It came from the hole in her knee, this new feeling. At least that’s your theory. So you turn away from the bathroom door and beeline to the safety of the sofa, but you find that the feeling is sitting right there next to you. You stare at it, mouth agape, and it jumps into you uninvited. You swallow on instinct and feel it nestled in your gut, right next to the place it first hurts when you get hungry.
You wonder if you have been accidentally hurtling towards this all summer. For example, you remember trying on your best friend’s older sister’s jeans in her full-length mirror and the dreadful disconnect that enveloped you. And there was that time you began crossing the street well after the hand started flashing, the thrill of survival as your own choice. You also remember the hours you spent perching hidden in a tree, memorizing the way adults walk through the park when they think they aren’t being watched, the power in mimicking their sighs and furrowed brows and distant stares.
Lying on the sofa you think about the weight of everything inside a body. Dense and squishy unknowns floating in too much liquid, mixing with your new feeling, which is still vaguely warm and flashes its origins back at you like a strobe light:
You peek through the slice of the open bathroom door at your mother crying and your own tears are wrung out of you instantly, like the uncontrollable sponge that you are. Your dad holds large bandages and the bottle that you know stings. He soaks a cloth with a tenderness that startles you. And all the while there’s that hole in her knee impossibly staring out at you. Red flesh and bits of gravel peppering it with a connect-the-dots allure. And now, a drop of burgundy (anachronistic, a time traveller, an intruder) falls from that portal in her knee, the one that tears apart the edges between your first ten years and whatever comes next.
