This is a Linguist-in-Chief Anne-Michelle Tessier guest post. You may remember AMT from being kind to strangers and having emotions about baseball, among other things. Today she takes on the confoundingness of remembering.
One night more than 20 years ago, I was out with two friends and we saw a man get tasered at a cocktail bar in Brattleboro, Vermont. I will call the friends Keir and Michael, since those are their names, and I will not name the cocktail bar, although I still remember it being called The Metropolitan. The idea that anything in Brattleboro could be urban enough to be called ‘Metropolitan’ is about as likely as the town having a cocktail bar in the first place. Also about as likely as someone getting tasered over your martini.
In the decades since, I have retold this story many times (how could you not). As a sort of cognitive scientist who also listens to true-crime podcasts, I am fully aware both of how episodic memory works—that it does not store frozen snapshots but rather assembles event reconstructions, which become more influenced and degraded every time they are accessed – as well as the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Then, some months ago, I received a text out of nowhere from Keir and Michael, updating me that they were visiting Bboro and drinking in the bar that replaced that other bar where one time that guy got tasered. And so finally, a few weeks ago when the three of us were making dinner and drinking in Toronto, reminiscing as old friends do, I asked what they remembered of this incident.
Predictably, but still amazingly, it was like a textbook case study of fallible memory. Almost every part of my account conflicts with theirs; between them there are also several fundamental disagreements. All we can agree on is (1) a man was in some way running from the police; (2) glass in the front window or door of the bar got broken; (3) a taser must have been deployed. Everything else is complete chaos of uncertainty. Who broke the glass: the fleeing man, a policeman, someone/thing else? Where was the man tasered: out on the sidewalk, inside the bar? From where we were sitting, what part of the action could we have seen? Was one of us outside smoking? (People used to smoke when they went drinking, kids, though oddly enough not me.) What did it sound like? Had we paid for our drinks? Most notable to me is that I was absolutely convinced that we SAW the man get tasered, like it happened IN the bar, in the open space between the entrance’s full-length wind-blocking velvet curtain and the long dark wood bar, I saw the stinger thing fly out and make contact with his back. Both Keir and Michael are sure this didn’t happen, and that the man was tasered somewhere outside (although possibly his collapsing from the tasering was what broke the front glass?) I grant you that their version is more plausible, in this inherently implausible scenario, but if so it’s wild that my brain painted all those images on its imaginative own.
So now.
The other week, I hit an animal while driving at night along the Westminster highway. This is a dark rural road, single lane each way, lined only with occasional farmhouses and other driveways, and a ditch running close alongside the road. Suddenly from one of these driveways emerged into my headlights a creature, light brown, quite big, moving somewhat slowly and silently. I hit the brakes and parsed it as a deer; the car behind me was not too close for immediate danger, but I couldn’t swerve into oncoming traffic and surely the deer would move, wait it wasn’t a deer… it was a DOG… and then I hit it.
I felt and heard the impact, possibly somehow two impacts? It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it also wasn’t at all good. I took a beat, then I found the closest safe place to pull over, told Howard and Bagel to stay calm, and RAN back along the bike lane to where I was sure I would find… a dead dog. Someone’s dog. A pet that I had killed. I felt slightly wild.
But: there was nothing.
The following series of moments cycled between confusion and alarm. I searched until it was clear there was no corpse. Ok – so the dog had run off to die. That was still horrific, but maybe if I could get help the dog would live? I rang the doorbell of the nearest farmhouse, and had possibly my worst five seconds of the year (already calling it in mid-January of 2026 is pretty bold I know*), when I asked the woman at the door whether she had a dog and she said YES and I had to follow with “I have HIT a dog and now I can’t find it” but turned out hers was inside and fine. (PHEW). So: me, Howard and Bagel (both on alert in the backseat and totally baffled) drove to a safer parking lot, where I made semi-tearful phone calls and eventually spoke to a very kind Animal Control professional who heard my story and said “You’re not the first, it’s not your fault… and I’m almost positive you hit a coyote.”
Ultimately, this turns out to make the most sense for several reasons. Much later that night, M and I went out to look at our front bumper, where I was convinced I had seen blood, but our phone flashlight revealed primarily large streaks of mud. The two impacts I thought I felt now make sense as the coyote being sideswiped by my right-side bumper and it then knocking against the passenger side door. And while I do not wish death to any wild coyote, I also know that I didn’t kill a child’s loving old companion or something similarly intolerable. (In fact, I probably only mildly injured a BIG male, hepped up on hormones in the pre-mating season – this being according to the Animal Control expert who drives those roads all year, and I will trust them.)
The reason this all made me think of the man tasered at The Metropolitan cocktail bar of Brattleboro Vermont is that my memory of the animal and the impact was so fresh that night, so clear in my mind. The headlights light up the figure, I see fur and ears… and I see a collar around his neck. You know, a pet dog’s collar. My memory tells me it was orange? And yet, I’m pretty sure now that the collar was my mind’s invention: that some part of my brain told another part that was a dog, remember the image of a dog and so a collar appeared.
Pushing a little further: if I dig in my mental file cabinet labeled “Parts to Rebuild the Westminster Highway Incident”, I do find the orange collar, but it seems perhaps to be tagged ‘unverified’. How long has it been there? Was it pulled directly from the scene? Or was it added in the seconds that I was running over, bracing myself for finding a dog? Where is the orange collar’s chain of custody documentation?
No answers are available, and so I must continue on in my state of ignorance and confusion. Sometimes it’s actually good news that you can’t trust yourself?
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*When I wrote this about a week ago, I was tragically WRONG about my worst five seconds of 2026, which now I really hope HAVE happened, and stay tuned for my next Rosecoloured piece on the topic of my new Broken Ankle life.
