Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 3, March 1990

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It isn’t just me, is it? Surely other mothers of little girls experience this uncanny sensation when time overlaps and folds back, when they feel they’ve lived this incident before in another body or seen it through different eyes?

For instance, when I tell five-year-old Beth, “You’re not going out in shorts in the middle of winter!” and she glares at me a long level moment before she stalks off to change, then I know — I mean I really know — exactly what she’s feeling. More than that, I am her, whirling away from my mother and biting back the rebellious words that would get me a spanking.

I flounce upstairs and yank open the dresser for those ugly woolen slacks, banging my anger, but not hard enough to bring Mama up with the fly swatter. (And how come that never gets put away for winter?)

With an almost physical jerk, I pull myself back to the present of 1965. I’m me again and getting irritable and if Beth slams the drawer just one more time, she’s going to get a smack on the bottom.

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