by Brianna Barnes
A few years before the divorce, during the June that Dad initiated his silent protest and stopped going to church, we took a family vacation. We must have decided as a family that it was time to see the ocean, or Dad must have decided. It was clear from his increasingly frequent monologuing, pacing, 1 a.m. smoke breaks that change was needed, imminent, being avoided or denied—maybe all of those things. It seemed we had to get away from something unclear in order to go see something in focus, move collectively from the blur of a fogged mirror into unobscured reflection. So we did. I brought several envelopes and binder paper to write my friends. I planned ahead to describe to them “our new home” while omitting the temporal “for the weekend.”
I squinted at the road so colors melted together and rolled down the windows to greet the spruce scent, overly awake, quaking a little from my ritual morning cup of filched coffee pot dregs. Henry slept beside me, and as he dreamed and twitched, I surgically extracted his GameBoy from his unconscious hands, and became even more lost with Zelda—sound off, to match the white noise of the highway.
When we arrived, the campsite looked warm, bathed in absurd, too-painterly light, like some sort of nerdy inside joke God was having with Himself, but we stepped out and the cold sent the blood out of our hands. The sun we’d seen from the inside of the car was deceptive, a sun that had forgotten to mention the proximity of the Pacific Ocean, framed by tinted, shatterproof windows that dulled and softened the wails of coastal winds. I replaced the GameBoy in Henry’s lap and shook him awake, “We’re here.”
While Mom and Dad unpacked, we ran around the campsite, shouting out unsolicited recommendations to them on where to place the tent and where best to hide food from bears, ignoring the food locker already there for that specific purpose.
“One of us has to climb that tree and tie all the food to the highest branch,” said Henry. He consulted his Boy Scout manual, a waterproofed, large-text, photograph-heavy guide for the youngest of aspiring Eagles, and explained with urgency that bears will eat anything, “anything, like huge, walking garbage cans,” and he pointed to a flash photograph of a surprised Brown Bear Momma and her baby cub for my edification. “See?” Hovering above my brother’s tiny finger, the Brown Bear Momma lovingly clutched her cub.
We ate Mom’s turkey cheddar Wonder Bread sandwiches from the cooler, expressionless around the picnic bench. When we finished, she asked, “Did anyone remember to pray?” None of us replied.
She raised her eyebrows at Dad and waited.
“Going for a smoke break,” he said.
Henry and I were permitted to wild again, so we grabbed our puffy jackets and each put on an extra pair of socks. “One hour, stick to these trails,” Mom instructed. I set my stopwatch and we set off running.
“This way!” I motioned for him to follow.
“No, this way!” Henry veered away from me down an alternate path.
“No, over here,” I said. As the oldest, I won, and Henry ran after me, shaking his head and balling his fists.
I led him through the hemlock, pine, redwood, and Douglas fir past an audience of squirrels, each one only capable of watching a few seconds each, long enough for eye contact, all of us acknowledging intrusion and otherness. The dirt path expanded and contracted, and running it acclimated Henry and I to the randomness of the woods. We could only sustain a run for what my stopwatch said had been eight minutes. I used a fallen tree obstructing the trail as an excuse to stop. We heaved together: inside children, outdoors.
“This log is too big,” I observed, confident we could not climb over it.
“A bear did this,” Henry advised, breathless.
I nodded. “Bears,” I mused. We sat down together on the ground and leaned on the steady, wooden mystery until we were breathing normally. I listened with one ear to my brother’s breath and my own until they twisted together and entrained, and with the other I heard the ocean swoosh infinite basketballs. I could smell the salt, wondered where the pepper was. We were close, I knew that.
“Look,” Henry said, and pointed to an indentation in a grove a few feet away we had missed by running. There was no trail, but it appeared there was some soft grass that had been worn into, used forest carpet, that led into a tunnel carved out of the brush.
“Whoa!” I walked over and looked inside. It was a tunnel similar to the ones we sometimes made with forts. One of us would throw a starchy blanket on the floor and the other would burrow, sweating, underneath it, attempting to carve out a tunnel to fit a sibling, or at least a hesitant cat, all to make a very personalized entrance into a custom-built world, a series of safe rooms.
Henry opened his Boy Scout book, flipped through the pages, fingered the plastic compass he’d won at Chuck E. Cheese and turned into a twine necklace. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s go,” I said, and crawled into the tunnel on my belly as he followed behind.
I moved through the wet grass and crumbling leaves in the manner I had seen demonstrated in WWII documentaries at the nursing home. We soldiered through for only a minute into blueish light muted by dense brambles. As the tunnel came to an abrupt end, there was room for Henry to move from behind me up beside me, and we dug in our elbows together, pushing aside fir cones to clear the path. The brambles melted into a sort of miniature meadow, a little misshapen circle of ferns and cedar chunks. We were positioned at an opening. Roots of trees and brush formed a dome, completely obstructed from the view of the trail by the concentration of trees.
A dark, glossy eye appeared in front of me on a brown, furry face. A baby deer. I could feel its hot breath, but couldn’t smell it. The mother deer stood immediately behind it.
I jumped and Henry gasped. “Shh,” I whispered. I put my finger to my mouth and shook my head.
Baby trusted us immediately, perhaps interpreted our small features as indicative of our cordiality, perhaps had never before crossed paths with humans. The mother deer sniffed the air, snapped her head toward us, and subsequently positioned her body deftly between us and the fawn in a sort of animal ballet we had never seen before. Henry and I were completely still, it in the freeze-tag sense. She leaned her head in toward us, very close, with her wet nose crowning our hair—like a dog, I thought. She smelled us again, and with a seemingly momentary appraisal, recognized the baby in us, our runny noses, Lilliputian teeth full of holes eroded by soda, and decided we could stay. She moved back to her former post near the blossoms and her face was replaced again with Baby’s.
Synchronistically, in the long tradition of freakish timing shared by blood relations, Henry and I turned to momentarily grin at each other, baring sugar teeth, then turned back in the rare, understood, and total silence of children to watch the mother and fawn eat. With its long, rose tongue, Baby licked lichen off the trees and the mother snacked on ferns and pearly everlasting. I rested my head on my crossed forearms and tried to memorize the moment. I felt around on the forest floor for some grasses, ripped them from the soil, and offered it from my extended hand to Baby, who ate the blades one by one out of my loose fist. Henry and I stayed that way a long time, reverent, until the mother nuzzled Baby and motioned for it to follow her black tail through a secret exit from the underbrush only deer know. We stayed until they vanished.
“Show’s over,” I told Henry, “let’s go.” Henry wriggled back out of the thicket backwards on his belly, through the same tunnel we’d come in, and I followed once I couldn’t see his face behind me. We exited like worms in reverse, and when we stood up back on the trail, our clothes and bodies reflected our worm impressions—we were covered in mud. I noticed I had leaves in my hair; I kept them there.
Henry started running to get a head start on me, and I followed him a split-second later, exuberantly racing back towards camp.
We ran straight into Dad on the trail, wearing a cowboy hat, leather jacket, and beat-up tennis shoes, a cigarette in one hand and soda in the other.
“Dad! Dad! We just saw a deer! We were so close to it!” We tried to explain.
“Good,” he said, with levity. He ashed his cigarette.
We were jumping. “There was a mom deer and a baby deer. We fed it! The baby ate out of our hands!” Henry said.
“My hands,” I corrected, but thought for a second about how often and organically Henry and I used the “we” pronoun to describe each other as extensions of ourselves.
At the mention of hand-feeding a fawn, Dad squinted with a suspicion not lost on us.
“It’s true!” I protested. He was nonplussed.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get back to camp.”
We skipped ahead as Dad trudged along behind us, watchful but glazed over, like some sort of half-asleep owl.
#
Back at the campsite, Mom was sitting on the picnic bench, hunched, hugging herself, looking glazed in the same way Dad did, but with a ceramic hardness. She was wearing a jacket and setting up Solitaire, the card game she told us she learned growing up.
“Did you have fun,” she asked without intonation.
“Mom! We saw a Mom deer and a Baby deer and we fed them grass!” Henry exploded while sprinting towards her.
“You fed them?” At this, her voice remembered punctuation. She picked Henry up into her lap and kissed him on the forehead.
“I fed them,” I began to correct, but I was too devoid of breath to really be heard. I started spinning very quickly in a circle, watching the scene blur into itself, colors and objects get swallowed up into whatever they were adjacent to, Mom into Henry and the picnic bench into the redwoods, the tent into the metal food locker and the conservative fire into its own smoke.
“Stop that,” Mom said, “you’ll fall.”
Beep beep beep beep, my stopwatch timer went off, and I stopped spinning and ran quickly around the tent and the trees. I heard Henry continue to tell Mom about the deer encounter. Zoom, I thought, trying to run as fast as the road runner from Saturday cartoons, trying to run faster than myself, faster than my breath. Too happy. I was too happy.
“…and then we crawled into a tunnel into the deer’s home…”
“A tunnel?”
I smelled the pine, ocean, tobacco, leather. Ran.
Abruptly, I felt pain and heard myself scream. Then I heard Mom scream.
I was on the ground next to the beginnings of our firewood pile with a bow saw stuck into my ankle, blood waterfalling out, dyeing the cuffs of my jeans the deep purple of tulips. I sat up slowly with a stern face like I had seen in the reenactments in the WWII documentaries at the nursing home, bent on my elbows, and was crying as though a switch had been flipped and an emotional decision had been made for me.
“Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit,” Dad thundered, and a flock of California scrub jays fled the trees above us. He deftly picked me up so that the bow saw fell out of my body, and I realized I must have stepped on it for it to hinge and bite into me. Mom threw sand on the fire, unlocked the car, and hopped into the passenger seat, Dad threw me in her lap, Henry climbed crying into the backseat and buckled up without anyone asking him to, and we drove.
I continued to feel the bite of the saw, its bright, many-knived jaw, its tenacity and vigor. It bit me again and again. I peered at the wound with trepidation to make sure the saw was gone; the wound was still hiding underneath the stain of my jeans. I could only breathe if I focused. I made tiny fists, ready to fight the pangs the laceration insisted upon. The skin of my ankle, thin and malleable as a page from a hotel copy of the King James Bible, had been ripped open by inhuman teeth, and I had that much less separation between me and the world. I needed my body to be a still and reliable boundary between me and my environment, but there was a new opening with which to contend, tender and pulpy and pouring out so much blood, as if my body itself was showing off, reveling in the drama and abjectness, in letting the ocean and the forest and the campsite and the car and my family all inside.
“Oh my God,” Mom said, “oh my God.”
“Where are we going?” I asked. “It hurts.” I felt the blood leaving my body. I need that, I thought about the blood. Stay inside.
“Keep it elevated,” said Dad, and Mom positioned my foot on the dash so that tiny trails of blood dripped down into the air conditioning vents. She pulled up my jeans, removed my soaked double-pair of socks, and started to tie a washcloth around the wound.
“You are going to the Emergency Room,” Dad said.
“Is this an emergency?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mom replied, terse and shrill. “We need to pray,” she demanded, but only Henry complied. I saw him in the rearview mirror with his eyes closed and hands folded like a Precious Moments figurine, just as china-white with just as boring features, holding tightly to the same focus and posture. Maybe he had learned to pray this way from the figurines. It is impossible to determine how children learn to pray.
#
I fell asleep bleeding and woke up bleeding on an examination table, lying down, my leg high above my head.
“Well hello there,” smiled an older man over his glasses. “Looks like you got yourself a cut.”
I blinked and realized I wasn’t in any pain. I smiled back dreamily, “Looks like I did.” Mom was standing on the other side of the table, faking a smile. The room was lit up like heaven.
“How did this happen?” the doctor asked me gently. Mom shifted her weight.
“I was too happy,” I established.
“She was running,” Mom interjected.
The doctor looked from Mom to me. “Go on,” he told me.
“I was running and I stepped on the saw,” I said.
“It was a bow saw,” Mom explained, “for the firewood.”
The doctor nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He looked at each of us separately for a moment, then continued to me, “Well, it’s deep but not too deep, and we are going to give you stitches.” Then, while looking at Mom, “We are going to try very hard to ensure it won’t scar too much, but it will likely be perceptible. Looks like she’ll need ten.”
“I will have a scar?” I asked.
“Yes,” the doctor sighed, “but we will try so that it is not too big.”
I grinned hugely. I had recently read some young adult novels which emphasized the many poetic merits of scars.
The doctor seemed bemused. “Do you want a scar?” he asked, and then, without giving me time to answer, he said, “You don’t want a scar. Later, when you are a woman, you will not want a scar on those beautiful legs.”
I looked at Mom, who had stepped closer and put her hand on my arm, and then looked at the doctor. “I know that it is very important to be beautiful,” I told them soberly.
The doctor laughed.
#
That night, we returned to camp very late. Sleeping, I had missed the transition from the hospital to the campgrounds and into my sleeping bag. I was exhausted but kept waking up, hallucinating bears. Henry was cuddled up next to me tighter than normal, snoozing open-mouthed, sleeping bag half-wrestled off, his glow-in-the-dark Superman shirt still glowing from the “S,” his hand tightly gripping my shoulder.
In the morning, Mom said, “We decided to call it a weekend. We’re gonna head home early.”
“Mom, no,” Henry protested, aghast, and tugged ferociously on her jacket sleeves.
“Mom, why? No. I’m fine,” I said. My bandage looked very strong and made an impressive bulge that my neither my pant leg nor my socks could fit over.
“It’s not you,” she reassured me, “it’s just we think it’s time to go home. It just isn’t our weekend.”
Dad sat smoking in the background, next to the fire, listening.
“We haven’t even seen the ocean yet,” I reminded her.
“I want to go to the beach!” Henry wailed.
“Don’t argue with your mother,” Dad said, and we fell instantly silent.
“Can we at least see the ocean before we leave?” I ventured. “Just once?” It roared in the background, a forgotten lion.
Mom looked at Dad. They stared at each other a moment, and then he nodded once in assent, eyes rolled.
“Yay!” Henry yelled, satisfied immediately with the compromise.
I smiled, but felt unsettled.
“Let’s pack up first and then we’ll go on the way out,” Dad said, stood up, and stretched.
“Okay kids. Get your things,” Mom said, and we dutifully went into the tent and started rolling up our sleeping bags.
“How’s your ankle?” Henry asked as we wrestled with the stuff bags.
“It will scar,” I bragged.
#
We removed the campsite of all signs of ourselves. It didn’t take very long, which disturbed me. I took inventory of everything we would be leaving, standing absorbed at the picnic table, surveying the spot of packed earth where the tent had been. Pensive, I played with my jacket zipper. Mom and Dad were playing Tetris with the suitcase, bags, and cooler in the trunk and Henry was playing Tetris on his GameBoy, reclined in the backseat with the door open, his legs dangling out. I wanted to go back out on the trail and look for the deer.
There was one more box of cast iron pans on the picnic bench, the last thing to be loaded. I went over to make myself helpful. It was going to be heavy, I knew, and so with great effort, I slid my hands underneath the box—and it was this act of quickly sliding my hands, palms up, that caused the picnic bench to break off into large wooden splinters, four, five inches long, thick chunks, underneath my fingernail beds, to lodge underneath the skin of my fingers. I gasped, choked for breath, and yanked my hands back out from under the box, tipping it over and causing all the cast irons to fall off the table and clang onto the ground. I turned around toward the car and held my hands up in front of me with each finger beginning to bleed.
“Mom,” I called out weakly, unable to take my eyes from my hands.
She was with me in a second, her pupils as big and round as the cast irons lying stupid and overturned on pine needle blankets.
“Mike!” she called for Dad.
“Not again,” he said.
I almost fainted from the excruciating pain, a pressure I felt in every nerve of my body that flooded over me in electric waves. My field of view threatened a brown-out, but I saw Henry at the edge of it in the car, sitting rigid, framed by the door of the Toyota, holding onto himself, and I stayed awake.
I looked again at my hands. They had turned into new hands, monster hands. My fingers were extended at least four inches each by the chunks of bench that had been shoved under my nails. Dad was lifting one of my hands up gently. “Goddammit,” he yelled into my ear. The blood from my hands was on his.
“Mike!” Mom called again.
I wiggled my fingers and felt the extension of their length.
“Will I be this way forever now?” I asked, swallowing bile. I imagined going back to school with my new hands.
“No, honey, of course not,” Mom said. To Dad, “They look deep in there.”
“A few of them go past the knuckle. We have to go back to the hospital,” he said, resigned.
“Should we try to take them out? I have tweezers in my purse…”
“No,” he said. “Gotta let the doctor do it. They’re too deep.” Using his fingers as a strainer, he dumped soda out of his tall cup and kept the ice, ran into the car for his water bottle and filled it up.
“Put your hands in here,” he said, and my mom helped me carefully squeeze both hands into the ice water. I could feel each finger’s wooden extension knock against the cubes as they pushed in and involuntarily wheezed. I leaned in close to the water and watched as it turned red. Hypnotized, I leaned in closer and could smell the Marlboro breath Dad left on its rim.
The lingering smoke stench took me out of my pain for only a second. I compared today’s injury with yesterday’s: instead of feeling like knives were still piercing my body with the gracelessness of a cheese-grater, my body had become the knives. My fingers were whittled wooden daggers that pulsed and bled. The opening of boundaries was clear in yesterday’s wound. But with splinters sticking underneath my fingernails and also elongating them, I had a sense of corporeal addition and subtraction. I was pierced and new. Freak hands, new possibilities. A circus career.
“Let’s go,” Dad said, and suddenly I was being carried by Dad with Mom trailing closely, carrying my hand cup with my hand inside. In another minute, as I lost the ability to feel my fingers, I lost the ability to feel some of the associated pain, and my hands became surreal attachments. I wiggled my fingers under the ice and felt my wooden extensions knock against the inside of the cup and clink against the ice.
“Please stop making that sound,” Mom told me, her voice a little airy, and I stopped. She held onto me until we arrived. I cried, but more out of compulsion than anything else. In the backseat, Henry was praying again, and I thought of how happy the nuns would be when I’d tell them about him praying without even being asked.
#
It was the same doctor as the day before.
“You again,” he said.
“Hello,” I said, and pulled my new hands out of the lukewarm blood water, ice now gone with the cast irons. The doctor blinked at my hands. The wooden extensions reached out a few inches on some fingers. I felt part-tree, a human-forest hybrid.
“This will take a while,” he told Mom, then called for the nurse, who came in with vials and syringes. As they busied themselves with betadine and cotton balls at the counter, the doctor asked me, “What happened today?”
“They are splinters from the picnic bench,” I said. “I tried to lift a box.”
“I see,” the doctor said. “Rough vacation, huh?” he asked my mom.
She let him have a forced laugh.
“Did you see this happen?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“Hmm,” he said, using the same tone as Dad when we told him we hand-fed the fawn. Mom stiffened.
“Now,” he told me, “nurse is going to give you some shots so we can take these out of your hand and get you back to normal. They might pinch a little.”
Nurse gave me two shots underneath my fingernails in each hand and soon I felt nothing. “We’ll be back to check on you in ten minutes,” Nurse said, and they left Mom and I in silence. When they returned, I felt even more nothing. They removed the splinters with long tweezers and metal rods with hooks at the end of them, sliding the instruments next to each puncture, into the wound, to latch onto the wood and draw it out. The doctor wore a magnifying eyeglass around one eye and focused into it.
My hands were under a lamp as they worked. I tried not to watch. As they pulled each stick out of my body, the doctor would announce, “Got another one!” He laid the little sticks next to each other on paper towels on the counter. They looked like delicacies from a blood fondue; I thought about eating them. This went on for hours. Mom stood by the table the whole time and never asked for a chair.
When they were done and finishing the bandaging, the doctor asked Mom for “a minute alone with the patient.” She looked as if she were about to speak, then closed her mouth and nodded. She left with the nurse.
The doctor turned to me and knelt down to my eye level.
“Is everything okay at home?” he asked me.
“Well, we’re camping,” I said. “We don’t live here.”
He paused. “I mean, are you okay?”
“I’m pretty okay,” I said.
“Is there anyone in your life who is hurting you?” he asked.
“No, no,” I said quickly, suddenly realizing the source of his anxiety.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
The doctor frowned. “Well,” he said, but didn’t continue.
I waited.
“Why do you think you keep getting hurt?” he asked me.
“I’m not very careful in the world,” I said.
He smiled, believing me.
“You need to be more careful,” he admonished. “There are so many ways a person can get hurt.”
“I do know that,” I said.
#
The doctor walked me back out to the waiting room and released me with a lollipop that he gave to Mom so she could give it to me, since I couldn’t hold it or anything.
“I hope I never see you again,” he told me, and Mom laughed for him again.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said.
“Take care,” he told us, and disappeared.
“Go out and tell your father we’re done here,” she said.
I felt like royalty as the glass automatic doors opened for me and I walked out into the cool parking lot onto the gorgeous, asphalt carpet. Dad was leaned up against a lamppost, smoking and drinking vending machine coffee out of a styrofoam cup. The air felt clean; I sucked it in. The stars overhead competed with the streetlights for primacy.
“Let me see,” he said, and motioned to my hands.
I held them up between us in the sign of surrender I had learned from the WWII documentary, my wrists stained with betadine below my bandages. I still could not feel them. He bent down and leaned his coffee on the curb and then with his free hand, pulled my hands up closer to his eyes underneath the streetlight. Swarms of moths flew into the bulb and obscured the light, made shadows on my hands in the patterns of their interlocking flightpaths. He nodded. “Okay,” he said, as if agreeing to something. He picked his coffee back up and sipped at it. “How are you feeling?” he asked, and assessed me. I knew how I looked: bloodstains on my shirt from today, bloodstains and dirt on my jeans from yesterday, two mummified hands and a mummified ankle, greasy hair.
I shrugged. “Fine,” I said.
He laughed at this, in sudden, loud, snorting guffaws, and without looking at me, said between spasms, “This is the worst Father’s Day ever.”
I giggled nervously and thought about that. “But we tried, didn’t we?” I asked.
“I guess we did,” he said, shaking his head. “I guess we did.”
“That’s what matters,” I reminded him, but I wasn’t sure anymore.
On our way home, we drove by the sea. It was too dark to see, but we could still hear it. I thought about waking up Henry but decided to let him sleep. I rolled down the window a crack and squinted into the night. Rawr, said the ocean, an animal.
Brianna Barnes has been published in the Apeiron Review and has work forthcoming in Ohio Edit, 300 Days of Sun, and RipRap. She’s all about mitigating risk and enhancing resilience. She is a nerd in so much pain.