This is what it feels like on June the twenty fourth, two days after the Solstice, seven days before her period starts, four years before she has her first child, six years before she has her daughter: grief has pulled apart her face, her eyes, the molecules of peace and quiet inside her. The chemicals in her brain, delicate in their balance for years, now jolted and scrambled like a power cord ripped from an old tube tv—hissing finality. She spirals.
          What else can she do? The horror—fiction to her once, so far removed from the days when Abuela first drank the castor oil six months after having twins—is now real. The static builds, deafening. The molecules, chemicals, the Lexapro and the rum and the dopamine, vibrating so hard trying to come to grips with this new reality, that she feels alive but not really living.
          Dead and alive.
          Deadalive.
          Deadite.
          The word comes fast and absurd. Deadite. The walking dead that can talk and taunt. The ones destined for pulpy, rancid endings. The ones with waxy faces and clouded eyes that made them look more like monstrous grandparents than anything. That movie. She thinks of it now. Inexplicably.
          She hasn’t thought about Ashley in years. The man with the girl’s name—the man who did what women usually did. Screamed and cried, begged and raged, drenched in blood against his will. Ashley was beamed into her room at the mercy of her older sister Alejandra, whose sharing of Evil Dead with an eight-year-old was to be the first marker of her badness, her worseness, her indifference, her choices, her own eventual and terrible motherhood.
          Their parents had a cabin in the woods, like most Michiganders did, even the Puerto Rican ones. The Puerto Rican ones in fact, built their Craftsman cabins close to the water, to the expanses of sand, so as to feel closer to home. Swap those palms for pointy evergreens and there will still be a set of fire ants waiting for you under them. Abuelo would say not to play so close to the heaps of dead needles because of the snakes and the rats. At night the forest was filled with moaning frogs and screaming foxes, but she couldn’t put a name to those sounds back then. When the foxes screamed, they sounded like children. She felt surrounded by ghosts, or something worse.
          The first trip to the cabin after watching Evil Dead was miserable. All the ways they could have died, all the ways she now knew how to kill, in the event of an emergency. The scythe in Abuelo’s shed, the hammers in the garage, the hot oil in the kitchen, the set of steel knives. Ash’s cabin lived on in her head because the late 70s kitchen he nearly died in could have had Abuela standing in there, too, telling her about her abortion while she coaxed tostones to fry in molten canola oil. These stories, she later learned, were kept and saved for a girl who would listen to them. She was the right neita for the job, easily traumatized, too marked with feeling and love to refuse her grandmother’s attention.
          To this day, she still hates the forest at night. Hates the watching, hidden eyes. Hates the laughing foxes. The monster that scared her most of all was the monster watching from afar, unseen, the one that knocked Ashley down while he ran and then killed him, the last survivor, the final “girl,” the final Michigander, slicked in blood, with a scream. How it chilled her, stopped her cold, when she saw all his fighting was for nothing. And Alejandra had laughed, told her simply, that was life.

          Still spiraling, she imagines the same beast swipe through distant trees in her yard, and roar across the precious stone and sand and peonies in the garden. There is no one coming to help, no heroes. She’s too old for this, to think there’s someone out there, someone else, who can see this and say they can fix it. It is back to hangers and castor oil, a fall down the stairs. It is up to her. Alone. Ashley taught her that years ago. You can go on believing there are heroes, someone to save you, until you find yourself sawing through the gristle and bone of your own wrist with a chain saw, blood spurting hot in your eyes, because there are no other options. It’s lose the hand, or die.