Gaslight
Lenny DellaRocca


When you tell me something and I ask later what it was, you say you hadn’t said anything.
You say something a second time, then a third, but you deny having said anything ever. Maybe
I’m losing my mind. No, I lost my mind long ago when Michael hurled a stone, hit me on the
back of the head. But before even then, when I was 4, sitting on a red fence on the side of the
house when I tried to balance with no hands. The smell of my mother’s perfume. I fell backward. There was a thud on the concrete. I tried getting up but gravity was made of honey and my head was full of bees. Maybe in that blackness was where I saw her—the lady— hovering three feet above the ground on the other side of the fence. She spoke to me, rather she hummed or tingled in my head like a glass of water fizzing with a strange tablet. I think she said Write this down.