Family Portrait in Scars

1. Two inches long, the center of my upper right thigh. Muscle biopsy, age two. The anesthesia didn’t work. They carved the chunk out with only Novocaine numbing the skin. I remember screaming. Slightly above and to the right is a freckle, like an eye to the scar’s mouth, like a winking face in my leg.
2. A long arc low on my mother’s belly. C-section, May 19, 1991, age twenty-six. Three months before my younger sister was due. Mom thought she was constipated right up until her water broke.
3. The length of my spine, curved this way and that. Spinal fusion, fourth grade. Only six days in the hospital. Therapy dogs were coming on the seventh, but the doctors wouldn’t let me stay.
4. A starburst of a bruise, my sister’s right foot. I misjudged the distance between us in the mirror—closer than they appear. I didn’t realize that bump was her foot. My chair, mid-wheel drive: turned on a dime. She didn’t scream, but her mouth stretched in the mirror like a surrealist painting, her body lifting upward, as if to loose herself. I froze until she whisper-shouted, “Move!” The bruise lasted months, faded eventually to slight discoloration. Probably a fractured metatarsal, but she never got it checked. On that foot now: a tattoo of the bird-headed man from “Bird-Headed Man with Bison” at Lascoux.
5. Do tattoos count as scars? Do piercings? Does the barely-there line I’m so fond of on the inside of my thumb count if I can’t remember its source?
6. Psoriasis across the full terrain of my dad’s knuckles. No cure. Insurance stopped covering the cream he used to keep the scales in check. These days he eats cans of tuna for the omega-3 fatty acids, slurping the leftover water straight from the sharp rim; his knuckles are a gentle pink, like the flaky gleam of certain scallop shells.
7. A small, circular burn, right side of my neck. Mole removal, mid-teens, elective. The dermatologist suggested seeing a plastic surgeon to ensure “less of a mark.”
8. Two precise trails of small, circular burns along the inside of my sister’s left forearm. Cigarette burns, age twenty, self-inflicted. Faded now. Under the emergency room lights, though, fresh and molten. An anchor to hold me inside those white walls instead of letting myself float away.
9. A short-lived scar, which is to say, a contradiction: a diamond-shaped patch of skin scraped off my chest, age twenty-five, self-inflicted. The skin heated as I scratched. Satisfying friction. Satisfying, too, the burst of red in the mirror and the watery film that built up soon after and sooner still congealed to pus. After the infection cleared, a raised scar I’d hoped would fade into a blush-tinted memento but faded instead back to skin.
10. A purple splotch on the back of my sister’s right hand. Ironing accident, age twenty-three, running late for work. The restaurant’s guests asked about it for months, until the mark matured and turned rich as the wine she served them.
11. An ever-changing array of cuts, scrapes, and pale patches of healed-over skin on Dad’s forearms. From cats’ claws or dogs’ claws, metal edges or metal tools or branches. Sometimes from seemingly nothing at all. The older he gets, the thinner his skin becomes.
12. A lattice of carefully shallow cuts the length of my sister’s thighs. The usual instruments, pre-teens to mid-twenties. We were having dinner at Texas Roadhouse when she, eleven, showed us the first one. Pails of whole peanuts sat on every table and shucked shells carpeted the floor. The burgers were thick, peppery, slathered with mayonnaise. The pre-dinner rolls (warm, glazed golden) were served with pats of cinnamon butter, a surprising sweetness. We never ate there again.
13. Third degree burns on Mom’s face, left arm, and side. Car crash, age fifteen. Her friend, drunk, hit a telephone pole. Mom wasn’t wearing a seat belt. She fell out the passenger-side door and the car rolled on top of her. She was trapped for ten, fifteen minutes. Long enough for her skin and the muscle beneath to burn away where it touched the undercarriage, for gravel to embed in the wounds.
14. To clean her wounds, doctors applied gauze with ointment and—after cementing—ripped both gauze and damaged tissue away. A recurring process. She quickly learned the sound of her doctor’s shoes. Whenever she heard the distinctive click-clack on tile, she started screaming.
15. The unknown-to-me ones.
16. The ones unknown to each of our own selves.
17. A sunken area on the inside of Mom’s left bicep. Presumably from the crash, like the others. “No,” she told me, age twenty-seven. “My nose came from my arm.” For months, her arm was attached to her face so the doctors could graft the skin and shape it, like damp clay, into a nose.
18. A notch scooped out of the shell of my right ear. Growth removal. Caused by recurring pressure. Dad scoops a hole from my pillow. Nightly, Mom sweeps my hair away from the sensitive curve. I still sleep with my ear in the hollow, cradled in the protective lack.

Kayla Whaley holds an MFA from the University of Tampa and is former senior editor of Disability in Kidlit. Her work has appeared in anthologies including Unbroken, Vampires Never Get Old, Game On, and Allies. She is also the author of chapter book series A to Z Animal Mysteries.