Today on Midwest Weird: “We Knew A World” by JP Solheim.
JP Solheim’s short fiction has earned recognition in contests held by Glimmer Train and Craft, and their short fiction has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, MQR: Mixtape, and The Pinch. They are part of the MFA in Creative Writing and Literature faculty at Stony Brook University, where they also serve as Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship. They live in Oak Park, Illinois.
Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Episode Transcript:
This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.
We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Today’s episode: A short story by JP Solheim, titled “We Knew a World." Read by the author.
They had been on the boat for two days now. Or maybe three. Time was starting to blur and Miriam wasn’t getting any sleep with her elbows tied to the armrests of the bench seat. But there had been two sunsets, and now it felt like late afternoon n again. Dad did the untying and tying when they needed to use the head but they weren’t allowed to fully close the privacy partition. Mum held the gun. “I don’t want to have to use it,” she said to Miriam and her brothers Jacob and Abe.
Miriam could no longer pray. She calmed herself by composing the journal entry she would write about being kidnapped by her parents, all in her head—there was no paper, no pen on the family’s pontoon boat, swaying quietly on the Maumee River. As desperately as wanting to write, she wanted to lie down. It couldn’t be good to have her circulation and movement limited like this. Mum was a midwife—but she didn’t know Miriam was pregnant. Of all her problems, circulation was the least. Movement was another question.
From his seat beside the motor, Dad kept looking from Miriam to Jacob to Abe. Anytime Mum went off over the past few years, Dad had sat mute, an affable look on his face—until Mum turned her back. Then and only then he would mouth the words to his children: She is my wife. Miriam thought of the wedding vows appliquéd and framed on her parents’ bedroom wall: to love, honor, cherish and protect, forsaking all others and holding only to one another forevermore. But she could tell by the expression on Dad’s face that he knew Mum had gone too far.
There was only one other time Miriam had seen that particular look on his face. It was before Jacob came home from college, earlier in the summer. Abe was at a friend’s house. Miriam was on a walk. Her stomach was upset, so she came home early and went straight to the master bedroom to find the Pepto Bismol. Her mother’s big body was splayed over her father’s and she was holding his arms down. “I am your complement,” Mum said. “Say it. I am your complement.”
That was when Dad looked toward the door and saw Miriam. He gasped and tried to right himself, but Mum had him pinned there, her hips rocking against his.
“Close the door behind you, Miriam,” she said. Her voice was calm and reasonable, and Dad’s whole face trembled. Miriam did as she was told.
That evening she wrote in her journal. The church’s doctrine on complementarianism taught that the man is the head of the house and the woman supports him. God’s love and grace surrounds all. In what way did her parents live in grace, really? Mum decided everything, and could change her mind any time. It wasn’t fair. It definitely wasn’t right. Nothing righteous about her parents. When I get married, Miriam wrote, and underlined I three times, the bed will be bathed in love and grace and light.
Miriam looked at her mother sitting in the captain’s chair beside her father, hands poised on the gun, which rested on one big thigh. Miriam looked down at her own big thighs. Behaving this way surely wasn’t Christian. Mum wasn’t anyone’s complement.
Miriam and her brothers had been home-schooled, and although they attended the old church on Sundays, they had maintained a cordial distance from their fellow parishioners since the basement incident. It happened soon after Mum went off her meds. Jacob had gotten into college in Columbus, and Mum didn’t want him to leave. So she locked all three of them in the basement on Good Friday. She let them out on Easter morning, and they emerged from the darkness into cold spring, sun bright, a sprinkle of snow. Abe threw up on the frosty grass. Miriam had never found the air so fresh and clear and clean.
Jacob had talked to their pastor and he had tried to intervene.
“Sequestering your children in the basement for a full weekend?” he said to her parents. Miriam was listening from her cracked bedroom door. “It gives me concern. It’s a bit…extreme.”
“Is counseling in order? You know, for the kids?” Dad said.
“If that’s what you think best for your family,” the pastor said.
He didn’t insist. Mum demurred while he was there, but once he left, she and Dad had one of their weird conversations. She acquiesced to Jacob going to school, but the family stopped going to church during the week.
Even after the basement incident, Mum continued to serve as a midwife for a number of women in the church. Many of those births took place in a tub in the basement. Miriam had been raised above the sounds of women in the throes of labor shrieking below the flecked kitchen linoleum, lowing under the creamy expanse of living room carpet. At times throughout her childhood, she lay with her head on the floor, sometimes quietly imitating the women. Their cries made the entire house feel alive, as if it were vibrating from the basement up.
But at some point, writing in her journal at night, Miriam made the connection that if she followed the teachings of the church, Mum wouldn’t be working at all. She would be focused entirely on supporting their father as the head of the family, and on raising Miriam, Jacob, and Abe.
Four years ago, Dad had come home from work on Miriam’s twelfth birthday with a long, flat instrument case. A bass guitar. A month earlier for his fourteenth birthday, Jacob had received an electric guitar. Miriam had hoped for the same thing. “But this is the perfect instrument for a young woman,” Dad said, handing her the cherry red instrument. “No one’s more supportive than the bassist.”
Mum gave her a purity ring and a diary. The ring was silver with black onyx inlay. “We’ll talk more about this,” Mum said, slipping the ring on Miriam’s third finger. “But this diary is for you alone. A girl needs a place.”
“I can write anything I want in here?” Miriam asked.
“Yes,” Mum said. “Anything.”
For his tenth birthday six months later, Abe got a drum set. That’s when the band was born. They called themselves Built on a Hill, from Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.” Mum was pleased with the name, but she cautioned Miriam. “I know your father wants to include you in the music,” she said, “but don’t lose sight of who you are supposed to be. You are a girl, and soon, a woman.” She stood beside Miriam, smiling as she held her hand to the tops of their heads, as if measuring. Only twelve, and Miriam stood almost as tall and broad as her mother. Of this fact, she was ashamed.
As the boat swayed, Miriam watched Abe, her little brother, out of the corner of her eye. Abe was twisting in his seat. How was he getting along without his usual finger taps and beats on the thighs?
They’d eaten roast beef sandwiches the first and second nights. Now Mum smeared peanut butter and jelly on bread. Mum knew Miriam hated PB&J. There were cellophane sleeves of cookies, Cokes in bottles. Oh, what Miriam would give for her toothbrush! Her mother always emphasized dental hygiene for pregnant women. If she’d known Miriam was pregnant, she wouldn’t be treating her this way.
Her mother’s big-boned hand extended a sandwich under her nose and she retched.
“Miriam,” Mum said.
“Seasick. I’m sorry.”
“Miriam.”
“Maybe we could dock and get something from the convenience store?” But the thought of a gray, soggy burger made her retch again.
“You know I know, don’t you?”
Miriam’s heart caught in her throat. She looked wildly at her father. His eyebrows were raised and the lines in his forehead were panicky. Jacob looked from their father, to the floor of the boat, to Miriam. Abe sat small and terrified. From a distance came the sound of another boat motor.
“Your journal.” Mum patted the gun, its holster peeking out from the folds of her caftan. Then she made a noise like a snort. “Of course I read your journal.”
Mum wasn’t wearing her pager. Nor had Miriam heard its muffled call from her caftan pocket. She never went without her pager—she always had women in various stages of pregnancy. “I trusted you boys to watch her. I trusted you, too.” She nearly spit the words at their father. “I thought, look at my family doing good work, playing music in the name of Jesus our Savior our Lord.”
The boat motor had grown closer, and now another family went by in their pontoon boat, calling hello and waving. Mum waved, called to them and glared at Dad. He jumped to his feet, and waved as well. “Have a good evening!” he called.
When Jacob had returned from college in May, the band had three weeks of glorious practices before they played the show. It was organized by a youth group at one of the megachurches in the city, and Mum and Dad came with them in the van. Dad was excited, of course.
Mum seemed genuinely excited about the show, too. She came, even though one of her women was exhibiting signs of labor. She wore her pager on a thick, black elastic band at the waist of her pastel blue caftan. The other moms—in the church kitchen and front hallways, with their fixed hair and capri pants—looked nothing like the billowing hippie mountain that was Mum.
In the freshly blacktopped church parking lot with manicured evergreen bushes, Miriam and her brothers helped the other three-piece band unload. They were older, in their early twenties. The drummer was a small, elfish guy with a cross tattoo on his arm, and the guitarist was tall—taller than Miriam—and handsome. His voice was a deep baritone. When he thanked her for helping, she pressed her thighs together.
They had a female bassist, too. Miriam helped with her amp. The band was from Chicago, and they were on a one-week tour. “I booked it,” the bassist said. “The only way to do it is to do it yourself.” When they finished loading in, she pulled a compact from her shoulder bag. Her lipstick was a few shades darker than her dress, a tight red paisley number in crushed velvet that gave her a comic-book voluptuousness, with black tights and boots. She didn’t look like any youth group girl Miriam had known. Miriam was wearing jeans, Converse sneakers, and Dad’s old T-shirt from his days in a band, buttercup-yellow jersey fabric with dark brown rings at the neck and arms.
The bassist’s appearance made her shy, so Miriam said the only thing she could think of. “You should keep a diary. That’s what I would do on tour.”
The bassist lowered her hands, the compact in her right, lipstick in her left, and smiled. “I do, actually,” she said.
I’m like her, thought Miriam. The idea made her warm. She stopped thinking then about the fact that like her mother, she was mountainous.
After the show it turned out the Chicago band didn’t have a place to stay. “We’ve got our sleeping bags,” the bassist said, her eyes darting from Miriam to the drummer. “We can sleep in the van.”
“Of course you should stay at our house,” Dad said. “We wouldn’t want to leave you out in the rain. I’ll tell Mum.”
They caravanned out to the suburbs, Miriam and Abe in the van with their parents, and Jacob in the other band’s van in case they were separated on the road. Mum’s pager went off as they got home. Her overnight bag was ready in her car. “Watch them now,” she said to Dad, nodding at Miriam before she drove away.
Dad helped unload the gear, and made sure the basement was dry for sleeping. Everyone sprawled around the living room and started talking. It turned out the other band wasn’t Christian at all. The guitarist had been raised in the church but had left it the year before—and the youth group leader who had organized the show was an old friend. He was hoping to bring the guitarist back into the fold. “We were going to stay with him,” the guitarist said, “But we’re just not seeing eye-to-eye on things.”
Dad sat off to one side of the room, drinking a root beer and smiling, looking around like he had accomplished something. He clearly wasn’t listening to what the guitarist was saying. Miriam tried to focus on the other girl bassist. The guitarist increasingly fascinated and scared her.
Then Miriam saw something come over Dad’s face. He looked from Abe to Jacob to Miriam. He stood up slowly. “Guys, I’m beat. I suppose I can trust you to keep an eye?” He looked at each of them in turn. And then he went upstairs.
The guitarist came to sit beside Miriam. She wondered if Jacob would say anything. But she forgot about her big brother as she and the guitarist talked about the differences between electric and acoustic and compared the sizes of their hands. As their palms touched Miriam felt herself glowing. His touch was electric, alive.
Soon the other band’s drummer went to bed, as did Abe, who still had an early bedtime. Jacob and the girl bassist were sitting very close to one another on the other side of the room. They stood and stretched. Miriam wondered if Jacob had dated girls at college. “We’re going to walk down to the river, Mir. Okay?” Almost as if he was giving Miriam permission.
As soon as they left, Miriam leaned forward and kissed the guitarist. “You haven’t done this before, have you?” he asked. Even then she knew that “this” meant more than kissing. She thought of Bathsheba, King David watching her bathe.
She didn’t want to stop, even though she knew she should go no farther. But then, she’d already gone too far. So what did it matter now?
They went down to the basement into the room with the birthing tub, away from the sleeping drummer. They giggled as they helped each other into the big round emptiness. “Are we in, like, a spa or something?” the guitarist asked.
It felt so good she didn’t know how it could be wrong until he was inside her. Still, that didn’t feel so bad at first. Then the slight edges of pleasure shot through with pain. After a time, she felt nauseous. She’d had enough, but she didn’t know the words to say she was done.
When she crawled into her own bed very early that morning, she felt like she’d escaped without anyone knowing. Dad had left his bedroom door open, ostensibly a sign that even in his sleep, he was keeping a watchful eye. But he hadn’t. Nor had Jacob.
Before she went to sleep, she wrote it all down in her journal. It was like her spirit had broken out of a cage and was flitting around, and no one the wiser. Until now. Miriam knew she’d stepped completely and irrevocably out of bounds. It flowed from her loins, and she felt it in the soft tissue. She had gone somewhere that night, slipped out of the restraints only to sneak back into them. When she was done writing, she wrapped another rubber band around her journal, making sure the bands were just so before she hid it in a boot box in her closet.
Mum was still at the hospital when the band left the next morning. They were playing in Cleveland that night. “A real club. But this was a good warm-up,” the guitarist said.
He never wrote. Miriam was scared to even look up the band online—Mum checked her browsing history.
Then Miriam missed her period, and the smell of coffee began to turn her stomach. She knew enough from listening to her mother talk to pregnant women that she ought to be worried. She got a test from the drug store and snuck it into the house buried in her backpack. A plus sign. She threw the used test stick into a dumpster near the river. But throwing it away didn’t change the fact that life outside the cage had snuck back in with her, and pretty soon, everyone would see.
Miriam told Jacob first. She was thinking that at some point soon after he left again for college, she’d figure out how to get to Columbus so he could hide her. She needed to have the baby away from her mother. She couldn’t imagine having the baby in that basement, the place where she’d once been kept and the place where she’d strayed.
Jacob had a different idea: early admission to college and a family dorm. Their parents had lived in one when he was born, although their Christian college probably wouldn’t admit an unwed teenage mother in a family dorm. Jacob picked a big fight with Mum so Miriam could sneak to the only remaining pay phone in town, at the convenience store. She called an admissions officer at the big university in Toledo and took notes, a load of quarters weighing down her pocket. She propped her journal on the small metal shelf under the phone. With her interests, experiences, and test scores, she would certainly be admitted, and once she had the baby she wouldn’t have to take her parents’ income into account on financial aid forms. She could even try for a scholarship.
She and Jacob went for a walk after she returned. She told him what the admissions officer said and they started to plan. Then they talked about life before the basement incident. “I hated some things about the church. But we had the church. We weren’t alone. We knew a world and how it worked and we were in it,” he said. As he talked, he kicked a small rock up the street. It skittered and bumped. “Mum’s going off farther and farther and Dad just cowers before her. I’m not coming back again. Promise me that as soon as we get a plan in order, you’ll leave.”
That was last week. Miriam had written it all in her journal. To write it made it real and kept her feeling safe until three days ago when they drove down to the boat for a picnic. Once they were out on the water Mum pulled out the gun and ordered Dad to tie them up.
Miriam couldn’t even ask God to help them. She had stopped praying. How could she, now that she was pregnant? Miriam was sleeping when she felt a gentle rub on her ankle, then on her shin. She opened her eyes to the river darkness and her dad’s face. Just beyond him, Mum was sprawled on the floor of the boat, snoring, gun strapped to her hand and resting on her chest, her thighs and calves flattened wide and white.
“Swim,” Dad said, his voice as quiet as the sound from a seashell. She felt the ropes at her elbows loosen, like the answer to a riddle.
Miriam stretched her arms and whispered, “You, too.”
Dad swung his head back and forth.
The sound of the water lapped at the boat. Miriam could see and hear her brothers as their father helped them with their ties. What would they do? They hadn’t made a plan for this. So Miriam would do what the church taught her. She would obey her father.
She raised herself silently and when her brothers saw her, they stopped struggling. “Go,” Jacob mouthed, his go barely audible. Her eyes had adjusted and she saw that he was looking at their dad with surprised eyes. Maybe admiring.
Miriam turned, like sleepwalking, and carefully lifted herself over the edge of the boat. Quietly as possible she slid into the water. It was colder than she expected. She marveled at how weightless she felt and she treaded quietly. She needed to get her bearings.
Rustling. A thump. Splashes. Her brothers must be in the water now, too.
“What in the name of…” her mother’s voice.
“Go.” Her dad’s whispered voice echoed across the water.
Miriam swam, unsure where she was at first, but as she glanced up between strokes, she saw lights on the river shore and knew they must be in Toledo.
One shot.
Another.
More splashes.
She swam in swift, quiet strokes away from the boat. She would stay in the water until she found a ladder. It was August, and warm in the night.
Her mother’s voice, screaming her name, then Jacob’s. Then Abe’s.
Miriam kept swimming. Once on shore she would make her way down the city streets until she found a church or a police station. Somewhere safe. Hopefully with Jacob and Abe. She was pretty sure that she could hear her brothers swimming. Then the motor swarmed to life on the pontoon boat, and all other sounds were drowned out.
The water wasn’t cold but it was laced with filth. And there, Miriam started praying again. She admitted her sins. She made promises.
God just see them through this.
Miriam’s hand touched the loose weeds lacing the wall of the quay. She climbed the slippery ladder. Feet on the ground she steadied her body. Someone else splashed to the ladder, but the gun went off again and she knew she couldn’t look back. Her brothers would have to follow. Somewhere in the distance before her, a church bell sounded.
JP Solheim’s short fiction has earned recognition in contests held by Glimmer Train and Craft, and their short fiction has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, MQR: Mixtape, and The Pinch. They are part of the MFA in Creative Writing and Literature faculty at Stony Brook University, where they also serve as Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship. They live in Oak Park, Illinois.
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