Creative Nonfiction by Lauren E. Koops

Chosen submission for the SmokeLong Quarterly.

I recall the hospital’s cracker-smelling, sterile white lights shining down on Mama’s yellow hair. She wore star-flecked pajama pants and neon orange tennis shoes, walking away with her fuzzy head tucked down. Her shoulders shook with crying.

Some primal piece of my splattered noggin started to cry, too, and it’s the clearest thing I remember from all that time in the hospital. That and Jesus walking beside my wheelchair, of course.

Five years later and fully recovered at 23, I hold the words Traumatic Brain Injury like a poisonous dart frog. I don’t let folks touch the mangled-up scars on my legs when wearing shorts in a sweaty Texas summertime and I look both ways before crossing the street. I don’t get hit at 50 miles per hour anymore.

My mind was scrambled eggs for three years. I can’t remember much from that time ‘cause my thinking muscles were fried on a range too hot, smacked on a pavement too hard, then screwed back together again like Humpty Dumpty. Some thoughts are still scorched and flaky, others wet and boogery. My brains are a smelly pond. Opaque scum stretches across the surface’s mush.

I can hardly recall the years of wheelchairs and a shaved head and therapy teaching me how to swallow… those memories feel like telling a drunk story when you’re hungover. Barely there through hazy lights and sticky floors.

I find myself re-learning a bunch about life and seeing things like a baby these days: I frequently cry at wildflowers speckling Interstate 35, the sensation of having cracked lips, and hearing radio in a restaurant’s kitchen. 

My papa calls me his miracle but I don’t even know what all I did. 

When the tendrils and cogs in my skull fused back together, when the cracks in my legs got plugged up with bits of dead fellows who had hearts on their driver’s licenses, my DNA must’ve got itself all shuffled up, too. Now I’ve got a superpower to love this life and its people a breadth larger than anyone who’s been alive the whole time. I fear only Jesus Christ or Mother Teresa could love me back like that.

Mama, too.

Mama, Mama. Sweet fuzzy-headed Mama in her pajama pants. She said it took her days to comb through my hair, unraveling the mass of mats and knots formed while thrashing in pain. I think of her looking at her baby’s damn-near lifeless face, putting gentle fingers in her hair. I’ve heard of mother apes carrying around their dead babies for months, grooming them like Mama did for me.

Mama watched ‘em intubate me. Watched ‘em break my legs to see if the surgeries worked. Watched ‘em shove a catheter up there. Watched the blue and red ambulance lights that night and says it still kills her that she couldn’t get to me. Couldn’t call out my name so I’d hear— couldn’t spare me that comfort for just a second.

I don’t cry for myself no more, for that young lady left half-dead on the side of the road for Christ knows how long. I weep for Mama instead.

My papa calls me his miracle, but I don’t even know what all I did!

I write to untangle these mats and knots in my decrepit mind, the amber veins of gratitude tethering to black strands of isolation like a braid. I write to that smug God above, shoving against the ten-thousand-pound chip on my shoulder. I grit my veneer teeth, kicking cyborg legs that can’t run, screaming at the smelly Carpenter with bare feet and long hair:

“Why me, Jesus?! Why’d you pick me and not the others??! Why’d you let them go, why’d you leave me to carry their souls and unfinished destinies, why should I justify a reason to be here instead of them?!

Why’d you let our mamas walk down that cracker-smelling hall? Why didn’t mine come back to her baby’s dead body, too?!”

Fiction by Lauren E. Koops

Part of the 2020 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Silver Medal winning senior portfolio, Yellow Wildflowers

2020 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards regional Gold Key recipient

Please don’t miss my Pop like I miss my big sister Janey. Don’t think about him and smile or nothing like that.

Pop doesn’t shave and his beer gut’s getting bigger. Some days for no reason he’ll throw one of those Keystone cans at my feet and maybe it’s full and then the next day at school I gotta try real hard limping to keep up with everybody else running on the track.

My Mama’s a quiet mouse lady who ices my beercan bruises and has empty, fogged-up eyes like mud puddles. Except when we cry and she stares straight through the door right at Pop in his chair and her look goes crystal like it’s saying I hate you.

Janey didn’t take Pop’s shit so she just took every smack and every holler and stuck her chin out for more. Sometimes I saw tears, but I never once saw my big sister Janey cry. I wanted to be just like her, Miss. And earlier I went into her room but I didn’t even cry or nothing. I just let my insides get cold then I left. It smelled like books and candles and open window lawns, and I’m only writing that down so I can remember it forever.

I’ll tell you what happened Thursday night when my big sister Janey died so you can understand me and see that Pop is really the devil. I never thought about Hell or nothing like that before, but I know that’s where Pop came from.

… (omitted section) …

The next thing I can remember is me sitting alone on the porch step lots of hours later, one of them times where it’s late at night and early in the morning all at once. I was wanting and waiting on big sister Janey to come home from working late cause I wanted to be the first one to give her a hug. I wanted to see her rounding down the crabgrass sidewalk and I’d run up to her and sling over her neck and she’d smell like window spray and greasy smoke and she’d hold me back with one arm while she carried her purse in the other and we’d sneak inside and count her tips together on her carpet but the only person rounding the crabgrass sidewalk was a stumbling Pop coming back from Jesus knows where, and he smelled like booze and he didn’t even notice me.