Scars
by Rebekah Pulaski
Creative Works… 118
My little sister, Joannah, has an ungodly number of scars. She has one very long, slender scar on her right calf, a small, almost invisible scar on her forehead, and many many tiny scars on her hands. She received the long scar on her leg when she was just a small girl. Influenced by her two older sisters, on a summer day much too late at night, Joannah had dawned her slipperiest socks and prepared herself to get a running start. After receiving one last word of encouragement from yours truly, she took off down the length of the living room, towards the long hall that separated the bedrooms from the rest of the house. Joannah continued down half the length of the hall at full speed then jumped, landing on her wonderful socks, and awaited the thrill of sliding through the remainder of the hall without the hassle of moving her body. But the length of Joannah’s slide was magnificent in a way that she hadn’t anticipated. She was quickly approaching the wall heater at the dead end of the hallway—whose door was foolishly left open by someone who refused to admit to it. And in a blindness fueled by a mix of anxiety and gravity, Joannah’s feet slipped out from under her, and her poor, small calf was sliced open by the wall heater door. Joannah’s forehead scar happened much later, after moving to a new city and after starting high school. Joannah joined the basketball team, although in reality, she hadn’t grown much since the incident with the wall heater. She was still very small for her age, but nevertheless, she pursued basketball because it’s what she loved, and it was her way of making friends. On the day of Joannah’s very
