Just a Flesh Wound
Me with my cast, Idaho
When I was maybe eleven, I walked into the bathroom and burned a piece of skin off the back of my hand on a curling iron. My aunt had left it plugged in for hours—it was hanging off the edge of the sink, waist high, and when I made contact the first layer of skin peeled away, leaving an indent the size and shape of a kidney bean. I thought it was okay at first—at least I don’t remember when it started to hurt, if it came with the shock of seeing a piece of my epidermis melted off, or if it was when I’d put it under cold water. I know it hurt when I applied the toothpaste—a neighbor had once told me it soothed burns. I had a hard time scrubbing the toothpaste out from the melted flesh. It burned mint-fresh for days. I didn’t let anyone see how bad it really was. My parents asked if I was okay. They scolded me on paying more attention and told me not to ever listen to irrational medical advice from stupid neighbors. They asked if I needed to see a doctor. Gripping my hand, careful not to put any weight onto the paste-filled concave, I said no. It was fine. I was fine. I didn’t show it to any adults until after it healed over. It seared red and infected around what had become a black scab mixed with fragments of white paste. It lasted days. Weeks. Longer. I hid it under a Band-Aid, and it eventually healed. Now I have a smooth, oblong scar between the bottom knuckle of my right index finger and thumb. But it’s okay. I’m okay.
* * *
There is nothing on my skin that shows where I was hit by a car, and then abandoned, while walking across a street in Rancho Mirage, California, when I was thirty-three. I have no scar. I wasn’t hurt. With no definitive proof of the incident, I’m not sure what to say. How can anything be important if it doesn’t leave a mark?
* * *
I don’t have a mark from when I broke my arm when I was ten. But I know it was my left arm because I was grateful that I could still write. It happened while I was visiting my grandparents for the summer in Genesee—on the sometimes green, sometimes brown and red, or white, rolling hills of the Palouse in northern Idaho and Washington. I broke my arm skating alone with loose, plastic Rollerblades at a school that sat on top of one of the infinite hills. By the time I hit the patch of grass that had been creeping up from the cracked sidewalk I was going so fast that my legs shook from the speed. Luckily, I managed to defy physics and push my body backward.
My arm didn’t go crooked or anything. It was just a hairline fracture. It wasn’t even immediately apparent it was broken. My great-grandmother—who was raised on a no-nonsense, Depression-era farm—assured me that I was fine. All I needed to do was roll my wrist around and move it as much as I could. “Like this,” she said, and twisted her hand in the air. I don’t remember how many days it took before we went to the hospital; it was sometime after I tackled my brother Mike, who had deep brown skin and straight black hair and an almost perpetual smile that showcased his crooked teeth. My best friend. We were in the neighbor’s slanted yard playing some game we’d made up. My bone was already broken, so falling on top of it with Mike just broke it a little more. The doctor said, “Hey, you want to see what a broken arm looks like?” before pulling up the X-ray. I can’t see it now, but I know I did see it then. Plus, there were witnesses. It’s always better to have witnesses. It doesn’t hurt anymore though. It’s okay.
* * *
I knew the car was coming before I stepped off the sidewalk. It was one of those moments when time slows and the body moves on its own and everything is silent except your thoughts. I knew the car was coming, but I kept walking, no longer in control. The car was low and blue and expensive, the driver oblivious and small—her head not completely visible over the steering wheel. By the time she made contact, I was in the middle of the street. My body reacted like it did in my skateboard days; I jumped without thinking. My body said up, and I went up, landing with both feet on the hood. Everything was so slow that I had time to look at my shoes and consider how the Converse-pattern soles would leave a distinct mark on her car. Already familiar with the rhythm of collisions, I felt velocity beneath me and imagined how much force I would have to transfer to fall onto the windshield if the woman’s reaction was too slow and she kept moving. But she stopped, and time resumed, and I fell backward. My right foot hit the asphalt. I crouched as I fell, my left arm behind me, and rolled. I felt the thud on my arm and thought, it’s okay if it breaks again. I’ll still be able to write.
* * *
Mike broke his arm three years later, when he was nine, at about the same age and in the exact spot I did. The difference was he was on a skateboard when he hit the patch of grass, and it was his right arm. His fracture left a mark—or at least the eventual surgery resulting from the break left a mark. They put him in a detachable metal brace and a soft cast that frayed and had to be changed often. While his body tried to recover, he kept skating and kept falling on his arm and was pushed around in a crowd after being dropped off at Warped Tour ’97 when we were twelve and nine, where we tried to find a way to get piercings and tattoos, until I had my wallet stolen while crowd surfing—and then, not only did we not get piercings and tattoos, we didn’t eat for the rest of the day. It took Mike forever to heal, and when he did, something was off. It hurt him for years, through our time in Puerto Rico and back to the mainland. It hurt him after he was kicked out of school and I dropped out, through his exile to the annex school after he was expelled, and back to public high school when he was allowed back. It kept hurting seven years after the initial break, even after I moved to São Paulo at nineteen to become a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—where I would hide my wounds more than I ever had before or since—and he stayed behind in Florida. It was around that time Mike was X-rayed, and they found a detached chip of bone floating around the warped ulna (how many years had it floated like that?). They cut him open, removed the floater, inserted a metal rod, and gave him a stack of opiates that would last maybe a day, since by then he already had the hunger for them that we would both know so well.
Mike in his cast, Idaho
* * *
I put the hole in my leg skateboarding at my high school in Puerto Rico. My board slipped from under me as I grinded a bench. It tumbled, and my right shin slammed against the concrete edge. It hurt less than you might imagine. It went numb. I thought it must have been okay. I mean, it was deep. I did see a gape, lined with layers of skin, and at the end of the layers a hole slightly bigger than a sideways pellet, and in the hole, white. The white lasted only a moment before the blood poured out. But I forced it to be okay, forced myself to stop thinking about how that white might have been my bone. I pulled my sock up high enough to cover the mess and took a bus to a friend’s house to watch Welcome to Hell. I was okay. I kept thinking of bones while we watched the skate video, of how they live inside a person but no one ever sees them. I thought of muscles and organs and all our moving parts. It made me wish that what I had seen really was my bone, so I could say I had seen it. I also wished that it really wasn’t. Because maybe then it would be a fantasy, and therefore impossible, and therefore okay. I wished, not wanting to accept what I saw as real, knowing that it was.
The next day my skin had scabbed around the hole. Not over the hole, just the large space around it. I pushed it out of my head. The day after that it started to smell like meat that had been left outside for a while. I was in shorts—wanting someone to notice—eating lunch with friends, when a fly flew into the hole. I jumped and slapped the side of my leg, and it flew out right away. But I had seen it happen.
I spent the rest of the day stomping, so that if anything were to fly in there again, I would scare it out. I could no longer push aside my terror. The stomping hurt. My leg hurt. Fear followed me through classes and the bus ride home. I shook and kicked the whole way, pretending to listen to the fifteen-year-old girl in the seat behind me try to tell me about an affair she had been having with a married man. My fear rode with me in the humid, tropical air that I imagined was riddled with parasites and rot. Everything rotted so fast there. I thought of our trash cans, whose metal interiors crawled in the night.
At home, I rushed to the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. The label warned not to use it on deep or scabbed cuts. I noticed what I didn’t want to acknowledge: the area around the lesion was red and swollen. I took off my shorts, sat on the edge of the tub with my foot pointed at the drain, and poured the liquid into the wound. The scab melted and ran down my shin, leaving the deepest, most infected chasm I had ever seen up to that point. The cut had bloomed. The concave was deep and smooth, wet, and the infected and swollen skin and meat had risen up—my own inflamed volcano in the middle of my leg. That little pellet hole was still there, but I couldn’t bring myself to look inside this time. The bone was still there, and I would need serious medical attention if I saw it. I kept repeating, it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay, as I put a Band-Aid over it. One Band-Aid that covered maybe half the crater. It covered only the middle, deepest part but left two cavities on the top and bottom of the sideways bandage. I continued wearing shorts so that someone would see and maybe take care of my problem. For a week no one did. “It’ll pass,” I thought. “No need to make anyone angry or worried or scared. I’m okay.”
The day I didn’t skip gym, the PE teacher noticed. I didn’t often go to his class, but when I did, I would sit in the top bleachers and read. He was surprised when I showed up in gym shorts. He gaped at my leg and asked me to follow him outside for a moment, where he asked if I was getting beat at home, if that was why I never went to PE. I said no. He sent me to the nurse. She was excited, jittery and, grinning, wondering out loud what to do with my leg. In the end, she tried to close it with butterfly stitches that popped off the second I left her office. She wanted me to ask the doctor if she had done the right thing when I saw him, pled with me to tell her what he said. I was a learning experience. I smiled and said okay because I wanted to be polite. I never did ask.
It took me a couple of more days to get to the doctor. One of my little brothers got sick and I told my mom I was bored and would go with her to take him in. By then the tiny hole had closed—though the swelling was maybe worse. It hurt to walk, and the skin around the crevice seemed to keep puffing up.
After the doctor finished with my brother, I said, “Hey, since I’m here … you think you could look at this thing on my leg?” I peeled off the Band-Aid.
“Oh, shit!” He called another man from the hall for a second opinion. This second man, bearded and tall, crouched down and stared at the leg for a long time. They muttered to each other for a couple of minutes before taking me down the hall.
“It’s too late to stitch,” the family doctor said on the way to the X-ray room. “After so long, and especially with that kind of infection, it’s too late to stitch. You should have gone to the emergency room the moment it happened. I don’t know why you didn’t go to the emergency room.”
After the X-ray showed my bone wasn’t infected, he calmed down some. “You’re about this close to spending the next six weeks hooked up to an IV in the hospital,” he said, pinching his thumb and index finger together. “Something like this could cost you your leg.”
My mom, terrified of what the doctor was thinking about her, kept repeating, “I had no idea. I swear I had no idea.”
Now I have a bald, smooth indent on my right shin, about an inch wide and two inches long—it’s shrunk over the last twenty years. But I still have both legs. I’m okay.
* * *
I saw the woman who hit me through her windshield before I fell backward. She looked frail. I was afraid she would have a heart attack or stroke because I could feel her sharp breaths in her wide, watery eyes, could feel the entire contents of the inside of her car tremble with her while the car itself stayed solid, heavy. There were two figures in the back seat, but the car rode low and I never saw their faces—chubby children? A senior citizen couple? All too afraid to move.
* * *
When Mike, in his late twenties, ragged and worn, was thrown out of his car after falling asleep at the wheel in the wee hours of the morning, he looked down at the blood and his twisted, crooked leg and thought he was going to die. He didn’t die then, but he lay in a growing puddle of gasoline as onlookers gathered. No one else was hurt. It was just Mike on the ground. Just Mike who had been in the car. He asked an approaching man for a smoke.
The crowd asked the man if he was crazy. “Look at all that gas!”
“Can’t you see he’s dying?” the man said. He gave Mike a smoke, lit it for him. The crowd backed away.
Mike smoked his cigarette surrounded by gasoline and spectators—and didn’t blow up.
In the hospital though, when the doctors straightened his leg on the table, he knocked over the tiny nurse who had been trying to hold his arms down.
* * *
The cops found scars on my arms when I was pulled over in the middle of the night in 2008, three years after I ended my mission, while on my way to buy pills from a one-legged man. I was twenty-four and sick and desperate. My tags were expired and my license was suspended and I was in possession of two used syringes and was infested with strings of track marks following the paths of my veins.
Some wounds pile on and on, frantic, erratic, and I guess the cops had been following my brother and me around for a while, looking for some anxiously made mistake, waiting until we tripped over ourselves. Who knows why. We weren’t drug traffickers. We were more stupid than dangerous. All I know is that a year later Mike was arrested, and the cops told him they’d been “on to us” for a while.
The pay phone outside the twenty-four-hour Walgreens prompted them to stop me, thinking I was in the middle of some major deal. I was not. I only had money for three pills, and the one-legged-man ended up not even having any that night. He just yelled at me over the phone because I owed him money.
When I saw the blue and red lights, I couldn’t remember if cops were meant to search the person or the car first, if they were allowed to search the car only if they found something on the person, or vice versa. In my confusion I put one rig in my pocket and the other under my seat, screwing myself either way.
“Do you have anything in the car we should know about?” they said. They asked me to get out, put my hands on the hood. They only asked for my license after.
“The syringes are my dad’s,” I said before they started patting me down. “He’s a diabetic.”
It was hot out. I was sweating and cold.
The lead cop clicked his flashlight on. “Turn your arms over,” he said. “What about those?”
“I’m a lifeguard,” I said. “I scratched my arms pulling a kid out of the water.” I was a lifeguard and was always pulling kids out of the water, almost always because of the parents’ neglect. Those were hero-scars. I wanted him to believe they were hero-scars. I wanted to believe they were hero-scars, because hero-scars are okay. I wanted my lie to make everything okay, like maybe if the marks were gone, the real reason they were there wouldn’t exist.
They didn’t arrest me that night. Instead, they gave me a ticket to go to court and followed me around the next few days. I never went to court. I moved to Arizona and spent the next two months working as a bill collector on defaulted student loans and chose to take the non-extraditable bench warrant and become a fugitive.
* * *
Who were those motionless figures in the back of the car? I know my reaction. I know the driver’s reaction. I know the reaction of the impatient people in the honking cars around us. But what about those people—were they people? I think they were dressed in black, but maybe that’s too cliché to be true. Did they really sit as immovable and stoic as in my memory? Were they stunned and clutching one another, too afraid to speak? Were they the ones to whisper to the driver to leave the scene? Twins? A long-married couple who’d taken on the appearance and countenance of one another? They could have been anything. Did the driver plead with them to remain quiet about the incident? Were they all friends, tied together by secrecies stretched over years?
* * *
My body is covered in secret scars. They make indents and slight discolorations in my skin; they hide in my bones, behind my eyes. I put most of them there myself. I was born with some.
Some remained hidden, lost for years, until I decided to disclose them:
Copyright © 2024 by David Martinez
