Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: Mary Ardery’s flash autofiction piece “Assistant Guide” gives the reader a glimpse into the addiction recovery community, where the specter of relapse, and its attendant violence, looms large. The details that Ardery lays out—the handbook, the policies for using sharp objects—show us a world bounded by unspoken rules and specific routines. But what Ardery doesn’t tell us casts a long shadow over this piece. When, at the end of a candid conversation, a woman described only as “the group’s longest member” declares that “not everyone is so fucked up that they have to be removed from society,” the reader, like the narrator, is left wondering: is this really “just the truth”?
To hear Mary read her piece, click below:
Assistant Guide
We made it to camp with enough light left that the group had time to focus on their workbooks before dinner. The lead guide—who was in recovery, whom the women loved—hiked off with the satellite phone for afternoon call-in. I sat near the fire pit reading the guide handbook, still learning, as the group’s longest member unfurled her green sleeping pad beside me.
She wiggled her hands into Kevlar gloves and asked me for the knife. I put the handbook facedown on the ground—a page about snake bites. Do not apply a tourniquet, it read. Keep the victim CALM. I unlocked my backpack, then made eye contact—policy—as I gave her the tool.
Resting before her crisscross legs, her workbook was open to the page with instructions on how to build figure-four traps. She began to carve notches into sticks so that they would fit together snugly like Lincoln Logs. I watched her as the first wood shavings landed around her, to make sure she kept her gloves on, then I went back to reading.
Ten minutes later she asked, “Are you in recovery?”
“I’m not.” I looked up from the handbook, now a page describing the difference between poison ivy and poison oak. “But my dad is,” I added, as if offering an excuse, justifying my presence.
She nodded and stayed focused on her work. “So what made you wanna be here?”
I looked around the site. Two women crouched at the stream pumping water into their Nalgenes, one woman reclined against a sycamore to write in her workbook, a fourth, I knew, was napping in the tent. “I guess I’m grateful to the recovery community.”
She tested the notches she’d made to see if they fit together. “Did he ever go to rehab?”
“No, just meetings.”
She pulled the sticks apart, satisfied with her progress. “Yeah, not everyone’s so fucked up they have to be removed from society.”
I raised my eyebrows, unsure how to respond, and she laughed at my silence.
“Just the truth,” she said as she put the knife in its sheath and handed it back to me.
Mary Ardery’s work appears or is forthcoming in RHINO, Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week,” Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she won the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. You can visit her at maryardery.com.
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