Hawaii Pacific Review

by Stephani Nur Colby

From the memoir Walking with the Ineffable by Green Writers Press

Sometimes the clinical unit felt as if, rather than being rooted on mothership earth, it was idly circling in the meteor belt deep in space. The twelve severely and profoundly cognitively impaired children who lived in its cinderblock and linoleum capsule seemed to ramble – those who could ramble – in a kind of Brownian movement, unfocussed, drifting by walls and chairs as if impelled by eccentric, unseen gravitational forces that sent them hither and thither, reasonless. The children themselves often seemed like lonely asteroids, shot out of the shattered core of some larger planet where parts of them – the parts that gave speech, sight, hearing, linear reason, functional ability, even varying degrees of physical motion – had been left behind. And here they were, still trying to live out their lives – butterflies with only one wing. Continue reading →