Close Your Eyes

(Flash Memoir) He left the room briefly and returned with a handful of Pixie Stix candy. “Want to play a game?” He asked, and I said yes because it involved candy, and I was six.

Sunrise at the Bonneville Salt Flats

I was six when my brother tried to kill me. Luckily, he was nine and didn’t know salt isn’t as lethal to little sisters as it is to snails. “Let me show you something.” He sat down next to me at the picnic table where I had placed the plastic bin I’d turned into a preserve for my mollusk friends. He pulled the snails out of the dirt one by one and put them on the table, then sprinkled them with salt. Instantly, they started writhing. As my brother laughed, my friends shriveled and stopped moving.

One evening my brother and I sat in his bedroom and played Street Fighter II. He often played Ryu, and I played Chun-Li. Despite our age difference I was a match for him, and he didn’t like that. He was often jealous of me, and that jealousy sometimes manifested in cruelty.

Once he lured me outside to ‘play a game.’ The game required me to hold one end of thin cotton thread from my mom’s sewing kit. He took the spool and let out length until we were about twenty feet apart, then took up the slack and shouted “Hold on tight. Are you ready?” When I said yes, he yanked the taut thread as hard as he could and it sliced the palm of my hand. I screamed out in pain and bled. My brother’s glassy stare broke into a sharp grin.

The night I kept beating my brother at Street Fighter II, he put down his controller and left the room. I played a couple rounds against the computer until he returned with a handful of Pixie Stix candy. “Want to play a game?” He asked, and I said yes because it involved candy, and I was six. “Lay on your back. Open your mouth. You have to close your eyes!” He instructed, and I obeyed. “Okay, ready? Open your mouth and close your eyes and then I’ll give you a big surprise.” The tart powder hit my tongue: grape—yum! Why is he being so nice?

“Open your mouth and close your eyes, and then I’ll give you a big surprise,” he said, and I obeyed because he was masterful at intentionally building and violating my trust.

“Open your mouth and close your eyes,” he repeated the sweet refrain, and I thought how lucky I was. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, hoping for cherry, when all at once my throat filled with an avalanche of acrid granules. Salt poured from the gaping metal mouth of the blue can over my sputtering lips and into my nose and eyes. I retched, spit up on the ground and began to cry. Everything burned.

My mom did what she always did when she didn’t know what to do and ran the bath. I got in and put my face and mouth under the water as I sobbed.

Over two decades later my brother killed my mom and took his own life. Afterward, I saw a trauma therapist who asked if he had exhibited any signs of cruelty in childhood and memories such as the snails, the thread, and the salt began to surface. “I think he might have been trying to kill me without killing me,” I half-joked.

My therapist didn’t laugh. “Do you think he knew the salt wouldn’t kill you?”

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