by Emily Carlson
“Amnesia of the moment. Amnesia of the decade. Forgot what he had done. The pain that rippled over her body in reds in oranges didn’t stop there. My body felt it, too. ‘Wake up,’ I pleaded.”
Our first time alone together for almost ten years. My mother and I stay in a hotel at the edge of an old growth forest. After dusk, we follow a path into a grove, tips of white pines vanishing in the moonless dark. A friend has told her, “If you photograph the trees at night you’ll see orbs.”
Before leaving her husband she wants proof she isn’t alone in the cosmos.
An internet search for “orbs” yields another term: backscatter, an optical phenomenon resulting in often circular artifacts on an image, attributed to the camera's flash being reflected from unfocused motes of dust, water droplets, or other particles in the air or water.
As soon as I tell “what happened” there’s this nagging feeling that the story I’m telling isn’t true. The experience falls away, the world falls away. All I can do is hold the realization in my hands.
I held my mother’s stories as if they were her. As, for example, the time when—
Mom leans over the page and whispers: “Don’t tell the neck part. It’s not even accurate. Charlie didn’t put his hands around my neck when I was in the shower, he—”
“Maybe you could say instead, ‘He put his shoe in her mouth.’ Or, ‘One afternoon, standing in their backyard, the great drifts of white cloud looked to her like a woman being choked by a monster.’”
Casting him as a monster I could say, He is what I am not.
Like Deepfake tools that let users manipulate visual and audio content, animating old photos of relatives, etcetera—an eraser, a line break, white-out, the delete key replies: He is what I am / not.
Mom washed our clothes and hung them out to dry. The line sagged with their weight. Washed and dried so many times the shirts became translucent.
As I walked toward them, I couldn’t see the shirts at all. As if they hadn’t existed in the first place.
Had I grabbed someone else’s load and mistaken it for ours?
The mind holds the I like a shield as if to say, Here is something.
What if it isn’t?
You know the expression, “Don’t air your soiled laundry.”
Carbon is the lifeblood of soil and the second most abundant element in the human body after oxygen. It first formed the interior of stars.
The metal trinket on her necklace spun.
Amnesia of the moment. Amnesia of the decade. Forgot what he had done. The pain that rippled over her body in reds in oranges didn’t stop there. My body felt it, too. “Wake up,” I pleaded.
It happened over and over. For what seemed like a very long, geologic time.
After he stopped yelling and her dog stopped scratching to escape the house, mom would scrub bloody paw prints from the wall, the floor, the stairs.
My emotions? I put them out, like a dog in the rain. You cannot come in, I told them when they pawed the door. You stink. There’s no room for you here.
“I was taking a shower and he came at me and his hands came through the water and grabbed my neck.”
MOM: Don’t tell the neck part. It’s not even accurate. He didn’t put his hands around my neck when I was in the shower.
In the kitchen one night he pulled his fist back and said, “I’m going to kill you.”
The performance of a neural network is measured by its ability to reconstruct the original image from its representation in latent space.
As in: His head appears too large and more pixelated than his body.
I approach a wall of photographs at his mother’s house and see, to my horror, someone has made mom’s face an inky smudge, a few curls of her hair left sticking out.
Whose face have I made an inky smudge?
For a long time, nobody said, “That never happened,” because in the first place nobody said, “That happened.”
In the old growth forest, mom and I want the photographs she takes to reveal what we can’t see with our own eyes.
But, here in the dark, among the trees, I see the orbs. Aloft, floating, exuberant things, in varying colors and sizes. Over and over I point.
“Where?” Mom spins around. Although she can’t see them, she snaps photos of the air.
When I pointed, mom never said, There’s nothing to see.
Mom said, “Where? Where?” Believing.
Later, in the hotel room, we sat on the edge of her bed. On the camera screen: around the trunks of trees, dark night and circles of light like stars, some small enough to fit in a hand. The orbs I’d seen in the forest. “Look at this one!” mom exclaimed again, magnifying the image. Although I loved her excitement, I grew tired. What could she see that I was missing, her eyes welling with tears?
And she left him.
I saw the story I was telling myself: White light, deep blue. It wasn’t the invisible made visible. But the visible made invisible made visible again.
I have made majestic cuts. I have changed some names, made real people composite characters, transposed events, imagined dialogue. It happened, but not in this way. Not like I say it did.
As Thich Nhất Hạnh writes, “An electron is first of all your concept of the electron.” How can we “see” a person beyond our perception of them, beyond the limits and limitations of our own mind? What does it take for a person to become real to us? For us to become real to ourselves?
A story. A gust of wind lifting the branches. I shaped it into something that I can hold. The truest story isn’t always told according to the facts. The heart feels beyond.
Emily Carlson is the author of Majestic Cut (Fernwood Press, fall 2025), Why Misread a Cloud (Tupelo, 2022), winner of a Sunken Garden Chapbook Award, I Have a Teacher (Center for Book Arts, 2016), winner of a Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition, and Symphony No. 2 (Argos Books, 2015). Emily is the recipient of the University of Pittsburgh’s Syria-Lebanon Nationality Room Scholarship, an Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh award, and was a 2024 Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Artist-in Residence. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Denver Quarterly, The Dodge, Fence, jubilat, Poet Lore, Swamp Pink, and Vox Populi. Emily teaches poetry in a public school in Pittsburgh, is the director of Art in the Garden, an LGBTQ+-led and joy-centered program, and with friends runs the Bonfire Reading Series. Emily lives with her partner and their three children in a cohousing community centered around a garden.