Nonfiction Second Place, 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Contest

Sill

My earliest memory is of throwing a stuffed toy called Morgan out my bedroom window. Elongated isosceles body, silky white ears flowing past its own toes, a proboscis. Unisex, patterned after no known creature, with a pudding smell.

I must have been about three, my mother says, because of how I describe the bedroom. Pink oval of rug, a jewelry box on a small desk. On the second floor, looking down into a backyard, a swath of grass. That was the house in Minneapolis, she says. But who would have let you throw things out the window?

Morgan’s ears catching the air lift, like white sails parachuting. I remember elation and the flex of my forearm: I can throw things out the window! Between the moment the window swallowed Morgan and the next—leaning on the sill, peering down—was time. A fall, up until then, must have been an instantaneous thing (toys dropped from a highchair, a skinned knee from tripping) because my elation at the sill came from the newness of that moment of freedom between the window ledge and the white puddle on the lawn. Not from the fall but from being able to observe it, as if in slow motion. To see the distance between one event and the next. And, I suppose, to know that I had caused that distance; that I could manipulate time. From my bedroom window, leaning out, the afternoon light translucing the grass into chartreuse fragments far below, I released my grip on Morgan’s candy floss fur and observed the falling. I saw how things happened.

Morgan was not my favorite stuffed toy, but he lasted, and I remember seeing his long fur body years later, half-blind and dirt-mottled, clutched in the fat fist of my sister’s eldest girl.  How was it that Morgan was awarded the gift of longevity, when what caught and stuck in my memory was the elation, the power, discovered in those few moments when he fell through the air? I suppose that already, leaning my naked summer tummy on the white sill, I knew that things inside houses were not supposed to fly out of them, because things falling onto hard surfaces from far above might break. That was why I chose an unfavored stuffed animal and not something else—jewelry box, pink rug, myself. And perhaps that explains why Morgan survived; there were risks, and there was information, and both are necessary, dainty, sailing things with white painted edges.

Dinosaur Zygotes

I stuff Kleenex, wadded into round balls the size of peas, up my nose. They are made of tissue, fascination, necessity, and utter sense. I press the balls, delicately, with my pinkie, up as far as they go. The specifics of my reasoning have vanished into my pre-language brain; I can only say that they existed, and I held onto them firmly, and thought that those who tried to keep me from stuffing my nose (my parents) faulty in their logic.

I fish the balls out again, and examine their slimy golden surfaces; I am an archeologist poring for clues to the beginnings, or the end, of an ancient, lost animal.

Occasionally, I am caught, and the evidence removed with tweezers. I remember exclamations and frowns. “Why on earth?” There seems a great divide, perhaps the first time I notice it, between the way my parents think about things, and the workings of my own mind. They do not understand, and I have no way of explaining. And so I go into the bathroom, that windowless subterfuge, and shut the door.

Perhaps, looking back, trying to recreate my thought process, I am interested in the insides of my body? The purpose of my elegant scientific experiments is to learn what is inside my nasal passages, on the way to my brain? Yet I don’t put my fingers in my mouth, or stick beans in my ears, like my friend Polly. (I don’t think it occurred to me at that time that my body had any other entrances or exits.) Her mother complains to my mother about it, and I listen, and think merely that Polly must be stupid. Whoever heard of putting beans in your ears?

Box

The fingers of both my hands curl above me over the prickly rim of a cardboard box. My head follows, I peek over the edge at a tangle of Schnauzer puppies. This can’t be a real memory: why would someone put a litter of puppies in a box as tall as a three-year-old? And yet intractably in my mind are the pudgy, reaching crescents of my fingers, the scratchiness of the cardboard, the surprise of puppies as my eyes raised over its edge. Standing on tip-toe looking down into a half-view of wriggling jet fur, pointy ears, ridiculous Vaudeville whiskers.

The excitement of adults and joy faded into the background of some midwestern basement; what I remember is a flood of rightness, a tingling warmth like a vein unblocked.

My parents tell me that before the visit to a breeder of Miniature Schnauzers, I had been shown a litter of poodles and told I could choose one. My parents were baffled when I wasn’t enthused; they had thought a three-year-old wouldn’t be fussy, would love any dog. I don’t remember this at all. I do remember that Whiskers, the pup we brought home, had a low tolerance for cuddling; that she leapt through Minneapolis snow like a black rabbit, disappearing completely into whiteness at the nadir of her bounds; that she sat next to me on our Corvair’s red leather seat on the long stretching I-90, when we left the state for a new life in Tacoma. Even more pointedly than her cropped ears, I remember the vague discontent during the search for her, like a cloudiness, a nagging question— some kind of imbalance between me and the world that was righted when my eyes rose above the lip of that cardboard.

Locked Door Mystery

Once, I caused the bathroom door of our Minneapolis house to be locked with no one inside the bathroom. I believe this happened—although I have no memory of pushing the central button in the knob, or even knowing that doing so would cause the door to not open again—because I remember my dad exploding, and the subsequent argument between he and my mom about how on earth to get the door open again, and whether or not to paddle me, and not once in that argument did they question the primary fact that it was I who had locked the door.

My dad was a mechanic and he fixed things. The hinges for the solid wood door hid on the inside, unreachable, and the puzzle was how to get the door open again without smashing it. It must have been his anger—very uncommon, he was a quiet man—that marked this incident so strongly in my memory. But what I see now, looking back: the purity of his concern for the door.

Not until fifty years later does it occur to me that, if indeed a three-year-old manages to lock a bathroom door, that that is a problem with either the parents or the door, not the child. At the time, all I remember was that we three stood in the upstairs hallway, my dad yelling, my mom, face wet, pleading and furious, and the blank slab of walnut.

I was not afraid, I did not feel guilty. I had, possibly, in order to examine a wadded ball of nose tissue, locked the door. I was puzzled by both my parents. There were mysteries much more stolid than locked doors.

Neither of my parents remember this incident, and they both deny ever paddling me. And yet how then, do I retain this distinctive use of the word paddle?

The memories of this time, when I was three in the Minneapolis house, float, dust moats through the occasional sunbeams of my quotidian life. At the time of the origin of Whiskers, of my interest in orifices and the nature of time, I had so few words to attach to my experiences that the experiences themselves flutter, free body-less butterflies. Weightless, their measure is never taken, yet their repetition, no matter how fleeting, their longevity, no matter how fragmented, adds up over a lifetime to subconscious heft. The obscuringly wispy nature of these early memories, I am sure, has to do with my brain’s inability at that time to attach them to words. Those markers, those sorters and labelers of the past, that allow moments to be stored away and found again when wanted. The memories that endure are simply the ones that have managed to attach themselves to words, like snot to tissue. Sill, fall, ball, box, dog, door. It can’t be accident that most humans retain memories beginning from around their third year of life, and not before—it is at around this time that most children, like me, begin to string words together, make rudimentary sentences, use abstractions like “remember” and “ago”; that we begin to comprehend our ability to hold and tell our own stories.

The upper hallway of the Minneapolis house, my bedroom, the shag carpet, the balcony overlooking the main floor, the bathroom. The way the bathroom door opened inward on its hinges. I’ve described these things to my parents and, despite having resided in at least fifty other dwellings in their adult lives, they agree it is the house in Minneapolis, where we lived when I was a toddler just grasping, dropping, and stringing together—ancient beads—my first thoughts. Until we loaded all that we had into the tiny red car and like so many others before us, moved west into what we would be.

Kimm Brockett Stammen’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in CARVE, the Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, Prime Number and many others, and her work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies. Before earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in 2019, Kimm spent twenty-five years touring the US and Canada as a concert saxophonist. Kimmbrockettstammen.wordpress.com

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