April Salzano

When I first read the famous essay “Welcome to Holland” by Emily Perl Kingsley, I was touched. The overall premise, for those unfamiliar, is that having a child with a disability is like having planned a dream vacation to Italy, only to find out that the plane has landed in Holland. Not only are you in the wrong country, but everyone you know has been to Italy and talks about it all the time. What’s worse is that you will never go to Italy. Though the text itself is a bit unclear here, I think Kingsley means that you will remain in Holland forever. She could just as easily mean for the duration of the vacation, but either way, you are in Holland. Kingsley writes: for the rest of your life, you will say ‘Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned.’…And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Ital...

“Nana just finger-fucked the lasagna I was making for dinner tonight.”          I could never have predicted hearing these words as soon as I pressed the Accept button. It was my younger sister, Ronnie. I held back laughter, which wasn’t easy when she followed up with, “and she stole my fucking sandwich!” My sister was referring to our 94-year-old grandmother, who she took in a few years ago. Our older sister had just lost her house to foreclosure, then moved in with the blind mechanic next door. She had been sleeping with him for a few weeks before her live-in boyfriend found out and bailed on her, taking her cashed-out 401K with him, but kindly leaving all of their joint debt, including a mortgage she couldn’t afford alone. They had purchased the house together with the noble intention of providing a home for Nana, who had just lost her own house not just when but because our father died. Wait, it gets better. Turned out our father had coerced Na...

We each have our share of moments we will relive forever, sneaky little flashes that come right in uninvited square in the middle of another moment. Things are going along great—the perfect cup of coffee great, a nailed workout great, new pair of boots-great, and Bam! a clip inserts itself, a brainworm on roids, bigger, stronger, complete with the ability to rewind and replay itself at will, ad infinitum, create its own highlights and soundtrack, freeze-frame, slo-mo, discord. Here is mine: I feel my teeth sinking in the flesh on my son’s left ring finger. I feel the resistance of skin and bone. I hear, almost out loud, the word bite three times in rapid succession. It is not a reaction, not an instinct to protect myself, but an intentional, briefly pre-meditated action done in deliberate attempt to show him that he should not be pounding my face with his open hand, that inserting his fingers into my mouth and trying to yank my lips off from the inside is a mistake he will regret. ...