by Nikki Mayeux
You don’t remember it, but
when you were a year old I sheared your little finger
clean to the bone in the fulcrum of the bathroom door
trying to play peek-a-boo on a cold too-busy morning—
I heard it. Not a crack but a crush,
a sickening I have not felt before or since,
not even when a young person stood across my four students from me
and held up a kitchen knife the wrong way
tight fisted, thumb on the tip of the handle, the blade a thrown die.
I screamed.
Not then but the other then,
the then when you stood in the doorway and jumped at my voice
before your brain registered the pain in your finger
I watched it arc up your arm and pixelate across your face like
an image rendering on a server with too little bandwidth,
rendering,
rendering,
rend,
and I’ve never been so fucking angry at anything as I was at that pain,
as I was at myself for just staring at you,
screaming,
a spectator at the zoo of you while your father scooped you up in his big hands
and looked over what had been done with eyes to mend it.
He told me later, while we held the bloody gauze and waited for stitches,
that two thoughts went through his head:
1. Every second counts, and
2. I can’t let her see.
I pulled you close, my hand over your chest an apology for
this slipshod motherhood,
this betrayal of bodies,
this chapter in your book I can’t unwrite in which I could behold any broken part of you,
any small spoiled thing,
and look away.
Nikki Mayeux is a queer ex-Evangelical writer from New Orleans. She completed her MFA in Fiction at the University of New Orleans and works in special education.