A Memoir by Lisa Lynn Biggar

Our cat knows to escape to the bedroom when we practice our music—even after thirty-five years of playing together, we lose patience with each other. They say you hear what you want to hear, but that’s not always the case, and that was the case that night in early December, during a new moon, when I threw on my flannel jacket, donned my warmest wool hat, put a headlamp over it, then walked briskly down our lengthy driveway, bordered by woods on both sides. There was no snow on the ground—rarely do we get snow anymore in December in Maryland—but it was cold, in the high thirties. I had reached the valley of our driveway, the low spot where Mill Pond lies off to the right, when the headlamp went out, and I was left in total darkness.

I grabbed for the headlamp, and it went flying to the ground, along with my hat, and for what seemed like hours, though surely was only minutes, I felt around for them in the darkness on my hands and knees, to no avail. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the pitch blackness, but they didn’t, and my sense of direction, never good, was now non-existent. I tried to make my way back up the driveway but ran into invasive bamboo and briars and barb wired fences. I yelled for my husband, but my voice was as lost as I was. It felt as if my cries were being sucked into the silent void of the night. It felt as if I was the only person left on earth.

I wondered now what it would be like to step onto the surface of a dark planet, not knowing what was out there, not knowing whether you could even survive in these conditions, and if so, for how long. . . I took one small step, gingerly, cautiously, and then another and another, and then I found a clearing that led to a grassy hill. I climbed and climbed, and the sky opened up, and I saw the most radiant stars I have ever seen in my life—constellations guiding me out to the road, where a neighbor’s porch light shone like the star of Bethlehem itself, and I was reminded of when my husband and I first fell in love and how the stars would guide us on our walks from our tent to my grandparents’ farmhouse to take a shower. It felt as if we were the only ones on the planet then, two souls destined to be together. But what is destiny other than walking blindly to a place you could never foresee?

I found our driveway then, my eyes finally adjusted to the dark, made my way carefully back home, and when I walked in the door, my husband was walking out of the bedroom in his robe, fresh out of the shower, oblivious to all I had seen. 

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Lisa Lynn Biggar received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College. Her novella-in-flash, Unpasteurized, was recently published by Alien Buddha Press, and her short stories and poetry have been widely published in various literary journals, including The Minnesota Review, The Delmarva Review, Superstition Review Pithead Chapel, Litro Magazine, Kentucky Review, and Main Street Rag. She’s the fiction editor for Little Patuxent Review and she and her husband own and operate a cut flower farm on the eastern shore of Maryland with their two hard-working cats.