Suffocating

By Keily Blair

The smell first strikes me while we’re traveling down the road, confined to a car. Brutal citrus and bitter herbs mingle in the air, gagging me. My grandmother notices this, and a rushed apology flees her lips despite the fact that I’ve told her countless times that strong scents send me straight into sensory overload. Still, she won’t allow me to roll the windows down for countless, meaningless reasons she lists off as if they’re scripture.

Oils are prominent in the Bible, after all. They anoint. They heal and cast out demons. They drive granddaughters insane with their potency and general awfulness.

As the stench envelops me, I am drawn back to an earlier moment, to a kitchen in Alabama. The air is electric with heat, anger. I am raw and desperate for someone to help me. A combination of teenage hormones and bipolar disorder rages in my skull, and I need my grandmother. All I can do is spit out the words.

“I hate God.”

I say them because they’re true, but also because I need her to understand how far gone I am. She turns from me, and for a moment, I’ve gone too far. Then she returns and smears oil across my forehead. She grabs hold of me and prays in gibberish—tongues to a believer. The humiliation and anger I feel bubble up higher, reaching a point where the memory darkens. The argument ended, I wash the oil from my skin, cursing God and my grandmother.

Later, I will find peace in a steady diet of lithium and writing.

I will achieve some successes, even more failures.

I will open up my phone one day to see words that wipe the smile from my face and make me touch my forehead in remembrance.

I will know my grandmother encouraged my aunt to accuse me of being possessed by not one, but seven demons, because she loves me. Because she loves her God.

There will be other moments:

When I wear a hoodie with a skull pattern and my grandmother purses her lips and loudly states that she “doesn’t like that.”

When my first publication arrives in the mail and she takes one look at the cover and says, “What kind of book is that?”

When I accuse my aunt of insulting my profession, and my grandmother doesn’t look at me.

And because she is a second mother to me, a woman who had more than just one hand in raising me, I will reach for her and beg to be held, comforted by the barbs she spews from her lips.

For now, I am in this enclosed space, this safe trap of glass and plastic and metal. My grandmother’s perfume fills the space, and although I want to be free of her, I can’t be. Her words echo in my head, the babble she claimed would heal me mingling with the words she spoke through my aunt.

For now, I am suffocating.

Keily Blair (they/them) is a neurodivergent, queer writer and editor. They hold a BA in English: Creative Writing from UT Chattanooga, where their nonfiction won the Creative Nonfiction Award. Their fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as The Dread Machine, Trembling With Fear, and Good Southern Witches, and is upcoming in Dream of Shadows, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and others. They are currently at work on a dark, high fantasy novel. You can find more details about their work at www.keilyblair.com. They live in Chattanooga, TN with their husband, dog, cat, and four guinea pigs.

Photo credit: Tracey Holland via a Creative Commons license. See more of Tracy Holland’s artwork on her website.

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