Edie Meade
My son gripped his left index finger in a coil of righthand fingers so anyone in the urgent care waiting room could see the punctures go purple before their eyes drifted onto me, the mother with eyes the same hard black glass, and wondered if I’d done it, whatever it was, unless it was a snakebite, unless it was a fishhook, and it was nobody’s business but he wanted these work-wounded strangers with limps and fiberglass lungs to know he too was a throbbing darkness, see the rusty tissue papier-mâchéd to his palm, his hurt writhing, his finger a wild beast clenched into idolatry, blood-encrusted serpent, maybe he wanted them to know he’d done it himself with the stapler, not accidentally but something else, perceive the medusa of his mother, the invisible viper in the invisible pit, but because they knew, they knew better, for an hour we all levitated with our vision two dueling televisions, one braising a fish and another beaching a whale, and the meat just fell off the bone, and people tried to save them but they came right back to die, and a zest of lemon got the juices flowing, and scientists delivered hushed hows but not whys magnificent animals wanted to self-harm, and commercials rushed in tidal with pharmaceutical side-effects, cottonmouth, chest pain, suicidal ideation, rolling us coiling us corpses battered against the gray cliff built of the stone tears of mothers, talk to a doctor, talk to your doctor, see your doctor, see if it’s right for you, until my son told me actually his finger didn’t hurt much anymore couldn’t we just put a Band-Aid on it and be more careful in the future, as if lack of care was ever the problem, couldn’t we just leave, couldn’t we, couldn’t we just, just go home, just slink home, slither home and have fish sticks for lunch, have it just be the way it was before?
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Edie Meade is a writer and musician in Petersburg, Virginia. She has been published in Louisiana Literature Journal, Gone Lawn, Room Magazine, Invisible City, and The Harvard Advocate.