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(Hi. I’m Justin Martin. Throughout history, in religions both pagan and Abrahamic, there’s a huge value placed on naming things. Knowing something’s true name is a way of either binding it, in the case of demons, or loving it better, in the case of angels. I thought that, as a disabled person, it’d be helpful for me to name some things before I transition to adulthood.)

NAMING MY ANGELS AND DEMONS

By Justin Martin

To the nights when I’m still up at 3 AM wondering what will happen if my child wants to learn how to throw a football, I name you Ambrose.

To the realization, at an early age, that I would have to learn to open even the heaviest of doors, because nobody would ever bother to turn the buttons on, I name you Andronikos.

To the people who, earnestly and without malice, ask me if I have a penis as casually as old ladies ask to borrow cups of sugar, I name you Arcadius.

To the thankfulness that my penis, unlike the vast majority of my body, is still on speaking terms with me, I name you Aristocles.

To the feeling when you see a little girl playing Dance Dance Revolution at an arcade, simultaneously hating her for not realizing the miracle and loving her for never having to, I name you Arsenios

To the moment when a small cousin is climbing on my wheelchair like a jungle gym and I understand that fear, pity, and shame are all adult inventions, I name you Basilious .

To all of the birthday cakes I’ve barely eaten at the parties I’ve barely been invited to, I name you Cassander.

To all of the mothers who forced their children to invite me anyway, but never forced themselves to consider why their children and their society put me on an island, I name you Cyrus.

To the glorious chocolate drop contained within the three second pause after I make a cripple joke, when the audience considered if their laughter would tan them in the afterlife, I name you Demetrius

To the people who decided to call it “The Special Olympics” instead of “The Olympics That Even NBC Won’t Air”, I name you Draco.

To the Center For Disease Control, who all too often seems to have placed a quarantine on any table I sit at, I name you Euclid.

To the people just insane enough to break the quarantine, I name you Eutropius.

To the years where there was mulch around the swings and slides of the playground, where I learned the value of the people who were more comfortable outside of it, I name you Georgios.

To the six seconds before I drift under a surgical knife, exhaling to draw the border between the times when things happen through me and the time when things happen to me, I name you Herodotus.

To comic books, where it is more likely for someone to be bitten by multiple radioactive spiders than it is for them to live happily while disabled, I name you Homer.

To the little battles for dignity, whose cannon-shots are seen in the eyes of people who hear me sing a stave of music or help me set up a decent spare in bowling, I name you Isidore.

To my doctor, who still asks me if I’m having unprotected sex every time we have an appointment, proving that even medical school can’t kill one’s optimism, I name you Kleopatra.

To the constant dread that takes hold when people ask me what I did this weekend and I remember that most people can fit into their cars, I name you Leonidas.

To the realization that my parents felt worse hearing that than I did writing it, I name you Linus.

To all of the energy I subconsciously devote to not looking spastic, I name you Myron .

To whatever force blessed me with the ability to, when told that God will heal my legs, not respond with “is that before or after he fixes your brain?”, I name you Nikon .

To the fear that I’ll want to go around one more time, less limited, I name you Olympos.

To the peace in knowing that if I don’t live to see a just world, I can make sure that my children do, I name you Philon.

Mulch

It starts with a steep downward slant, so that if I were to let go of my wheels, the asphalt would send me careening down to the playground below. In the center of the playground, where it plateaus, a giant map of the world is painted, flanked to the south by twin tetherball sentries. To the north is the sea, wide and apathetic, whose waves would batter me for six years, made not out of water, but of mulch. The swings and the slides are there, so the kids are, too. If I was to try joining them, like I did in the early days, the tires of my manual chair would sink into the pellets, and I’d be completely immobile if I moved more than an inch into them. So my home became the shore between the land and the sea, where I spent a half-hour every day watching people play. I didn’t tell my parents that I cried when I got home, and it stayed that way for a while. After a time, I realized that the playground aides were watching me and probably feeling awful, so I at least moved around a little bit every day and pretended to have fun. I didn’t know how much this would prepare me for life in high school, where they took away the playground, but left the mulch.

The first time that I realized that the mulch could move was in third grade, when my elementary school, unwilling or unable to use the money my family had raised to replace the mulch with a rubberized surface that I could access, erected a boat in the corner of the mulch area, a bright red Play-Skool Stonehenge that was accessible by a rickety ramp and could rock back and forth. It really got the blood pressure pumping, let me tell you, and was the talk of the town amongst every tumbleweed on the playground. Nobody populated it whether or not I made the tenuous climb up there. (A special shout-out, however, goes to the guy that wrote “sex” in black Sharpie along the ship’s starboard bow, as if to consolidate all of the things that I could never have into one place.) I could look over the edge of the boat and see no mulch on any of its four sides, but I knew that the invisible variety of it was still there.

The mulch isn’t visible to most people.  You see it everywhere, but only if you know where to look. You see it when every lunch table fills up except yours until the seventh grade, when a few kids finally push past it and sit with you. You see it when, in gym class, an otherwise-sane teacher with all the subtlety of a Southern Baptists preacher begs people to pick you for their dodgeball team because you’re “the secret weapon, baby! The secret weapon!” You see it when, after watching a play at Bradley, all of the other theater kids make plans to go to a coffee shop that was two minutes from your house, and nobody asks you even though you’re right there.  You see it when small children try to touch your chair at the grocery store, and mothers slap their hands as if theirs tots have just made a covenant with Satan.

You see it, but the problem is that nobody else does. Hardly anyone, while they’re having fun on the swings and slides, or three seats ahead of you on a choir bus while you’re tied down in the back where nobody can hear you, or posting pictures on their Facebook of their homecoming, thinks that they’re leaving you out. I’m sure that the man who put that mulch down had no idea how much it was going to hurt me: in fact, when my parents finally heard about the problem and asked school administrators why the mulch was there in the first place, nobody had a good answer, but nobody was in any hurry to do anything.

That’s not to say that, when kids are forced off of the mulch, they don’t hang out with you. I used to thank God every time snow would come down, and everyone would have to stay inside for recess, when we’d all play games of checkers or build robots out of connectable toy blocks. I’ve somehow managed to fight my genetics enough to be fairly good at bowling with bumpers, and some of the most mulch-destroying moments of my life have been the seconds before a perfect strike, when a tenor who maybe sees me as a little more human than he did two seconds ago helps me set up the perfect angle. But sooner or later, through no fault of their own, everyone who is able to do so drifts back to the more familiar objects, the shinier ones, and there you are on the border looking in again.         

I’m back at my elementary school playground. My freshman year of high school had just ended, and I’ve changed in a hundred ways from the last time I was there. I’m in a power wheelchair, for one thing, sitting next to a boy who I think I might like a little too much and another one who I’d have never guessed I’d spend any time with.  It’s maybe nine o'clock at night, nine-thirty tops, and Ohio is welcoming the beginning of a storm that comes down like the wrath of God, reverberating off of the cheap pastel plastic of the swings and slides like a ten-pound bucket of ping-pong balls spilled over the perimeter of my childhood. I hadn’t come back to make some grand statement: I’d been at a bonfire where a few friends and I had burnt all of that year’s homework. We’d gotten tired of hanging out in someone’s garage, and Hilliard Crossing’s asphalt jungle was about a five-minute walk from there. But here I was, a question and its answer rising in my head to greet each other in tandem: could I go on the mulch now? Yes.

A MODERN MUSE; she is everywhere. text messages, last words, love letters, myth - different stimuli beating in the same circadian rhythm. the evidence is damning, and my wrists only write sober. how do you explain a ghost with no name?