A is for ASYMPTOMATIC. An intruder has snuck into your body disguised as yourself, and is even now making a home of your blood. Another way to say it: You know exactly what you are, but have nothing to show for it. You are asymptomatic.
This is the opposite of the word you’re looking for. Good job! You’ve reduced the possibilities by one.
B is for BULLFROG. Your brothers found a bullfrog behind the hose and coaxed it out with your lacrosse stick. You were fascinated with the way the bullfrog presided with such dignity to the patch of rusty grass where your brothers prodded it, as if it had meant to go there either way. Your brothers kept it there until it baked into a bullfrog brownie and died. Then they were surprised.
Your older brother explained it like this: “Stuff dies when you kill it.”
Your younger brother explained it like this: “I didn’t think it would happen for real.”
The bullfrog grew interestingly firm when it was dead, which you later learned was its muscles locking up in rigor mortis. But you wondered if there was something hidden inside the bullfrog all along that swelled up in the sun, like a beach ball, and perhaps that secret thing had been what killed it. Sometimes you got dizzy. That was unrelated.
C is for CABINET. You can measure your life through the size of the cabinets that your brothers fold you into, starting with the smallest and moving slowly to the biggest, until eventually they just nudge you into the pantry and lock you in. They didn’t mean this in a cruel way.
Inside the cabinet, you would imagine each part of yourself slowly melting away. First your toes, filling the shadows around you; then the balls of your feet, and your ankles; up your heels, creeping hair by hair to your calves and your shins; over the knobs of your knees. At the end of it, you would be a nothingness, and you could finally breathe.
When your mother opened the door on you, sometimes you would daydream that she wouldn’t find you. She’d inspect each cabinet, then she’d panic and call the whole town to search for you. When they finally realized, they’d have to coax you back to your body and say, we’re so sorry we didn’t notice you in the cabinets, you were so brave to wait for us and you looked so beautiful.
Sometimes you hoped that there was an invisible thing inside you that had made you fade away like the thing that killed the bullfrog, and they’d find it and extract it for you and prove it wasn’t your fault, and it’d all be perfect. Sadly, this never happened.
D is for DAVE, a boyfriend you obtained mid-ceremony of your high school graduation. Your favorite activities were lounging in the grass of your backyard side-by-side with your fingertips barely touching, making plans to rent a big-city apartment together after college, and lying.
Here are some of the lies you told him: “The haircut looks great,” “You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” and “I love you.”
Here are some of the lies Dave told you: “You’re perfect just the way you are,” “I trust you,” and “No, you haven’t changed a bit.”
E is for EVEREST. On the subject of lies, here’s one that your younger brother liked to tell: “I’ll be the first kid to climb Mount Everest.” The lie burst when he learned that other people had climbed Everest so hard, they never came back down. It wasn’t the “never coming down” part that bothered him; it was that there was nothing original left to do in the world.
At ten years old to your younger brother’s eight, you knew that originality just meant your mother kept telling you to eat more fiber, which sounded medical and so was probably right. To him, though, it was the key to getting out.
F is for FRIGHT. One day, when walking back to your car after coffee with Dave, you had a fright. Here is what it means to have a fright:
You had a startling sense of vertigo, like you were climbing a mountain. Your stomach told your brain that the ground roiled, although it didn’t. You thought surely you had to throw up.
Your vision staticked. It crept over you slowly, the world fuzzing into a dead channel, until you saw nothing but black and gray, and the faint outline of what you knew was the curb.
Simultaneously, a ringing increased from a far-away burr to a shrill whine in your ears. Together with the static, this cut off all sensory input except touch and smell and the ground swaying beneath you.
For ninety-eight seconds, all you knew was the grip of your hand around Dave’s arm. You sat down on the sidewalk, right there in front of the Starbucks, and he sat down with you. He held his elbow stiff and stable under your palm until your vision cleared.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I don’t know!” you laughed. Adrenaline crashed through you. “I don’t know! But I guess I’m fine now!”
G is for GOAT. Your older brother came home with a goat skull, which he’d found on the side of the road, sans goat. He’d politely wrapped it in old gym shorts before shoving it in the trunk of your mother’s 2018 Honda Accord.
Your mother screamed when she saw it, but he said, “What do you want me to do, put it back?” There was nowhere in your suburb you could drop a goat head that wouldn’t have kicked off the plot of the Godfather (or maybe Goat-father, re: the circumstances). So the skull stayed.
Your older brother followed a tutorial to blanch it in your garage, which left it browned and patchy, but apparently immortal. The left horn had half broken off, and there was a crack down its face that fractured neatly around one eye. He hung it in your brothers’ room, staring down the space between their beds. You asked him once why he didn’t leave it where he found it, and he said, “Sometimes things just happen to you.”
You used to loiter in their room while your younger brother was out, mostly to annoy him. You’d ask aloud whether the goat had known what a car was, or if it thought daytime had come early when the headlights closed in.
Your older brother would say, “Who cares? It’d know something was up. Probably that it was dead.” He might even lift his head off the mattress, narrow his eyes, and add, “I feel like this isn’t really about the goat.”
And you’d say, super convincingly, “Nooooo.”
H is for HYPOGLYCEMIA. Your blood sugar keeps dropping, although food doesn’t help so maybe that’s not it. One day, your mother said, “My mother and I both had hypoglycemia when we were teenagers, but it went away later.” She’d never mentioned this before. You felt betrayed. When you went for a blood test, it turned up nothing, and you never went again.
I is for IGLOO. You and your younger brother built igloos in the backyard. Given that you lived in Arizona, this was difficult. You made them out of mud, slapping handfuls of slop onto slop until you built up walls and could crawl inside. Is it still an igloo if it isn’t made of ice?
J is for JAGUAR. A jaguar is an old stuffed toy that you got when you were seven. It went with you to first grade, nestled in the crook of your arm while you practiced printing and addition. Life was much easier with the jaguar. It was so familiar and smelled like home. It made you feel confident, and, secretly, ashamed.
You called Dave every night through your first year of college. You’d lie on your dorm floor and put the phone beside you, and if you closed your eyes, you’d feel the graze of his fingertips on yours, and smell grass. He tried to break up with you during winter break, but you didn’t let him.
“I feel like you don’t care about me,” he said. “I feel like you don’t value me. Why don’t we ever see each other?”
“Stop coming to my campus,” you said. “It’s creepy. It should be enough that I love you and I’m trying.”
You stayed together another month, until you thought you could breathe on your own. Then you broke up with him, because he was clingy and held you back. What were you talking about, again?
K is for KITCHEN. When your younger brother went away, you were hiding in the kitchen, in the pantry, which is a cabinet, like you were twelve. It isn’t right to say he went away, but you didn’t know what else to call it. You overheard your parents talking about it after the phone call. You had no idea if you would have ever found out he was gone, if you weren’t in the cabinet when they started arguing.
L is for LAZY. Your older brother got home from college to find a job, but instead laid in bed, staring at the goat. One time you waved a hand over his eyes to check if he was still alive. He thought you were mocking him, so he gave you the most hateful look and rolled over. You were twenty. He was twenty-three.
“Mom thinks you’re rebelling. Are you?”
“No. Leave me alone.”
“You slept all day. Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” He didn’t respond to that one. You ended up lying on the floor of his room, watching the ceiling fan go around and around, listening to him breathe, until your chest went tight. Then you got up to go hide in the cabinets.
Your mother tried all sorts of ways to help him get his mojo back. First, she stroked his hair and cooed, “There’s a whole world outside!” When he didn’t respond except to blink, she updated his resume, opened the windows, and signed him up for fitness classes.
Lastly, she stood in the open door and shouted at him to “Get up! Get up and do something! Do you not care about your life? You’re just lazy! That’s what you are! Lazy and pathetic!” He didn’t even kick her out, just took the barrage until she screamed and slammed the door on him. He stopped keeping it open after that.
M is for MISSING. Missing is the best word you had to describe your younger brother, and even that wasn’t good enough because you knew exactly where he was. He’d gone to the Stateville Correctional Center, where all the bad people in Chicago who drink-drive and hit cyclists go.
The cyclist got over his aphasia after two long years of therapy. Your younger brother made a single phone call to your father in all of the three years since he’d left for college. He spoke five words: “Hi Dad, I’m in jail.”
None of your family could get out to Illinois, where you could video call from either side of a concrete wall. The prison tossed Pride and Prejudice, The Self-Help Book for Men After Prison, and even the Bible. So for three years the only contact you had with your younger brother was the knowledge that at some point, he received a dictionary in the mail.
N is for NOODLES. Every day at 12:30 p.m., your mother stood outside your older brother’s door without opening it, holding a bowl of noodles. She’d stand there as if counting every grain in the wood, but never put her hand on the knob. Then she’d knock, leave the bowl in the hall, and loudly do the dishes because she couldn’t bear to hear if he opened the door or not. He didn’t.
You’d sit in the living room and watch the door for her since she couldn’t do it. After a half hour, you’d take the cold noodles and put them on the counter. She’d throw out the marinara, clean the bowl, and make it all fresh again the next afternoon.
On the fifteenth day standing outside that closed door, she began to cry.
O is for OPTIMISM. Dave texted a few weeks into summer break. You met at the Starbucks where you had your fright and drank coffee in ways that let you avoid looking at each other for too long.
“I’m not mad at you,” said Dave, “I just worry about you a lot.”
You didn’t know what to say, so you said, “Thanks.”
“I worry you’ve died, and nobody would think to tell me about it.” His fingers curled with tragedy around his miserable plastic cup. “I think, maybe you had a horrible brain virus, and I was the only one who could have known about it because I was the only one there, you know, when the thing happened. I worry that would make it my fault.”
“I was also there when it happened.”
“Oh. Well. Right,” he said, and paid for your coffee with astonishing speed.
Optimism is when you believe in the best possible outcome. What is that for you? Do you want to be special? Do you want to have a strange and persistent illness? Most people wish to be healthy, but you’ve found yourself longing for a very specific kind of disease that’s curable with a single pill and no lifestyle changes. You think this is unlikely. You think it’s more likely that everyone gets shaky in their bones after they eat noodles and you’re just making a big deal of it. Still, you hope.
P is for PRESCRIPTION BOTTLES, which you found in your mother’s room, unopened. When was the last time you talked to your mother? Actually talked to her, about more than just fiber? You didn’t remember.
Q is for QUERY. You entered a series of queries into Google. Here are a few:
Lightheaded weak clammy why
Lightheaded not dehydrated why
Lightheaded not dehydrated why reddit
Then you deleted your search history and spent the next three weeks tracking down all the passwords you’d saved in your browser.
R is for RAZOR. You cut yourself shaving with the razor even though the product listing said the heads were smooth. You only realized once you’d already dressed and gone to the hall, when you felt an itch down your calf. You paused outside your brothers’ room to examine it and sigh.
Your older brother opened the door, and you startled. You looked at him, and he looked back at you, greasy and eye-bagged. For a moment, you glimpsed the skull past his shoulder, and saw in his face exactly what the goat must have looked like before it met steel.
He got you a band-aid and let you lie on his floor. You told him, “I don’t want it to just be me.”
“Then what else could it be?”
Neither of you had an answer.
S is for STANDING UP TOO FAST. You often stand up too fast. People do this all the time. It’s not Everest. It’s a process where your heart races, and your skin grows clammy, and your head swoons, and then you’re okay again. When people say, “I stood up too fast,” this must be what they mean, except sometimes, you doubt.
One time, you stood up too fast, looked across the living room, and saw your mother clutching her chest, halfway out of her chair. “Are you dizzy?” you asked her. “I feel dizzy.”
She was already turning away. “I’m fine. I’m tired.”
“I think there’s something going on with me.” You followed her to the kitchen, then to the pantry. You gripped the doorframe of it so hard your knuckles ached. “Something’s not right. I know it’s not right. What’s happening to me?”
“You need more fiber.” She opened the cabinets. “Let me find an oat bar.”
“That doesn’t do anything.” You were desperate with no clue how you got there. “There’s something going on with you, too. Haven’t you noticed it? You have to have noticed. Do you think it’ll just go away if you ignore it? Look at me!”
You stood in the doorway, your mother framed in kitchen light as she hunched into the cabinets. She turned her face towards yours, and you let go of the doorframe. That gave her enough time to press an oat bar to your hand, regain her composure, and escape.
Later, you’d scold yourself for yelling when she looked so scared. The oat bar would do nothing; you’d throw out the wrapper and try lying down instead.
T is for TRUCK. Your younger brother came home in his friend’s truck. A truck is a snorting wild horse of a car, which stomped its rubber hooves and blarted angrily in your driveway. Your mother had clearly been imagining a sedate homecoming. She stood at the door and sighed at the truck as it pulled in, waiting for your brother to slouch up the porch and weep into her arms.
Instead, he leapt from the passenger seat to the ground and immediately tripped. He’d buzzed his hair and you hardly recognized him. He made it to the door in three huge bounds, gave your mother a hug, and disappeared into the basement, which he proceeded to colonize into a den of youthful sloth in less than two days. He’d barely said a word to any of you.
U is for UNFORGIVEABLE. Your younger brother stood in the kitchen with his arms out wide and beamed. “They said it could never be done, that nobody could drive an Express Cruiser yacht onto the freeway blindfolded and with a BAC of over 0.15-percent, until I did,” he claimed. “Aren’t you proud of me?”
He was unapologetic, and so your parents found him unforgivable. “What’s the problem?” he asked them. “Saying the words doesn’t change anything.”
He turned to you and you were surprised that he was taller than you, even though he’d been taller before moving to Illinois. “Are you proud of me?” he asked.
“Did you get my dictionary?”
He put his hand on his heart and said, “I memorized every word.” You could forgive him, personally, for lying. You hadn’t decided about the rest.
V is for VISITOR. Some things are visitors, which means they’re temporary and don’t need fixing.
“I’m fine,” your mother said. “It’s nothing, I’m just tired today. I’ll do some exercise and that’ll help. I just need to eat better. I have unhealthy habits.”
“There’s something rotten in this house,” your younger brother scoffed, through noodles. “It’s hereditary.” And he eyed her.
She swelled up like a bullfrog, thought better of it, left the room, was unable to contain herself, returned, and said, “If you aren’t going to respect me, you can leave.”
He didn’t do either, of course.
W is for WRONG. You were never taught how to use this word.
X is for X-RAY. She didn’t tell anyone they wanted X-Rays. Maybe she did, and it somehow slipped your mind. X-Rays make things sound so serious. Were you supposed to catch that? Should you have been watching her?
Y is for YOLANDA. They find the cancer just in time, which means before it killed her. Yolanda comes home unable to meet the eyes of all three of her children. Your younger brother stays in the basement and refuses to come see her. Your older brother leaves a bowl of noodles at her door. You bring it to her bedside and feed her marinara.
Yolanda can’t look at you even while eating from your hand. You catalogue the curve of her eyebrows and the careful slope of her nose. In the mirror, after, you peel apart the skin on your body, pulling it this way and that, looking for lumps. What lived in her, lives in you. You find nothing, but standing and twisting made you lightheaded. Your vision statics. Somewhere far away, the world begins to ring.
You grip the sink, which is cold under your hands. You turn off the lights, so you can’t tell whether you’ve lost vision. You sit down against the tub and dig your toes into the shag of the bathmat. You can almost believe you’re in the cabinet, and Yolanda is about to open the door and find you. The bathtub chills the sudden clamminess along your trembling spine.
When the moment passes, it’s as if nothing happened. You stand, turn the lights on, and you go to Yolanda’s room, where you find her asleep.
You crawl onto the bed next to her, over the covers, and curl in so your head rests on her shoulder and she exhales onto your ear. She’s warm, and it soothes your muscles until you relax into the mattress by her side, breathing when she breathes, and trying not to wake her.
When you bend your knees, your phone pokes your thigh through your back pocket. You imagine dialing the hospital.
You think of the words you could say.
Avery Yue is a current student at Stanford University and a prose reader for The Adroit Journal. She splits her time between San Francisco, California and her hometown of Sacramento.
Photo by: Arturo Añez