The Scar Prompt

He didn’t mean it. We were out back in the grass, rummaging in the dirt, running across the parking church gravel behind our double lawn. We were little. There’s a picture of me as a kid I imagine I was around that time, a kid who could be anything, who could be a boy or not, could be a librarian or a Pulitzer Prize winner, with this mop of hair mostly brown but streaks of something lighter from the sun, maybe, or just the lighting in the room. Wearing a cable knit sweater like an Irish fisherman, like an investment banker on holiday, like a kid maybe-five years old who will grow up to be what I am. Hurt in the ways I’ve been hurt; still able to laugh out loud at a friend last week on a long run through town, carrying coconut water last week in a plastic water bottle, but wearing then gorgeous velour, I don’t know, maybe houndstooth britches as a five-year-old kid or so. Maybe it’s flamestitch; the photo is old and cut off, but I hope so. I hope flamestitch, or paisley. Jesus. My mom did so much wrong, so much violent and wrong, so much later that was violent and gender imposed, and she got this so right. This moment captured. Brown velour houndstooth, maybe maroon, though, and maybe chevron. A gorgeous, queer, could-be-anything kid. Smiling. This kid is the one I imagine running through the yard with my brother. Grubbing, laughing. Maybe fighting and bickering, but I only remember laughing. I remember finding a quarter near the gravel lot and smiling so big and laughing together. Running together. I remember finding something tall and forever in the quarter, limitless. Could be anything! and running together to share it immediately with our mom, to show her immediately! what we found and how much and endless it is!

It must have been spring, if there was really grass. If I’m not inventing grass. It must have been spring if we were running in the grass and dirt and across the gravel, finding a quarter, finding an ocean. Running across the grass with the sky in our palm to show our mom, across the grass to the doorway and through the door. Him first through the door, and then me, through the door. Him through the door as he opened it and me as it closed. Certainly it was spring, because the screen was still glass, the mesh not yet swapped in for the pane. The screen solid and firm, and then glass mesh. Not solid or firm. Then in pieces all around me, a kid who was blond and brunette and not a boy and maybe yes, and could be anything, who wasn’t quite yet in pieces. Who still ran and laughed and didn’t think it a wonder to laugh, a surprise. A wonder. Standing in a ring of glass bits, bleeding, from running through the door that closed behind my brother. From running through a solid door. From running through. The only time perhaps he hurt me that he didn’t mean it. The only time a quarter felt like a rocket. The only time.