I want to believe I will have the courage walk on my own legs and that they will not have to drag me, as I have seen them drag others. At the edge of the great well, they will say prayers to ask the god to accept us and bring an end to the drought. And then we will jump into the cenote, or we will lose our nerve, and the priests will pick us up and throw us in. If we survive the fall, they will pull us out of the well, and the god will give us the gift of prophecy.

I want to be brave. I want to make this sacrifice for the sake of our people, but especially for my parents and for my little sister. But I am not sure that giving up my life will bring the rain. I am young, but I am not too young to remember last year and the year before that. The priests gave victims to the gods, but the rain still hasn’t come. Why do they think that this year will be different?

Once my father was gone for eight days, scouting with a party of warriors. When he came back, he told me about a man that they met in the jungle to the west. The man was tall, with long limbs, and he told them of a place many days’ march to the north where rain falls nearly every day, and of places far away where the gods make rain flow across the ground in a kind of roadway of water.

I don’t want to die. I want to escape to a place where the gods don’t ask so much of their people.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

But the babysitter was not as careful, even though she was 17 and should have known better, so sometimes he had to be careful for her, turning the handles to a safe position when she stepped away to answer the phone and to have long, giggling conversations with her boyfriend or one of her girlfriends from school about boys and songs on the radio and hair and makeup and teachers. But this time he was not watching, he was in the family room in front of the television, and he wasn’t supposed to have to take care of his sisters, that’s what the babysitter was for, but even though he was mostly paying attention to an episode of Star Trek that he’d seen seven or eight times already, in the back of his mind he knew that something wasn’t right, and he could smell the canned beef stew cooking, and he could hear it bubbling on the stove, and then in a moment he was seized by the vision of his youngest sister, the one who had recently become very curious about the universe of things above her head, and he could see her standing in front of the stove and looking up at the rattling pot and wondering what to make of the bubbles of stew starting to splash over the edge of the pot, and he could see her reaching for the handle, and he could see her pulling the boiling liquid over, spilling it on her face and neck and arms and screaming with pain and fear while the babysitter stood transfixed in shock or panic or disbelief, so he jumped up from the carpeted floor and ran into the kitchen and turned the handle on the pot away from the edge, and then he stormed into the hall, grabbed the phone out of the hand of the surprised babysitter, slammed it down on the receiver, and stood rooted to the floor in front of her, his face red with rage, angry tears streaming down his face.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

When I was young, I had a fantasy that as an infant, I had somehow been switched—by a wild and convoluted set of circumstances that I never went to the trouble of trying to contrive—with Prince Edward. Yes, that Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, the youngest son of the Queen of England (and Canada and Australia and all sorts of other places around the globe). The fact that his name was Edward and that we’re about the same age made the fantasy seem more plausible than any of the other switched-at-birth scenarios I could come up with. I hoped that some day the mistake would be rectified and I would get to go live in a castle and ride polo ponies and go to Cambridge and be third in the line of succession to the English crown. I let go of that fantasy long before Edward was demoted to seventh in line by the births of his nieces and nephews and became as bald and dorky as all of his male relatives. You only have to look at a photograph to know without a doubt that he’s Prince Charles’s little brother.

So it turned out that I’m just the youngest son of Jim and Jean Gumnick, and every time I look in the mirror, I see a little more of Dad.

As far as I know, our ethnic heritages or national origins include Polish, Austro-Hungarian, French-German (Alsatian, woof!), and Irish with maybe a touch of Pennsylvania Dutch thrown in. We can’t claim any royalty, nobility, or even commoners of great distinction in our bloodlines. But I think one of the birthrights of Americans of mixed ancestry should be the right to claim anyone you like as one of your ancestors—whether by genes, by culture, or just by affinity. And so I claim descent from Genghis Khan by way of his first grandson, Orda Khan, who invaded Poland in the thirteenth century. It’s entirely possible that he left behind some Mongol-Polish offspring, and I credit the Khan genes for my natural talent for leadership and my propensity for cross-cultural communication.

Culturally, I consider myself a descendant of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was creative, imaginative, left-handed, at least a little bit crazy, and is reported to have had a weakness for men much younger than himself. A man after mine own heart. I think I will start referring to him as “my uncle Leonardo.”

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

I should ask Dad about that old car. What was the model? How long did he drive it? I think he sold it for scrap when I was about eight.

I almost couldn’t believe it, but Dad said that he was the one who drove on my first day of school. He says my mother was riding in the back seat, and since it was my special day, I was up front next to him. He wasn’t sure what car I was talking about. I’m going to ask Larry what he remembers.

Larry is sure that the car with the tan interior was a Chevy Impala. “It was forest green, and it was what they called a ‘hardtop.’ That means that when you rolled down both windows on the same side, you had one huge open space that went from the post next to the front windshield all the way back to the little triangular window next to the back seat. That car was a monster!”

“I’ll have to take your word for it.” Larry was always a car guy. He went on to tell me a long story about taking seven friends to the beach in that car the summer he got his driver’s license.

Dad called this morning to tell me he’d found a photo of the Chevy, but it was blue, not green. I called Larry back, and he said, “Oh, yeah, my friend Billy drove a forest green car. I think it might have been a Caprice.”

I told him what had gotten me started asking about the car, about my crystal-clear memory of that fall morning at Emerson Elementary.

“Hm. You’re six years behind me in school, so you would have started kindergarten in, what? 1980?”

“Yeah, that math seems to work.”

“Then Dad was driving a white Oldsmobile with a red interior,” Larry said. “He never let Mom drive that car. He said it was too big for her to handle, but it was really just because that car was his baby. And when—”

I thought maybe the line had gone dead. “Are you still there?” I said to the silent line.

“Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking. The tan interior. Mom in the front seat, the way she kept one hand on the steering wheel even when she was sitting in a parking lot. Dude, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think you’re remembering my first day of school.”

My inspiration for what to do with the line was a podcast I listened to today. It was a 2006 story about “stolen” memories—a phenomenon wherein people appropriate memories they’ve heard from others, or to which they were merely witnesses, and incorporate the recollections into their own personal narratives. (Read more about “stolen” memories.)

So I decided to attempt a story about the unreliability of memory. Or maybe this actually happened. I forget.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

Their house was the fourth from the bottom of the row—fourth on the right as you climbed the street in the front, fourth from the left as you climbed the alley in the back. In the back, the outbuildings were landmarks to find our way into the correct backyard through a gate in the low chain link fence. All the fences on Mommom and Granddad’s street were of the same height, as if someone had started putting up fences at one end and worked their way up the alley. Most of the yards had clotheslines; my grandparents had rose bushes, too, and a garden hose and sprinkler.

From the front, you had to find the house by more subtle signs. All of the houses were of red brick and white-washed concrete, and all of the porches had the same open brickwork front railings. Mommom and Granddad’s house was marked by rectangular, whitewashed ceramic planters that were always filled with stinky red geraniums. The porches ran together in a row, ascending the street, separated by low concrete dividers that an adult could step over. A child could sit on the little wall and swing one leg over at a time. On one side, you could walk to the neighbor’s porch by way of the shared landing at the top of the conjoined concrete staircases on either side. Mommom and Granddad shared their staircase with Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie. Miss Elizabeth was friendly but stern with a surprising old-lady mustache and fierce eyebrows. Miss Marie had wispy white hair. She was older, very kind and sweet. She would invite us in and offer sugar cookies from a tin, but only if she knew that Mommom was away from home or busy somewhere else in the house.

Granddad had whitewashed the planter boxes to match the concrete face of the basement wall, below where the bricks started. Many years later, I stripped the white paint off of one of those planters to find a glaze of gingerbread brown with a wash of green highlighting the ivy pattern wound around the top.