BARBARA LAWHORN

Barbara Lawhorn is a finalist for the 2026 Subnivean Fiction Award. She teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Western Illinois University. She’s into community literacy work, mindfulness, walking her amazing dog, Banjo, running, eating pie, and finding the wild places, within herself and outside in the world. She lives joyfully in the Midwest with her two sons. Her most recent poetry, fiction, and nonfiction can be found at Iron Horse Literary Review, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Another Chicago Magazine, El Portal, and Santa Clara Review. You can find her on Instagram at @barbara.c.lawhorn.

THE POETRY OF FACT

In sleep, Silas is a body to behold. The comforter is kicked back and he’s splayed, his well-muscled legs scissored. His skin is pale. They are all pale, with allotted recess of only 30 minutes outdoors each day, combated with mega doses of vitamin D and government issued green pellets. His face softens in sleep, so Irene is able to see all of the versions of Silas, even Silas as an infant, asleep at her breast. If she was still a Screen Coach, she would begin with a wide shot that allowed the world to see his tastefully decorated, age appropriate mess. She’d zoom to his face, maybe place a soft filter on it, so he was haloed with golden light while she murmured something softly like, “That’s my sweet boy.” Then she’d cut to the kitchen, her well manicured nails featured (ads popping for the brands utilized) as she gracefully swooped out cinnamon rolls (ads popping again for the canned brand with emojis communicating mothers are allowed to cut corners if it means more time with kids), and placing them on the counter strategically next to a pitcher of orange juice, a platter of glistening turkey bacon, and a bowl of purple grapes that she’d misted before filming. She’d sing out his name and then go close with the camera as he entered, smiling sleepily, taking her kiss upon his wild hair like a benediction. She’d have to go remote for that shot, maybe camera three in the northeast corner of the kitchen, but that was an easy flick of a button on the remote in her pocket.

She isn’t a Screen Coach now, but she still pockets her remote and it roots her, and reminds her to try to live her best screen life even if no one is watching her. Susan and Mavis, who she brought on, basically forced her into retirement, and bought her out nearly a year ago after a particularly disturbing Silas meltdown live when her remote wasn’t fully charged so she couldn’t cut to pre-recorded videos showcasing her recipes, readings, and watching for the day. Susan and Mavis had presented a litany of the ways she had undercut the brand’s mission and disturbed their viewership. Her payout was such that she doesn’t have to work, ever again, but she’d insisted on continuing as a Screen Mentor, meaning she helps newbies with setting their intentions for their best online lives. She assists with teaching interested parties about the necessary equipment for filming, directing, editing, increasing viewers, product placement and sponsorship all via online, asynchronous training and weekly consultations. She cannot imagine her life without being, in some way, under the umbrella of the company she helped found and had named, Poetry of Fact, Inc.

She has effectively been cut off though, like an octopus tentacle that thinks and feels independent of the body it has been severed from. Isolation became a country she lived alone in after Silas was born. A sense of complete loneliness would descend when he was nursing, sleep settling fast, and she would stay, rocking in the privacy of night. He was like a dreaming dog whose legs churned or who whimpered at a dream squirrel, except Silas would dream nurse, his infant lips such sweet, pink bows. Bob could have been on another planet, even though he was only in the next room, asleep, and the only other human she had direct and physical contact with.

Now, at 12, Silas’ mouth has changed, his lips an exact replica of her own, although they wear all of the expressions she has trained herself against. He stretches his lips into grimaces, scoffs, knots, or pried wide open in ragged rage. It is all Irene can do not to climb into bed with him, and cradle him. He hasn’t hugged her in 16 days. She had brought this to Bob’s attention in bed last night, both of them plugged into their tablets with their blue reading glasses on, and he had grunted.

“How long has it been since he’s hugged you?”

Bob regarded her over his glasses, brown eyes hard. “Are you really keeping track?”

Irene sighed. “Look. It’s like a teeter-totter. Remember those? I can take his rage, and his belligerence, and his total obstinacy, but only if we have those soft moments. Otherwise it’s like being in a room with only corners.”

“How long has it been since we hugged?”

“Bob.”

“For real, Irene.” He put his tablet down and looked at her.

“I just. Sometimes, I just feel like you are completing a genetic sequence in the lab. I could be anyone.”

“Who do you want to be? I’ll fuck her. Do you want to complete the work I complete? Do you want me to keep my eyes open? The lights on? Do you want me to act like we haven’t done this before and before? Do you want me to pretend? You disappear. You don’t engage and honestly, it becomes work then.  What do you want, Irene? Tell me.”

“I don’t want to have to tell you. I just want you to know.”

“Irene. How am I just supposed to know? You have to tell me.”

“I know. I just don’t want to tonight.” She took off her own glasses and pressed the ridges where the glasses set on her nose. “I’m bored, Bob. With everything. Is this it? Is this everything? And when I’m not bored, I’m floundering with Silas. I’m exhausted. Meds haven’t worked. We’ve run out of experts to consult. I can’t talk to anyone else about this. Just look at Mavis and Susan’s live feed of lunch today. Both of their boys are dreams. Jonas braided chocolate Brioche for Christ’s sake. He’s five, Bob.” Her voice drops. “Silas. Do you ever worry? Like something is really, really wrong with him?”

“Oh, Irene. He’s just a twelve-year-old boy. You have to turn that shit off. That shit is staged. You know that better than anyone. What would happen if you turned it off? Honestly? Silas and I haven’t hugged in weeks. We have a handshake now. We keep building on it. We call it writing code. I just think the way we connect with him is going to change and we have to let him determine how he wants to connect.” He dimmed the light, and then warmed it with a small turn so there was a soft, forgiving glow. He put his tablet away, removed his glasses, and in a single motion, peeled off his shirt. He whispered, “Super Sexy Mix 33” in the direction of the ceiling and Leon Bridge’s “Coming Home” began. Bob swayed his naked shoulders and lip synced, “Baby, Baby, I’m coming home to your tender sweet loving.”

Irene shook her head, no.

“I am right here, Irene. Can we forget for a while? Can we remember each other? I’ll try really hard not to be boring.”

Irene reached out and traced the constellation of freckles on his shoulder with her index finger. He closed his eyes, and leaned in, thinking she’ll meet him in a kiss, but she examined his face, one she has not been away from since they married 17 years ago. They had compatibility tested across the board, and aligned on all 39 questions for sexual compatibility and relationship longevity, and once they had met, everything was mapped out and they felt that choosing one another to shelter in for life, including careering from home together, made good sense. They were of an age. Loneliness made the comfort feel concentrated. The sex was fine. Now, she thinks comfort is still exquisite, but it dulls the senses. She wants the wilderness of passion, and Bob is not a passionate man. She thought she understood what sheltering in and careering from home with a single person meant, but she hadn’t. Bob opened his eyes, and searched for her own. What does he see?

She wondered what she wanted, and she thought Silas, but Silas calm and kind and as loving as he had been at age 6, the whole world in astonishment at their relationship and learning from both of them how to navigate and create and become The Poetry of Fact. She had heard that phrase once when there was still radio, an author’s voice explaining there is poetry in the daily, in the facts of life, and she began live streaming her life with Silas. There were moments when the live streaming was evidence of something transcendent, and without artifice. Bob asked for his face to be blurred and his voice changed. This was a point of contention, until she determined he simply would not appear.

She misses her social commodity stock rising, watching it advance, and reading the comments from strangers, who became fans and then rose to friend status. Bob wanted her, but it is not at all in the big way so many people wanted her. They wanted to devour her whole life. They wanted to be her. She wanted to be someone other people wanted to be.

At that moment, she did not want Bob. She wished she did. Eyes open, he kissed her, but she remained still. She closed her eyes and imagined him a stranger, one she had no interest in knowing, only fucking, but he is too known to her and his Bob smell got in the way. With her index finger, she pushed him back, before turning away completely and pushing the button that pulled the mattress apart and sent her half of the bed to the far side of the room. She chose crickets to fall asleep to, bypassing Leon Bridges by stating “Irene’s Crickets Third Variation at volume 29” and ignored the fact that when Bob left the room, he didn't turn the light off.

From the hallway, Bob called to her without malice, just resignation. “Have you ever wondered if cruelty is a genetic trait? If it can be passed down? Do you ever ask yourself how it is, as someone who is so deeply bothered by a boy acting developmentally appropriately, that you can so easily extend cruelty?”

“I’m sorry,” Irene called out before whispering, “I love the son we made more than I’ll ever love you.”

“What?” Bob asked, “I didn’t catch the rest.” She let silence spread between them like an oil slick until she heard his steps, away from her.

 *

Irene, herself, walks away from the tableau Silas makes. What Irene thinks of as healthy detachment—what allows her to go about the business of her day without engaging with Bob on an emotional level or Silas, really, in any meaningful way beyond completing tasks—is actually just deep denial and disconnection. Maybe this is because of the fact that physical interaction is limited to only those members of your household, and beyond that, life is enacted on screens. Silas has known no other way, but at recess, the time when houses staggered at a quarter mile apart are allowed outside, getting him back inside is so hard Irene would like to bypass recess completely. He has run away no less than 32 times. The overhead drones have captured his recess violations, and Bob has cheerfully paid each one, and has managed to make friends with the clerk, and smooth things over with the truant officer. Silas always goes to a 5-acre manicured park encircled by the homes of the truly rich, who can pay for nature to be beaten back into submission, even while the road there has become reclaimed, wild and green so that Irene feels nervous and highly aware that nature cannot be trusted. When Silas runs away, he hunkers under the decorative bridge in the park.

He is enthralled with the historical fact that once there were homeless people. People who did not have homes. Bob told him that once there were minnows and toads in the creek that winds beneath there, and Silas insisted on unhinging his boots from the mandated outdoor dry suit and putting his feet in the water. When Irene had tried to stop him, he had wrestled her down to the ground and pinned her arms underneath his bony knees and howled wordlessly. She had lost all control, and she had seen his sharp canine teeth and thought he could kill her if he wanted or bound off. Silas always manages to find a stick to thwack at anything within thwacking distance, and he swings violently and sometimes hits trees repeatedly because he likes the sound of it. Irene cannot understand him.

His newest obsession is that he wants to camp like in the olden days. His latest outburst, which ended with him hysterically crying and hiccupping and holding a steak knife in a vaguely threatening way, was because he had watched a film, upon Bob’s recommendation, in which a group of boys had camped and found a dead body. What Silas wants, suddenly and very much, is to camp with real friends in a real world, not virtually with boys he has come to know by voice and gaming. Irene tries to explain the boys and girls on screen, in his classes and activity times and virtual camps are his real friends, but Silas screams, “How can that be? I’ve never seen them breathe! Maybe they are all bots, all AI. Maybe I am AI and I don’t know it! Maybe I am an AI hallucination! Maybe you are too and you don’t know it.”

*

Irene can’t help it. She blames Bob. Good-natured Bob who wants to share his childhood with Silas. Irene is always the one left to navigate the loss, the explaining of before and after, even though Bob is the scientist. He had delivered Silas under direction of their online birth team. What is now the bird room began as an addition built for labor and delivery. When she thinks of labor, she thinks of being totally alone on a glacier, and she thinks of the sounds that came out of her, a bit like the sounds that come out of Silas when he loses control. The room had been sterile, white, and cold, in case Silas had to perform a c-section. He hadn’t, all had gone better than the OB Screen Team had hoped, but it was an experience that made her see Bob in a different light. He was there as a go-between, a mediator, and not really with her,  not really with her in the experience as a father to be or as her husband. When they had done tele-therapy he explained he could not be. He had to distance in order to do what was required, but he had been willing to do so out of love, and had she ever considered for a moment what it cost him? How hard it had been for him? Of course not because he hadn’t expected her to, and why couldn’t she do the same and see how he had shown up, and tried, with everything in him, to deliver both her and Silas to safety. It had rattled her to think she had never considered what it was like for him, not once. It had stolen her words and made her angry.

When Silas, naked and still covered in vernix, was pressed to her naked chest, she wept with wonder and exhaustion. After Bob had cut the umbilical cord, checked her pulse and the baby’s, monitored her blood pressure and vaginal blood loss, felt the firmness of her fundus, and then expertly sewed up her perineum, he politely excused himself. He left the room, having properly incinerated his bloody surgical garb. Irene heard him crying, separately, and from what seemed from faraway, over a frozen tundra that stretched the distance between them impossible to travel. In tele-therapy Bob said he had to press his face up to the fragility of her body, the enormity of his responsibility, the tiny, slippery being that was going to become a human being, all while facilitating labor and delivery. Irene had raised her voice to exclaim, “I know, Bob. I was there. We agreed to it. We knew going into it what was required.”

And Bob had shook his head mournfully, and said, “The idea and the reality were two different things, okay? I did the best I could. I did.” He began to cry, and when Irene tried to defend herself the tele-therapist had whispered, “Shhh. Irene. Let him have a moment. He deserves this. He was changed by this experience.”

How dare they.

Irene couldn’t help herself. She looked at the eye of the camera and said, “Fuck you, asshole. I was changed by it too.” Then she disconnected and terminated services via a voice memo she considered professional, detailing her dissatisfaction, giving the therapist a two star rating, which was generous. Bob was still diligently attending and had worked up from client to therapeutic collaborator, therapeutically assisting his own therapist with her life issues and coming to a new, more intimate psychological relationship that authentically acknowledged the symbiotic nature of true mental health. Bob thinks it is really important to let Silas be Silas, not to force him into a mold. This is old school thinking, but his therapist thinks it important for Bob to assert himself as a nurturing father, rather than simply going with the mainstream agendered role and title of parent. If she gets to mother, he gets to father.

It was only after Silas began breaking plates and screaming he didn’t want to live like this, that something rattled loose in Bob, like a tooth. Together they pried away the last piece of their wedding china, and Bob collected him, folded him into his body and held him. Irene ran a hot bath and together they bathed him and put him in pajamas, and stayed with him, both on either side until he fell asleep.

Bob whispered, “I bet I can do this. I bet I can negotiate the sequence. We know where behavioral adjustments can be made, but nothing has been done on a broad scale because nature versus nurture, and Irene, it’s both. There are no guarantees. And we have to nurture him. You get that, right? And whatever happens, you can’t blame me. Good or bad. I’m just going to clip code. And it’s for him. It’s so he can manage. He wasn’t made for this world. But maybe I can just trim the genetic hedges and he can relax into life as it is, really?”

Irene wanted to tell him that if he did this for her, she’d try to love him again, and if she can’t, she’ll pretend.

*

Irene has never known what Bob does, really, in the back half of the house that the government furnished with equipment and secure computers. She knows he is a genetic scientist, but she doesn’t know what he really does or who he is when he does it. She only knows that everyone loves Bob, and all of his coworkers send old school Christmas cards and photographs and letters, real letters, just because he’s Bob. Bob tries hard at all things. It exhausts Irene. She knows it isn’t fair. Bob is hard to look at, because of his wide smile and easy nature. His authenticity. But Irene did not have to look at Bob or Silas for four days, as Bob does what Bob does in order to make life easier for Silas, and easier for Irene.

Irene spends that time in the bird room. For their 15^th wedding anniversary, Bob had the spare room remodeled extravagantly. The room has a high domed ceiling with skylights, and the walls are a series of shelves housing succulents and cacti and miniature palm trees and dwarf bougainvillea that self-irrigate. He brought in 14 computerized birds that had been programmed to behave as starlings and one actual living, lead starling. Irene cannot tell the difference between the mechanized bird and the living one, but Silas can, and the bird loves Silas in the same headlong way her boy loves the bird. Silas names him Freedom, and he flies to Silas and perches on his shoulder, then hops down and feeds out of his hand. Silas is gentle with the bird in a way that makes part of her heart feel like crumpled tin foil, but in a good way.

She sits, still, two years after Bob gifted this room to her, watching the small murmurations undulate in the high ceiling room, surrounded by green, and something inside of her unknots. In watching the birds’ flight formations, she feels as though the caged part of her, the hungering, desirous, wild and searching part has wings.

She also eats dark chocolate, and drinks gin and tonics with extra lime, and in order not to be strangled by worry, hooks into Susan and Mavis’ live feed and watches them live their deepest online truths.  It is like watching choreography she doesn’t understand, the way she felt when she took a modern dance class before the world changed. It was all undecipherable, and she just made her body approximate what she saw the other students doing so naturally. Her teacher always said, gently, “Get out of your head. Stop thinking. Get into your body.”

Only one day, a student named Amber called to her out front of Brophy Hall and took her down a short hill and into a huge drainage pipe that ran under the street. There, they got high, and when they were climbing the hill back up to street level, Amber caught her hand and tugged. Amber had directed her body, through touch, pulling her down, arranging her arms on the incline, wordlessly spreading out her hair in an artful fan before kissing her. Slow and steady, and then insistent, in a wordless language Irene understood even though she had never kissed a girl before or had known she wanted to, and then Amber had slid her hand inside Irene’s leggings, breathed in her ear, “You’re so wet” and right there made her come so hard in the silk of spring sunlight and the smell of fresh cut grass that Irene had covered her face with both hands, so suddenly shy, because what was inside of her must be written there on her face. Irene had not known she had been waiting for all of that until it happened. Amber gently took her hands away and said, “Hey.” And then she smiled with a great recognition, like whatever was on Irene’s face should be there and was what she had hoped for. That day, still high, still sex-stoned, Irene had danced without fear, and her teacher, after class, pulled her aside and said, “That’s what I’m talking about. Whatever you did today, keep doing it.”

Which was a ridiculous idea. She had avoided Amber, and had taken the path of parental expectation and met Bob through the most expensive matching app that allowed for holographic dates, and the world closed up into boxes and screens to protect them all from an invisible enemy and she had only tapped into that wilderness again when she had labored Silas into the world with the help of Bob and a team screen of labor and delivery experts. She thought she’d never want to fence in the love she felt, not ever, but she had no way of knowing she was like most people who would choose the known and controlled over the vast and wild space of uncertainty and becoming.

*

When Bob and Silas returned to the living quarters, they looked the same. Bob was exhausted and his eyes, well, always there had been a softness there, waiting. Irene had always thought of Bob as someone who just wants to understand—her, the world, and the way the body and mind work. The heart too. What does it say about her that she would reject his kindness? But whatever softness had been there had hardened. He was careful with Silas, and led him to the breakfast table with kindness. He regarded her from a distance though.

Silas looked like Silas. He smelled like Silas too—like summer and goats and sweat and sunlight. His smile was the same, except it didn’t reach his eyes.

Bob said, “Don’t forget to hug your mother, Si.”

“Of course, father. Good morning, mother.” Silas stood before her and placed his arms gingerly around her. His arms were wooden.

“Really wrap me up, Silas,” Irene said from where she sat. She pressed her nose into his chest, and then looked up into his face.

“Like this, mother?” He asked and he stepped away from her and put his arms into an approximated hug shape, like a ballet dancer holding a pose. “Is that right? Shall we try again? I’ll do my best.”

She thought perhaps he was joking, Silas who was a hug expert, whose body was made, it seemed, to hug hers. She thought of being a child, letting all the lightening bugs out of the jar, how decidedly empty the jar seemed without the illumination of their mating dance. She thought about how easily, at Silas’ age, she had gutted the insects of their light and bejeweled her ears and wrists with their glowing. Silas. Emptied and gutted of whatever raging fire he had held. Was it possible? Bob sat across from her, his head cradled in his own arms.

“Well?” Bob asked.

The Silas who was no longer Silas hugged her with a hard awkwardness and echoed his father.

“Well, mother?” And his question rang inside her with a terrible urgency, until both of them boiled over in laughter. “Did we get you?” Silas asked, hugging her tight so her wet face pressed into his soft t-shirt, for she had been crying without knowing it. “Oh, mom, I’m so sorry. It was just a joke. I missed you. I really missed you.”

Over dinner, she could not discern any real change in Silas beyond the fact that he was patient, leaning in to listen to them with his whole body, and laughing with his whole body too. He cleaned the kitchen without complaint, and then went to his room to do homework. When she went to Bob, he put his hands up.

“I’m exhausted, Irene. I mean, beyond exhausted. Don’t, okay? Just let me go.”

Irene retired to the bird room, to zone out on a hit of Susan and Mavis, and Silas came to say good night. The bird did not fly to him and Silas made no move to call it. He sat on the arm of her chair, arm around her shoulders, and kissed the top of her head. She saw how she’d film this too, and looked up, adoringly into her son’s face for an audience that was not there.

“Aren’t you going to call for Freedom?” She asked, and Silas shrugged, indifferent, face passive until he saw her watching him, and then he smiled cheerfully and blew kisses on his way out.

In the morning, cup of coffee in hand, she found Freedom, neck broken and abdomen splayed open, an accordion of entrails snaking out of the small and cold creature, laid like an offering, wings spread, on the same chair arm Silas had perched the night before. On the other arm, a mechanized bird was also unmoving, its entrails all wire and gears, but nonetheless unknitted and spilling forth too. The mechanized cluster of birds circled above, ceaselessly, like a small tornado or the persistent whisper of truth.

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