I guess she feels safe,” I say out loud to the room. My husband is here now, or was he always here?
“You need to take these pills,” Amber says and I am no longer holding my baby. “I'm not good with pills,” I say. “You were just given an insane amount of narcotics on an empty stomach. You do not want to have diarrhea in this bed. You do not want that.” I take the pills and swallow them all at once, a magic trick.
I am holding my daughter again. She is asleep. I think I am close to dying, but I'm already past that part. There are no windows in the room. How much a hospital looks like a spaceship how much a hospital looks like a jail. My husband wears a silver watch with a black face. I stare at the calendar window and try to make out the date. The dial’s center wheel is orange.
*
A thud on my brother’s window wakes him up. A police officer asks him to open the door. The sound waves catch up with him and he opens the door.
My brother does not make it to work. He spends the day in a cell and then Mom bails him out. I'm not supposed to know this, but I do. I promised I wouldn’t write about it, but I am. I imagine the backpack, his tired face, his body buzzing from the comedown, his hair dirty and smelling like smoke. I imagine he must be hungry. I imagine the empty car in the parking lot outside the gas station. I imagine his empty desk at work.
“I was so fucked up at your wedding,” my brother once told me on the phone. It was the middle of the night, and we were thousands of miles apart. California to Florida. I was listening to him talk. Once he said those words, there was no going back to unknowing. My brother is a drug addict. He’s a fuck up. Do I believe there is no hope? I don’t know.
An addict only knows the id, the primal force that compels you to keep pushing the green button to release the rapture into your bloodstream.
I was wearing white, of course, at my wedding. But so was my brother. He also wore white, and I had loved it. I had loved that he was wearing white, too.
*
We aged out of Sugar Sand Park, out of all the parks, out of using them for playing as a playground and into using them for smoking weed behind a slide, for letting our tank tops raise up to just below our breasts as we hung from the monkey bars. We let boys look at us for as long as they wanted to.
When commissioners toured the site that would become Sugar Sand Park, they found that for the better part of half a century, the land served as a dump site for old cars, appliances and other junk. Motorbikes and ATVs had carved trails and chewed up the natural ecosystem. It was a terrible mess. Endangered gopher tortoises called the site home, as did native oak and pine trees. The district issued a call for volunteers to design and build a science playground. There needed to be a balance between a green space and the recreational needs of a growing community.
Sugar Sand Park still stands today.
*
A memory: My brother takes me to see the Pokémon movie in 1998. Mom doesn’t let us share drinks, but I decline a soda for some reason. My brother drinks a fountain Coke and we split a share of popcorn in two separate bags. A kernel gets stuck in my throat. It hurts to swallow. My brother notices me choking and passes me his drink. I freeze, not wanting to break our mom’s rules. “It’s fine,” he says and holds the drink out to me. I drink until the kernel dislodges and the pain is gone. I have never felt closer to my brother than in that moment, the shared soda. Such a normal thing. Such a small peace.
*
We leave the baby in the hospital nursery and go for a walk. It feels strange to be just us two when we are now three. I step into the sunlight for the first time in days. It’s hard to walk, the pain, the layers of muscle fibers cut deep to bring my daughter into the world. My husband holds me by the arm and we walk. An empty IV tube is still taped to my left arm. I still belong in the hospital, but I want to leave so badly.
We walk to the edge of the grounds to a cluster of tables. Nursing students eat their lunch outside. One girl talks on the phone and complains about something, the way her head is flopped onto her hand as she picks at a boxed salad. I long to be her, to have a small problem that can be solved with conversation. I start to cry but my husband doesn’t see. I look away from him and up at the buildings that surround us. How to be a mother now, and forever, for the rest of my life? How to switch so quickly from carrying her to being with her?
I think of a plan: to wait until dark again and leave the room, take the elevator down and walk out to the street, let the oncoming traffic decide my fate. I hold the plan in the darkest chamber of my mind. But when night comes, I don’t go.
The plan, like pain, dispels, goes elsewhere. I never leave.
*
Maybe my brother ends up on a beach. Maybe when he’s let out of jail, the beach is where he thinks to go. Or maybe it’s a bodily response, something natural like a sea turtle finding its way back to water. Maybe he takes off his sneakers and carries them. Maybe the sand is cold beneath his feet. Maybe he collapses to the ground in supplication, or maybe he finds a good spot and settles to take in the view. The horizon is a line, thin as breath as it floats atop the coast, meaningless as each grain of sand and each molecule of water. Or maybe he believes there is meaning.
My brother knows that sand is a granular material made up of tiny grains of minerals and rock. Sand grains are between 0.06mm and 2.1mm in diameter. Sand can be made up of many different minerals, but the most common are silicon dioxide and calcium carbonate. Sand originates from the weathering of rocks, precipitation, the remains of organisms. This is all science. The history of sand, where it came from and how it’s traveled.
In one ending, my brother walks into the water and ends his life. In another ending, he quits everything and goes on living clean. In another ending, he sheds his clothes and goes for an innocent swim in the ocean, the early morning water crisp against his skin. In this version, he swims out farther than he thinks possible. He swims until he is breathless, and the shore is a pinch in his line of view. He treads water and wonders if he should keep going or turn back.
A school of fish passes beneath him and he feels the flutter of their bodies creating a disturbance in the water. Above, the roar of an airplane engine cuts the sky and a contrail floats behind it. The humid exhaust mixes with the cold, dry air at such a high altitude. The water vapor condenses and freezes into ice crystals, creating a cloud.
My brother watches the plane as it moves and the sky stretches open with every possibility of a past and a present and a future. Time becomes a sticky thing.
In this version, my brother is free for a moment and I can hold him here like I can never do in real life. Even so, I choose to let him decide what’s meant to be. If he wants to go, I let him go. If he wants to come back, I let him return.
*
I take my daughter to the playground in our new neighborhood in California. She loves to ride on the swings and to pick up the mulch on the ground and to draw with chalk all over the cement. She climbs up the stairs and sits in the plastic tube with Swiss cheese holes all over.
She screams because she likes the echo of her voice. She screams so I can hear her. She screams so she can hear herself.
Volume 15.1, Winter 25
Brittany Ackerman
