After the bleeding stopped, after the doc’s questions while sewing and my explanations about how accident prone I am and how the craziest things do happen sometimes, after my flesh has spent weeks kissing itself back together, Myra comes to me, settles into the lawn chair next to mine, on the back porch, her tone honey sweet in the day’s fading light: “You know I didn’t mean it, Baby. You know I was just trying to get your attention. That was the liquor. That wasn’t me.”
I listen, but don’t, rub the scar the whole time, still pink, raw where the stitches used to be, row of twelve ridges under the pad of my thumb, a trail like breadcrumbs leading me back to myself.
Tom Weller is a former factory worker, Peace Corps volunteer, Planned Parenthood sexuality educator, and college instructor. His fiction collection And There Came Forth a Great Fish was published by Gateway Literary Press in 2022. He lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, with his wife and his big-hearted rescue dog, Beans.
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