Carroll Susco

My first memory is of my death. I was three, in the grassy area between brown brick garden apartments, where the kids collected. My mother was absent, perpetually absent, and my sister was coming out of one of those apartments after stealing a five-foot-long stuffed animal, a green snake with a forked tongue, like her. Who was I? I had to be terrible, too, but I wasn’t. My grandmother reassured me. She held me while I slept and called me an angel. If I was an angel, I was in the wrong place.

But there I was, looking for four leaf clovers when one of the boys got this look on his face (arched eyebrows, wicked grin). He came at me with a squirt gun, barrel loaded, aimed it up my nostril and shot it. My eyes rolled back in my head, and I fell backward, flat on the grass.

I didn’t know that I had died until I saw a glowing orb in an old man’s hands. I saw an old man’s face. He said to me, “The next sound you will hear will be your own voice.” He placed the orb inside my head gently.

I opened my eyes and said, “What happened?” My grandmother was running smelling salts from nostril to nostril and crying, her talc smelling stronger than what she ran under my nose. My sister stood over me looking like the guy who shot me. That kid had gone.

So sudden. So safe one second and then not. Just a stupid kid. That’s what I tell myself 60 years later. I’ve learned to laugh at myself about the so-called memories that I remember. That involve my sister. That involve mean people wanting me dead. Oh, so funny. The point is I want to tell my sister, is not whether it happened or not, but whether it could. I say, You know what I mean? But she and her snake have wandered off the beaten path of family ties, the ties that choke and gag as my mother used to say, and left me to perpetually ask what happened to no one until I get an answer. And so now, as I see it, God is real. The snake was real, the boy, the out of body. I give myself permission. I make myself promise, Don’t let go yet. I make myself promise, Trust me again. I won’t, I will. Someone has to steer this ship that’s sailed too close to the edge and could go over, again, any time. Any Time! And why do I remember God looking like the Grateful Dead figure? I never did acid.

Most people have nothing to help them exit, stage left. Maybe I imagined him, I guess, and I should give up this fish tail. Ha ha ha. But secretly I remember, “The next sound you hear will be your own voice.” It follows me to bed. I could sleep standing up. But there’s no need.