When we were fourteen, our father punished my twin sister and me for watching Adult Swim by ordering us to clean out our late grandmother’s attic. There, Sis uncovered a straitjacket with our favorite great-aunt Florence’s name in needlepoint. As children we had found her risqué word salads at Thanksgiving hilarious, never dreaming she had been a shame the family hid away the rest of the year.

Sis ordered me to strap her in. Tight, like Mom used to hug us, she said. I cinched the straps and said, You mean, tight as her noose? Sis replied, You’ll never understand her, or me. That much was true—me, the football tacking dummy our father adored, her, merely a poet.

She wore that jacket goth-style all through high school, flunked out her senior year. That summer the two of them split for Manhattan, which so infuriated our old man he cut off all communication with her and the jacket.

According to a mutual friend, she wore it to job interviews, Yankees games, dental appointments, and dared lovers to loosen it. Did her hair up in a vortex, learned to drive with her knees, pick pockets with her teeth, and get herself off with her toes.

When she ran out of money, she knew better than to ask Dad, who would have charged her the vig of a loan shark. Instead she sold her arms, which she no longer had any use for, to a national limb bank. She used the money to hire a trainer to hang her by her chin from a pull-up bar every day until she was strong enough to win high-stakes cage matches by butting heads.

She named that straitjacket Jill, shouted love poems to it so loudly I could hear them back in Pittsburgh. None of the family was invited when they married in a bowling alley on Halloween. Soon after, I learned they had a baby boy, bought a conversion van, and went nomad. I received nothing but Christmas postcards thereafter, always the three of them posed on the road by a campfire, Jill by then soiled and wearing dreads of loose thread. There was never any message on the cards.

The last time I saw them, by wild coincidence, they were trying to flag down cars on the berm of I-80. I gave the three of them a hitch to the nearest Shell station, learning they had been thwarted on their way to Burning Man by a broken brake line. Sis insisted I leave them at the station, but before I would agree, I begged her for a promise to stay in closer touch. She said Jill was all the family anybody needed, and I should try a straitjacket myself if I was so damn lonely.

The only part of our family she really missed when they were trying to hitch a ride, she said, was her thumb.

Tom Barlow is a Pushcart-nominated American writer of novels, short stories and poetry, whose work has appeared in hundreds of journals including One Art, Ekphrastic Review, Voicemail Poetry, Hobart, Tenemos, Redivider, The New York Quarterly, and many more. See Tombarlowauthor.com.

About the illustrator: Dominik Slusarczyk is an artist who makes everything from music to painting. He was educated at The University of Nottingham where he got a degree in biochemistry. He publishes literature, nonfiction, and visual arts. In visual arts he has published paintings and drawings, photographs, and cartoons. His fiction came 1st in The Cranked Anvil Short Story Competition and his poetry won The Letter Review Prize for Poetry. His full-length poetry collection Reaction is out now with Cyberwit. He is on Instagram and X as @thedreamingseal and he has a website here.