My sister says she doesn’t have many memories from childhood. When she looks back, there’s nothing there: a blank screen. I never asked her if she saw black or white in her absence of memories.

   One of her earliest memories, one that became archival celluloid: my father, drunk and drugged out of his mind, chasing her and my mother down the block with a knife. My sister and mother ducked into a doorway next to the toy store around the block and hid there until the threat had passed.

   I don’t know where I was when this happened. My sister shared this memory so many times that I began living through it, as if I too had been there, and in moving through this memory with the propriety born from intimacy, I may have modified it. The knife, for example: Did my father have a knife when chasing my mother and sister? Or did I plant the knife in my father’s hand, based on another memory, one which belonged to an ex-girlfriend who told me that one of her first memories was of her father holding a knife to her mother’s throat. Did I combine the two fathers into one? Did I duplicate the knife and place it into my father’s hand, making me an accessory in this revised episode of violence?

   I had experienced my father during lunatic flights of rage, and knew very well that not only might he wield a knife during such moments, but he was also capable of slashing or carving into one of us with a blind fury. It was possible. The knife was possible. Mutilation or death … possible.

   When I asked my mother about the memory, she said she had no recollection of that happening. So, in her story: no chase, no knife, no husband. It was a blank screen. Whether she saw black or white in that absence, I don’t know, because I never asked.