Sandra Ketcham

Reflection

The girl sits in class on a Friday. She sits near the edge of the room, where the cold air blows, where she is close to the door, where she can watch the door. The girl wishes no one sat behind her, but someone does. Others in the classroom plan their weekend, talk of pool parties and shopping and sleepovers. Once, the girl was invited to a pool party. She thinks about this for a minute, then she raises her hand and asks permission to go to the restroom. The teacher thinks it is odd when the girl gathers up all her belongings before walking out the door, but he says nothing to the girl because speaking to the girl is never a good idea.

She walks home, through the woods, through the spider webs built by gold and black banana spiders. The girl does not like spiders. She used to like cats and had several when she was younger, but at some point in her childhood, cats stopped seeming real to her. Now she cares about real cats in the same way she likes the stuffed animals she got for her 10th birthday. Santa always brought her stuffed animals when she was a little girl, probably because he never knew her well enough to buy her anything that mattered. The girl thinks about stuffed animals all the way home and into her bedroom.

The girl climbs into her bed, stares at her hands, at her long bony fingers, at her jagged nails, at her picked-at skin. She stares at her fingers and watches herself running her nails up and down the inside of her arm, tracing her pale blue veins, feeling the slightly raised tendon that connects the soft part of her arm to her wrist. She sees her jagged nails digging into her flesh, two centimeters, four centimeters, and she sees herself pull a large flap of tissue back toward her body. She watches as the blood slowly fills up the empty space inside her arm and runs over the gray-white muscle. She feels nothing. She wants to feel everything. She wants to feel all the sadness and confusion and panic leave her body through this beautiful hole in her arm. She wants to feel fresh air enter her body, bringing with it a calmness she imagines must exist outside of herself. But she feels nothing.

She watches three separate trails of blood run down her arm, two toward her elbow, like diluted watercolor paint. The third seems thicker somehow, more important, more determined. It wraps her wrist and slowly drips onto the floor. She listens, it sounds like time, like the future. Drip, drip. Tick, tick. Drip, tick, tock. She closes her eyes and she listens. The sound takes her away from this place, this small room in Florida, this place with peach walls and brown carpet, this place filled with things she's never cared about, with unworn sweaters and half-dressed dolls. She listens. The clock speeds up, the drips tick and tock faster and faster, fading in volume, and then blurring into a barely perceptible noise that may be originating from inside her throat. A hum, a soft hum. A purr. She purrs as the darkness comes.

Inside the darkness appears a light and it shines on a family sitting at a dinner table. There is a father: he eats with large bites, he does not speak. There is a mother: she watches the rest of the family, she opens her mouth and the sound of sirens comes out. A girl on one side of the table covers her ears in pain at the sound the mother makes. She relaxes, she moves her food around with a shiny silver fork, she counts her peas, then she counts them again. She cringes every time someone's silverware scrapes the bottom of a plate. She looks across the table at a younger boy. The boy is staring at a half-empty saltshaker. She cannot remember the boy's name or where he came from.

She reaches across the table to touch the boy, to lay her fingers on his arm. She looks down at her wrist and sees a gaping wound, an empty hole, where once there was blood. She looks up at the boy, tries to speak. Her words are gone. The boy looks at the girl, his eyes black, he wears her face. She stares at the boy, at his nose, at his cheekbones, at his pale pink and chapped lips. She stares at the boy and knows he is wearing her face.