The nightmarish setting of Elena House-Hay’s “His Place” in the Fall 2025 issue of Beyond Bars will be familiar to anyone who’s watched a few episodes of The Wire: House-Hay guides us past the dilapidated row houses, broken windows, and midnight corners of an unnamed city, bearing witness to the tyranny of black-market capitalism, violence, addiction, and civic neglect. In her short essay, House-Hay recounts a series of experiences when, compromised by inebriation, she finds herself returning to a house—“His place”—she knows to be unsafe. Though the owner is a violent patriarch, she “will pass through His doors again.”

What drew my attention to “His Place” was its precise, controlled diction, leveraging opportunities to establish tension through tone: a pimp “worries the sidewalk.” The speaker feels “the grope of certain men’s eyes.” House-Hay’s language drips with anxiety—danger lurks in the bodies of strangers and acquaintances alike; inanimate objects bear the marks of hostility, aggression, and indifference. The narrator’s body, too, is a site of suffering, her “stomach bubbling” from Jägerbombs, her tongue “a pickled knot balled in cotton.” As a reader, I felt her vulnerability—and feared for her safety.

House-Hay makes a unique choice in “His Place” by narrating a past event in the future tense. The insistent “I will” constructions of House-Hay’s sentences create a sense of certainty in the unfolding of violent and traumatic events, as if to reflect the cycles of addiction and substance abuse pervading the essay. Speaking about the past as a foregone inevitability emphasizes the powerlessness of the narrator to alter her fate—it reflects the powerlessness one might feel under the influence of “plying liquor” or a man’s unwanted advances.

This dramatization of past traumas through the future tense is the essay’s narrative engine. As Freud defines it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “traumatic neuroses” arise from external disturbances “which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” (33) of our anxieties; that is, our mental preparation against dangers. When such breaches occur, the individual who has experienced a traumatic event “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as a physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (19).

In the case of “His Place,” House-Hay’s use of the future tense enacts this repetition—though the story takes place in the past, it is told as if it has yet to occur. After the assault, she must relive the trauma to protect herself from a future trauma which, in the story’s telling, is inescapable. There’s a figurative echo in the essay’s depiction of alcohol abuse—reliving a trauma to shield oneself from trauma is like drinking to cure a hangover. This, of course, is the tragedy of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the paradox House-Hay deftly evokes. I love “His Place” for its language that illuminates the dark streets of America; for the compassion of its speaker despite the desperation of her circumstances; for its recognition of the patterns of disorder. It hooked me like a sleeve on a chain link fence.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

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Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated and edited by James Strachey, W. W. Norton, 1989.

About The Author:

Chris Ketchum is from Moscow, Idaho, and received an MFA from Vanderbilt University. He is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week, and elsewhere.