By Rachel Holbrook
When I was a little girl, it was simple things like a splinter in the plump meat of my palm, slid beneath the skin like a dagger when I couldn’t resist the appeal of a weather worn fence rail, looking warm and smooth in the summer sun, but unaware that even the soft things bite sometimes, requiring Papaw to pull out his pocket knife, wiping the blade on his blue jeans and holding my small hand in his large, brown, veiny one, twisting it toward the light, so he could ease the sharp tip just under the topmost layer of skin, easing out the foreign object; not unlike the small shards of glass embedded in feet and toes, from dropped and shattered light bulbs or broken bottles tossed aside and waiting in pieces at the bottom of the river shoals where I placed tender steps while going in deeper; and, as I got older, but, let’s be honest, not very much older, the blades were pressed in deeper, separating layers of skin and fat and muscle, until out she came, waxy and screaming, it’s a girl, and there she was, no longer inside of me but not unlike a splinter in that with her departure from my inside there came a relief; and maybe it was the same desire to touch things that shine in the sunlight, that promise warmth and satisfaction that led to the son, and the second son, and the daughter, all pulled screaming from the safety of me, all taking parts of me on their way out; and I can’t forget the little one, like the splinter, that burrowed much deeper in the wrong place, and how I cried when they took her out of me, promising me relief would come, and how I knew they were lying; how I knew she wasn’t like the wisdom teeth or the appendix that I never needed in the first place; but, yes, there was an ending when the bleeding stopped and the pain ebbed away, and I hate them for being right that relief did eventually come.
Rachel Holbrook is a proud Appalachian, a queer woman, an Army wife, and a mother of six, who writes from her home in Knoxville, TN.
