my mother, the tachinids, and me
What Marie remembers of her father is this. He left when she was six years old, and when he did, she pretended to cry. She knew that a father leaving their family with no intentions of returning was supposed to be sad, but her father was nothing like the goofy, happy go lucky, loving fathers she grew up watching on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Leave it to Beaver, or Bonanza. She was well accustomed to seeing her mother in long sleeves during the peak of dry Southern California heat, her slender fingers daintily removing the compact from her purse to conceal a stubborn bruise blooming across her skin.
But nonetheless, a father leaving their wife and children is, in theory, sad. Even six-year-olds know this. So, Marie pretended to cry, and never told her mother about her secret prayer whispered in the dark that night, asking God to never make see her father again.
And she never did.
*
A monarch butterfly may lay anywhere from 300-500 eggs. Not only is this an overwhelming number of children to yield, but lepidopterists are almost certain that monarchs don’t currently have a system in place to dictate disbursement of child support. Much like Marie, the eggs are left to their own devices. Maybe the unsustainability of nurturing and parenting so many eggs is why fewer than one out of ten will survive to adulthood. Or maybe it’s simply because the most beautiful aspects of nature seem to always have something—or someone—who wants them to be a little bit less.
Once a monarch egg hatches, the little caterpillar measures less than 1/10 of an inch, and there are numerous dangers awaiting the thing. Spiders, ants, birds, and wasps all find her to be a rather decadent treat. But these dangers are large, with sharp, clicking pincher mouths and wings that, although weak to humans, produce hurricanes of wind to a tiny, freshly hatched monarch caterpillar. The caterpillars who have the best chances of living are the ones who learn to hide.
But the greatest danger to the monarch caterpillar can not be hidden from. The tachinid. An insect that parasitizes other insects. A parasitoid. Although I’m sure it’s working on it, nature has yet to come up with a better metaphor for vile, ugly things sullying beautiful creatures than the literal parasitic relationship that the tachinid has with the monarch.
*
For years, there were two occasions when I saw my father. Christmas Eve and fishing. When I was four he bought me a pink fishing pole, and he’d pick my brother and I up from our condo and drive us forty miles to a manmade lake nestled in the Southern California mountains. When my brother got his first cellphone, our father would call him, sometimes past midnight, as if we wanted to go fishing, and his green truck would be out front before 4:00am.
The first time he taught me how to puncture a worm on a hook, I cried. The little thing writhed frantically, a teeny tiny stream of red blood, alarmingly similar to my own, trickling down down its slimy body. Growing up I wanted to be a veterinarian, so he told me that I had to get used to seeing animals in pain. But when my brother reeled in his first smallmouth bass, and I watched my father secure it to a chain left in the shallow water and the lake’s edge, just for him to slide a dagger across its scales and chop its head from its body in his driveway later that evening, I was inconsolable.
But I liked the act of fishing. And I liked my dad. So he decided to break the number one rule at this lake. Whenever one of us caught a fish, we’d weigh it, just to see what we accomplished, and then we’d toss it back. Much to my brother’s dismay.
“What are we going to do with it?” Our father would say. “She’s allergic to fish.”
So, what I remember most from those fishing trips is how gentle his large, scarred hands suddenly became when impaling a worm on a hook. How those same hands wrapped my Christmas presents with delicate golden ribbon. How he whittled me a rattlesnake with a little knife after I told him, once, that I thought they were pretty animals.
I never saw his hands as anything but gentle. Even killing a worm. Cutting the ribbing. Gripping a knife.
I never told him I met Tony in a bar. He’d call it a red flag and I’d roll my eyes, I know, I know. But at twenty one, that’s not what I thought. I thought he was charming, he made me laugh, and he was handsome, because of course he was. I told him I was in school, and he asked me the most terrifying question you can ask someone who has changed their major six times.
“So, what’s the goal?”
I’m sure his breath was as rancid as the sticky bar floor, but at that moment, all I could focus on was the way he leaned into my space without invading it. Despite the little voice in my head warning me not to, I told him the truth.
“I don’t know exactly. But I want to work with people with addictions. I want to help people.”
I remember laughing as I said it, because every time I told someone that, they looked at me with condescension, as if to say, You’re so sweet, the world is going to chew you up and spit you back onto the pavement.
Maybe that’s why I was drawn to him. He didn’t look at me that way at all. Not yet.
*
Marie met David in the summer of 1978 on opposing sides of a cash register. Her mother owned a 7/11, where Marie spent most of her time working when she was not in class. Well, technically speaking, Marie’s stepfather owned the store. They were still a decade away from women being able to legally own any establishment without a male cosigner. But still, her mother kept the store running, while her stepfather stayed home drinking cough syrup straight out the bottle and chainsmoking.
David was Marie’s first love. A girl’s first love is a peculiar phenomenon, especially at the tender age of sixteen. It seems to enrapture her heart, consume her body and soul until her sole purpose is to keep that love unfractured is the only thing she can think of. For some girls, a first love can be tender. For some it can be quiet. It can be pure. But the complication of first love is that, as the name implies, it eventually comes to an end and is followed by others. For some, this end is brought about like a dagger across a rose stem; a quick, sudden finale leaving room for something new to grow. For some, the end is quiet, like smoke dissipating into a dark room. For some, the end is one long, drawn out, violent act that spans across years.
The end of Marie’s first love would be the violent kind.
They married shortly after Marie turned 22. Their wedding was unusually large by Marie’s protestant family’s standards, and unusually small by David’s Irish Catholic family’s standards. There is nothing special to report about the wedding day itself, besides the question that Marie’s mother asked her that morning when the car parked outside the church, and they had not yet unbuckled their seatbelts.
“Are you sure?”
And why would Marie say anything besides, “Of course.”
What really matters to Marie’s story is what happened the night before her wedding.
In the 80’s everyone had a landline. The phone number for the Los Angeles County Jail did not flash on any screen when David called Marie to tell her he’d been arrested for a DUI. At 3:00AM, the night before her wedding, she drove 150 miles from San Diego to Los Angeles, bailed her fiancé out of jail, and drove him back to his home. He was living with his mother, but they were set to move into their new home after the wedding. The lease was already signed.
Marie was well aware of David’s drinking problem. Frankly, anyone who met David could see plain as day that he was an alcoholic. The problem is that Marie had known many alcoholic men throughout her life. The father that left her family was an alcoholic. Her stepfather was an alcoholic. Her brother was an alcoholic. Her sister’s husband was an alcoholic. Alcoholism has a funny way of being accepted as a natural part of society, like leaves changing in the fall and dying in the winter. It’s expected.
That night Marie saw a flash of David that was dangerously similar to what she remembered of her father. So, she gave him a choice. Marie told David that she would only marry him if he promised to never drink again. Daivd promised, and the following day, as you already know, they were married. Unfortunately for all involved, David would find a loophole to his promise. You see, the thing about promises, is wording matters immensely. David never actually promised to stay sober. He just said he would never drink alcohol again.
That year, David began smoking crack.
It didn’t take long for Marie to find the little rocks hidden in his truck. She can’t say what drove her to check his truck, other than an overwhelming hunch led her to sliding her hand underneath the driver’s seat while he was asleep one Sunday afternoon.
It would have been very easy for her to leave him then. She was still young, unfairly beautiful, and although she did not know it, she was very intelligent. But she loved him. She made a vow to him to stay with him through sickness and health, and addiction certainly qualifies as sickness.
She was also pregnant.
*
Here is how the tachinid infiltrates the life of a monarch butterfly:
The tachinid fly lays its eggs on the monarch caterpillar, and the fly larvae then forces itself inside the little caterpillar. Once nestled buried inside, it uses its tiny, spongy mouth to gorge on the caterpillars blood. While the little caterpillar is eating, growing, and trying its best to live a happy life, it is simultaneously completely powerless to stop the parasitoid that is squirming beneath its skin. Once the caterpillar is ready to pupate (form its chrysalis) and thus begin the next phase of its life, the tachinid makes its own plans. The caterpillar crawls to a safe, ideally a shaded, hidden space, and hangs upside down in the pre-pupal “J”-shape. A “J” shape is a sign of a healthy, happy monarch caterpillar. Infected caterpillars will never form this “J”, because the tachinid will burst through their body while it is still hanging with a perfectly straight form. It is essentially a real life version of the Chestburster erupting from John Hurt’s character’s ribs and effectively killing him in the 1979 Alien. The tachinid, now a full grown fly maggot, then spills from the caterpillar carcass in long, slimy, gel-like white threads. Once out of the now dead caterpillar, the tachinid grows into a fly, and hunts for more victims to lay its eggs inside.
The mutilated caterpillar will never grow into a butterfly.
*
I didn’t tell my family I was getting married.
I wore a borrowed dress and gold Kohl’s flip flops. We didn’t have rings. We didn’t have a friend as our witness. We had to wear masks because it was the summer of 2020. The correlation between the pandemic and courthouse ceremonies really needs to be studied, because the dates were booked out for so many months that we instead found a priest online who was performing ceremonies on his balcony. When we arrived, Tony couldn’t find his mask, which meant we couldn’t walk through the priest’s home to get to the balcony, and he was convinced I had hidden it.
It wasn’t the first time he raised his voice so aggressively I thought I could hear the scrape of his vocal chords. It wasn’t the first time he called me an idiot. Or a liar. Or a sneak. But it was the first time he said any of those things publicly, all while tearing the inside of his car apart, asking me where I put his mask.
What I remember most from that day is the priest’s daughter, who functioned as the witness for each ceremony her father performed. She must’ve been thirty years older than me, and from the doorway of the home, she met my eyes and quietly said, “This is a real marriage. You know that, right?”
I smiled, because she just didn’t understand the stress he was under with work, and that he didn’t mean the things he said. Not really.
The mask was in his pocket. When he finally found it, he laughed.
The ceremony took less than five minutes.
*
Approximately one out of four women experience physical violence from a romantic partner. I really want that number to sink in. Like the monarch caterpillar, the odds are not in our favor. Like I said, nature has a funny way of destroying beautiful things. One out of four is the woman behind you in line buying coffee, the car that cut you off in rush hour traffic, the woman browsing the five dollar mugs in Target, the girl sitting next to you in class, the teacher of your son’s class. One out of four have experienced violence from their intimate partners. To some this number will seem unfathomably high. To the women in Marie’s family, it seems low. Marie’s aunt, mother, sister, daughter, and Marie herself all know the sound of their teeth clacking together after knuckles meet their jaws.
Marie became a part of this statistic after the birth of her first son, Emmett. It began small. David loved Emmett, but he did not love what being pregnant with Emmett did to Marie’s body. He insisted she weigh 125 pounds, and to help her reach this goal, he put locks on the kitchen cabinets so she could not get into them while he was away at work. He also ensured the refrigerator was as empty as possible, and taped notes to the door that said “125” so Marie would be discouraged from opening it.
Marie was a type 1 diabetic. After she fainted due to hypoglycemia and had to be hospitalized, David relented and removed the locks on their cabinets. Her breastfeeding body could not handle the lack of nutrition. But he left the notes on the refrigerator, and taped new ones to all the cabinets.
When she could, Marie would escape with Emmett to the park near their home. She tried her best to shield him from his father’s edges, so he would only ever know his soft spots that she fell in love with. And for a while she protected him well. For a while, it worked.
The first time David ever laid his hands on Marie was when she cut her hair without his permission. When he left for work, her hair reached past her waist. When he returned, it barely reached her chin. He balled her new hair in his fist and dragged her across the living room floor, all while little Emmett watched from the hallway, yelling at David, telling him to “be nice.”
*
The monarch butterfly is poisonous. It’s not a poison that can harm humans, unless someone were to eat, say 50,000 of them (this is not a real statistic, but regardless, please, don’t test it). This particular poison is called cardenolide, and the monarch butterfly obtains it from eating milkweed, and it’s highly deadly to insects, birds, and mice.
The tricky thing about cardenolide is that it doesn’t kill the monarch’s predators until the butterfly is already eaten. The poison itself doesn’t technically protect the monarch from harm. It just evens the score between prey and predator. To truly protect itself, the monarch had to develop a signpost. An indicator. A clear message to each and every enemy that would clearly say: Touch me if you want to die.
So, evolution gifted the monarch with bright orange wings.
*
The first time Tony put his hands on me was when I asked, again, to go fishing. It had been years, and I missed it. It was so ingrained in my life, something I did with my father, and sometimes just my brother, that once it was no longer a part of my life, I felt a bit incomplete.
Not that fishing is riveting. But it was the quiet I missed. Our apartment was always loud, if not from Tony’s friends that never seemed to want to be at their own home, than from the sirens and drunken fights that were always happening in the alley outside our bedroom window.
I wanted the whisper of the wind against the water, and I wanted Tony to feel it with me.
I don’t know how many times I asked him if we could go fishing together. We could’ve gone right down to the beach and cast our lines into the Ocean from the shore if we wanted. But he insisted it was a waste of time.
“What are we going to do with them? You’re allergic to fish.”
“We could toss them back.”
“That’s fucking stupid.”
I don’t know how many times I asked before it was too many. But one evening I was on the floor before I could finish the sentence, a knob growing under a dark bruise on my hip from the edge of the oven he pushed me into. That was the first time I began to see Tony not just as scary, but as dangerous. He didn't even remember doing it by the morning.
*
Eventually, Marie’s daughter would learn the story of her father gripping her mother’s hair, and she’d think of her father’s hands, so gentle as he swiped her tears away after threading that worm onto its hook, telling her that it would be okay. That God wouldn’t be mad at her.
When Marie finally decided she had to leave David, their daughter was two months old. David was currently in one of his phases in which he claimed to be sober. He was managing a construction job in Rancho San Diego, building Regal Cinemas 15. He and Marie loved movies, and David envisioned himself taking his little family to the theater once it was completed, and explaining to them each step of completing the job.
David had an accident while inspecting the space that would eventually be labeled as Theater 1. He walked straight off the platform of the balcony seats, fell fifteen feet, landing directly beside a row of vertical metal poles. It was a miracle his only injury was multiple broken ribs. For weeks he slept on the couch because it was too painful for him to climb the stairs to their bedroom. While sprawled on the plaid couch, in a stupor from his pain medication, Marie found the lump in the toe of his black sock.
She knew what the lump was before she unpeeled the damp, musty sock from his foot and dug out the little bag.
She didn’t wait for David’s ribs to heal before she told him she was leaving. She knew it was safest that way.
She called his mother, his sister, and his brother, who along with Marie’s mother and brother, all helped David and Marie move out of their home. Although no one in David’s family ever admitted it to Marie, they were all secretly glad to see her leave him. They loved Marie, and they wanted to see her and her children safe. They, like Marie, eventually had to admit that Marie’s safety didn’t exist where David was.
When David was leaving, their second son, Kyle, who was now three years old and very perceptive, asked him, “Where daddy go?”
“Ask your mother,” he said.
Kyle would remember those words throughout his entire life. Even after he would eventually fall victim to his own addictions, after his dishonorable discharge from the US Army in 2016, after multiple arrests, overdoses, and induced comas. He would remember.
“Ask your mother.”
Marie’s mother insisted she go to college. There was a time that Marie wanted to become a teacher, but now she insisted she was too old to begin college. College was for young people. College was not for single mothers in their thirties.
Her mother pointed to the baby girl in Marie’s lap, not yet three months old, and said, “She won’t remember you going through school. She’ll only know you as a teacher. You’ll be 40 years old regardless. Do you want to be 40 with a degree or without one?”
So Marie went to night school. She worked full time as a receptionist at a doctor’s office while attending classes full time. Sometimes she took her youngest children to class with her. Sometimes her mother took them to the bar she now owned (on her own, with no male cosigner). Marie graduated in four years, got her teaching credential, and moved into a two bedroom condo with her three children, where she gave Emmett a private bedroom, Kyle and her daughter the master bedroom, and she had a pullout couch in the living room.
Her daughter remembers the move very vaguely. Like Marie’s mother said, the memories of her mother attending night classes feel far away and foggy, like they were only a dream, and not something she actually witnessed her mother accomplish. But she remembers each and every school Marie has taught at.
David never fought for any partial custody of his children. Not because he didn’t love his children or want them in his life. Quite the opposite. He knew he wasn’t ready to be a good father. As much as he wanted to be, he wasn’t. He gave his children to Marie, full custody, no argument in court.
*
I still don’t know what to think of my father. I have this monstrous image of him in my mind, starving my mother and dragging her across the floor for breaking a rule he never told her was in place. Intertwined with that image is the man who taught me to put a worm on a hook. The man who drove me to a bakery half an hour away so we could get a donut with chocolate and glaze. The man who read me Arthur books before bed when I spent the night at his house. The man who hung his head in his recliner that is older than I am, said, “You mother hates me. And she should.”
I don’t think he’s an inherently evil man. I don’t think anyone is. I think that David, like the tachinid, like Tony, has been trying to survive the only way he knows how.
There is a version of this story where Marie sees the signs, and she helps me leave Tony so history doesn’t repeat itself. I’ve tried to write that version. I’ve drafted and redrafted it over and over. I want to tell it so badly. But it’s not the truth. Marie never noticed. I suppose I, like so many others, was really good at hiding it. And I want to tell a true story, and the truth is that no one ever even knew I was married to Tony. Very few people in my family ever even met him.
But I’m glad Marie never found out. Somehow, she’d find a way to blame herself. Which is why she’ll still never know.
The day I left Tony was the only time I’ve ever held a gun. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to use it. I don’t remember why he left our bedroom, leaving me crumpled on the floor beside our bed. Maybe he was pouring another drink. Maybe he was pacing. I don’t know.
What I do remember is being strangely comforted by the warmth spilling down the side of my face, staining our carpet, and that twisted something in me, I think. I knew kept his gun beneath our bed. Not even in a lockbox. And if he was dumb enough to do that, he was dumb enough to leave it loaded. But if I’m honest, I didn’t know how to check. I didn’t know what a gun was supposed to weigh. But, curled up on my side, peering under the bed, listening to his footsteps thump against the carpeted hallway, closer, closer, I wasn’t afraid of him.
I was angry.
So I reached beneath the bed and wrapped my fingers around the gun.
My great aunt was almost murdered by her first husband, but by some miracle, she evaded every single bullet until the gun was empty. He told her to wait in their apartment while he went to his truck to get a different gun that he kept in his glove box. He truly thought that his control over her was so absolute, that she would sit and wait for him to kill her.
It took her decades to tell that story. I didn’t learn it until over a year after I pointed Tony’s own gun at him. I asked her, if she had the chance, would she have pointed the gun back at her husband?
“No.” Her answer was so quick, so definitive that I knew she was lying.
In my memory, I’m already standing when Tony re-entered our bedroom, my arms straight, aiming the gun at him. But I don’t know if that’s right. I can’t imagine it was easy for me to stand. But that’s how I remember it, so that’s how I’ll tell it.
I don’t know what I said. Maybe I didn’t say anything at all. But I think my message was clear.
Touch me if you want to die.
And he never, ever did again.
I think we all have something that we swear we’ll never admit to. Never put in writing. But then it just lives in us, rotting. And no one deserves to rot from the truth.
Besides, when a person is put face to face with so much ugliness, they seem to find ways to turn it into something beautiful. Maybe that’s why Marie began raising monarch butterflies. She needed something beautiful in her life. Something gentle. Just once.
The butterflies started out as a rather casual hobby. She began by purchasing monarch eggs from her local plant nursery and putting them in a travel fishbowl with plenty of milkweed, so when they eventually hatched, they wouldn’t ever have to go to bed hungry.
Then she realized she needed a secondary home for them, because the tiny caterpillars grew rapidly and became too big for the little fish bowl. So she put the growing caterpillars in a netted butterfly house.
Then she realized that the full grown caterpillars needed their own, private space for when they were ready to form the holy “J.” For them, she got a second butterfly house.
Then she learned about the tachinid. In her own words, they are “horrid little creatures.” She learned the tachinid can spread like a virus from one caterpillar to the next, so she got a third butterfly house to incubate the sick caterpillars away from the healthy ones, knowing that the infected caterpillars had no hope of living to become a butterfly.
When the caterpillars grow into butterflies, she releases them into her rose garden. Most of them fly away, disappearing into the world to do whatever it is that monarch butterflies do. But a few stay in her rose garden and lay their eggs, which Marie collects. The cycle of raising the caterpillar into a butterfly starts over.
She’s become rather good at seeing the signs of a sick caterpillar. And because she’s so committed to separating the sick caterpillars from the healthy ones, she has noticed a great decrease in the number of caterpillars that get infected at all.
But on October 24th, 2023, she noticed that one caterpillar, almost full grown, was acting off. It climbed to the top of its butterfly house, but it failed to make the necessary “J.” Marie knew this could only mean one thing. There was a tachinid inside this caterpillar, killing it slowly. This was the first sick caterpillar that Marie had seen in quite some time, and she could not bring herself to leave it home alone. So, she put the caterpillar in a plastic tumbler, did not seal the lid so there would still be airflow into the cup, and took the little caterpillar to school with her so he would not be alone while he was sick. She kept him on her desk, away from her rowdy middle school students, and took him to a staff meeting at the end of the day.
Before she left work and drove home, she gently peeked inside the cup, and saw that the little caterpillar had formed the holy “J.”
This time, the tachinid lost.
Maybe there was no tachinid. Maybe, despite her experience with spotting the signs of the parasite, Marie was wrong, and that caterpillar was just slow to form the “J.” Either way she was there for the little thing. Either way, she felt compelled to protect it. Make it feel loved. Make it feel safe.
By now, that caterpillar is a butterfly somewhere, doing whatever it is butterflies do.
Marie stopped counting how many butterflies she’s released somewhere around fifty thousand.
Here is what is really interesting.
Before Marie started doing this, monarch butterflies were endangered. However, in September of 2023, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced that the monarch butterfly is no longer endangered. It is vulnerable. And if the population continues on its current track, they will be able to change the status to near threatened. That’s a real statement. Google it.
The monarch butterfly population is growing.
Personally, I like to think this is because of Marie. She’ll insist that what she’s doing is simply for fun.
In her own words, “I don’t think I have that much of an impact.”
And to an extent that’s true. She’s not single handedly saving the monarch butterfly species. But people like her certainly are.
But Marie’s daughter knows the only true way to dispose of a tachinid is to see past the closed doors and orange concealer it hides beneath. To see when someone can’t form their “J.” To make the thought of starving less frightening for the tachinid than feeding off its host.
*
In California, May and June are punctuated by thick, gray clouds that fold into the ocean, swallowing the end of the Municipal Pier. Those days where you can’t tell where the ocean ends and the sky begins, and you have to wear a rain coat despite there not being a single drop from the overcast sky, are the best days to go fishing.
It had been over a year since I last saw Tony, and although I didn’t grieve him, I grieved what I thought our lives would look like when I was head over heels at twentyone, the same way I’m sure my mother grieved what she thought her life would look like before David ever laid his hands on her.
We lived in Oceanside together for a year, but we never once walked down the pier together. And I’m glad. California, despite all its sour memories, is my first home. And all the horrible things that happened there were inside various apartment walls. That pier was unsullied. That pier was mine.
And it was at the edge of the pier, beside Ruby’s Diner before it burned to ash and faded into the ocean, that I anchored my fishing pole, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And listened to the whisper of the wind against the water.
Until my hair curled with salt carried on the gusts, and my skin was tacky with moisture, and there was a twitch in the line.
My first spectator was a pelican, no doubt hoping to hop on my catch the moment it flopped onto the pier. The more I fought, the more onlookers and tourists gathered, as they always do whenever a fisherman is performing the dance of giving the fish some slack before pulling it back. Slack, pull, slack, pull.
My arms burned, my foot propped on the rail of the pier for support, but when the fish first cracked the surface, I smiled. It fought the entire time I pulled it through the air, and I didn’t object when a man came forward to help me get it over the rail.
I snipped the line and pulled the hook through and out of the fish’s lip, trying to be as gentle as possible. A sixteen pound halibut. A complete joke compared to some of the other fish caught on the pier. But I smiled and posed with it all the same.
When I threw it back, the man who helped me pull it in asked why I didn’t keep it.
“What am I going to do with it? I’m allergic to fish.” And besides, that fish still had far more growing to do. By now it could be a hundred and sixteen pounds.
I didn’t notice the monarch butterfly until I got to my car, loading my pole and tackle box into my trunk, the backseats folded down. It was clinging to my backpack, its orange wings a stark contrast to the dark green canvas material. I don’t know if it landed on my bag while I was on the pier and stayed with me the entire walk back to my car, or if it had only been there for a moment. But I decided that it came from my mother’s garden, as impossible as that would be.
So I rested my bag on the sidewalk, sat on the curb, and while it slowly opened and closed its wings like it was flexing a muscle, I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until it opened its bright orange wings wide and flew, far, far away.
Sophie Cornwell is a PhD student living in the midwest with her chronically sleepy dog. Her publications are featured in, West Trade Review, Bodega Magazine, and Barzakh Magazine. When not writing, she’s on a long walk or curled up with a book, and she’s likely eating cheese right now.