Sue William Silverman is an award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet of eight previous books, including How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences (Nebraska, 2020) and Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul (Nebraska, 2024). She is co-chair of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her most recent book Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader (Nebraska, 2025) was published in September.

The essays in Selected Misdemeanors are unapologetic word grenades lobbed into an otherwise complacent forgetfulness. Throughout the collection, Sue William Silverman focuses on pivotal, often fleeting moments that defined the course of her life, such as a fraught family vacation; an evening watching the Chippendale dancers’ extravaganza; a Pac-Man-and-whisky-fueled rumination on failed relationships; and the way melodramatic movies such as Rome Adventure shape an adolescent’s idea of love. Ranging from short to flash to micro length, these emotionally courageous writings imbue minimalist forms with maximalist emotions and an unrepentant, no-holds-barred attitude. Each action explored in this collection produces the Butterfly Effect—seemingly quotidian events rippling into emotional tsunamis.

AT THE APOLLO THEATRE

St. Thomas, circa late 1950s

My father sexually misloved me growing up, but that’s another story.

This story is about Marko the Magnifiko, a magician who wore a turban and silky Turkish pants. No shirt. Gold necklaces. A red bauble dangled from an ear.

He rolled a mahogany barrel to the center of the stage in this movie theater where I usually watched films such as House of Wax. But Marko the Magnifiko was real, the main attraction, and live. He thumped the barrel to show the children its heft. He scanned the audience seeking an assistant.

I waved my arms knowing, from the outset, I had to be chosen, selected over all the other kids. Having recently moved here from DC, where I was born, I already felt drenched in island magic, flowers blossoming in West Indian sun year-round.

And sure enough, there I was on stage!

The barrel lay on its side facing the audience. Marko the Magnifiko helped me on until I sat astride it, like riding one of the island donkeys. He squatted behind it, arms outstretched, his feet firmly planted. With his teeth he lifted it. I heard him straining under the weight. He raised it higher. I felt as if I were levitating . . . up, up, up a volcanic mountain until all of St. Thomas expanded below me. I imagined I saw the bank my father opened when we moved here; our Danish Colonial house atop Blackbeard’s Hill; my mother on the verandah painting watercolors; my older sister swimming in Magen’s Bay; the Antilles School, where I attended third grade; islanders shopping in Market Square; cruise ships in the harbor; all the blues and greens of the Caribbean Sea.

Then I was blinded by pure light. Not the tropical sun. A spotlight beamed from the ceiling of the Apollo Theatre. The island vanished. I couldn’t even see the audience. Nor could I see Marko the Magnifiko shadowed behind me.

In the glare, I was only aware of me, still on the barrel, perpendicular to his body. I barely breathed, didn’t move a muscle.

I sat perfectly balanced, six feet up in the air, even knowing Marko the Magnifiko’s teeth could pop out at any moment, sending me sprawling in splinters.

Was this real?

Was it worth the risk?

Did I think Marko the Magnifiko could abracadabra me into a little girl with a different father?

No.

But there was still magic in levitating, in seeing, and in being seen.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

I sit on a stool in Caribbean sunlight as a fortune teller asks to see my palm. Her Carnival booth, decorated with seashells, mirrors, and scarves, is in Emancipation Park, crowded with food stands and steel-drum bands. I’m only vaguely aware of the calypso music, the swarm of dancers. The fortune teller, in a red madras dress, sets down her palm-leaf fan. Bending close to me, she traces the lines on my sweating hand as the blue scarves billow in trade winds. Her predictions themselves are soft blossoming promises: sweet love, sweet marriage, sweet babies. In fourth grade, I am young enough to believe her foretelling, to believe the story she tells is my story.

The Life Line

What the fortune teller doesn’t predict is more important than what she does. She does not predict that the movie Sundays and Cybèle will upend my life when I’m a college freshman in Boston. The movie depicts a psychologically wounded veteran and a neglected child who engage in an intimate but seemingly nonsexual relationship that goes tragically awry. He is killed by an angry mob. Without him, the girl’s slender shoulders bend under the weight of loss. Neither character could foresee that their unsanctioned obsession would destroy them both.

She does not predict that, about the same time I see the movie, I will become obsessed with a man, Forrest, more than twice my age, who lives across the street from my college dorm. She does not predict how, as soon as I return from class, I will sit on my bed, nestled into the bay window, waiting for him to appear. When he does, he waves. I wave back. One day he lifts his blue telephone, a signal he wants my number. I glance around. Yes: my roommate’s vase of red roses, a gift from her boyfriend. Seven times, I hold up the number of flowers to indicate each digit of the pay phone in the corridor.

When it rings, I race down the hall to answer.

When he asks me my favorite singer, I say the Beatles.

“No, no,” he says. His voice is low, urgent. “Sinatra. Listen to Frank Sinatra.”

I perch on the stool by the pay phone, a wall of graffiti beside it. With a black pen I print the letter “F”: for “Frank,” for “Forrest.” I draw a rose-petaled heart around it.

Does permanent ink foretell a lasting future?

I no longer care about classes, about grades, about boys my age. I pretend Forrest doesn’t have a wife. All I crave is meeting him in his green Mercedes. He takes me out to dinner. He takes me out for sex. He promises love. Autumn nights he drives me back to my dorm in
Back Bay, his silvery hair bright with moonlight. Predictably, I don’t consider the distance to the moon, the loneliness in Sinatra’s voice.

By spring, Forrest disappears. But he never really leaves. He remains in the scent of red roses, in a black graffitied heart. Years later, I still listen to Sinatra. How can this lingering persist for someone I never really knew?

It perseveres because I gaze into the future for another obsession to replace him, and him, and him.