He broke his arm when he was young. Far too young. Three and a half, to be exact. His rebellious, rambunctious phase started earlier than it did in most boys. Made him prone to disobeying what his mother would call “strongly worded advice,” but what Chris would call “oppressive orders.” Or at least he would once he was able to form such phrases for his therapist about twelve years later, by which time his contempt for his mother was firmly crystallized. Like refined sugar. Only there was nothing sweet about the ever-worsening dynamic between them. As a matter of fact, at these therapy sessions, he would come out insisting to Claire that he was this close to unearthing the repressed memory about what really happened when he broke his arm at three and a half years old. 

Something about the whole story had never tracked for Chris. And since it was what forced him to learn to write and do everything else with his left hand, he resented the way in which she had changed the course of his life trajectory. Nay, who he was at his core. For “handedness” is nothing if not a key essence of who a person is. Regardless of what the “average person” might have to say about that theory. But thanks to being left-handed, Chris was no longer “average” anyway. And he knew the theory about being a fundamentally different being depending on whether you were left- or right-handed was true, and real. He wondered constantly at the person he might have been or become if he was still right-handed. But after breaking his arm, he was forced to become someone else. Someone that he didn’t necessarily want to be, if for no other reason than he didn’t consent to it. He was born a righty and transformed into a lefty. 

The nature of the break, which was severe, meant months of his right hand being muzzled while Claire decided to keep him locked up inside like a porcelain doll whenever he wasn’t in school. She would allow no sports, no outdoor activities—in short, no fun. That meant one of the few ways he could amuse himself was by drawing…with his left hand. So it was that a new preference for handedness was “developed.” Or rather, as mentioned, forced. What else was he going to do, not be the tactile, hyper-active three and a half year old he was? 

If he had maintained his right-handedness, maybe he never would have remembered breaking his arm at such a young age at all. He was sure Claire would have liked to keep it that way. But unlucky for her, whatever she did to cause the arm break resulted in this lifelong tragedy for Chris. Maybe he could have made a concerted effort to “go back” to the right, or flirt more often with ambidextrousness, but why? The die had been cast (in the form of an arm cast). His fate bifurcated and sealed. 

His therapist, Dr. Alegoría, a forty-something woman who wore beige-framed glasses and, usually, oversized sweaters over yoga pants, wanted to know why Chris was so fixated on this aspect of his life. Why couldn’t they focus on more important things, like his incel tendencies as they related to his mother issues? But that was the issue, couldn’t Dr. Alegoría see? The crux of his mother issues began at handedness—but more to the point, whatever she had done to cover up the cause of the early-in-life broken arm that had shaped his handedness. 

Whenever he tried to confront her directly about it, she clammed up. Wouldn’t hear of reflecting on such an “unpleasant subject.” And since his father wasn’t around, and hadn’t been for some time, there was no other witness (he believed) to the event for him to make inquiries. Claire was the lone, lacking-in-credibility source. But like any bad criminal, Claire had forgotten to cover her tracks, to conceal all the evidence. Specifically, the home movie Chris found buried amongst all the others in a box that was shoved to the very top left corner of Claire’s closet while he was looking for something he couldn’t yet name. Riffling through the twenty-plus tapes, Chris happened across one that was unlabeled…as though whatever was on it might be too unspeakable to label.  

Maybe Claire never got rid of the tape because she couldn’t imagine anyone would try to play it. They had gotten rid of the VHS player years ago, after all. But that didn’t stop Chris from riding his bike to the Goodwill and unearthing the necessary technology to play the tape there. Later that night, he waited for his mother to go to bed so that he could sneak downstairs and access the only TV that he would be able to connect the player into. 

Sitting there in the dark, Chris watched the staticky blue on the beginning of the tape turn into a scene of him jumping up and down excitedly in their old backyard. At the house he and Claire had lived in up until Chris was five, not much longer after the arm breaking incident. As he ran gleefully toward the hose to turn it on, he heard the sound of his mother, clear and stern, shouting, “Chris, you stay away from there!” She then ran over to him as he proceeded to defy her orders, turning the hose on and spraying it right on her brand-new skirt suit (Claire was a power businesswoman, who still wore skirt suits to this day). The suit was immediately soaked. And its cheap material caused the magenta hue to show up in traces of the water as it spread across the concrete. A stunned Claire, who had just come home from work and was highly irritable, looked from her suit to Chris and back at the suit again. Whoever had been filming, maybe the babysitter, then put the camera down haphazardly, perhaps thinking they had turned it off or not finding the time to bother. Whoever it was never reveals her face. Chris can only hear her reaction—“Mrs. Erickson, no!”—as she tries to stop Claire from yanking Chris by the arm so hard that he falls to the floor, landing on that arm when it was bent in such a way that the blunt force crushed it as it pushed it back upwards in all kinds of wrong directions for the bones inside Chris’ once-fresh arm. 

While Chris is still sitting there, too stunned to react, Claire takes the opportunity to slap him across the face. It is right after that moment that he bursts into uncontrollable sobs. The spectral babysitter is the one to pick him up and take him out of frame, while the camera lingers on Claire’s wet, dye-leaking skirt suit for another few seconds before she seems to have an epiphany and follows the babysitter inside. The tape stays recording on nothing but the backyard for probably twenty more minutes, but that’s all that Chris needed to see. Almost as if the angel of a babysitter, whoever she was, knew that one day Chris would be able to excavate this tape and find out what really happened. Maybe even Claire wanted him to as well. Why else would she have kept this? She obviously wanted to get caught. Wanted to confirm what Chris had known all along: she was a bad mother. And the one responsible for his altered course in life. His altered handedness. 

Staring at the now black screen in a state of shock, he was jarred out of his incensed reverie by the sound of Claire’s voice. “Now you know, I guess.” 

He whipped around to see her standing on the staircase behind him. 

In her matching white silk pajama set, Claire looked ever the sophisticated woman, even in sleepwear. And in that instant, Chris could fully fathom how things had always mattered to her so much more than he did. When he found himself saying this aloud to her, Claire only balked. “Don’t be ridiculous. I had just come home from the worst day of my professional career, beaten out by an unqualified man for a promotion I deserved, and there you were getting on my last nerve. Pure and simple.”

“If it was so ‘pure and simple,’ how come you never told me?” 

“I see how you are Chris. You’re always looking for more reasons to pile on to blame me for whatever you think is wrong with your life.” Her expression toward him softened. “I didn’t want you to have one more reason to hate me.” 

Chris glared at her. “Well that’s too bad, because I fucking do. I’m a freak because of you. A lefty. If we were in the fifties, they would call me a Red and lock me up.”

“Oh for Chrissakes, will you quit being so dramatic?” She started to walk down the stairs and approach Chris. For a second, he thought she might actually be trying to genuinely comfort him. Instead, she went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet and grabbed a pot out of it to fill with water so she could make herself some chamomile tea. “If anything, my little outburst of rage has made you more interesting. Who knows how much more banal you might be without this chip on your shoulder?”

And just like that, Chris knew his mother was probably a sociopath who would never understand the full weight of what she’d done, the trauma she had inflicted. As the years went on, and he heard equally as egregious stories about his friends’ childhoods, he started to think that might be the case with all parents.