All the Bad Apples

Runaway Queer Kids Become Victims of Remote Cottage Chainsaw Killer, Surprising Absolutely No One.’ ‘I’m not queer,’ Ida said. ‘Sorry.’ ‘Then chances are you’ll be the only one left alive.

You won’t see us in the photographs. The history books. But the landscape remembers.

Do you think we carry them with us?’’ I asked. ‘’All the stories of the past?

They survived on the bare bones of hope.

There’s great power in sharing stories. In connecting. In speaking truths.

You tell your story and the story of your family. You speak your truth. You shatter the stigma. You hold your head up to the world and speak so that everyone else who was ever like you can recognize themselves. Can see that they aren’t alone. Can see how the past will only keep repeating itself as long as we’re kept powerless by our silence.

Mary Ellen was also a woman of logic. But her logic dictated that if all evidence seemed to point to magic, then it would be unwise, logically to discount it.

There were silhouettes of girls holding hands on a couple of the covers, and on one - a shiny, hardback American edition - two girls kissing. I shook my head at the audacity of my sister, at my own embarrassment, at the sheer perfection of both her timing and her gift. From Tipping the Velvet to Cameron Post, an entire library of girls like me.

This is what a curse does: It takes a truth and twists it. It punishes those who don't conform. It sets the parameters of conformity so narrow that few can actually stick to them.

Our family tree blew down in a gale and we are the bad apples it shook off.

He kissed her and whispered nothings that were as sweet as ripe apples, but that meant far less to him.

Rumors spread on nights like this, under the cold darkness.

We had only just met, but this was an old love. This was a love that ended in flames.

Belief was a fraying rope bridge over a stormy sea. Strand by silver strand, I unraveled.

The history of this country is tied to the roots of our family tree. I need you to know this. She needs you to know this. They all do.

They didn't keep records, and those they did were destroyed when the first investigations into abuse were called for. They didn't want people knowing what went on here. They didn't want the numbers getting out. The babies were sold to rich couples in America. The illegal adoptions. The deaths.

She wouldn't leave me like that. She had to be here still. She had to be here, somewhere, at the end of the world.

Slán agus beannachtai Dé oraibh. Goodbye and God’s bleesing be on you. Provided you aren’t wearing a rainbow pin.

Three ciders deep, we swam between telling each other what our friendship meant, how much we loved each other, and comparing our taste in girls, despite me never having actually tasted one.

I’m just me.’’ ‘’Exactly,’’ the three gray ghosts said together. ‘’You don’t have to believe in who you are. You just are.’’ Together they grinned.

A seventeen-year-old girl in 1936 was still a seventeen-year-old girl, was still a whole person, regardless of her time.

It didn’t matter that times had changed. In our family, so many things remained the same.