Look, I know you hate suspense, so I'll answer your question first. 

Yes. I'm sorry. I didn't know. 

When you screamed your question in my face that night for everyone in the neighborhood to hear, my heart stopped until the echoes settled to silence. 

I want you to know your words didn't cut me. They didn’t hurt. This was different. Your words infected me—straight to the brain. A fever consumed me, left me curled up alone on the red and white John Wayne quilt that used to belong to your grandfather.

I took test after test. I failed each time. I searched high and low for another answer. I already knew everything I needed to know, but I was afraid to see. You made me look. A lifetime of events dovetail.

A three-year-old boy crying at the dinner table with a silver fork on a ceramic plate and a half-eaten steak. That boy didn't understand his mother screaming in his face and sending him to bed hungry. Why? What did he say?

A thirteen-year-old clutching at his leg, trying to stay silent as the sharpened pencil rammed through skin and into the flesh of his thigh. He watched his best friend, the person he trusted most in the world, snap the tip off inside, then pull the pencil out. Why? What did he say?

A forty-year-old man, sitting across from a friend, a colleague, an employee whose face was red and twisted in rage over a simple question. Six words. Scorching black liquid splashes out of a mug already in motion—tipping and tumbling. Coffee splattering walls, screens, desk, shirt, arms, pants—burning. He jumps to his feet to pull the burning clothes away from his skin. The red-faced attacker, the enemy, the active threat dropped the empty mug and stormed from the room. Why? What did he say?

I’m retching and puking in an auditorium bathroom because I don’t want to let my child down. She looked so small sitting behind her cello. The place was packed. The heat was overwhelming. The seats were hard and too narrow. They pinched my legs and hurt my back. The noise. The persistent murmur and the smells of the other people sitting and sweating in the stuffy, stagnant air. It was too much. It beat me.

The drumming and tapping and snapping and clicking. The sleepless nights of diving headfirst down rabbit holes. Of knowing and remembering seemingly everything. You did always call me a robot, remember? A half-step out of sync with the rest of your world. A deaf man dancing to music he cannot hear.

So, love, that question you screamed. You remember it, right? The way you spun and stood with your fists clenched. The way you spit the first T. The arched eyebrow the passerby gave me.

 "Are you autistic or something?"

Yes. I'm sorry. I didn't know.

By day, J.E. Teitsworth analyzes data, develops apps, and writes documentation for his job in the casino industry. By night, he crafts stories and essays about life in the Midwest—especially his home state of Iowa.


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