Brenda Moguez

My roommate, Marti, would tell me the same story whenever the stresses of college claimed my consciousness and left me alone on the bottom bunk roaming the ether. It amazes me still that she didn’t smack me over the head and bury me under the house because of all those nights that I kept her from sleep. Some friends are like that.

My story starts as hers did. I too was born. My mother, Patsy, best known for factual alteration tends to create the details on the fly. The fiction writer in me follows her lead.

I came into the world late February during a snowstorm. The streets in downtown Denver were clogged by snow that was knee high while the winds, blustery, bitterly cold, sang their freedom song dipping and dodging through skyscrapers and tree branches, wrecking havoc every chance they had. These days, ‘memoir’ doesn’t explicitly imply the facts are concrete, so you’ll no doubt forgive my liberties. I have fuzzy memories of those early days, but unlike Mary Karr, I couldn’t tell you what my Uncle Tubs said to me when I was three.