When I was six years old, my mom packed a suitcase for me, the smallest one she could find and the most worn down, filled it with an assortment of sweaters and socks, and took me to the train station in a nearby town, in Colby, Wisconsin. I was born in Colby three days before Christmas in the winter of 1983 in a shack of a home along the side of a wealthy landowners farm. Because my father worked year round, the self-proclaimed philanthropist let our family live there during my mom's pregnancy, but once I was out, so were we. The new year brought more willing men to Colby, younger men, men with lower standards and even lower income requirements. My father didn't last long. Three weeks later, my father shot himself in the head with a .36 caliber revolver on his way home from the market. They found his body in a ditch below the concrete road only two miles from the farm, blood seeping into the bushel of parsley and grain as the snow fell forgivingly over him like a blanket. My mom moved into her great-aunt's house and raised me as best as she could, until one day her exhaustion and her loneliness caught up with her, and the only thing she could do was pack up and leave. Only I was the one who would be leaving.


...I got the idea of this story from a movie, which was based on a book, Wisconsin Death Trip. In the movie, there's this one segment that describes a woman who places her son on a train with a sign around his neck. The woman shortly thereafter disappears and the boy, unaccompanied, travels to wherever the train was going in hopes of finding someone who will claim him. Nobody does. He waits at the train station to no avail and ultimately dies of hunger in the snow. I thought this story was so beautiful in its simplicity. A child left alone to fend for himself when his mother could find no better solution to her own troubles.