Here's another short piece from Percy's workshop. I actually finalized this piece awhile ago and have sent it out for submission, but it's footnoted and I didn't want to go through the trouble of figuring out how to do that on this blog. Now I apparently have lots of free time on my hands and can do that.

Scarred

I have seven scars on my body: three accidental, and four intentional. One soft, white dent; two red-purple skin blemishes; two former holes, pulled shut by time; two tattoos.

I got the first, accidental scar, when I was two years old. I don’t remember it happening, but I’ve memorized the story: a nightmare drove me into my parents’ room, fumbling through the dark, bumping into their bed, toddler hands grasping in front of me for the familiar warmth of their bodies. After my father soothed me back to sleep, he, in his bare feet and pajamas, was carrying my limp body back to my bedroom, when he slipped and fell, sliding down the staircase with his oldest daughter in his arms. My small freckled forehead, laced with towhead-blonde wisps of baby hair, knocked against each wooden step on the way down. Minutes later, my mother cradled me on the floor of the bathroom, held a washcloth full of ice to my forehead, screamed at my father, tried to prevent a scar. Human skeletons remain malleable throughout childhood, to allow for growth, so the bone remains slightly sagging even now, more than twenty years later, my skull with a small swoop in the upper right corner, smooth and barely visible. (footnote #1 here: When I first told that story to Kevin, it reminded him of one of his first scar stories: as a child, he was hit on the head with a baseball bat during a Little League game. He ran my fingers over the small, white ridge of a scar on his forehead.) There was no cut, never any blood.

Age 20, years deep into a rebellious streak, I got a secret, spontaneous tattoo because my best friend was having a bad day. We walked to the convenience store and withdrew fifty dollars in cash each from the ATM that didn’t charge a fee, and walked into Medusa Tattoo Shop. Cesar didn’t have any appointments that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a gauze bandage between my breasts, hiding a small, black ampersand permanently injected under the skin. The first people I showed it to laughed. Explanations (which depend on who I’m talking to and how much I feel like revealing): a—I love the English language, particularly grammar and punctuation, and I think ampersands are lovely (true); b—it’s to symbolize that I am an unfinished work and can always be added on to; to express my eager, interruptive personality; to keep my heart open to change (footnote #2: A few years ago, AT&T began running a television commercial whose slogan was “The conversation never stops with ‘and’.”). But I usually leave out the part about deciding on the symbol twenty minutes earlier, in Caity’s dorm room, because she told me to come get a tattoo with her.

A year later, I got my second tattoo, much more meditated, but equally a secret from my conservative parents, to memorialize the massive geologic scars of the places on the earth I have called home. Four hours bent over a black leather pillow, clutching it, crying into it, biting my knuckles, fighting the involuntary spasms of the lower back muscles. Black outline, grey ink, a permanent sketch based on the print of a t-shirt. Craggy mountains with snow on top, pine trees along the bottom: the White Mountains of my childhood, my coming-of-age Rockies, Adirondack future homes (footnote #3: A friend who saw my tattoo exclaimed, “I’ve been there!” Once, when I wore a bikini at a public hot spring in Montana, a complete stranger ran up to me, yelling, “That’s my mountain!” She literally had tears in her eyes.). I wanted a lasting reminder, a physical manifestation of the buried internal effects of those ranges, far beneath my skin.

I’ve never broken a bone, never had an operation, never spent any time as a patient in a hospital since the day I was born. But each land has laid its own marks across my body, just as time and weather and geology have wounded those lands.