Killer Stuff and Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton

Once, in Columbus, Ohio, I choked up at Taco John’s, a brand new mom and pop joint, all spiffy with shiny stainless steel, but empty of customers. This is apparently because of the placement on my birth chart of the comet Chiron, “the wounded healer,” named after a Greek centaur who could heal everyone but himself. An astrologer once said that my soul bears the karmic burden of feeling others’ pain as if it were my own. I am a super crier, or maybe a super empathizer. Some people are super tasters or super smellers, or even super see-ers, with an uncanny ability to remember faces. “There’ll be no more tears,” he tells the child’s mother. In one scene, a man carries a pod containing the alien replica of a small child. In the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people who’d been replaced by aliens could no longer cry, a telltale sign that they were not human. Animals do not shed tears of emotion apes have tear ducts but only to “bathe and heal” the eyes.

Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. I hadn’t expected the quilt - a patchwork of many quilts - to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones. In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling.

Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Killer Stuff and Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton