Elizabeth Theriot petticoats. I googled just to make sure. It means bold and without shame. It also means made of brass although the word brazen does sound more similar to bronze. If it were bronze, perhaps my imperfections would be less obvious. I don’t want to use the word “imperfection” because I understand intellectually that there’s not some perfect standard to which I’m falling short. I don’t aspire for perfection. But I wonder, if Mephistopheles appeared in my bedroom, what I would trade for a pair of knees like any other knees, for skin that would be imperfect in the most mundane ways. Summer 2016. I found some string lights in a closet at my parents’ house and decided to hang them in my little sister’s room to surprise her after school. With a row of safety pins in my mouth I stood on her bed, stretched, forced each pin into the wall until my thumb was sore and almost all of the lights wound across her bookshelves, over her bed. I was almost finished, left foot on the mattress and the other on the bedside table, when I leaned too far, put too much weight on my right foot. The table toppled beneath me and I fell hard, the pain immediately reverberating. For the briefest moment I was still and almost thoughtless—a pause to fortify myself for whatever damage I’d find in the next breath, whatever broken shards of glass from my sister’s lamp and knickknacks might have found their way inside my skin. Amazingly, nothing was broken—candles, snow globes, little squirrel figurines, all intact. I limped into the kitchen for ice as the bottom of my foot swelled into angry reds and purples. I was crying when my mom and sister got home because it hurt, yes, but also because I had finally been exercising regularly and now would struggle to even walk properly, to wear certain shoes. It felt like something was always frustrating my plans, my attempts at routine and normalcy. A small raised knob still sits on the bottom of my foot. It’s shrunk considerably since the initial injury but still gets sore if I’ve been walking or exercising for a while. On the same foot: a subtle egg-like protrusion that never leveled from a sprain in high school; a pair of scars splayed between my first and second metatarsals. The paler one is my very first scar, from when I was four years old and ran into a rocking chair. The second is a mirror to the original scar, reopened when I was a teenager and my dog landed her claws on my foot in exactly the wrong way. The two scars resemble a butterfly, half living and half ghost. I’ve always had the most trouble with the right side of my body. I am right handed. Do these two pieces of information connect at all? Is there some esoteric explanation, maybe, for these misfortunes? Something about the dominant hand, the flow of blood?
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Crab Orchard Review