brittle raze no one told me not to shove my whole hand in there. no one told me not to turn the dishcloth around inside the glass. i thought it was a good way to get the inside clean. it was a good way to cut my hand open. i heard the glass break before i felt anything, and then i saw blood. my hand my hand i cut my hand. my voice loud and fast. it didn't sound like me. it wasn't my whole hand. it was my right index finger, right around the medial phalange. just beside it. a long, jagged tear in the flesh. it stopped before the knuckle. i wrapped my finger in a damp washcloth. we drove to the hospital. i asked if i would need stitches. you said you didn't know. maybe. probably. i cried. you laughed. laugh and the whole van laughs with you, except for the person who's bleeding. cry and your finger cries too, but its tears are a different colour, a different vintage, and they'll stain whatever they touch. you let me hold your hand when the nurse stuck a needle in the wound. i screamed and laughed at the same time. the needle was worse than what the broken glass did to me. i couldn't believe the thing that was supposed to numb you could hurt so much. i tried to squeeze hard enough to break all the bones that made your hand work, that held it together and made it do what your brain told it to. i couldn't hurt you. not that way. not with my weaker hand. i can't remember how many stitches they gave me. enough to make it look like my finger had braces. just like my face. you ever want to know how it feels to have someone use vice grips on your jaw, wear headgear for three years. i had to keep track of my hours. i had to write them down. i had to screw the headgear into my face after dinner and leave it on all night. thirteen hours. fourteen. fifteen. i felt the thin metal bar strapped to my head moving my teeth where they didn't want to go, i heard the gears grinding, and i thought, this is what a headache really is. not those pinpricks behind your eyes or that heat hidden somewhere inside your skull where you can't get to it. this. your whole face burning. a slow fire that won't quit, that no one else can see, that doesn't smell like anything. i looked like an alien. i couldn't get my finger wet until the stitches came out. i couldn't do somersaults in the shallow end of the pool. all i could do was stand there and point at a sun that probably thought i had something important to say. i had nothing. the sun wouldn't have listened anyway. it wasn't there for that. it was there to cook me. more heat. more ache. skin red like my blood until it blistered. the scar was almost nothing. i didn't even get a good tattoo out of it. but i learned how not to wash a glass. 211007 what's it to you? who go blather from