Amoral Inventory

by Shannon McNicholas

RESENTMENTS

Beaumont TX, 2020

Ethan told me I have no empathy. After ten days of using my own food stamps to feed him, taking him to my work at The Giving Field, one of the few safe spots outdoors within the city, and housing him in my own bed for free despite his near six-figure salary, he said that he wanted to explore my flaws with me.

Ethan and I had history. We dated for almost four years, which, when we broke up in 2019, was about a fifth of my time on this earth. He had taken care of me through mental health crises and sobriety from hard drugs. He bought me my drugs. He separated me from my community. He vilified my family. I cheated on him. That was the end.

After we broke up, I moved to Wheeling, WV then Beaumont TX for AmeriCorps. He moved to Austin to work at the university there and study virology through computers. He decided that he’d like to visit me to take a break from life in the city and his small apartment.

He said, “Your big flaw is that you have no empathy.” He packed up, as he had planned to that day, and immediately drove up towards Chicago to visit friends from college.

Morgantown WV, 2022

I kept a half-pint mason jar of their dead bodies, tweezed them off the floor so they wouldn’t sting me, then took pictures and sent them to the apartment manager. The yellow jackets would die in the walls and the live ones would push the dead, one by one, out of the vent above my bed. I learned quickly that the dead still sting. After rolling onto a few in my sleep, I started to sleep on the couch, body swollen with lumps despite the Benadryl and prescription strength cortisone cream that the free clinic, where I interned, had slipped me to quell my allergic reaction.

I sent emails to the apartment manager every few days, each time with a picture of a mason jar slightly more full with bugs. I stopped filling the jar because it began to smell like death. They sent out an exterminator once. We wandered around the apartment together, hunting for the nest, as if I hadn’t already scoured the three little rooms top-to-bottom. Instead of finding the nest, we found exactly forty-seven dead bodies hidden under unwashed clothes and in the backs of cabinets.

The apartment complex would not let me break my lease and I had no money to put a deposit down on a new place. Travis told me that he was not ready to move in together, not letting me stay at his place for more than a night or two at a time. When I ultimately threatened the complex with lawyers that I could not afford, they caved and not only gave me my full deposit and helped me find a new place to live, but also threw in an extra couple hundred and an NDA.

Weston WV, 2024

(Locations and diagnoses changed for anonymity)

He refused to schedule a man with ALS for regular doctor’s appointments with his specialist. I was working on a forensic psych ward as a therapist. One of my patients kept saying, “My doctor won’t let me see the specialist.” I reached out to the doctor, who said that, yes, he had stopped scheduling appointments for the patient due to multiple refusals to go to said appointments. He said that the patient “no longer gets that privilege,” and that his complaints are “psychosomatic.” This is a patient with a known degenerative medical condition, so I reported the doctor to the ethics committee for grossly unethical practice at the behest of my supervisor. What I didn’t realize at the time is that the ethics committee consisted of managers at the very small rural Appalachian hospital, which had limited professional staff. He knew every single person on the board.

The “ethics committee” tried to catch me in lies, tried to paint me as the bad guy, tried to see if I was snooping in places where I shouldn’t be, tried to see if I had a personal vendetta against the doctor. They yelled at me. I shook. They told me to “stop being so anxious. It is not helpful in this investigation.” They found him not guilty of any ethics violations. I quit a month later.

FEARS

Portland OR, 2016

Nightmares in broad daylight. That’s how I’d describe it. Since I had returned to Reed’s campus that Fall, after spending summer in the Sierra Nevadas as a camp counselor, I had been experiencing recurring dreams of blood dripping down my wrists and my body slowly becoming light, as if I were floating off to heaven. Then, I started seeing it happen when I was awake. Blood oozing vertically from my arms. I could separate it from the reality of my uninjured pale white wrists. I could also see it happening, feel my body drifting off to another part of the universe. One late-Fall night, I found myself walking from my dorm to my friend Jeffrey’s apartment in only underwear and his oversized denim coat that I had borrowed a few days prior. I thought he could keep me safe because I had told him what had been going on inside my head over a glass of wine earlier that Fall. I didn’t make it there before breaking down, sitting down on the half-frozen concrete. He found me, tears dripping down my chest and hands. He took me back to his cozy apartment, laid me down on the futon-bunkbed, and gave me a large glass of mulled wine. It put me to sleep. I dreamt what I had experienced awake.

THE HARMS I’VE DONE

Portland OR, 2014

I’m still not sure if I was the party or the pity of Mac Three’s dorm community. I was known for making “toilet wine” which consisted of Welch’s grape juice concentrate and bread yeast, fermented inside of my closet, and selling homemade edibles baked in the communal oven. I didn’t even enjoy getting fucked up at that point, just wanted to pretend to be cool. The girl I shared a dorm room with was fed up with my antics by November of that year. She ended up dropping out after the spring semester. I wonder how much of a part I played in that.

It was the year I turned eighteen and also the year of the first Black Lives Matter protests. I was ignorant—not because I had bad intentions, but because I unknowingly grew up in the most conservative county in California. I hadn’t taken the time to educate myself on race, class or any struggles I did not experience myself. The protests arrived at our majority white, deeply privileged freshman cohort. I did not understand what “marginalized” meant when I was eighteen. The protests went over poorly and, from what I gathered at the time, left many people, both people of color and white people, feeling unheard. I didn’t understand what “Black Lives Matter” was all about, or anything beyond the loud arguments that took place in Humanities One-Ten. I said to my roommate, who I sat with every class, “everyone’s life matters.” She was Black. We didn’t sit together after that.

Portland OR, 2017

Whether it was his molly crash after Renn Fayre, the fact that he did not pass his thesis orals or the incessant bullying built up as “social restitution,” there was a body bag on top of a stretcher outside of his apartment, and he was inside it. I drove past the apartment and texted my friend Rebecca, his neighbor, “Do you know why there is an ambulance outside your house?” She responded, “Nicholas killed himself.”

I laid on the lawn in front of the library with his friends that day. Everyone around me was devastated about their loss while I wondered how I had caused it. Instead of staying there with the rest of them, I hopped up to grab water from the café next door to hydrate them before tears dried them out. Then I sat off to the side and cried my own.

Months earlier, Jeffrey asked me what to do when someone was depressed. I don’t know why, but I was the person everyone came to with questions like this. I had no qualifications, just my own serious case of the sads. He said, “Nicholas wants to kill himself.” I responded, “Tell him to get a therapist and some meds.” I’m not sure if he ever did.

We weren’t friends. Lots of my friends were his friends, but he gave me weird vibes. I steered clear. I was one of those people who viewed bullying as okay if someone “deserved” it. When he crosses my mind, I often wonder what he’d be up to now if he’d still been alive. I wonder if he would’ve recovered. I wonder if he’d have become someone who I’d have wanted to be around.

ASSETS

Wheeling WV, 2019

They called me “the pig whisperer” at the farm out on Big Wheeling Creek because I was the only one they came for when called. It wasn’t that I was good at calling pigs, it was, more so, that I had accidentally trained them to respond to the phrase “here piggie piggie piggies” instead of the typical “sew-wee” that most farmers use. This confused the rest of the folks involved in animal husbandry tasks.

We spent a dozen or more hours working on any given day, with a short break for lunch and dinner. Dan would drive us ten miles up the road for some slices of cheese and bread at the gas station for lunch, and we’d share a six-pack of Natty Light between us. Once we got to the gravel road, I’d hop in the flatbed and crack a cold one. The beer spilled as I bounced. After longer days, I found that it made no sense to drive forty-five minutes home at nine pm, only to wake up at five-thirty and drive back up. I started to pack a tent.

Vincent, Ryan, Ben and I would have parties out by the creek. Vincent worked on the admin side of the farm, Ryan and Ben liked to call themselves “friends of the farm,” but were really just townies. We’d go skinny dipping with the copperheads, light a fire out on the grass in front of the farmland, and cook vegan hot dogs over its flames. For them, it was an escape from reality, as they rarely left the little industrial city’s lights. For me, it was partying on the job. I’d wake up hungover and stumble a quarter mile out to sling fifty pounds of feed over my shoulder and hike it over to the pig pen.

Beaumont TX, 2020

It was called The Giving Field. All my veggies tended to grow huge. I was the only paid staff other than the founder. Us two and the volunteers grew vegetables for the local soup kitchen. The Giving Field was a subsidiary of the local catholic diocese which basically acted as its own nonprofit. As garden manager, I did everything from planting seeds to social media posting to dropping off the harvest at two soup kitchens close by. We put all of the produce on a scale that season. It weighed in the thousands of pounds. I would haul fifty-gallon plastic bags of collards, lettuce, zucchini and cucumbers in my car; so many that I had to pack my Camry tight in order to avoid multiple trips.

At some point, I began taking pictures of vegetables as big as my face, next to my face, each time there was something notably large. I’d text them to my mother. One day she commented, “You look happy.”

Morgantown WV, Present Day

My hands are magic. I make my clients bawl with just my waving fingers and their imagination. I know that Accelerated Resolution Therapy is based on the science of bilateral stimulation, but it feels spiritual, more magical than brain chemistry. It is a drug that requires no chemicals. A drug that you only have to take once to be forever changed.

A few years ago, before I worked under my current boss, she had reached out to me on Facebook, saying, “We are both therapists and we have the same name. I think that means we have to get to know each other.” So we did. We met up in her therapy office. It was strange to me sitting in a therapist’s office as not a client or a clinician, but a colleague. We learned a bit about each other’s lives. She moved nearly as far away from home as I had to land in rural Appalachia. Later, she needed someone to practice a new form of trauma therapy with. She knew enough about me at that point to know that I was traumatized, so she asked me to be her guinea pig. I went into it with zero knowledge about bilateral stimulation, aside from the fact that EMDR exists. Man did that shit work in weird ways.

I didn’t cry the day I tried ART, but I did become so out-of-it that I walked into a wall on my way out. At that time, I had allowed the trauma to be my identity. ART changed everything. For weeks afterwards, I felt like my life had been uprooted. As if I were missing something. My body felt heavy. I was grieving. I later realized that the problem was, my whole concept of who I was had shifted from drugged mishaps to who I am as a helper, a lover and someone messy but not irredeemable.

As clients sit in the chair across from me, I now have the same power to change their lives with a few quick swishes of my hand.

BIO: Shannon McNicholas is a poet and nonfiction writer based out of Morgantown, WV. Her chapbooks have previously been featured in Blood + Honey Lit and Bottlecap Press. Her poems have also appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal and Neologism Poetry. Shannon lives with her wife and their chickens, cats and dog, Burl.