by Pamela Painter
My new shrink wants me to talk about mistakes I made. He doesn’t use the word “mistake” but I know that’s what he wants to hear when he asks me to think about the past. I’m flat on my back in water-boarding position on a most uncomfortable chaise. It is our first appointment. I close my eyes, communing with my mistakes. Mistakes that bring me to tears. Not men, pets.
I tell my new shrink that as a child I was forbidden to have pets. All my friends had pets. My cousins had pets. I used to visit their pets. Then after college, I had pets. The three kittens were my first obvious mistake that morphed into two litters I didn’t have the heart to give away or drown. I moved out and didn’t leave a forwarding address. I think about those tiny cats. I tell him the fish were boring, but easy. I took them into the office. But the snake. Whatever was I thinking when I walked out of the pet store with a Ball Python the size of John Wayne’s belt. I knew immediately that it was a mistake. I refused to name it, unwilling to allow even simple syllables to give it definition, before I returned it to the Pet Store and its dinner supply of mice. I hear the tears in my voice as I remember the parrot whose lush voice was that of Maria Callas, except for all her toxic swear words. Here, tears spring to my eyes.
I sit up abruptly, swing my feet to the floor. I say, “The tiny miniature horse was…” My new shrink holds up his hand. He tells me there will be no charge for this exploratory session, but the session is over and alas he is booked solid for the next year. I leave. You are waiting for me. It might be a mistake to tell you about my pets.
PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections, and co-author, with Anne Bernays, of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Five Points, FlashBoulevard, Harper’s, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, New Flash Fiction Review, among others, and in numerous anthologies, such as New Micro. Painter’s stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on the YouTube channel, CRONOGEO, and her work has been staged by WordTheatre in Los Angeles, London and New York. Painter’s newest collection of stories is Fabrications: New and Selected Stories from Johns Hopkins University Press.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Mistakes I Made”? I’ve never been to a shrink, though I’ve known several, and I like the possibility of confounding them. I do not know why. I imagined the shrink in this tiny story hearing too much already and not wanting to get to “the miniature horse.” And I don’t know why I continued the story past the narrator’s exit from the shrink’s office. Perhaps she has learned something from this session–that some things are better kept to oneself. Perhaps.