Good Mourning, America

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

 

It’s eighth-grade writing class day and the weekly morning jaunt to my favorite little school, nestled in a rural Southern California valley. Here, the water table’s level prevents developers from bulldozing nurseries and groves, and there’s still a farmer’s grange. A canopy of Live Oaks shades my drive to the school, where the children of immigrants are the dominant demographic. My child went to school here, transferred from our very-white hometown, so she’d no longer speak disparagingly of the Latinx kids on the playground. She didn’t understand back then that she’s one of them.

Today, my students are learning to make notecards for a research paper on climate change. The assigned article that challenges their English can no longer be found on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

“What did you all find most surprising about the article?” I ask.

“That the U.S. is the second biggest producer of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming,” one of them answers.

The students are smart. Smart and so young and hopeful. All but two or three of them want to attend college. They all have plans for the future. Here, in the United States.

They finish up their notecards.

“‘Heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related death in the Southwest, and heat waves are increasing in frequency and intensity.’ That’s a direct quote combined with a paraphrase,” a student says.

“Nice work! Now, before I go, let’s talk about the homework for next week. Please complete—”

An alarm blasts.

“We have to stop,” the classroom teacher says fast and loud. “That’s our emergency response signal. Everyone, under your desks, away from the windows. Quick. Nope, leave your stuff. Get down now. Manuel, I can see your head. Rosa, you’re visible from the window. Get under the desk—under! I don’t want to have to say it again.”

It’s an active shooter drill.

The signal blares while I tuck my laptop into my briefcase, and down the dregs of my coffee. The students are giggling, sprawled on the floor—the perfect opportunity to make quick contact with the objects of their desires. The teacher tells them to cool their jets.

“Okeydoke, nice work today, everyone,” I say. “See you all next week.”

There’s more giggling as I leave. The alarm continues pulsing danger. I hear it—feel it—on the way to my car.

•   •   •

It’s another day, a Sunday, my writing day. But I can’t.

Five mass shootings in twenty-four hours.*

  • El Paso: Twenty dead and twenty-six injured. Now that’s twenty-one, now twenty-two.
  • Dayton: Nine dead and twenty-seven injured.
  • Memphis: One dead and three injured.
  • Chicago: None killed but seven injured.
  • Chicago: One dead and seven injured.

Numbers and names and the detritus of lives litter parking lots and store aisles and nightclubs and theaters and playgrounds and schools. Shootings are linked to hate websites, to Donald Trump, to manifestos, to mental illness, to familial discord, to immigration, to feminism, to news media, to the grotesque availability of guns.

So I wonder.

Which of my students will I be able to save when we have our school shooting?

How many of their heads will I be able to shove under desks before they are seen?

How many of their young bodies will expire in pools of blood, their cries for their mothers interrupted?

Will I die with them?

I wonder, because today, in this nation, with this president, with this Congress, with this NRA gun lobby, it feels inevitable.

* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting


K-B’s narrative nonfiction, commentary, political fiction, book reviews and author features have been published in Evening Street Review and Evening Street PressNot My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, December 2017), Publishers WeeklyDucts magazine, The Missing SlateTrivia: Feminist VoicesMs. Magazine blog, North County Times, Gay San Diego, and others. She is the publisher and a founding editor of Writers Resist, and teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Cal State University system. Read more of her work at ExcuseMeImWriting.com.

Editor’s note: The Trump in Guns photo was allegedly posted by one of the shooters on 8chan.

Heads on the Chopping Block

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt


Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh,

Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley,
Lindsey Graham and all other D.C. misogynists:

Beware.

You think Medusa was a monster?

Politics hath no fury

like a sexual assault survivor scorned

mocked, belittled, lied about,

ignored.

Our rage is beautiful and terrifying.

Our votes will turn you

not to stone

but to rubble.

 


A GOTV note from K-B: If you don’t like what’s happening in our country, let your voice be heard—at the polls. The midterm elections are Tuesday 06 November.

Your vote does count, particularly this year. It’s OK to be sorrowful, angry, frustrated, enraged, but don’t let that stop you from voting. Today, casting your vote is a dire responsibility.

If you’re not registered, or not sure, the deadline in some states is soon, but you can look up your state at this link (https://www.headcount.org/deadlines-dates/).

If you’re unsure of your polling place (they sometimes change election to election), you can look it up via this link (https://www.nass.org/can-i-vote/find-your-polling-place).

Whether online, by mail or in person, we must GET OUT THE VOTE.


Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher of Writers Resist and a co-founding editor, is an award-winning writer, an editor, and a Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies lecturer. Her work can be found in Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent, Ducts, Trivia: Feminist Voices, The Missing Slate, Evening Street Review, Publisher’s Weekly, San Diego Poetry Annual, and Chiron Review, among others. A former feminist newspaper columnist in a conservative bastion, K-B has learned to duck swiftly. Her website is at www.kbgressitt.com.

This image is a satirical adaptation by artist Kim Kinman of sculptor Luciano Garbati’s “Medusa With Perseus’ Head.”

 

On the Front Lines

Fiction by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

You look in the bedroom mirror, small enough to deny self-adoration, and pull your brownish hair into a ponytail. Tight, like Mother used to do it. You turn to the bed. Your clothes are laid out on sheets held in place by perfect hospital corners. You dress in practical layers, to accommodate the variable temperatures of the daylong vigil you perform every Thursday. First, your underthings, then flesh-tone tights and a plain white t-shirt. Next, the pleated blouse Mother used to wear, when you held the vigils together, and ski pants, a modest one size too large. Finally, a nice worsted wool skirt you found at Goodwill for a dollar. It’s a bit matronly, but you top it off with your 12-week ultrasound hoodie.

You strap on your choose-life fanny pack, loaded with crisis pregnancy tracts and embryo dolls; take the bigger-than-life-size fetus parts poster in one hand and your calico-covered Bible in the other; and you march to the local abortion mill. Battle ready. Here profit motive thrives under Satan’s leering eyes and abortions are marketed to the vulnerable—to provide lucrative embryos for ungodly research. You believe this with all your heart because that’s what the tracts tell you.

You bungee-cord the poster to a tree and take your position between the clinic entrance and the parking lot. You’re armed with the assurance that you’re doing God’s righteous work, as Mother taught you, witnessing for life, sidewalk counseling would-be abortion victims, guiding them away from mortal sin, toward salvation. You adjust the bunched-up layers around your waist while you await the poor misguided mothers, bearing their precious preborns to slaughter. You know they will come, as they do every week, in numbers that torment your heart with the horrid image of God’s beloved innocents torn asunder by evil and torturous tools in the hands of Death’s doctors. But you are stalwart, determined to rescue a life from the great abyss of immoral destruction.

The clinic opens, the women and girls—not so much younger than you—begin to arrive, and you gird your supplies—they are comforting. Mother was so much better at this.

You take a breath. “Excuse me,” you say as you step before the nearest sinner heading for the door. The young woman looks sad. She wears immodest jeans from which she’ll soon burst forth in the full flower of maternal fertility—if you can lead her to Jesus.

“How many weeks are you?” you say.

“Huh?” the girl says, wires dangling from her ears to a front pocket.

“How many weeks pregnant are you?” You give her your kindest, most eager smile.

“Hmm?” The girl frowns, pulls a phone from her pocket and, without looking up, says, “What?”

“Do not renounce God’s miracle growing within you,” you say. “Already it feels. Already it knows life. Already it loves you.”

She stares at you, says nothing. She needs you.

“I know you’re scared and confused, but don’t succumb to the fear of your situation, to the temptation of an easy solution. In truth, it is not easy. There are better ways. God has sent you his love and support—through me. Choose life for your preborn child.”

The girl pulls the wires from her ears. “What did you say?”

“Choose life,” you repeat. You put down your Bible and pull a tiny plastic embryo from your fanny pack. “Look, this one, this one here is probably the size of yours. Choose life for the blameless gift God has given you, and you will receive his endless blessings. Choose life for your baby and heavenly eternity for yourself.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the girl says and steps around you.

“Please wait!” Mother taught you how to deal with denial. You must use extreme counseling technique. You grab the girl’s hand and drop to your knees. “You needn’t be afraid. Turn your heart away from the evil of abortion. God’s innocent fruit grows in the garden of your womb. Don’t let them suck it out to rot in the bowels of evil!”

“Gross.” The girl pulls away from you.

You hold on tighter. “Don’t do this,” you say. “We’ll help you through your pregnancy and then—”

“Yeah?” the girl says, “and then what?”

“Then the lord will provide.”

“Yeah, right.” The girl snickers and pulls harder. “Let go of me.”

“No, please.” You try not to, but you cry. “Listen to me.” The girl hesitates. Your nose drips. You look up at her and think of Mother. “Before God formed the sinless one in your womb, he knew her. His hands shaped and made her. Would you now turn from the wonder of his love?” You wipe your nose on the sleeve of the ultrasound hoodie and wrap yourself around the girl’s calves.

“You’re nuts.” The girl struggles against your embrace. “Let go—let go!”

“I can’t. Jesus wants me to save you. Please don’t murder your baby! Give your preborn the gift of life!”

The girl yanks one leg free, puts her foot against your chest and pushes you backward. “Cool your shit,” she says. “I’ve got a killer UTI—stay the fuck out of my way.”

You gather yourself and get up from the sidewalk, brushing dirt and leaves from the nice Goodwill skirt, tidying your ponytail, and you wonder if the clinic switched the weekday it murders unborns. Nausea quivers through your belly at the thought of having to change your routine. The routine you and Mother performed together every week. Mother, who didn’t abort you.

“Have a blessed day,” you call after the girl.

She’s already inside.


January 22 is the anniversary of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women the freedom to make their own private reproductive decisions. It’s also Kit-Bacon Gressitt’s birthday, which has long seemed significant to her. Spawned by a Baptist creationist and a liberal social worker, K-B inherited the requisite sense of humor to survive family dinner-table debates and the imagination to avoid them. As a result, she’s a feminist writer, she supports unrestricted access to affordable abortion and other reproductive health services, and she’s an LGBTQ rights advocate. She also birthed a child of color, who’s taught her a lot about white privilege and intersectionality. An erstwhile political columnist with an MFA in Creative Writing, K-B is now an occasional Women’s Studies lecturer. Visit her website, Excuse me, I’m writing.

Because it’s unlikely the nation will see anything from the new administration akin to President Obama’s 2016 commemoration of the Roe v Wade decision, it is reprinted here:

The White House
January 22, 2016

Statement by the President on the 43rd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Today, we mark the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which affirmed a woman’s freedom to make her own choices about her body and her health. The decision supports the broader principle that the government should not intrude on private decisions made between a woman and her doctor. As we commemorate this day, we also redouble our commitment to protecting these constitutional rights, including protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her right to reproductive freedom from efforts to undermine or overturn them. In America, every single one of us deserves the rights, freedoms, and opportunities to fulfill our dreams.

Reading recommendation: The Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Embryo doll photo credit: Anthony Easton via a Creative Commons License.