The first thing I remember is the smell of wet corn. Not the lights, although I have drawn them a hundred times. Not the silence, although that was what frightened me later. Wet corn, the wool at the back of my neck, and the ridiculous certainty that I had forgotten to shut the kitchen door. There are memories that arrive wearing the important parts on the outside. This one hid its importance inside ordinary things.
I was six. Our house stood beyond a bend in a narrow county road, with fields behind it and a ridge of trees that seemed to me to be the edge of the world. My mother was washing a saucepan. I had been allowed outside until the porch light came on. I remember watching a rabbit disappear beneath a fence, then looking up because the birds had stopped. It was the sudden absence of them that made the sky feel close.
Three amber lights hung above the ridge. They were not arranged in a neat triangle, as I sometimes draw them now. The middle one was lower. They looked like holes through which a warmer evening was showing. Around them the blue of the sky deepened until I could see stars, although there was still daylight over the house. I thought someone had pulled a curtain aside. At that age I had no difficulty believing the sky might have curtains.
Something silver appeared behind the lights. I cannot tell you its size. The trees gave me a scale and then seemed to withdraw it. Sometimes the thing looked no wider than the field; sometimes I could not understand how it fitted inside the distance at all. A curved edge passed across the opening. It had no seams. Pale lines moved beneath its surface in slow branching patterns, like the veins of a leaf held against a lamp.
I was frightened when I realized the crickets had stopped too. I tried to call for my mother. My mouth moved, but the call seemed to remain inside my face. Then a feeling arrived that was neither a sentence nor a voice: someone had noticed that I was cold. That is the part people tend to change when I tell them. They expect a warning, a message, an announcement. I remember someone noticing my bare hands.
The warmth began in my palms. It did not spread like heat from a stove. It was more like remembering what warm hands felt like, and then finding that my body had followed the memory. I held them out in front of me. Above the trees, one light lowered a little. For an instant I saw a face, or the place where a face would later belong in my recollection. Long pale hair. An expression of attention. No movement of a mouth.
I do not remember going back to the house. I remember being there, standing just inside the kitchen, watching water run over the saucepan. My mother asked why my socks were muddy. The porch light had come on. She said I had been outside for ten minutes. I had the feeling of having travelled a long way without moving my feet, but I did not have words for it. I told her the moon had come down behind the trees.
For years that was the whole account. I made it smaller so I could carry it: an unusual evening, a child's dream, a trick of light on cloud. Then, at nine, I drew the silver curve in a school exercise book. My hand added a pattern of branching lines I had not consciously remembered. I sat looking at them until the classroom seemed impossibly noisy. Someone behind me asked what I was drawing. I closed the book.
I still have that page. The paper has yellowed and the pencil has rubbed onto the sheet opposite. It proves only that I made a drawing, nothing more. I keep it because the child who drew it did not yet know what a convincing story should look like. She remembered the lights slightly crooked. She remembered being cold. When I lose my way among explanations, I try to begin where she began: beside the fence, with wet socks, while someone washed a pan inside.
Anna
