A History of Things You've Forgotten

             You are sitting on the curb in front of your house, your legs in the street, your knees resting together, your feet pointing childishly toward each other. It is past midnight, a crow is pecking at a robin’s broken eggshell. You watch the dripping rain make ripples conquering a puddle below a tree.

The memory is soggy scraps of newsprint. You try to paste it together, but it dissolves in the unknowable knots of your brain. You were lying outside the park, by the fence, and there was a figure standing over you. He smelled stale and musty. You couldn’t see the color of his eyes or the length of his hair, but his silhouette looked so daunting from the ground. Then there is nothing – you think that the shock blocked this memory from you. You do remember clearly, though, his footsteps as he walked away from you and the lingering pain of his oppressive weight pushing your body into the mud.

You touch your fingers to the inside of your thigh, on the cold, goose-bumped flesh that is beginning to bruise. You inch them under your shorts, towards an aching, dull pain – a slippery, sore, secret corner – and you can’t touch it, because it is no longer yours.

Walking into the house, you feel the warmth rush towards you and wrap its arms around you, inviting you deeper inside. The air pressure pulls the door shut with a loud crash, and you are startled. In the dark hallway, you see crouching men sitting in the shadows; they are waiting for your heart to miss a beat, and then they transform back into stacks of textbooks and unread mail on wooden chairs.

Your husband lies on the bed reading. The door is open. He hears you walk past the room but doesn’t see you. He doesn’t see your hair half out of its ponytail. He can’t see your bloody nose in the dark, either.

“Hey, how was your run? Did you see the moon out there? It’s orange tonight. Fucking eerie,” he says.

You don’t respond as you head towards the bathroom.

“Hello?” he calls out.

In the bathroom, you turn the shower knob far to the left until it begins to steam and you pull your shoes off without untying them. One of your toes on your right foot has bled through the sock. Your clothing is cold and sticking to you like seaweed. Your shirt is heavy from rain. While your eyes are closed and you are pulling to free your head from inside it, you hear the door open. You are stuck in your long, damp sleeves. Writhing and panicked, you look like a child, unable to undress yourself. Your breathing gets distressingly fast.

“Let me help you with that,” he says as he pulls the neck of the shirt gently over your head. His hands emit calm warmth to the back of your neck.

Almost immediately, he notices the blood on your shorts. He looks up to see hundreds of scrapes on your back.

“Oh, my God! What happened?” he asks, tracing your lacerated skin with his fingertips.

 “What the fuck?” he repeats, “What the fuck happened?” He looks over your shoulder towards your face in the mirror, his eyes beginning to water. He steps in different directions, wiping his face with the back of his hand, looking around frantically, “What the fuck,” he repeats, this time to himself.

You open your mouth, but you say nothing.

He puts his hand He fingers a rip near your shorts’ elastic band, and you immediately swat it away and turn to face him, clutching your shorts at your side and pulling them taut across your waist.

 He stands very still. Your ribs are outlined with dark discoloration. The bruising resembles a puce, topographical map. Under caked mud, your elbows and knees are scraped, but the bleeding has stopped. He holds out his shaking hand towards your cheek, and with the back of his middle finger, wipes blood from a cut just below your eye.

After a brief moment, you walk into the shower – a small room encased in fogging glass walls – and sit in a corner where the water does not touch you.

He follows you, without asking questions. His flannel pajama pants and stained white t-shirt darken as hot pellets of water hit them. You look at him, mouth open, trying to decide if the man in the park also took your voice. He mistakes the shower water for tears. You begin to rub the dried blood from your thighs; it’s easier now that they are wet.

The sun is beginning to come up when your husband gets you out of the shower, in dry clothes and to the hospital. He carries you to the car in the itchy wool blanket you’ve had since you were a child. In his arms, you feel a strange combination of helplessness and consolation.

In the ER, two nurses proceed to compile a rape kit from you. One is fat and the other has a tangerine complexion under sticky, gelled mounds of dyed red hair. “Rape kit” sounds like a craft to you, an anomaly; a set of instructions for a game without rules. The latter nurse conducts the ritual. They set down a white sheet of paper for you to undress over, so any evidential debris isn’t lost. They have to ask you twice to take off your clothes. In the room, cold and white like the teeth of a corpse, you can’t look in the nurses’ eyes as they pull your grey, crew-neck sweatshirt over your head, and slowly unbutton your jeans.

“She showered right after it happened,” your husband tells the nurse with the poppy-red, crunchy, bush of hair.

“Well,” she replies, “unfortunately that means that we might not find as much evidence. And since you didn’t bring in the clothing she was wearing when it happened,” she glances at the heap of fabric next to you, her lips pulled tightly across her face, “I’m going to have to ask you to bring it with you in two weeks when she comes in for a pregnancy test.”

“Oh, I see,” he says, patting the cowlick on the back of his head towards his neck.

The fat nurse is clipping your fingernails and the redhead goes back to plucking pubic hairs from you after having just combed and collected the loose ones. Their work is choreographed and meticulous. After the redhead is finished, she pokes your most secret areas with a q-tip, wipes what she finds on glass slides, and sets them down on the counter. She squints at the slides for a moment, turns her head a bit then subtly nods. The nurse cutting your fingernails moves on to taking digital photos of your entire body. You begin to shiver and rub your arms, and she tells you to stop and strand straight with your hands down.

You come back two weeks later – this time your husband can’t be there, so you go alone. Most of the bruises have faded by now, and your cuts have scabbed over. You pee in a cup and then wait awkwardly for seventeen minutes on the table with the stirrups, sitting sideways with your legs hanging off the edge. A different, fatter nurse tells you that you are pregnant.

“When was the last time you and your husband had sex?” She asks you questions off a sheet of paper on her clipboard.

You are watching her tap her Lipitor pen. You memory rewinds back to as far as it can and stops. It doesn’t want to go any farther back.

“Can you remember, or should I call your husband?” she says, pushing her eyebrows together.

“No,” you say, “no, it was the day before. It was a Thursday, and I had just finished grading papers.”

“Are you currently using or have you used any form of birth control in the past six months?” She scribbles something down.

“I went off the pill because we were trying to have a baby.”

You’ve never heard yourself say this.

“Oh,” she looks up, making eye contact with you for the first time.

“But,” you interrupt her, “that was almost a year ago. We were beginning to think I couldn’t get pregnant.”

The nurse is silent for a moment, and then tells you your options with the pregnancy. It is still early enough to take care of it without causing much damage to your reproductive system. The labs didn’t find any DNA that wasn’t yours or your husbands, but, unfortunately, that’s not unusual in these situations. Because you didn’t contract any infections, the baby has a good chance of being completely healthy, she adds after a pause, if you decide to keep it. After it’s born, she says, assuming you do, the hospital can perform a DNA test on it to determine if your husband is the father. 

You take in the mail when you get home. There are several bills and envelopes, Scientific American Magazine, and a small package from your mother. You haven’t told her anything, and she hasn’t called in a few weeks. In the study, you pick up a gold-plated letter opener that was part of a desk-set gift you got from your parents before going to college. You slice open the package, and inside are a pair of light, mustard yellow booties.

You open the second drawer down in your desk and put the booties and the corresponding, unopened letter next to a rectangular, turquoise Tiffany box that holds the silver rattle your mother gave you four years ago when you got married.

You took the last week off work, and the substitute teacher brought you your students’ lab reports in a fat, manila packet. Before you start grading them, you decide to leaf through your science magazine. Not many of the articles seem remotely interesting. You glance at one momentarily about the origin of the Cyclops myth. It seems to suggest that ancient Greeks mistook the sizable nasal cavities of elephant sculls for ocular cavities, thus jumping to rather absurd conclusions. This isn’t really very interesting; you’re not really a history person.

You are about to set the magazine down when you see a picture of a human brain surrounded by fog. The headline on the opposite page reads Rewriting History – how the brain creates false memories to comfort trauma victims.

You shut the magazine, but hold the page with your finger. You know no one is home, but you get up and slowly shut the wooden door anyway. Sitting back down you open the magazine and look at the article as though it were a recipe, reading slowly, your body hunched over, much too close to the desk.

The article is shorter than you’d like it to be. It doesn’t offer any sort of solace. Instead, it tells you that memory can’t actively be changed, and when it is done subconsciously, the individual is completely unaware it has even happened.

You lean back in your chair, grinding your teeth. You open the second drawer again, pulling it a little farther this time. In the back are four boxes of EPT tests. You close it and rest your hand under your belly button. Though it is still sunny outside, it begins to rain.

            You haven’t been able to sleep. The pamphlet the nurses gave you told you that this is normal. The past week, you’ve been having the same dream. It is very simple. You can’t remember it, but you always wake up with the sensation of falling.

Tonight it’s a different dream. You are in a field, on your knees in the sod. Nothing yet has sprouted. You are digging seeds out of the ground, one by one and tossing them in a can. Some are just black ovals, and others are broken, with little white shoots emerging from the shell. Though it is sunny, your hands are shaking. After a few moments, a branch behind you snaps, and you look over your shoulder and see nothing – just a line of trees. The seeds are easy to find, and you feel an urgency to retrieve them before they grow. Another branch snaps, and looking back again, you see a black figure disappear behind a tree.

            You work faster, but there is so much more soil to dig through. You start losing fingernails as you claw at the ground. Wiping off sweat, you smear dirt on your face. Faster and faster you dig until a great feeling of nausea overtakes you and you tumble down from your knees.

            Something under your shirt is moving. Putting your hands on your stomach, you feel wet, writhing mounds. Your fingers are a deep brick red. You look down and see open flesh and maggots. They are crawling in and out of view, burrowing inward, down, making food and homes out of your abdomen until they grow wings, and you are worthless to them.

A shadow appears from behind you, and you look over your should to see only a figure, black, the sun shining out from behind him.

You wake up with a start. You are not under the sheet, but your clothes are clammy and foreign from sweat. You glance at your husband, who is still asleep, and get out of bed, knowing he won’t wake.

In your study, you take out the yellow booties. You can see the half moon outside your window, his mouth raised to one side, asking you for an answer. The letter opener lays untouched next to Scientific American. You pick it up and hold its deceptively heavy weight in your fingers. You look back up at the moon, and you cannot see who he is – the face – because he is incomplete.

In your leather chair, you take off your purple, striped pajama pants and press the palms of your feet up against your desk. The letter opener is smooth and cold in your hand. Closing your eyes, you turn its tip towards you. Your feminist roommate in college told you that the word vagina once meant “sheath for a sword,” you remember, and you gently push the somewhat blunt dagger-shaped utensil in, past your cervix and into your uterus. Sliding it around the walls, you imagine the eviction of the two-week old blastula. You are severing it from you – eliminating any memory of your attacker. You pull the letter opener out and in the dim light of your desk lamp; you see a thin coating of clear liquid speckled with little, scarlet dots.

There is a rush of pain that rolls from behind your breasts up to your shoulders, and for a moment, you can’t breathe. It’s not a biting pain, but rather a collapsing ache. The muscles in your face contract and you are gasping for air. For a moment there is silence, and then you let out a guttural howl. Your mouth stays in the same, wide, ovular shape as you break into deep, burdensome sobbing. Tears fall onto your t-shirt. Mucus and saliva drip slowly from your downward turned face. You don’t try to wipe it away.

You thrust the letter opener inside once again, this time with terrible force. Something deep behind your navel pops. You let go of the handle. Your hand shaking, you bring it to your face and cover your eyes. The golden blade slowly slides out of your baby’s never again home, like a thief leaving carefully and silently, and falls to the floor with a subtle thud. The blood shimmers burgundy and brilliant, dripping onto the floor.

            Two weeks ago you went for a run at midnight. You often did this when you couldn’t sleep.

            Outside, it was quiet and brisk. You ran quickly in the dark with a small flashlight in your right hand, and a little red blinker on your right heel. This way everyone in the dark would be aware of you; it was a safety precaution.

            Without forewarning, you thought of the room you set aside for a baby. It was beige, boring, and held cans of paint and unassembled Ikea furniture and the small gifts your mother sent you in anticipation. A mobile. A picture book. An elephant finger puppet.

            In the park, you looked at the apricot moon over a hill. The face in it was certain and commanding. It was abstruse, and, like a bug in the night, you couldn’t take your eyes from it.

You took your usual path through the park that night. Circling around the tree line, towards the lake, across the boardwalk over the marshes, and finally back across a large, open field. You had to climb over a split-rail fence to get back to the road. As always, you stepped carefully on the first log and swung your other leg around to the other side of the fence. A rustling sound came from the woods behind you, and startled, you lost your balance. Your foot slipped and you crashed down on the top rail, scraping your thighs. You tumbled off the fence, into the soft mud, and smacked your head on a large rock on the other side of the fence, and, like a flip of a switch, your vision went black.

Every memory was an individual frame in the slideshow of your life’s deductive reasoning. These stills came from a nook in your head that wasn’t quite memory but wasn’t exactly imagination. Murky scenes of men hiding in the wooded shadows, watching you climb over the fence burned brightly in the projector of your minds eye. A blunt object hitting the back of your head. Cold, fat, fingers holding your biceps. The fading of footsteps into the rhythmic melody of raindrops dripping from large, waxy leaves. You awoke into a muddy, bloody, bruising life that flickered before your eyes, scenes clicking, out of order, ever clicking, clicking, clicking...

END