To scrape your memory clean, you need only a handful of pills washed down with gin. You need a good wallop to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp granite. You need to take the prescribed dose of anti-malarial medication before the trip to the tropics. The combination of drug and sun and strange circumstance will have the desired effect, the wake-up in a stranger’s room, the philosophical conversation in a bar strangely devoid of smoke, you speaking in tongues, memory gone.But without my memory I am nothing. There is no story, no me. You could tell me about my life and I would smile and nod, sometimes gasp. Maybe I wouldn’t believe parts of it, just like I don’t believe the stories you tell about yourself, about first grade and that teacher with the wheedling fingers. He cornered you in the empty classroom and you knew something was wrong and then you let it happen again and again. OK. I can believe it. Maybe it happened; you wouldn't be the first. But the one about your mother, her fingertips coated in lotion, rubbing your bare chest as she tried to erase your budding breasts? The chair was cold, her hands were warm. You were obedient, pulled between pleasure and confusion.Are you sure that you're not confused now? I don’t need my memory to tell me that I am a skeptic. It's built-in, a defense mechanism, maybe, or just hardwired into me. So you could tell me about my life, the room done up in pale pink, my chenille bedspread soft against my cheek. You say he came in through the window after I went to sleep and the image is so surreal it could be fantasy, the fluttering curtains, the dark shadow of stubble on his familiar cheeks. And then, seven months later, in the same room, the push and shove of labor and my mother screaming. The silent bloody bundle that neither of us knew what to do with.Or you could lean across the table and tell me my secret, say that I let him in, did nothing to prevent it. The curtains didn't billow: the windows were closed. I unlocked the door and held out my hand for his. You could cup your hands and whisper, "Some girls get the ending they deserve."No. You could tell me and I would be polite about it, would raise my eyebrows in mock surprise, but inside I would fold your stories on top of themselves, like the handkerchiefs I wash and fold for my husband. I would make them smaller and smaller. I would compress them and leave them on the table for someone else to put away.Prompt: In the blink of an eye (heavily edited from the original and then avoided for a few weeks). This piece is mainly fiction, with some nonfiction thrown in. The narrator's viewpoint is not my own, though I struggle with the idea of what shouldn't have been.Image: Chair outside the Little House, Fall 1986.
