When he was a baby, his mother tried to kill him. Of this, Mickey is certain.
Not possible, you can’t form memories at that age. Probably a dream.
CRADLE BY CAROLINE GRIEGO 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 47
When he was a baby, his mother tried to kill him. Of this, Mickey is certain.
“Not possible,” a girlfriend (he forgets which) had said as they lay in her sweaty bed. “You’d have been too young.”
“What?”
“To remember. If you were still in the crib. You must’ve been about one. Two tops.”
“So?”
“Infantile amnesia. Kids can’t remember before the age of three. Not for this long anyway.”
He’d tried to explain. Yes, it’s a fuzzy image, but there are these little snapshots, these little sensory details, defined and sharp; these make it true.
A ghostly figure looming above his crib, blurry like a reflection in a window at nighttime. Indefinite, in that peculiar way of memories and dream. He sees his mother’s face but, at the same time, he doesn’t see it. Her voice is an echo and he doesn’t know her words. Then her hands descend and he sees little shooting lights in a blackness.
The crib, he’d told this girlfriend. (Tammy?) The baby crib, handed down from cousins on his mother’s side, its history marked by nicks, scratches, and a few teeth marks. Baby Mickey’s chubby hands, his hands, feel the rough lines on the once smooth lacquer. It’s a sensation he recalls whenever a war or prison film shows captives etching the passage of time onto the walls of their cells, though he doesn’t tell her this last part.
The thinness of the mattress; he remembers that. Then there’s the heaviness about his waist and pelvis. A sodden load of a cloth nappy. He looks down and tugs at it because it is making him cold and uncomfortable. He’d tried to explain. These details, they give shape to the mistiness of the memory. They are unchanging and real.
“Not possible,” she’d repeated. Tammy? Yes, it was Tammy. Her bed. Her college room.
Smoke and patchouli. “You can’t form memories at that age. Probably a dream.”
“No, I–”
“Anyway, do you know how many cases there are of maternal infanticide?” she drawled.
“What?”
“They’re, like, so rare. Pass the bong will you.”