SHEOL

1

I was born in San Francisco, but lived for the majority of my childhood in Slab City, a highway hamlet twice as lawless but only half as nameless; a colony that lies near but far from the town of Niland, California. I lived solely with my mother: my father was nomadic and vanished with the moon the morning after Bunny had discovered she was pregnant with me. I had learned to accept that my father never wanted me. I was complacent with the case that this precursor would never be a part of my life, but rather simply a lingering warmth in folds of the brumal breeze. I had learned from a young age that this world was cruel, and not everybody was going to love you.

My mother's full name is Ivonne Irmingard Haas, but everyone referred to her as "Bunny." Her physique was meager; she almost looked like a doll at times. Her hair was a wiry blonde and her eyes were an earthy brown. Her skin was unimaginably pale for the eternal summers that we faced.

My mother constantly coughed up devilish things such as tonsil stones and black mucus from the swamps of her craw. She was very proud of them though, her biological expulsions, and would keep them in glass jars, hanging them around our trailer and sometimes even stringing Christmas lights through holes in the lids. She enjoyed gazing absentmindedly into the textured glass and watching the slimy bodily rejections glow.

"I've always wanted to become an Ärztin, October, ever since I was a girl in Deutschland." She would say as she whimsically feasted her eyes upon those wretched jars. "But after I was diagnosed with mental sicknesses, I could not."

My mother had been diagnosed with a melange of psychiatric disorders. She had a massive psychotic meltdown when I was 18 months old and almost jumped from the roof of our apartment complex (which was 10 stories tall). She was eventually removed from the premises and transferred into a behavioral health facility. Once there, she had undergone her first-ever mental health evaluation. This is the precise point at which her life began to spiral downward. 

She developed severe depression, and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and schizophrenia. She was also thought to have dissociative identity disorder (DID), as well as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). After the doctors had invoiced the insurance companies for all of the medications that she was prescribed (in addition to the numerous appointments and therapy sessions that she was scheduled to attend), the fees skyrocketed. It broke us. We were forced to abandon our spacious apartment in the suburbs for a trailer in the Slabs.

The Slabs weren't so bad, though. There was always something to do.

I have never had much of anything, in any sense of the term. My mother was sustained by the governments' welfare and my father was nowhere to be found (not like anyone was looking for him, anyway). Despite the fact that she was unemployed, she still squandered our savings on drugs. She couldn't go a day without heroin or methamphetamine. She didn't call them by those names, though. She used pseudonyms; familiar words with unfamiliar connotations. She called them "mud" and "rocks." Being a child, when she said that she was going to get some "mud and rocks," I naturally was confused. I couldn't understand why she would spend our money on things that she could find in the bushes right outside of our home.

Sometimes, I would even go out and collect small stones and dirt from around the Slabs and bring them back to her. Her reaction was always the same.

"Oh, child," she would say as she shook her head and smiled. "That's not the right stuff that your momma needs. I need a different kind of mud. I need a different kind of rocks." She'd then take them away from me and set them up on a high shelf and look at them from time to time.

When I had grown older, around the age of five or six, I wasn't allowed to go to school. I had always wanted to learn, it was my favorite thing to do. I wanted to understand the world around me. I wanted to know everything that was going on. I was very intellectual, even though I wasn't permitted to leave our "local group" as my mother would call it. (Our "local group" was the group of 12 trailers and campers that surrounded us).