by R.S. Powers
We all know and don’t know why and how and who. We continue to live in our own versions of the same disintegrating story.
All my sister and I know is there was a foreclosure. When we were latch-key kids she’d slide an arm through the mail slot to unlock the front door. At twenty-three her arm still fits but there’s a padlock on the inside. We don’t know if our lawyer father or the bank put it there. Around back, where we buried the dog, where lightning hit the diseased towering tree, the deck is rotting and the kitchen door swings open. There’s no power. The kitchen tap coughs. We’re afraid to open the refrigerator. I take flash photos of everything. The dining room is junk mail. The living room is a lived-in couch and TV and DVD player; on the windowsill is a new family-size bottle of ketchup and a paper instant noodles bowl half-full of broth. Upstairs, my sister’s bedroom is white bags of dry garbage. Our parents’ bedroom is a round mountain of old clothes. All the toilets are missing and we can’t imagine why. My sister won’t follow me into the basement where my bedroom was. After my mother, my sister, and I moved out, my father emailed to say he moved into the basement since it stayed cool. An empty cardboard box big enough for a washing machine is where my bed was. Is it safe? my sister calls. A decade later, I no longer have that clunky digital camera. Before writing this, I decided against looking for the photos. I didn’t need them. I have no idea who lives there now.
Ask yourself: Where does the story of my family begin? Then: To whom does the story of my family belong? Next, consider your family’s story, and who it belongs to, in the context of the four-paned Johari window (popularized by Donald “There Are Known-Knowns” Rumsfeld): What do you know? What do you know to be unknown? What do you not know to be unknown? Žižek has called the fourth pane—the Known-Unknown—“the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.” About your family’s story: What do you know that you don’t want to know?
The first-person essay must grapple with what isn’t known. The constructed narrator of a personal essay positioned to both know and see all is basically blind. Speculation, ethically and responsibly signposted, affords the essayist the freedom to pose questions bigger than the self.
The house as my sister and I found it that day—why it was like that, how it became like that, how long it had been like that, who knew it was like that… We can speculate. She and I could each ask our father, our mother. They, too, could speculate. We all know and don’t know why and how and who. We continue to live in our own versions of the same disintegrating story.
—
R.S. Powers's fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Sou'wester, World Literature Today, X-R-A-Y, The Hunger, and other journals. His fiction has been a finalist for The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, and an honorable mention for The Cincinnati Review's Robert and Adele Schiff Award. He is currently a PhD student in creative writing at Florida State University.