WAYNE LEE Splinter

WAYNE LEE | SPLINTER

The splinter went in deep, couldn’t be tweezered or needled out completely. A sliver of it stuck in a crease of her middle finger, reddened, swelled, a yellow crush of pus trying to push it out, her pain mounting by the day.

Her husband was her foundation, her frame of reference, until one day he fractured and fell, bits of him scattered on the ground, others driven like shrapnel into the flesh of her skin, her heart— no, farther—to the bone.

Sometimes all we can do is trust in the body, in the ways the body heals, how we heal, though never all the way. There’s always some remnant left inside, some jagged shred of loss and, on the outside, some scar to remind us our wounds are signs of what we’ve survived, of how we’ve been broken and reassembled, the cracks now part of the design.