I am belly down on something soft, which surges and drops, like the sea. In my ear is a pounding surf. When I try to speak, I sound like a bleating sheep.
I am flipped over, and there it is, a woman’s face, hovering like a balloon. Her shining eyes are as black as Curt’s.
I wonder who she is supposed to be? I am so used to doctors and nurses, that I think she might be one, but she is wearing a loose white nightgown, not scrubs.
Besides, in slumber anything is possible.
All I want is Curt, who was just here, sitting beside me, my hand in his. The hospital bed was wet with my sweat, my auburn hair flat and dank, but it was peaceful until… the sudden desperate beeping, and the lights crazy blinking. I recall darkness, so maybe I had passed out. But there had also been something round and orange: one of those bright lights they use for surgery? Perhaps some painkiller has caused this current hallucination, made it so vivid?
Other women come and loom over me. They reach out to me with lavender-scented wrists, and lightly stroke me, like waves across sand.
“Look how tiny she is!” A girl’s voice.
‘Tiny?’ I’ve never been dainty. I clench my hands, sense how buttery soft my fingers are. ‘These fists, they aren’t mine.’
It’s just a dream, I counsel myself through the images, but still I panic, throw my arms open wide, then make a fist again, and push upwards. My hand reaches my head, and touches something spongy. My cheek.
“She’s like a doll! Maybe she’ll like mine!” It’s the girl again. A cloth face with sewn-on features is dangled before my eyes.
The doll’s grin is crude and crooked, menacing. I have crossed over into nightmare territory, and I scream, until I am moved toward something tender, intoxicating. A plump breast! It is strange, because asleep or awake, I have never put my lips around another woman’s nipple. I open my mouth wide, and drink down warm and sugary colostrum.
As I feed, my conscious mind pushes through, and I think of Curt, soothing my forehead, saying my name, “Annie, Annie,” before the machines went cuckoo.
There’s a murmur. “She’s a beauty, what will you be calling her?”
“Harriet. Harriet Harris. Don’t you think it’s got a nice ring?”
I nearly choke, and am spun into a football hold for some back thumping. Harriet Harris! Curt’s famous great-grandmother, born in Boston. The daughter of freed slaves, she waded through all kinds of discrimination to graduate from university, and become a medical doctor. And she was a suffragette way before there was even a word for them!
I am flipped back over. The bevy of faces moves in. “Aw, Jane, she’s alright. Just went down the wrong pipe.”
Jane. Harriet’s mother. I know, because I worked on that family tree with Curt. All of that research has clearly gone straight to the core of my psyche.
I try to look into the distance, but my vision blurs. So instead I peer up at the women. One has white lace at her throat, another a brown bow fixed to her neckband. The girl, holding her doll close, has her hair divided into two neat braids, and is wearing a collar as wide as a sailor’s. They look like they belong in a brown and white photograph.
But the world around me is full color. And unlike subjects in sepia portraits, these women are all smiles. I try to crane my head, and there are nods of approval. “She’s a spunky one.”
“Maybe she needs a little movement to hush her,” says the woman in the white lace. I am lifted, walked around. “See, honey, that’s a kerosene lamp,” she says. “And that picture on the wall is made from cut paper, it’s called a silhouette.”
Involuntarily, I whimper, then vomit, all over the beautiful lace. The women laugh. A piece of cloth is thrown through the air, but I only know this because a hand is briefly removed from my back, so that the lacy woman can catch it. I am near-sighted in the extreme.
“Mop up your bosom, Mabel!”
Mabel laughs, and shifts me in the crook of her arm. I stare at her other hand, and at the rag, as it scrubs away at the lace.
Suddenly, I know: this is no dream! ‘God help me,’ I think, ‘I have reincarnated backwards!’ I, Annie, who am, was, a linguistics professor, searches for a possible term. Preincarnation.
Could time really be this non-linear? Is it a closed circuit, eventually moving me forward to 1964, so I could become Annie again? Or could I next instead wind up anywhere?
Terrified, I feel my gorge rise again, so instead I try to hold on to who I am. My mind spirals into last summer, to Canada, and once again I feel myself standing on the deck of the boat which Curt and I sailed on Lake Ontario. I sense his arms around me, gaze out at the tree-lined shore. I even feel the wind lift my hair.
I savor it all, until it is pulled from my mind, stretched like chewing gum.
Until it snaps.
Now I know that I am supposed to remember something, but I don’t know what it is. I am being carried. I see a headboard, but it is just a flash of mahogany to me. It has no word. Neither does the bed where my mother lies, and I have no word for her, either.
Instead I am my body, and my body is me. I breathe in lavender as I return to the breast, latch on.
Then there is no me anymore at all – just my jaw, endlessly moving – and a flavor, endlessly sweet.
___
Brynn Olenberg Sugarman is a published author of both children’s fiction and speculative short stories. Her picture book “Rebecca’s Journey Home” (Karben/Lerner) won a Sydney Taylor Award in 2008. She has also been published in “Flash Fiction Magazine,” “Daily Science Fiction,” and “Cricket Magazine.”
She has a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton and a Master’s degree in English Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Paper Butterfly Flash Fiction 