The Inherent Risk of Being Alive

by Salena Casha

When a telephone pole crashed through Elana’s roof and landed in her bed, she was in the bathroom. Before, she’d slept like a rock, no need for lavender essence oil or white noise, but after, nights were spent, insomnolent, on kitchen tile. When she closed her eyes, she felt the wood crush her chest, electricity burn new veins into her arms. Sometimes, her bones clicked, shot through with static, and by some miracle, the first two nights she managed to avoid the bedroom entirely. Walked the midnight hours in rounds around her cul-de-sac, the pavement hard beneath her Ugg slip-ons. 

She hadn’t gotten this little sleep since she was twelve when, for six months, every time she went to bed, she played out scenarios of her dad, her dog, or her best friend dying unexpectedly. Amazon delivery truck car crash, mouth cancer, kidnapping by a silver Dodge on the way to school. Inexplicable and specific, the visions, and she learned to breathe through them, sometimes send them back to that deep dark. Over time, they stopped, but now, they had returned. Now, they were about herself.

Her father once said, it takes a heavy-duty soap to get fear out of duckling feathers, and she tried it a dozen times on the fourth and fifth days, standing in the shower with a bottle of Dawn, scrubbing her arms raw, watching the suds revolve around the drain. After something so catastrophic, it was easy to read meaning into everything, and she found herself whispering about the cheap H&M necklace she’d been wearing, lucky now, even though, wherever she went, she saw sparks and her old self feathered in broken glass across the earth. So, on the seventh day, she picked up the phone and called.

“Any advice?” she asked her dad.  

“I’d say homeowner’s insurance.”

A joke? Did he not remember she used Farmer’s? 

“Dad,” she said. 

He hummed into the phone, maybe thinking about the light that was out in the garage, doing complicated calculus of how long he needed to stay on the line with her without her taking it personally that he had to slip out. 

“Just be kind to yourself,” he said finally. “And always, get the mid-tier policy.” Not unlike the advice he gave her about gas, always the middle one, 89 unleaded. After he hung up, she put her phone on mute and went into her backyard to weed. 

Her knees rested on the foam matt, loose grit printing dots into her skin, and she told herself this was what it was like to be composition rather than decomposition. She gathered a handful of crabgrass and yanked its roots from the soil. In the morning light, she watched the remaining dirt fall back into place. She pulled over and over until the weeds piled high next to her, ends like thin white hairs. Even if she’d pulled out the source, she knew the game. It would grow again. Not the same crabgrass, but still a weed. 

The best she could do was feel her knees click, loud and deep, as they brought her to stand. 

As she rose again. 

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Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 100 publications in the last decade. Her most recent words can be found in HAD, Metaphorosis Magazine, and Flash Frog. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com.

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