OK! I'm gonna be brave and give up something more than random thoughts...this is the shortest of my stories, so it's fairly flash...the last revision was in April...
Bruises
A few weeks ago I slipped stepping into the tub, landing bare-assed on the floor, right leg extended toward shiny white porcelain, bruising the bone and knotting desperately. A few days ago, I slipped while de-icing the car before work – work that ended up being closed the entire day, not just until noon – the other leg, not so big a knot. Cutting a corner too close at the café recently, molding striking soft flesh, barely missing the connection between leg and thigh, just tender to the touch. Back right calf, barely there, almost faded, left outside kneecap, two places –I hadn’t noticed them before today. Should I circle them and make a notation in permanent ink – tub, doorframe, side of fireplace, dog. Or start a diary – dear diary, turned too quick while standing still, hit x with y, x much harder, resulting in level one bruise. I wonder does my husband notice them as he runs cool fingers along too hot flesh. He never mentions them. He doesn’t wear his glasses when we sleep, though; they just get in the way.
I think of my grandmother and of her arms, soft and fleshy, sleeveless against the morning chill; later in life, her skin became paper-thin, only two layers, the material touching too close, bruising, cool baths, Ivory Gentle Flakes. I should have paid attention more, maybe… My grandfather noticed, we were reminded with a soft reprimand each visit – you know mother bruises easy, watch her condition, now – and we would hug her gently at arms length. The house remained – probably until her death – aglow in a burnished orange haze, the curtains never opened and never replaced. She would don dark glasses when stepping onto the long porch in the early evening shadows, rarely approaching the steps. Steps where, until the age of ten, I drank Cokes in green glass bottles and ate Moonpies from the wrapper. Bare legs extended and face toward the sun, I would bask in the warmth of it all. It would be more than ten years before my father and his father reconciled. It would be another ten before my brother and father reconciled. I wondered what other unseen bruises had been carried by my grandmother besides transgressions of which I was vaguely aware.
I sported marks on the back of both arms from allergy shots for almost a year; each arm, twice then once a week, alternating pollen and mold by the arm – pollen was the bruiser. People asked, I told them. Stress last fall resulted in a slight irregularity, they took blood, and the needle left a creeping bruise in the crease of my elbow. People asked, I told them. There are others of varying depths and color that lay unseen by the naked eye, I wear these on my sleeve sometimes and in my eyes, my heart breaking with deep regret and sadness and loss; crying in my car every morning for four months, tears spilling to sad songs that made me think too much, my father’s big eyes, helpless beside me as we watched without recourse. Seeing eyes could never know my last words before I left my brother to die that night – left to die without me.
I wonder how something so innocent as life can be taken so cruelly; why people are how they are, their actions, their motives, and I wonder if their bruises, like mine, are hidden deep, just below the surface, each an island unto themselves, eaten away by the ebbing tide, but always there.
