"For days my arm swelled and with it my pain, aspirins doing little to dampen either. Eventually she relented and took me to the doctor. Enough time had passed since the injury that my arm had mended, wrongly, and so the nurses held me down and the doctors held my arm over the edge of the gurney as I screamed and Momma watched, unmoving, from the doorway, as they broke me in two...

 

... Children are just living scars, raised gristle born from the soft skin of innocence, proof of our parents’ having existed."