Zora Grizz

   The screams weren't coming from me, and they weren't coming from them.

   So then...who?

   I hastily climbed up onto the deck’s wide railing, balancing my worn boots on the top beam and standing as tall as I could, trying hard to see out over the juniper bushes and trees…towards the boneyard. I still wasn’t tall enough to gain any better information than what I had - which was nothing. 

   I stared out into the woods as hard as I could. There were no sounds. No stalwart birds calling out. No soft crunch as something moved through the snow. 

   There was only a complete, horrifying, silence.

   I remained absolutely motionless, barely breathing, and waited. I tried to calm my heart, to hear over the blood rushing in my ears.

   Suddenly, sounds came again, more distinct than the screams that had echoed out across the snow moments before. My heart stuttered and wrenched itself in my chest as I heard ragged and furious barking, horrendous sounds, like a dog was injured and dying. 

   I hopped down from the railing and rushed over to the deck’s farthest corner, cursing my short height and hoping for a better view into the boneyard as I climbed up again and carefully balanced myself.

   At that moment, as my boots found their slippery purchase on the board, I heard a young child screaming, interrupted by a womxn's voice shrieking in panic, “Git! Git!” and then more screams and barks coming from just out of sight.

   “Fuck!” I yelped. I lept back down onto the deck and ran inside the house. I made sure the deck door stuck closed behind me, thinking of mountain lions, as I yanked my own long mane of hair back away from my face, tying it up one handed, and moving quickly towards the front door. I hurriedly yanked up the zipper on my parka. No time for gloves. 

   An old, solid, wooden, axe handle was lodged into a corner near the front door, in case of lions outside, which is exactly what I was afraid was happening to some hapless weekender family who had possibly hiked up the hill, not knowing that there are at least 2 confirmed active lions in the boneyard next to the house & above the campground (...two confirmed, and likely several more, as those few folx who lived on this mountain knew well).

   I grabbed the axe handle and went outside. I heard the same womxn yelling “git!!!” frantically and a child screaming - the sounds seeming so close, just out of sight from the house. I scanned the dim driveway around me as I hurriedly made my way to the back of it - always hyper aware, listening for the light crunch of snow under a paw, a shadow where it shouldn’t be, or the quick movement of a tawny figure in my peripheral vision.

   “Hello?” I called out loudly, as I traipsed through the snow piled up in the driveway, its end backing up to the woods. I kept going forwards, over the retaining rock wall, and into the scrub brush and rocks until I was knee deep in snow. I scrambled up onto the top of a boulder I could see reaching up out of the snow line and called out again as loud as I could, “Is there someone out there?!” My voice sounded terribly young, echoing across the murky twilight.

   Another throttled scream coming from the woods in the boneyard was the only answer that I got. 

   “Shit!” I cursed and leaped down from the boulder. I started traversing through a field of snow that sucked me in above my knees with each step. I lurched onto higher ground, seeing the tops of what I knew to be low-lying bushes sticking up through the cold white. 

   I made my way further into the boneyard’s thick trees. 

   I was in the boneyard now, where numerous skeletal remains of elk, deer, and smaller creatures are always scattered across the ground and bleached by the sun - former meals of the mountain lions who call this place home and spend every winter here, next to the house. 

   I had the axe handle gripped in both hands, ready to swing it as a club, or to jolt it into an eye or a soft spot on a belly at a moment's notice. I didn’t want to hurt the lions, or discover cause for anyone else to hurt them. I was glad they’re thriving and healthy. 

   I also didn’t want to be dinner.

   I crept as silently as I could through the deep snow. I heard nothing now. No screams. No barks. No yelling. My eyes were processing everything around me at rapid speed in the fading light, making sure to keep looking up into the trees so that I didn't get pounced on by a lion. 

   I went all the way across the boneyard, maybe a half mile, my feet sinking into the snow, the cold burning and stinging my naked hands. 

   There was no one here. 

   There were a few scattered houses across a meadow on the other side of the boneyard, maybe a quarter mile away from where I stood now. I spotted 3 or 4 little kids playing on the porch of a house close to the edge of the meadow, laughing at each other. They were safe, not screaming in terror. They didn’t sound nearly as close as what I heard from back at the house either.

   There was no injured dog. 

   There was no womxn screeching “Git! Git!” in a panicked and desperate wail.

   I saw nothing else and knew I shouldn't linger...It wasn’t safe out here, especially at dusk, when the lions like to hunt their prey.

   I moved quietly back through the darkening woods, alone. 

   By the time I made it back to my house I was out of breath. The cold was a living presence taking up space inside my lungs and my hands were trembling.

   I tucked the axe handle back into its corner by the front door. It clattered a bit against the wall from the shaking of my hands, but it stayed upright.

   For the rest of that night, I didn’t play any music or podcasts. I didn't turn on a movie, or call friends to talk on the phone. I kept things very quiet, listening. I left a window on the deck cracked open, and I stayed alert - straining my ears and trying to stay focused in case there were any more cries for help. 

   But there were none. 

   No barking. No screams. No sirens.

   Just….nothing.

 

   The next day, I hiked into the boneyard again. 

 

   And again, I found nothing.

 

   That whole week, I searched the local news, but there were no reports of lion attacks or missing hikers…nothing that would have explained what I heard that night. 

   The experience continued to hang eerily around me. No answers. No leads. Just…nothing. A frantic search coming up as empty as the silence between screams. The only indicator anything had happened was my own memory of the eerie shrieks…of trying desperately to find them in the thick snow and murky twilight to provide help…but finding nothing in the boneyard but frigid, white, snow.

 

   Once spring arrived, I hiked into the boneyard again. 

   The ground was cold but coming to life: bits of green growth burst through the few remaining patches of snow. The old bones were still there and visible: a bleached scattering of ribs and legs bones marking where elk and deer had been cached by the lions seasons before. 

   There were no new bones.

   None that I could see anyway. 

   I searched for them, but there were no random mittens or hats on the ground, no scarves snagged in the undergrowth. Just…nothing.

   The experience left an uneasy and unanswerable question burned into my mind for years afterwards. A question that seemed to become more relevant with every passing winter and every new spring. As the world moved on and fell apart and came together in different ways, the question still clawed at my insides, scratching at my ribs like a lion fervently trying to escape a cage. Or maybe the lion was trying to get around my ribcage to reach deep underneath, to grasp for my heart, craving to pluck it from my chest with sharp teeth and throaty growls.

   The question still echoes inside of me as if nothing else is there - no bones, no heart, no lungs, blood, or thoughts. It rings through me as if I am empty. As if I am merely a meadow, filled with pale bone and deep snow and dark trees, resting empty under a midnight blue sky.

 

What do you do when you desperately want to help, but you can't, no matter how hard that you try?

 

   Years later still, this question that lives inside of me has…evolved…has grown. It has become another entity living in my chest, a symbiotic relationship that I know is there the same way I know I breathe with my lungs, type with my fingers, walk with my feet. 

   I have a question that I cannot answer living inside of my chest.

   I feel it not only echoing inside of me, but now it radiates from my heart like a beacon, as if a radar is stretching out from my chest, seeking and marking the world around it, the only unit of measurement it has is that cold question.

 

My heart is a blind bat, seeing the world through the sonar of a question it cannot answer.

 

   Years continue to pass for me. 

   I got my graduate degree in information science, specializing in issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. I wrote papers on the language of oppression. I built websites on social justice issues. I created interactive tools full of resources to help survivors of human trafficking. I taught people how to make real-world resources with concrete applications that can help specific demographics. I presented at conferences. I authored research guides. I earned titles and awards. I tried to approach others with compassion, I tried to always take a step back, to breathe, to center myself, to think. To help.

   I lost jobs. I had arguments. I felt despair. Hopelessness. Fury. Fear. Disappointment. I continued my lifelong battle with depression. I lost friends. I lost family. I lost parts of myself.

   Time went on. But this story did not end. 

 

Because there are things that I have not yet told you about myself.

 

   You know some things. You know I wear hiking boots and am familiar with how to share a world with lions. You know that I will risk my safety to help someone in need. You know that I am introspective. 

   You understand, I think, that I am haunted. That I am a house thick with ghosts and unanswered what-ifs.

   What you don't know, what I will tell you now, is that I was once the one screaming into the empty air for help. That no one ever came. That I was the one calling out for help time and time again - unanswered. There were no boots in the snow headed my way.  There was no one straining to see over tall trees. There was no voice calling out, asking how to help.

 

Don’t be mistaken - these are not words on a page, this is blood.

 

   I screamed and I screamed and I screamed.

   I was the child covered in constant, inexplicable, bruises that teachers were very careful  never to ask about.

   I was the girl who learned to run as fast as she could, as soon as she could, with track and field medals to prove it. My first and most constant race? Outrunning my father.

   I was the teenager who scrambled, screaming for help, staggering out of the house, but who did not make it far enough, fast enough, before being caught. I am the one who no one came to help.

   I was the womxn who packed everything they owned into a car in the middle of the night, disappearing onto the highway, fleeing an ex-fiancé who planned to murder me, and the law enforcement officers who would not help me.

   I am the womxn who asked for help and received a bullet instead - shot at, the glass of the driver’s side window shattering across my face as my hands worked frantically to keep control of the car. To try and live. 

   And now, as we stand here you and I, I think you may perhaps see me a bit clearer: the definition has been turned up, the scene becomes more vivid, perhaps better understood. You see a womxn who has chosen to live alone, to be isolated…because these things have become more synonymous with safety than anything else she could manage to grow out of this hard ground. A womxn who hears a pleading scream in the thick, gloaming-hour, blue, and frantically jumps onto railings, plunges her old boots through deep snow, hikes into a boneyard where lions prowl, desperate, frantic, to help the one who is screaming and who this time…is not her.

   A womxn driven by a cold desperation to provide the help she never received.

 

What do you do when you desperately want to help, but you can't, no matter how hard that you try?

 

   I have been screaming for so many years - across time, across space, from one horribly desperate moment to another, my screams forming a dark constellation of pain and fury around the half moon scars on my palms. My throat became a cosmic void, emitting a bloody, pleading, pulsar into the universe that went unanswered - my cries consumed by the immovable object of a culture designed to oppress and erase me…a black hole of patriarchy. My screams echoed across a world built only for my silence - my cries a stark violation of what was allowed of me, deemed more worthy of punishment than the men who put their hands on my body.

   I chose a life from the only options available to me. If they were good options or bad options was irrelevant. They were the only options I had. I chose to be a womxn of lions and ice, rather than a womxn of community and relationships. 

   …Once, a long time ago, I was born at high-noon. On my birth certificate, they marked an “X” in a small box next to the word "female". For much of my life, I have been perceived as and treated as a womxn living in a patriarchy. But they got it wrong, all of them. Because I am not a womxn.

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I am a scream.

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