Illustration by Evangeline Gallagher
When I was thirteen I didn’t know who I was. My family didn’t seem to know either. Sometimes I’d walk downstairs into the kitchen looking for a snack and my mom would be at the table smoking a Merit and drinking coffee while she read the paper. In 1983 everyone still read the paper, but my mom read it with vigor and suspicion, as though it was there, in the Bemidji Pioneer, that she would find evidence that the world was out to get her. Hearing my shuffling steps, she would look up and say, “Who are you?” Okay,…
