In the Mystery of Me, ILLUMINATE takes another trip down memory lane. I’m five years old. We’re living in the second house I remember in a town called Rock Springs. This is southwestern Wyoming, flat and full of rocks, mesas, buttes, stark beauty everywhere, vicious winds. My childhood. So, I’m five and as usual Mom’s told us to go outside to play. Me and my older brother and sister. We make such an uneven three. I’m the baby, and after a few years of playing with me like a doll, I am discarded. My legs too short, my imagination too limited. So I go looking for my own game.
It seems strange now to think about this, a five year old wandering the street by herself, but that is how I remember it. Probably wasn’t supposed to leave the yard. Probably, I slipped out on my own, leaving my siblings secretly glad. At any rate, I found myself on the street behind our house. I think our house was on First Street, so that would make this Second Street. Rock Springs, too, had a limited imagination.
There was an empty lot in this block, full of dried dirt and dead plants. Sticks and weeds. And an ant pile. At five I didn’t know much about the insect world. I’d been stung by bees, my earliest memory (see this newsletter), probably mosquitos, though I don’t remember much of those until we moved East to Connecticut when I was 13. But ants were interesting. Maybe ants could be my playmates. And these ants were red!
So I watched them for a while. (Picture a small girl, in a dress, squatting on her heels to peer down at the busy ants.) I took a stick and put it down near the entrance to their pile and instantly they climbed up and onto my hands and arms. And started to sting!
I don’t remember what happened next. In the fictional account, the girl’s mom is there, scolding her even as she brushes off the ants, as she spreads a salve on the painful bumps. But I only remember the feeling of confusion and betrayal. I just wanted to play. Why did they hurt me?
But there was something else there in the lot. A thing I remember with great fear, so it’s a wonder I missed it when I went to play with the ants. It was a sunflower. All alone. Very dead. Black dried head on a tall bent stalk, much taller than me. Maybe I didn’t see it that day. Maybe I only noticed it when, in pain, I struggled to shake off angry, biting ants.
What I like about the story I made from this memory is the purity of a child’s experience. There’s no should or shouldn’t, no quick justifications we adults make of the things we don’t like. The only thing is the raw hurt. First, the betrayal of the ants, my would-be friends. Then, the horror of the plant.
Roger Corman’s “Little Shop of Horrors” terrified and confused me as a young person watching what was supposed to be a campy movie. There’s a scene where Seymour, looking for blood for his plant, sees a drunken man on the railroad tracks. The man falls in front of a train, and Seymour takes his body parts back to feed Audrey II. The image of him squeezing the insides of a hand, like emptying a glove, into the plant’s gaping maw scared me in ways few other movies ever had.
Fast forward some 16 years and I’m riding a cab in New York City when an ad comes on the radio for Little Shop the Musical and I can’t wait to get home so I can call my sister (friends now) to let her know. We saw it at the Orpheum Theatre and it did not disappoint. Ellen Greene stopped the show twice, breaking our hearts with “Somewhere That’s Green” and exploding our heads with “Suddenly Seymour”.
Me and pl-ants.
Does this help? Have you found me yet?
Writing Prompt
As a young person, what scared you in nature? Write the memory of this from a young person’s perspective and see where it takes you. Give the object (animal, plant, whatever) a voice and see what it has to say.
News
THESE THINGS THAT WALK BEHIND ME, by my dear David Surface, is out in the world. Available in paperback at Lethe Press, or, for a limited time, ON SALE as ebook at Smashwords for $3.00! Also available in paperback or kindle at Amazon.
“dark and haunting tales that explore the thin line between nightmares and daydreams” (Christopher Barzak, Shirley Jackson Award Winner)
Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival is October 19th. Our annual in person event at the Haverhill Public Library, Haverhill, MA. David and I will be there at the Haverhill House Publishing table with our books. It’s a great event, and FREE! LOTS of authors, and enlightening and funny panels. If you can make it, please stop by our table and say hi.
What if you had the power to heal your broken family? To bring back a lost loved one? Jessie and Jared are about to find out in a place called Angel Falls, where an ancient and mysterious power waits to fulfill their deepest wishes––with dangerous consequences.
As I mentioned last month, ANGEL FALLS is turning two! If you haven’t read it yet, please buy a copy through Amazon or your local book store and give it a read. OR visit your local library and, if they don’t have a copy, request that they order one. This helps us a great deal. Thanks in advance.
