MEMORY TRIGGER

by LUCY HELL

for Scott Allen, with love


The Cars sing, “Whose gonna drive you home tonight?” and I remember how you would have rather died than listen to that crap. I loved their music: “I don’t mind you coming here and wastin’ all my time …” but Kiss and the Scorpions were more your style. True to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Jethro Tull. I appreciate all of this now, the music giving me memories that otherwise would have died with the bullet in your head.

I fought with you evil-like, showing off my reading skills, shamelessly, as your dyslexia kept you caged—and every time I walked into your room without knocking I could smell the smoke, and never wondered what it was, but the natural fragrance of home grown plants somehow got replaced by the chemical odor of white powder on burning spoons.

I didn’t see you much and when I did Dad would be screaming, but you no longer had the pride to stand up to him. You needed money for your personal journey of self-destruction. The old man’s guilt so deep he gave you the cash every time. Maybe he thought about how he abandoned you to your psycho mom and violent step-dad. Maybe he saw you locked in closets, your body beat black—and did he know how they turned the bedroom lights on at 3 a.m., thrashed everything in your room, and then made you clean it all up?

I was in England when you died, ruled an accidental suicide, due to the game of cranked-up Russian roulette—you so foolishly had been playing, maybe, but didn’t you know the bullet would be for you? As the gun barrel revolved and each addict pulled the trigger, maybe you knew that night the pain would go away permanently.

“I guess you’re just what I needed, just what I needed. I needed someone to bleed.”

And it was peace that would drive you home.




Mystery Island Bottled Message No. 4
"Memory Trigger" by Lucy Hell. Launched: 5.21.05 by Mystery Island. 2005 © Copyright Mystery Island Publications.
All rights reserved.


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