Ostrocaphoria

Jacob Wrich

Think of every decision you make as a vote. A ballot cast one way or another. You ignore the phone calls from your spouse, you’re voting against your relationship. You take time off work to care for your dying father, you’re voting for family. You lie about how your sister died, you’re voting to still be loved. You ignore the doctors and leave the hospital with your twelve-year-old son, Leo, gaunt and pale, blue gown flashing bare skin in the winter wind, well, then you’re voting for his safety.  

Mostly we’re aware of the ballots we cast in our own lives. We’re aware of their consequences. We know a vote for that extra slice of pizza is also a vote against our own health. But like a poor man casting his ballot for the billionaire politician, we often vote against our own self-interest. We feed ourselves a big bowl of reassurances and dispel any argument, no matter how logical, that flies in the face of our convictions.

Yet even the most mindful of us forget that the world is constantly casting ballots as well, and that many of those votes are cast against us.  

The ancient Greeks held ostrocaphorias. Think of the opposite of any political election you’ve ever known. Citizens of Athens would gather and cast ballots in the city center. The “winner” of the election would then be ostracized from Greece for ten years. An ostrocaphoria is basically an anti-popularity contest. The Greeks would vote for the worst person, the most dangerous to their republic. And if that was you, pack your bags.

We like to think of ourselves as civilized, and for the most part we are. But it’s at least worth questioning. Especially if you could see my son’s teeth chattering in the backseat while my car’s heater blows lukewarm air and the temperature outside is making even the most resolute winter birds tuck themselves into the snowy pines.

Today, you won’t find an official ostrocaphoria anywhere on earth. We’re simply not that honest anymore. But they’re still happening, just without all the formality.

People have been voting for my ostracization for a while now.

My son’s doctor voted.

“Leo’s blood shows traces of radiation. He needs to be admitted for further testing.”

Ballot cast.

My HR department voted.

“Kari, you’ve used up all your FMLA. We need to rehire for your position. Oh, and we still need to talk with you about some missing medications.”

Ballot cast.

The hospital social worker voted.

“Ms. Sullivan, can I speak to you alone? Have you ever heard of Munchausen by proxy?”

Ballot cast.

Even I know that it’s not called Munchausen by proxy anymore. The DSM now refers to it as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another.

My phone rings almost constantly. People casting their ballots. I fight through the seatbelt to get my jacket off and hand it back to Leo. He covers himself. I turn the ringer off and tell him to sleep.

We arrive at the old farmhouse, the house I grew up in. How many times have I bowed my head in supplication in this old pile of boards? How many times did my mother cast her ballot with a yardstick across my knuckles? And how many times did my agnostic father sip his whiskey and shrug back into his recliner. Many will argue that abstaining is a vote in and of itself.

I tuck Leo into my childhood bed upstairs. He’s fast asleep when I drag the rocker from the other bedroom and angle it toward the window. Through the naked branches of the white ash tree, the silo, rusty and stained, slumps up from the snowy ground, and still manages to stand taller than my childhood.  

My phone tells me that I have fourteen missed calls. Tells me that my voicemail box is full. Tells me that they’re moving in. That I don’t have a lot of time.

Every time you force someone into a corner, you’re casting a vote.

Have you ever seen desperation? Like really seen it up close? Have you ever been so near to it that you could hear its heartbeat under the soft blankets in an empty farmhouse in the middle of NoWhere, Minnesota?

Leo crawls open his eyes. I rock forward and place my face on his cheek. Twelve-year-old Leo, suffering under the weight of some unknown disease, some virulent strain that doctors can’t comprehend, or perhaps some as-of-yet unidentified cancer that hides in his body and kills his willpower, dissolves his strength, chews away at his organs day by day.

“Take this,” I tell him and slide an orange and blue capsule between his teeth.

He turns away, but I slide my palm behind his head and lift. He’s too weak to fight.

“Drink,” I tell him, pressing a bottle of water to his lips. “Drink,” I say again, and I hold him until he swallows the pill.

He’s so delicate. The arches of his eyebrows like the flight patterns of songbirds. How amazing to be this close. To watch the slow breaths that make the blankets rise and fall almost imperceptibly over his chest. How astonishing to feel the coolness of his skin as his antibodies flee the surface to fight the invisible demons invading his body.

With Leo sunk deep into sleep, I listen to the voicemails. More ballots cast in the ostrocaphoria of my life.

“Kari, this is Susan at the Department of Human Services, please call me back at your earlies…” I know the rest. I’ve been identified as a suspect in an abuse allegation.

Ballot cast.

“Hi Kari, it’s Beth. Look, I know you’ve been separated from the company, but I really need to talk with you about some missing medication for Martha’s cancer treatment…”

Ballot cast.

“This is officer McGuire from the St. Paul PD. Please contact our department…”

Ballot cast.

“This message is for Ms. Sullivan regarding the lab work for your son Leo. We have found some abnormalities. His white blood cell and platelet counts are exceedingly low. Furthermore, he has tested positive for Procarbazine, an oral chemotherapy medication. Please contact us immediately at…”

Ballot cast.

Leo sleeps so frozen that he doesn’t even flinch when I throw my phone and all the little broken parts skate across the hardwood floor. Giant tea-saucer snowflakes tear down from the sky as if the world has begun to spin so fast that gravity has doubled. A wind whirls the snow and blurs the silo, and for a moment, a surge of nostalgia sweeps through me.

As if on cue, a cardinal lands near the window and stares into the bedroom. “Oh, hello father,” I say, but these are not my words. These are my mother’s words. My mother, believing that cardinals were visitors from heaven, repeated these words anytime she saw a cardinal perched near the house. On anyone else, this little idiosyncrasy would have been endearing.

But I hated it.  

And now here I am, her words coming out of my mouth, speaking directly to this bird that sits like a flame on the matchstick bough of the white ash tree.

Leo gasps awake. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he rattles.

The water has been turned off at the farmhouse since my dad died last year, so I go downstairs and find my mother’s favorite vase, an extra wide decorative piece that she used to put hydrangeas in every summer. I set it in the corner of the bedroom as a makeshift chamber pot.

Leo leans his lower back into the corner and props his elbows on his knees. Squatting above the vase, the balls of his feet pressed into the floor, his arches curve like gothic architecture. His skinny body buttressed in perfect symmetry. Utterly beautiful, my son. Even when he explodes watery waste into the vase and falls forward to his hands and knees. Even when he pivots around to vomit into the vase.

I dump the waste behind the shed and rinse it with snow. Leo will sleep for a while now, so I push through the ever-deepening snow and hike out to the silo. I stare up the rusty yellow ladder that’s bolted to the side of the silo, heave a deep breath, and climb. The cold metal stings my hands and the wet snow makes each slippery step a negotiation, but I persist until I’ve climbed to the top. The gray expanse of falling and drifting snow furls out for miles. At the top, a small metal platform leans over the bowels of the silo. Inside is empty but for the sweep auger, covered in moldy grain and small clumps of corn tamped to the sides. I think about Kelly.

I was ten when she died. She was eight. Mom used to tell her, “Kelly, you were worth the wait.”

She used to tell me, “Kari, if you keep bullying your sister, I’m going to bully you!” And she would eyeball the yardstick.

For Christmas, Kelly got whatever she asked for. When I complained that Kelly got more than me, Mom would say, “And were you a good girl this year, Kari?” At least Kelly shared her presents with me when Mom wasn’t watching. I suppose I appreciated that.

Every time you give one daughter a Sparkle Princess Posey doll and a beautiful dress for Christmas and you give the other daughter a pair of winter boots, you’re casting a vote. 

I look back down the shaft and wonder what it must have been like for her, drowning in all that grain. Her face twisted in fear as she flailed, the outline of her body disappearing until it was replaced by a calm surface of corn.

I remember the rush of guilt when I wondered if I would still get candy on Halloween. It was so quiet climbing down that ladder. Much like it is now, with giant snowflakes soundlessly slapping against my cheeks and melting in my eyelashes.

Leo is still fast asleep. I rest the back of my hand against his cheek, lean down and kiss his forehead. If my mother and father could see me now, they would know what a caring mother I have become. They would know that when my mother said that I am “all blood and no heart,” she was dead wrong.

I sit back in the rocker and cover myself with a patchwork quilt. I’m sure the police have already been to my apartment, and it’s just a matter of time before they send someone to my childhood home. My car is hidden, and the lights are off in the house, but it’s just a matter of time.

I can barely keep my eyes open. I prop a pillow behind my head and close my eyes.

It’s a dark world when I open my eyes. Mom sleeps sitting up in a rocking chair. She’s drooling on an old quilt. The vase I pooped in (how embarrassing) rests on its side in the corner. The window is covered in snow. I open it, but the snow just stays there. Like a wall. Like we’re buried. But I know we’re upstairs, so I dig. It’s deep. Like there’s no end. I keep digging until I’m out of the room. Then I’m tunneling upward through the snow. Up, up, up, thirty, forty feet, until I push through the surface and the sun blinds me. It bounces electric off the snow. The world I know has been buried. I’m in a new land. A vast tundra of white drifts and frozen sunshine. 

The cold is not unbearable. Even in the hospital gown and my undies and bare feet. The air is cool like the feeling when you jump into a swimming pool. 

I walk for a long time. Miles maybe. Then footprints? If they are footprints, they’re huge. And round. The size of manhole covers. Hundreds of these giant potholes form a trail that stretches off toward the horizon.

“Hey! You there!”

I turn and three kids about my age, dressed in furs, point spears at my chest.

“Who are you?” 

The cold catches up with me all at once. My lips turn blue and frozen and blubber around my clattering teeth. I muster out a puff of air: “Leo.” And I collapse into the snow.

I wake in a dark cave with icy walls and the glow of a warm fire. I’m wrapped in a blanket made from the coarse hair of some giant beast. A boy, younger than me, with sunken cheeks and long black hair, hands me a steaming mug with a broken handle that says “I Hate Mondays.”

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Bone broth,” the boy says and sits among a group of eight other boys. All are close to my age. Some slightly younger, some older. All with oily, uncombed hair. All wearing a variation of brown and orange furs.

The tallest boy, his fur clattering with dangling bones, stands with a spear across his chest and says, “I am Odin. You are Leo?”

“Yes,” I say.

“How did you get here?” Odin asks.

“I don’t know. I was standing there talking to you and I must have…”

“NO!” Odin yells. “How did you get here? To this world?”

“I don’t understand.”

Odin sighs and bangs the heel of his spear on the ice. “Where were you before we found you?”

“I was sleeping in the farmhouse where my grandparents used to live. When I woke up, it was dark, so I opened the window and tunneled up to the surface. Then I just walked for a long time. And you found me.”

The boys nod as I sip the hot bone broth, leaving the cup near my face to let the steam warm my nose.

“Are you sick?” said a boy with a bubbling scar on his chest.  

I stare blankly through the broth steam.

“Yeah, us too. Ryan’s got pneumonia,” he says, pointing to a kid who keeps coughing. “Chris’s got leukemia. Odin was in a car accident. We think he’s in a coma. Ash over there, he’s got something called Reye’s Syndrome. None of us even know what the hell that is,” the boy laughs. “Me, I’ve got a bad heart. What’d you got?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Oh, you’re one of the unknowns, huh?” A few of the boys nod and brush their thick hair from their eyes.

“Quiet,” Odin says. “It’s time to sleep now. Tomorrow we hunt.” 

The fire has burned through the night leaving a smoldering glow in the orange dawn. The boys and I rise and drape our furs over our backs. We sweep the baby hair from our eyes and shake away the last wisps of our dreams. Guarding our eyes from the brilliant sun, we trek out into the blue tundra, a pack of wild animals ready to kill for survival.

Soon we’re perched on a snow cliff above a trail littered with footprints, a byway for wooly mammoth. We laugh and make snow angels and piss our names into the snow. We wrestle one another, our sinewy muscles taut under our atavistic robes. Ryan builds a snowman and shoves his spear through its chest, then karate chops its head off. We halt when Odin shushes us.

We crawl on our elbows to the edge of the cliff. Three wooly mammoths shrug around the corner and lumber through the chasm. They nod their huge heads and grunt and snuffle clouds of white breath. Odin holds his left fist above his head and we inch nearer, peering thirty feet down over the edge. We wait as the first two mammoths go by, and when the third is directly below us, Odin lets out a savage scream and we all leap down onto the back of the giant beast. The other two mammoths run away. We stab our prey and tumble to the ground. We drive our spears into its ribcage and stomach, being careful to stay behind it and elude the wrath of its tusks. Ash gets too close to its crushing hind leg and screams out in pain.

With the brute finally on its side and the last of its feeble attempts to defend itself slowing to a halt, we breathe proud, frozen breaths. We wipe blood like warpaint under our eyes and climb on the back of the dead beast. We jab our spears at the blue sky. But our victory celebration doesn’t last long as a sabertoothed tiger leaps toward us, trying to take the kill that is rightfully ours. We surround it, except Ash, who cowers near the mammoth’s head, holding his stepped-on ankle.

The tiger swipes at us with its immense claws, catching Chris on the upper arm and chest. Chris falls away, holding a tight hand over his cut. Then the tiger turns its attention directly to me. He rises on his hindlegs, tall enough to eclipse the sun, and leaps high overhead, arching into the sky and coming down toward me with his razor claws and teeth trained on my throat. I fall to my back and anchor the base of my spear into the icy ground and let the giant cat come down directly on it. The spear sinks through its chest and into its heart. Blood shoots out in rapid spurts as the sabertoothed tiger collapses on top of me.

The boys cheer me on and rub their hands through the tiger blood that soaks my face and hair. We walk back reliving the kills over and over, laughing and shoving one another and sucking the frozen blood from our hands, letting our bodies absorb the iron.

And with Odin clapping me on my back and rubbing my bloody hair, I disappear. I fall through a hole in the snow and slide down a tunnel that shoots me back into the bedroom where my mom still sleeps, propped up in the rocker, covered in a patchwork quilt in the frozen farmhouse.

Cleisthenes, widely considered the Father of Democracy, is credited with creating the ostrocaphoria. He wanted to protect his cherished democracy from potentially corrupt or tyrannical politicians. His theory is sound. What could be more democratic than a jury of peers? But as with any logical theory, the flaws of human nature quickly contaminated its rationality and bastardized the original intent of the ostrocaphoria.

Ultimately Athenians began voting for people they held grudges against. A statesman named Megakles was ostracized for his extravagant lifestyle. Kimon Miltiadou, a war hero, was falsely accused of having an incestuous relationship with his sister. And when there was no one else to vilify, the Athenians would form a campaign against a slave and accuse him of heinous acts of rape and murder. Or they would blame him for a famine, just to have a scapegoat. If people are voting for someone else, then they’re not voting for you.  

More cardinals have gathered in the branches outside the window. Maybe two dozen. They flit and twirl around, but mostly they just stare into the bedroom where Leo sleeps. I rest the back of my hand on his forehead. It’s ice cold and wet. I peel the covers back. His gaunt body shivers and breathes shallow breaths. I tuck him back in. Cover him with the patchwork quilt I have been using.

If only my mother could see me now, she would know how much I care. If she could just see me sacrificing my own warmth for my son, or the way I dab his face dry and rest my lips on his forehead.  If she could see the way I took him from the hospital because mother knows best. She would know that I’m not a monster. I’m not the kind of girl who would push her sister into a silo.

I’m not the girl who, seeing her sister bent over to get a better look at the grain sweep would, on impulse, put both hands in the middle of her back and shove. I’m not the type of girl who would wait until her sister’s outline dissolved below a layer of corn before climbing back down the silo and telling her parent that she slipped. I’m not the type of little girl who would play with her dead sister’s dolls after the silo was drained and her sister’s body slid out the chute coated in grain dust, jaw askew, eyes bulged. That’s not the type of girl I am.

If my mother could see me waking my son, holding his head and telling him, “Leo, love, take this,” and pressing the orange and blue pill between his lips, holding the water bottle tight to his mouth until he relents and swallows. Then she would know that I could not possibly be responsible for my sister’s death. How could someone so compassionate ever be responsible for such a monstrous act?

Hundreds, maybe thousands of cardinals have flocked to the ash tree. They flutter in the branches so thick that if you saw it from a distance, they must look like autumn leaves. Beyond the tree, down the road, two police cars speed toward the farmhouse, leaving little eddies of snow swirling in their wake. More votes against me.

The cardinals, generations of relatives descending from heaven (if you believe my mother), whistle in chorus outside the window. Each tweet directed at me. They chirp their disdain. They screech for my ostracization.

The police pull into the driveway and two officers get out. They knock quietly the first time but more and more urgently each time after. If I’m quiet, maybe they will go away.

But the goddamn cardinals are so loud that I have to open the window and yell, “Shut up!” The birds flitter about but go on whistling their disapproval.

“Ms. Sullivan, we know you’re in there!” the police yell toward the door.

“Leave me alone!” I scream out the window. “He needs me!”

“Ms. Sullivan, open the door.”

“You’re not taking my son. He needs me. He’s dying!”

A hand grips my wrist.

“Leo, my love, your hand is so cold.”

“Mom,” Leo says, his breath forming icy clouds. “Mom, let them in.”

And there it is, the final vote. The one that seals my fate. I’ve been ostracized by my mother, my sister, and my father. And now my son looks up at me, his eyes like glacial ice, and he casts the deciding ballot.