A Daughter’s Intuition, or My Childhood Skulls Memory
by Jillian Luft
I lived in Miami in the 80s. For most of my time there, I didn’t wear pants. Partly because of the tropical heat and partly because I was a tyke who preferred her natural state. It’s easier to sun and swim in your plastic kiddie pool when you’re unencumbered. The only thing I’d agree to wear were my huge rose-colored bifocals. I was three with a fivehead and a penchant for singing improvised tunes, reading in the dark even though Mom said I’d go blind that way, and perfecting a somersault.
In home movies from these years, I am always lurking slightly off-screen until someone asks where I am. Then the camera pans over to the toddler girl version of Benjamin Franklin conversing with tree stumps, murmuring wishes into her ill-shapen sandcastles. Her voice is that of a cartoon woodland creature about to teach you a lesson you didn’t ask to learn. No one understands what I’m up to and, honestly, no one cares.
So, it made sense I didn’t tell Mom or Dad about the skulls lining our fence that one night, all lit up like Halloween pumpkins from the porch light glow. Even now, I feel my shallow breathing, my Care Bears nightgown grazing my ankles as I kneel at the front of my bed, peering through the blinds and out into the dark. A row of dead faces adorning our wooden fence, front yard sentinels confronting me with their ghastly hollows. It is the utter stillness that gives the scene verisimilitude. The empty street. The crickets humming their nocturnal songs, the warty warbling of those massive toads that pile onto our deck at the hint of rain. I know the difference between this vivid apparition and the images my subconscious projects when I sleep.
Until I was six or so, my dreams appeared like surreal slideshows. Like lucid dreaming but stupid. During my REM phase, I dreamt I was tucked in bed, a reluctant and immobile audience, viewing film footage of strangers eating corn on the cob, of Phil Collins’ serious, shadowy face from that one video, of a variety of scary monsters culled from HBO. I watched and watched, trying to make sense of the things I didn’t yet understand. But this was not one of those movies. And I understood what I saw. A sacred glimpse of what the world really was, at what the human form became when it was no longer delightful rolls of kid flesh playing and prancing about. At what’s to come for all of us.
I didn’t have the words for this then, so I kept what my body understood a secret until I decided to tell Dad about it last year. The world felt like it was ending, and we’d been circling our shared family trauma, so I thought I’d lighten the mood. He was amused...and impressed that I recalled the fence and the position of my window in relation to my bed. You were so young, he mused. As if to say: How could you remember anything? As if to say: It was definitely your imagination. I wanted to ask him to put Mom on the line so she could weigh in. And when after a long pause, he said again, Wow, you were so young, I knew what he meant. And neither of us had to say it was too bad she’d died so long ago.
Jillian Luft is a Florida native currently residing in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Booth, The Forge Literary Magazine, and other publications. You can find her on Twitter @JillianLuft or read more of her work at jillianluft.com.
