Just a Flesh Wound by David Martinez

       ashley rose, CC


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Just a Flesh Wound
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    When I was maybe eleven I walked into the bathroom and burned the 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 think I thought it was ok 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 that it soothed burns. It soothed nothing. I ended up unable to wash the toothpaste out because I had a hard time scrubbing it from the melted flesh—it burned mint-fresh for days and no one saw how bad it really was. Family asked if I was ok. 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 adult until after it healed over. It seared red and infected around what had become a black scab mixed with fragments of white paste for a long time. Days. Weeks. Longer. It stayed hid under a Band-Aid, and I can’t remember when it healed, only that it eventually did. Now I have a smooth, oblong scar between the bottom knuckle of my right index finger and thumb. But it’s ok. I’m ok.
                                                                                                                                           *
    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. I have no scar. I wasn’t hurt. With no definitive proof I’m not sure what to say. How is anything defined without a scar? How can anything be important if it doesn’t leave a mark?
                                                                                                                                           *
    I guess I don’t have a mark from when I broke my arm when I was ten. I know it was my left arm because I remember I was grateful that I could still write, even though I hadn’t been writing anything. 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 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 were shaking from the speed. At least I somehow managed to defy physics and push my body backward.
    My arm didn’t go crooked or anything. It wasn’t that bad. Just a hairline fracture. It wasn’t even immediately apparent it was broken, so much that my great-grandmother—who was raised on a no-nonsense, depression-era farm—assured me that I was fine and 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 on the neighbor’s slanted yard during some game we’d made up. The doctor said, “Hey, you want to see what a broken arm looks like?” before pulling up the x-ray. Now I know what a broken arm looks like. I can’t see it now, but I know I did see it. Plus, there were witnesses—it’s always better to have witnesses. It doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s healed. It’s ok.
                                                                                                                                           *
    I knew the car was coming before I stepped off the sidewalk. It was one of those moments where time slows, and the body moves on its own and everything is silent except 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 was 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 I remember that I looked at my shoes and thought about the distinct Converse-pattern they would leave on her car. I felt velocity beneath me, 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 I fell backwards. My right foot hit the asphalt and from there I crouched as I fell backward, my left arm behind me, and rolled. I felt the thud on my arm and thought, it’s ok if it breaks. I’ll still be able to write. I remembered the hill at the school.
                                                                                                                                          *
    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 might be imagined—it went numb. I thought it must have been ok. I mean, it was deep. I saw a gape lined with layers of skin, and at the end of the layers a hole slightly bigger than the size of a sideways pellet, and in the hole white. I saw the white for only a moment before the blood poured out. But it was ok. I forced it to be ok, forced myself to stop thinking about it, to stop thinking about how that white I saw might have been my bone. I was ok. 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 ok. But I kept thinking of bones while watching the skate video, of how they live inside a person, but no one ever sees them. Made me think of muscles and organs and all our moving parts. Made me wish that what I had seen really was my bone, so I could say I had seen it. I wished because maybe then it would be a fantasy and therefor impossible. I wished, not wanting to accept what I saw as real—knowing that it was.
    The next day it had scabbed around the pellet-size hole—not over the hole, the large space around it. I pushed it out of my head. I was ok. The day after that it started to smell like meat that had been left outside for a while. I remember I was in shorts—wanting someone to notice—eating lunch with friends, when a fly flew into the hole in the scab. I jumped and slapped the side of my leg, and it flew out, but I had seen.
    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 and tell me about an affair she had been having with a married man. My fear rode with me on the humid, tropical air I imagined was riddled with parasites and rot. Everything rotted so fast in that air. I thought of our trash cans whose metal interiors crawled in the night.
    At home I rushed to the bottle of hydrogen-peroxide that warned on the label not to use on deep or scabbed cuts. I looked and noticed what I didn’t want to acknowledge, that 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 enflamed volcano in the middle of my leg. That little pellet hole was still there. I couldn’t bring myself to look inside this time because I knew the bone was there and I would need serious medical attention if I saw that it was. I kept repeating, it’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok.
    I put a Band-Aid over it. One Band-Aid, and it covered maybe a little more than half of the crater. It covered only the middle and deepest part but left two cavities on the top and bottom of the sideways bandage. I continued to wear 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. It’s ok. I’m ok.
    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 so he was surprised when I walked in with gym shorts. He was surprised at my leg and asked if I was getting beat at home, if that’s why I never went to PE. I said no. He sent me to the nurse.
    The nurse was exited. She was jittery-excited 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. She was studying medicine and wanted to know if she had acted right in such a bizarre case—it was a learning experience. I smiled and said ok because I wanted to be polite. I never did ask.
    It took me a couple more days to get to the doctor, and by then the tiny hole had closed—though the swelling was maybe worse. It was when my little brother got sick and I told my mom I was bored and I would go with her to take him in—by that point it hurt to walk and the skin around the crevice seemed to keep puffing up.
    After the doctor had finished up 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 and he said, “Oh, shit!” and 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, and they muttered to each other for a couple 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 he calmed down some but was still irritated. “You’re about this close to spending the next six weeks hooked up to an IV in the hospital,” he said and pinched his thumb and index finger together. “Something like this could cost you your leg.”
    My mom, terrified, 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 it’s ok. I still have both legs. I’m ok.
                                                                                                                                        *
   I had seen the woman who hit me through the windshield before falling backward. She looked frail, and I was afraid she would have a heart-attack, or stroke. 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—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—overweight children? A senior-citizen couple?
    All too afraid to move.
                                                                                                                                         *
    The cops found scars on my arms when I was pulled over in the middle of the night in 2008, while on my way to buy pills from a one-legged man. I was sick and desperate and 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 my veins.
   Some wounds pile on and on, frantic, erratic, and I guess the cops had been following my brother and I around for a while, looking for some anxious 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 my brother was arrested, and the cops told him they’d been “on to us.”
   It was the payphone outside the twenty-four-hour Walgreens that prompted them to stop me, thinking I was in the middle of some major deal—three pills. I only had money for three pills, and the one-legged-man ended up not even having any that night and just yelled at me over the phone because I owed him money.
   When I saw the lights, I couldn’t remember if cops searched 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, so 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. “He’s a diabetic.”
   It was hot out, and I was sweating and cold.
   The lead cop clicked his flashlight on my arms. “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 the parents told them to break the rules.
   These were hero-scars. I wanted him to believe they were hero-scars. I wanted to believe they were hero-scars, because hero-scars are ok. It would mean I was ok. It was ok. I wanted my lie to make it ok, like maybe if the marks were gone the infection would be also.
   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—financial blemishes—and chose to screw myself with a non-extraditable bench warrant.
                                                                                                                                     *
    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? In my mind they were dressed in black, but that’s too much. Still, it’s what I remember. Did they really sit as immovable and stoic as in my memory? I never did see their faces. They could have been anything. Did they sit, 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 have taken on the appearance and countenance of one another? Did the driver plead with them to remain quiet about the incident? Were they all friends, tied together by secrecies over stretched 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 that remained hidden for years:
    The gash on my back that leaked yellow fat which I wiped off with toilet paper in the bathroom.
    A slit on my finger from when I was thirteen and a razor blade slipped while I was making a bong.
    A slice on my wrist from when I fell into a wire jutting out from a wall in our rented house when I was seven.
    Miles of track marks.
    Aluminum-foil lungs.
    A hematoma the size of a golf-ball in the middle of my right thigh.
    The left ankle which has been rolled so many times it shakes in and out of the socket as I walk, now bone on bone.
    A cut behind my knee from when I fell down a hill during a family reunion when I was seven.
    Some that were found:
    The cut that resulted in stitches above my right eye from when I fell from a high-chair and into a table when I was two.
    The cut that resulted in stitches from when a car door was accidentally slammed on my head when I was four.
   The dent in my forehead from when I face-planted from a couch to the corner of a coffee table while singing a church hymn for my parents when I was four.
The skin burned off my elbows and knees by asphalt while clutching a rope tied to the back of a pick-up.
These are not the only ones, by far.
    I’ve spent a lot of time hiding my wounds, showing them only when they become scars, harmless, impotent, unable to instill fear or anger or pain in others or myself.
                                                                                                                                        *
    My hit-and-run was witnessed. As I was getting up from the floor, and before the driver fled, a woman in a yellow sports-car rolled down her window and yelled out to me that she had gotten the license plate. Then she drove away, in the opposite direction. I waited for her to come back and give me the number. She never came back.
                                                                                                                                        *
    I’m not the only one. Vovó—my ninety-one-year-old, Brazilian grandmother—cut the bone out of the top of her thumb with a pair of clippers.
    Her mutilation started with a boil. She was working as a nurse and midwife in Fortaleza at the time—chain smoking and drinking vast amounts of coffee between pulling babies out of screaming women. She knew better than to pop the boil. The doctor had told her not to pop the boil.
    She popped the boil.
And there it was, the bone, sticking out at her.
   Now, seventy-years later, she rocks in her chair and laughs loud about it, giving a thumbs up, displaying the aberration which looks normal on the bottom, but almost perfectly-round and way too-large on the top. One side of the preternatural tip has a small, crooked fingernail, the other has an indentation in her black skin that folds in on itself—the mark left by her self-surgery.
    “You cut it off?” I’ll ask. She tells the story repeatedly. It’s become a joke.
    “I had to do something,” she’ll say.
    I’ve often thought about those blades sliding against that white bone, thought about how far down she had to go. It makes my teeth sore.
    “It didn’t hurt?” I’ll say.
    “Of course it did,” she’ll say, and shrug. “But it was already hurting. I just took advantage of the pain.”
                                                                                                                                     *
    I stood up clutching my arm, not knowing, knowing that sometimes it takes a while to feel the full extent of an injury, knowing I felt a slight pain, knowing that I’ve had slight pains before that have grown into misery.
    She rolled down her window, confused, and asked if I was ok.
    The two in the backseat remained motionless, sentinels, strange guards.
I said I didn’t know, my arm hurt. I said maybe we should exchange information to be safe. She looked around. She looked at the cars behind her who were already starting to get impatient. She looked at me and her face showed no sign at having registered her accident. All it showed was fear. When she looked up at me, holding my arm, her expression went hard like she wanted to spit. “I don’t believe I really hit you,” she said.
    “Of course you hit me,” I said. “My shoe-marks are on the car.”
    But she didn’t hear me. Before I finished my sentence, she had peeled out.
    I stood in the meridian for a long time, watching the cars honk and wiz past.
                                                                                                                                    *
    I had only been in Rancho Mirage for maybe an hour. I drove in to hang out with my MFA friends and go to an alumni party at a resort. I was alone, walking across the street for some food. I had my favorite places, places I’d come to know over the periodic trips to that area over the previous few years as I was earning my degree, and I wasn’t about to let a hit-and-run interrupt my dinner.
    But the place had closed down, it was dark inside and under some kind of renovation by the new owners, and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to eat.
                                                                                                                                    *
    When Mike 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 laid in a growing puddle of gasoline as the onlookers approached. 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.
    “Are you crazy!” people in the crowd said. “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.
                                                                                                                                        *
    Mike broke his arm at about the same age and in the exact spot I did.  The difference was he was on a skateboard, not plastic rollerblades, 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. But he kept skating and kept falling on his arm and was pushed around in a crowd after being dropped off at Warp Tour ’97 when we were twelve and nine; we tried to find a way to get piercings and tattoos until I had my wallet—and Ritalin—stolen while crowd surfing. It took him forever to heal and when it did he didn’t heal right. 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 even after I moved to São Paulo 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.
                                                                                                                                     *
   Some scars are shared. Mike’s scars and mine run crisscross between one another like a map of a wild, unplanned city. Each one a partial witness of the other. Mike was the one that had jumped in front of me, causing me to fall into the fence that tore into my back. I accidentally broke his finger in a door. He had let go of the rope when I didn’t that time I skidded across the parking lot, tied to the back of that truck. He was one of the few I showed the gash on my leg to, knowing he would never tell. We paid one another’s debts. We passed our needles back and forth to each other. We stole from one another, stole for one another. One was arrested because the other. But it’s ok. We’re ok.
                                                                                                                                      *
   Some wounds run across entire countries, continents, peoples. Sometimes they fester. Symptoms of the underlying sickness emerge sometimes ignored, but still infected, still shared, forming a collected scar tissue.
                                                                                                                                      *
    I didn’t call the cops after the woman sped away because I was afraid. I didn’t call them after I walked across the street. I didn’t call them after discovering my favorite restaurant had been closed. Instead, I walked around the back of the mall area in the dark for about forty-five minutes.
    Some years prior, when I still had that warrant out, my upstairs neighbor and her boyfriend got drunk and fired a bullet through my ceiling. The cops said there was nothing they could do since the couple claimed it was their friend that had fired the gun, and they didn’t know where the friend was. Instead, the cops lectured me on having an outstanding warrant, and told me that even though it was non-extraditable that I still needed to get it taken care of. They had their eyes on me. The upstairs neighbors were white. Is it important that they were white? I don’t want it to be. Maybe they didn’t have any petty, five-year-old, outstanding warrants for drug paraphernalia—the warrant was certainly my fault. The neighbors…well, it was only a bullet. It’s ok.
                                                                                                                                     *
   The bench warrant caught up with me the day after my graduation ceremony at ASU during a layover in the Miami airport on my way to Brazil. My marriage was almost over at that point. Too many relapses. Too many lies. It was over, and I knew it. We were on our way to Brazil not to mend but to sever. It had already been discussed. We were still talking about it when I was taken into custody in front of my wife.
  The arresting officers, customs agents, were good people. They were apologetic in their arrest, asked if the handcuffs were too tight, talked to me about how important it is to have a day in court. They searched my carry-on in front of me and were surprised that all I had were books. They sighed and shrugged. I got it. It was their job. It was fine.
   I had been alone in the airport holding cell for a while, frantic over the loss of my wife, when a tall customs agent opened the door with my Brazilian passport in hand.
   “It’s illegal for you to have dual citizenship,” he said and grinned. “I should take this right now. I should shred it.” He flapped the passport in the air. “Why would you even want this when you have US citizenship? People like you don’t even know how to appreciate what you have. What, you thought we weren’t going to get you? You thought you could come here and think we weren’t going to pick you up on the warrant? You’re so stupid. But people like you never change. You’re probably high right now, aren’t you? Do you think people like you change? It’s in your fucking blood. You’ll be a junkie your whole life. People like you never change, and you’ll always be the same. You’re a pathetic, fuck-up and you’ll always be the same. Not even a man, running away like that.” His voice got louder as he spoke, and he leaned into the cell, grinning, daring me to say anything.
   I said nothing.
   Another bald and muscular customs agent came in and joined his partner. “Why don’t you just drink like normal people do?” he said. “Don’t mess with that shit, man. Just get drunk. What’s the matter with you?”
   They took me into the bald man’s office while they asked me questions and filed paperwork. He was ripped and wore a tight shirt. Wanted everybody to see him. “You should just drink like a normal person,” he said again. “You can get drunk every night and not get in trouble. That’s what I do.” The bald man was a lot calmer. “It’s only a few nights in the slammer. It’s not that big a deal. Seminole County probably won’t even want to come pick you up.” I told him it wasn’t the idea of being locked up for a few days that scared me. It was that I may have just lost my wife who was already on her way to Brazil. He said that was ok too, and kept talking about his divorce and his new, second wife.
   The Dade County cops were cool. They joked and laughed with me. They cuffed me with my hands in front while I rode in the car—they pulled over to put them behind me again just before we got to the jail so that no one would see that they had done me that small favor.
   The Miami-Dade corrections officers weren’t so great.
   The black, female guard was nice. When the other guards were out, she kept telling us how she knew we were good people because we were all not white—except the Cuban, but it didn’t count that his skin was white because he was Cuban. She whispered to me that she would get me another call, but I couldn’t tell the others in the cell, if I did they would all want extra phone calls—and when she took me to the phones she yelled at me the whole way and complained to the other guards about how I wouldn’t shut up about calling and how she was just taking me so that I would stay quiet. I get it. She had to prove herself to the others. I saw how that might be necessary for her. It was fine.
    I spent my time translating for the Cuban who had a hole in his leg, like me. “This is what happens when you don’t agree with Fidel,” he said, lifting up his pant leg after I told him I was having a bad day. “It could be worse.”
    The bail bondsman got me out three-days later. Back at the airport, everyone at the airline already knew what had happened. People I had never met before came up to me and said, either in Portuguese or Spanish, “You got to watch out for those gringos, man. They’ll throw you in jail for nothing.”
    I got to Brazil with one plastic bag that contained a dirty shirt, broken sandals, and a cheap, disposable phone. Everyone already knew about me and stared as I walked past, and when I got to Brazilian customs the woman behind the booth said, “Don’t worry. You’re Brazilian here.”
    My wife was waiting for me at the airport. We tried again, with only a couple relapses since. I hired a lawyer I couldn’t pay for, and now I no longer have issue with the state of Florida. So I guess it’s ok.
                                                                                                                                    *
    I’m always afraid of another cop like the skinny customs officer. I’m still afraid of relapse. I’m afraid of cultural rifts. I’m afraid of showing my wounds for fear of wounding others, or having the wounds declared unimportant then denied then ignored and abandoned. I’m afraid of the responsibility of injury. I’m afraid of the spread of denied infection, afraid of the news, afraid to see the bone beneath the skin but incapable of ignoring it.
                                                                                                                                    *
   I’ve thought of the woman who hit me and her pale fear, thought of her trembling and having nightmares. I’ve thought of her children perhaps having made previous comments about how it’s time she gives up her keys, and about how if this incident were admitted she would be forced to comply. Did she threaten the other passengers to silence? If so, what did she have over them? Did they tell? Did she lose her right to drive? My own great-grandmother drove until she was ninety and when a man cut her off in traffic, she followed him home so that she could lecture him on his driving abilities. Her keys were taken only after her car was totaled and she couldn’t borrow another vehicle from anyone else. Upon losing her freedom to drive she cried.
   Maybe the woman who hit me is more shaken up than I am, but then again for me it was never about the fall. It was the whip of her fear, her guilt which slid into anger and deniability and hate. The constant thought that comes back to me, the way the thought of flies keep coming back to me anytime I see a scab, is that she had to throw her panic into what she saw as my weakness: an unreliable, an other, someone who didn’t belong in her world.
   I don’t want that thought, namely because it’s a sign of severe infection, and I’ve learned how dangerous neglected infections can be. It makes me think of my leg and what a contamination of the bone, the core, might have meant. I think of the swollen heat surrounding and piling around the cavity I pretended was never there. I think of that fly and stomping the rest of the day, and the fear comes back to me. Not a fear of what had happened, but a fear for what almost was, what could be. I think of the infection of needles and the resurfacing of addictions. I think of my fear of police, even though I’m a middle-class, half-white—but not white, that thought always in the back of the mind—college-teacher, with a master’s degree.
   Later, after I walked back to the resort, my poet and writer friends and I laughed about how that woman shouted fake news at me then drove away. We laughed because it was too terrifying for anything else, because that’s what a person has to do to sometimes to dispel fear.
   My wounds come back to me in cycles. Most are scar tissue at this point. Some still infected. Some keep resurfacing, laughing, asking me if I thought they could ever really be gone. A good many I share with too many people. But everyone has wounds. I’m not hurt. Not really.     
   It’s ok.
   I’m ok.
   We’re ok.
   We’re ok.
   We’re ok.
   We’re ok.
   We’re ok.

David Martinez is a half-American half-Brazilian writer who has lived all over the US, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside Palm Desert. David has conducted interviews for The Coachella Review and has had fiction published in Broken Pencil. His most recent essay can be found in the Writers Resist Anthology. David teaches English and Creative Writing at Glendale Community College in Arizona.

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