Don’t flinch when the casefile, five-inches thick, drops with a thud on to your desk. Eat a light breakfast. Flip through each dog-eared page, breathe in the history of your soon-to-be client, a woman twice your age. Don’t search for family or friends, she has none. Read all the details in the badly-typed notes. Don’t overlook the scribbles in the margins; what is half-erased holds the unspoken truth.
Notice only the name of her caseworker changes.
When you meet her, breathe through your mouth or the mix of unwashed clothing and skin and ratty wig will choke you. Don’t hold your breath. She pays attention to the language of the body. Any stiffening feels like the slamming of a door.
Address her as Miss Jensen, not her first name as the others do. Show her the respect a human deserves. Ask questions, repeat them, compare the answers. Shift through the real or imagined. If you get duped confusing the two, shake it off.
Take a break from the work; search for balance. Accept the potluck invite from the senior admin, the team’s unspoken leader. Taste her spicy sausage, chicken, and shrimp pasta crockpot concoction. Welcome the exotic flavor of hot sauce as your tender lips swell. Pay attention to their conversation, their irritation when disrespected, the unkindness of certain staff in other units. Be the fly on the wall.
Pull back your shoulders and rally advocates for your client: from shelters, soup kitchens, housing, every do-gooder you can find. Insist they listen, insist they make calls on her behalf to agencies who refuse your call. Or better yet, make one of them add their address to your client’s welfare check application. Close the loophole of insanity which requires a home address for someone without housing. Beat down the doors that want to close to her.
Don’t avert your eyes. Study the pus-filled lesions on your client’s swollen legs. Don’t allow the ER doctor to dismiss her complaints as untreatable. Make them see the frightened girl inside the wandering woman.
But, and this advice is absolute, don’t dream about what you can never unsee, what you can never unhear, what you can’t change. Don’t let the details of her life enter your life. Don’t wake weeping.
And when she stops you on the street, maybe months or years later, and questions you about her check, ask her, “How you been, Miss Jensen?” She’ll ramble some but listen politely, nod once or twice, and when she quiets, point her in the direction of the shelter where her check now gets delivered.
Anne Anthony has most recently been published in Flash Boulevard, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Levitate Magazine. She is the author of A Blue Moon & Other Murmurs of the Heart (Anchala Studios, 2019.) She holds a Masters in Social Work from the University of Maryland and a Masters in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. She is a senior editor and art director for the online literary journal Does It Have Pockets.
Clear Shadows (Kumanaki kage, 1867) is a compilation of silhouette portraits depicting members of the kyōga-awase club by the artist Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904), which includes short biographies, picture riddles, and poems. [via Public Domain Review https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/kumanaki-kage/]
