Chapter One
My life began when I was seventeen. Before that, I
have no memories. Although borne of a mother, I
am lost to her now, and the person I think of as my
sole begetter is the farmworker who found me one
early morning, unconscious, on County Road 104,
south of Davis, in an empty, dew-covered field, my
body, like a newborn's, blood-covered and naked. I
was airlifted to the UCD Medical Center in Sacramento,
where I remained in a coma for nearly two
weeks. When I finally opened my eyes, I remembered
nothing, not the field, not even my name. The
people I'd known, the places I'd been, and the things
I'd done, were all gone, vanished, as if they'd taken
a vacation without inviting me along. What I had
left were vague but certain understandings of the
way life worked: although I didn't know why, I
knew people ate eggs for breakfast and sandwiches
for lunch; I knew, without confirmation, that I could
type a letter and drive a car and set a table with all
the utensils in their proper order; I also knew, just
as surely, that I couldn't speak a foreign language
and that if I sat in front of a piano, I couldn't play.
Abilities stayed with me; people, places, and events
disappeared. For weeks, I'd look around the hospital
room, the wall ... read full excerpt from Panic Snap ebook
