Cover Photo: Illustration by Sirin Thada for Catapult
Illustration by Sirin Thada for Catapult

Reflections on an Invisible Girl

People wanted to see the girl who’d disappeared and come back. They wanted to see Romy—who insisted she could not be seen.

Like the rest of the world, Lisa hasn’t seen her daughter in sixteen years. Unlike the rest of the world, she hasn’t tried.

Mary Maxfield is a writer, researcher, and organizer who strives to bridge creative arts, academic inquiry, and social change. Her work includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and explores queer experience and community formation, as well as the intersections of illness, trauma, and identity. (Bonus points for monsters or magic). In 2021, Mary received a Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellowship, as well as the Stone Soup Community Press Award. Her work has previously been featured in Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America, Feminist Media Studies, and Frontiers. Find Mary on Twitter at @mxmarymax or at her website marymaxfield.com.