Alexander Chee

Author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night (forthcoming)

Some memories that haunt me:

Trapped in the bathroom in the 4th grade by boys outside who say I need to use kung fu to escape.

A dream of being a woman with long red hair, and, as I wake up, gasping as I reach back and feel the close crop of my actual hair, still believing I was her and that my hair had been cut off as I slept.

In the lake at night in Maine, at 13, my first sexual experience with another boy, the light around us the color of a gun.

The red flood on the floor of a liquor store in San Francisco after the ‘89 quake, all of the bottles in the store broken open and seeping under the door into the street.

The water of the Iowa floods of ’93, coming in through the walls of my basement apartment.

The ashes of the towers falling on Brooklyn like snow of the wrong color, and knowing they contained human remains as I ran through them to get home, a wet cloth over my head and mouth.

Taking off my clothes after that, and bagging them, forgetting them, and then finding them three years later.

My spade hitting an old ceramic soap dish, a soap dish I’d seen in my mind for weeks, and knowing instantly the image had been the most useless premonition ever. Understanding also that the future might never reveal its most dangerous self, but just the dull parts.