A Plate a Name, a Pile of Dirt
- Kristine Langley Mahler
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
On the window ledge in my office, I keep a license plate hovering just out of direct eyesight. The license plate is near a container of holy dirt from Chimayó I’d collected on my last visit to the pilgrimage site in New Mexico, even though I still had enough dirt at home after I’d scrubbed it onto the back of my skull, trying to stop the inexplicable spasming on the back left quadrant of my head, spasms that sent me to the emergency room on my 39th birthday in a complete panic because they wouldn’t go away and I thought I was having an aneurysm, dying on my birthday.
If I think about the head spasms now, several years removed, I can still conjure them back into being. It is a magic I have done accidentally, and so I try not to think about them, those spasms on my head that had caused me to cancel the new moon birthday party I’d planned for months. I try not to think about how I came out of my bedroom on the morning of my birthday to see our dining room, completely transformed by my daughters with handmade decorations they’d spent days creating, Animal Crossing coins and Celeste in her pink plaid vest, and how I burst into tears because I was so touched and so afraid of the head spasms that hadn’t stopped overnight and I didn’t want my daughters to know how afraid I was, I didn’t want my daughters to see anything other than my gratitude, I didn’t want to die on my birthday, I didn’t want them to have to hold that horror.
The future that hasn’t happened yet is a model I build every day. I panicked when my head spasmed, even though the spasms didn’t hurt, because I saw the future.
The ER staff dimmed the lights in my triage room, even though I told them my head didn’t hurt. They treated me like a migraine patient, even though I did not say I had a migraine. They gave me intravenous drugs that made me blur within seconds, slurring to the nurse, “I’m sorry but I…feel really, really…tired…all of a sudden” as she replied, “then it’s working” and she left me there in the over air-conditioned triage room, an IV stuck in my right arm that I couldn’t bend, so I couldn’t turn on my side to try to sleep, couldn’t try to conserve my body heat, couldn’t stay warm by curling into myself like a child. I lay on the tissue-papered bed, holding my arm as stiff as I could so the tube would not bend and hurt me, waiting for the head spasms to stop and they didn’t, waiting to fall asleep and I didn’t. When the nurse returned, she asked if the pain had gone away and I replied that I never had pain to begin with, it was just spasms that wouldn’t stop, and she reached for the IV as she said, “Let’s try it again” and I said no, no, please, I don’t want to do that again, I just need to know if this is normal.
I returned home from the emergency room and rubbed Chimayó dirt onto my skull and the spasms didn’t subside; over the next few days I had migraine injections and a chiropractic adjustment and ibuprofen and acetaminophen and nothing touched them. The spasms lasted for exactly one week and then they disappeared on the morning of the day I had intended to drive to Indiana to visit my best friend.
The license plate on my window ledge is from Indiana. The tags expired in April 1985 because the license plate was on the car my father was driving down a hill in Lafayette, me in a child carrier in the back seat, when a woman skipped a stop sign and crashed into us. My baby carrier flipped all the way to the front of our car and shattered the windscreen and the license plate on the back bumper of our car crumpled with the force, but neither my father nor I were injured. Surely my head was shaken, but nothing was ever reported internally to my parents or externally to a doctor. I was two years old.
I thought I kept the license plate on the ledge to remind myself to WANDER INDIANA: the license plate has a yellow band like golden corn tops, a green band for the cornstalks, a red band along the bottom to represent dirt. But I think I keep the plate above me so it can live beside the wooden carving of my name, which once broke in half when lightning struck my childhood house and the ceiling broke above my bed and cracked my name, a neat snap. But I was not broken. My skull was not crushed that time. I keep metal and dirt and wood on a ledge, and I hear the clicking of the cervical bones in my neck when I lift my chin to consider the times my head has lightened, the unfinished business.
It is at the back of my head always, those ligatures holding my backbone together and keeping me upright, and when they collapse so will I. It is a balance between doom avoided and doom deferred: by ducking beneath the hammer-fist of fate, I must be saving the blow for later. I know my destiny and I do not know when it will arrive; I know it is all in my head.
About the Author
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books, A Calendar is a Snakeskin, Curing Season: Artifacts, and Teen Queen Training (forthcoming 2026). A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska. She is the director of Split/Lip Press.