The summer her mind reappeared for the first time in over a decade, she had packed the three kids, her husband, and their bathing suits, and moved them into a rundown, two-bedroom rental cottage, blocks away from the beach. The only thing she had to do that summer was decide what to eat for dinner and if bike riding happened before dessert or after.
Her youngest had turned five, and she let the kids take themselves to the beach every morning while she stayed at the house working out the school car pool with the other moms by email. Around noon she packed lunch and took it down to the boardwalk to join them. She brought books to read but mostly sat on a ratty sheet, covered in sand from the trampling of the kids’ feet, and watched the waves go in and back out again. She listened to the surf without distraction. They never stopped, the waves. They kept going, on and on. She used to think her mind was like the ocean, an endless force of motion that could not be stopped. But then she had kids, and her mind went somewhere else for a while.
You wouldn’t have known that she didn’t have her mind inside her brain. She thought she was still herself so it’s perfectly normal if you thought that she was herself too. Only she wasn’t. How could she be herself without her mind? Her mind was so sly! It snuck off without a word, hiding in the deep recesses of her brain, concealed beneath hand-knit baby blankets.
Her mind must have felt guilty about disappearing, because it left behind a machine in its place. The machine was reasonably capable. It organized play dates, signed up for after-school classes, and took extra clothes on long trips. It packed water bottles and always remembered to hug the kids. She might have noticed the absence of her mind, but the machine filled her brain with school supplies and shoe sizes, leaving no room for her. By the time the third kid arrived, her mind had completely vanished.
A damp evening breeze drifted in through the screen door along with the chatter of crickets. She had agreed to help a friend with a book proposal. She hadn’t drawn since her son was born, and she found herself discarding sheets of paper in search of something interesting. A buzzing near the back of her head distracted her mid line.
“Did you feel something?” she asked her husband across the table. He didn’t look up from his computer. “No, why?”
“Nothing. Never mind,” she replied.
She took out a fresh sheet of paper and drew a line that became a hill of ice cream. She felt it again, something fluttering below her ear, on the right side of her head. It tingled briefly like the pinpricks of a foot that fell asleep coming back to life. She moved the pencil in the air, trying to trigger the sensation through the movement of her hand. There! The rest of the evening she moved her pencil in increasingly odd motions, but nothing else happened.
That night, in bed with her husband sleeping unaware, she tried to recreate the feeling. She quietly moved her hand back and forth in the same motion, imagining her fingers curved around a pencil. Her head remained still. She drew gentle, soft shapes in the air, then, when nothing happened, fiercer motions to create jagged streaks in the space above her right hip. Increasingly agitated at the lack of response, she shook her hand hard, trying to dislodge the restlessness in her brain.
At the beach the next day, a rusty nail hanging from the underside of the boardwalk scraped open her son’s thumb. Admonishments from the lifeguards to keep the cut dry distracted her. She spent the afternoon on high alert, watching her son as he crept closer and closer to the water until she had to notice him and call him back. The cycle repeated continuously. The waves didn’t stop coming in, and he didn’t stop being tempted by them. Eventually she grew too tired to yell at him. She let the kids watch too much TV that afternoon. After a dinner where her son cried as he ate, or gagged, whichever way you see it, three green beans, she fell asleep on the couch to the lullaby of a laugh track.
She didn’t make them vegetables the next night for dinner, and they went to bed without a fuss. The drawing she started had become a landscape without telling her, so she added some sheep to the ice cream hills. Their spindly legs turned into tree trunks, and strawberry topped mountains filled the background. The buzzing in the back of her mind shifted to the left side. She tried ignoring it. She changed the strawberries to raspberries, and something sharp poked at her head. She gasped out loud.
“Ow!” she cried.
“What’s wrong?” asked her husband not looking up from his book. “Nothing,” she responded while rubbing her head.
She gently felt behind her ear, trying to isolate the prickly tingling rippling back and forth. The tenderness reached around the rear of her head. Sharper jabs occurred at random intervals, and as soon as she thought she had its most recent position, it would disappear and reappear on the other side of her scalp.
It was her mind gingerly poking around the edges of her brain, looking for space in the clutter of toy bins and coloring books. It seized the area once occupied by the preparation of formula. Then her mind took over the place where she had stored instructions on how to fold the stroller for carrying on the subway.
It was the stroller that finally revealed her mind’s deception to her. Her mind probably thought it was safe discarding the instructions. It had been years since they needed it. The stroller sat in a corner of the living room, where it had accumulated a pile of discarded jackets and umbrellas hanging from the handles. Once in a while, when it rained, she would remember that they had a stroller, but when the clouds cleared and the umbrellas went back on the handles of the stroller, she would forget again.
She removed everything from the stroller and bent down to collapse it. Wait. Was it the little black lever or the angled bracket on the right hand side first? She couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t she remember. She stared at the stroller, encouraging it to yield up the information. She moved from one side to the other, pushing and pulling on anything that looked like it might move, but the stroller didn’t budge. She tugged on brackets that should be bending and jiggled levers that should have been folding, but nothing moved. She kicked the lever harder, stepping down with all her weight even though she remembers it collapsed in a couple deft motions, not this clumsy tug of war she was engaged in. Furious with her inability to remember, she shook the stroller violently while ransacking her brain for the instructions. No amount of probing helped. The steps to folding a stroller had disappeared.
“Hey, can you come here?” she yelled for her husband in the next room.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“I can’t fold the stroller. Do you remember how to?”
He looked at her blankly. They had closed and opened the stroller through three kids every day for countless years, up and down two flights of stairs to the apartment door. He reached across her and in one fluid movement, collapsed the stroller. She frowned.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Yen Ha is a principal at Front Studio Architects in New York City. Her work was a Top 25 finalist in Glimmertrain’s Short Story New Writers Contest and has been, or will be, published in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Kentucky Review, Minola Review and the 2017 New Rivers Press American Fiction anthology. Her drawings and makings can be found at hh1f.com.