So serious. All doom and gloom. Come on, relax. Lighten up.
Amnesia
Nin Andrews
Rena could never remember her origins, and when therapists fished into her unconscious, trying to loosen the buried memories of the little girl, they found nothing but sunlight. One therapist interpreted it to be the light in an operating room. Or the light a person sees after being hit over the head with a brick, or when she dies and comes back to life. Rena was certain she had never been operated on, nor had she been bopped in the head. Adopted at age twelve by a hard-working and childless couple who milked Jersey heifers for a living, Rena’s first memories concerned only her tired parents and Madge, a red-haired woman who rented a stall in their cow barn where she boarded Jimbo, a dappled gelding. Madge dressed exclusively in lime green. Cashmere. Madge reminded Rena of luna moths she sometimes saw on the naked light bulb at night. Once when Rena skinned her knee on the gravel driveway, Madge dismounted Jimbo, picked up Rena, and hugged her close, pushing the small, freckled girl against her huge lime-green bosoms. Rena’s lips and cheek brushed her face, and Madge felt smooth and slippery as soap. Nervously Rena bit into the soft skin around her fingers. When Madge bobbed away again on horseback, rhythmically lifting and lowering her buttocks, her sweatered breasts slow-dancing, Rena noticed how the eyes of the farm hands and Rena’s father slow-danced with them. Even then Rena knew that bosoms weren’t just bosoms. Just as years later she would suspect that orgasms were not merely orgasms. They were tiny messages from the aliens, folded like cloth napkins in a linen drawer.
(From Spontaneous Breasts. Long Beach, California: Pearl Editions, 1998.)
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