Window

I doubt that I would recall the incident at all if it weren’t for the maggot-like scar still on the back of my right hand. I don’t know what incited my rage, or what, if any, punishment or repercussion came of it. What I do remember is that I was only eight years old, I got into a fight with my mother one afternoon about something, maybe nothing, ran out the door and down the three steps from our rented duplex, turned, and put my fist through the plate glass window, shattering it.

I immediately headed down the alley behind our house, running full out, frightened about nothing and everything. My memory is of a canyon of green shrubbery, an enfolding gauntlet with no exit arching above me on either side, though I’m sure it was nothing but the more scrubby patchwork of bushes and vines of my other, less anxious memories from that time. But when I got to the end of the block, I stopped, looked down and saw (as I remember it now) my hand covered in and dripping blood.

I made it back to the house (ran or walked fast, I can’t recall), my mother drove me to the emergency room, and I got a few stitches, though looking at the scar now, white, about half an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide, I don’t know why there would be a need for stitches for what seems a rather small wound. Perhaps a scar shrinks over time. Perhaps the stitches were meant as a reprimand for an infuriated (and infuriating) eight-year-old boy. Perhaps it’s just that memory is a fog floating between an indefinite past and an ongoing rummage for it.