Author: Formation London

Stairs.

Blue, frayed, carpet.

The corner of a table.

A telephone hung high upon the wall.

A sound that I could later identify as the music of John Lennon.

All at different times.

More an awakening than an event.

Submitted anonymously.

The change to a dark, crisp mood of an early winter morning in 1968 turned the memory switch on and I would hate to see the invoice. I was barely two years old lying on my back, dumb to a single detail: I was here in a hospital room, the walls were blank, I was bronchial and looking through plastic from behind a tent.

Turning my head right to left to right to left, nothing gave meaning to anything. A line of light appeared for a door that likely opened onto the fray of a pediatric ward in the early morning hours, but in the room the line was only a difference which I noticed in no mood until, my heart and cries bolting out of my chest, I saw a nurse in surgical cap and gown looking down on me and reaching in. Did we live happily ever after? 

Submitted by Gina B. Lives in the United States, earned an MFA in creative writing in 2003, and has a few short pieces of fiction and nonfiction published in Redivider, BRAND, and the Feminist Review.

Looking up at a blue flashing light. Turns out, from much later on in my life, that I was in an ambulance after falling on broken glass.

Submitted by Simon Davies. Follow him on Twitter here: @simondtwit

Falling off a swing on the first day of nursery, and ending up face down in a pile of sand. I cried for hours.

Submitted by Mark Gristock, a graduate of the nursery of hard knocks. Follow him on Twitter here: @Mark_Gristock

Here, outside the terraced house in which I was born, 1964, on my back. I must have been in a pram. Children looking in. Dark skinned faces. Sky behind.

Submitted by Mike Bell, a freelance event and exhibition designer. Follow him on Twitter here: @MikeBellDotEu

Laying on my back as a baby, looking out of the bars of my cot with my cat curiously staring back at me.

Submitted by Marcus Michaels, a creative technologist who blogs and curates. Follow him on Twitter here: @marcusmichaels

 

The day my brother was born. Mum in hospital. Healthy apprehension in the air. Adults using towering vending machines, me watching things fall from three feet tall. My cousin had a model car. A blue one. Die-cast. Maybe a Ford. Maybe an Austin or something. This is 1985. Man, I wanted that model car. An afternoon with auntie and uncle, picking rhubarb in Ripley. An orange VW Beetle. I’ve always loved Beetles and rhubarb.

Submitted by Richard Birkin, musician, storyteller and  amateur Catastrophysicist. Follow him on Twitter here: @rjbirkin

All I can remember, before anything else: staring down the open mouth of a crocodile.

Submitted by Nathan Nelson. Follow him on Twitter here: @mrnathannelson

I strain to move my head and see where the blond parental unit went, she walked through a door with dark tainted wood panel and a large glass window behind me. Holding my head like that I notice the big bright flower pattern on what I’m lying in. What am I lying in? It’s sortof lying down yet sitting up yet lying down and … I now turn my head to the front to see my wobbly little legs – and look feet! I lift my legs toward me as I have an urge to bite my toes but can’t quite reach. I drop my legs down again. Ooooh. When I do that the thing I’m lying in moves, it bounces as I bounce. I let out a laugh. Fun! I kick and kick and kick and kick so that the thing moves, as I see the last golden hues of sunlight caress the yard in front of me as evening arrives and I kick and kick and kick and … I must have fallen asleep because I don’t remember anything after that.

I was three months old, and in a Baby Björn sitter on the back porch of a 1970s house.

Submitted by Åsk Dabitch, resident geek and leader of Adland.tv. Follow her on Twitter here: @dabitch