dermis raze the worst cuts of my life have all been self-inflicted. they were accidents, but i still broke my own skin every time. i cut a deep vertical line that covered half the length of the back of my left thumb when all i was trying to do was memorize antony's speech from "julius caesar" and scratch an itch at the same time. it took months to heal. i was hiding it with a band-aid and sitting on the floor in one of the dance rooms when one of kat's running shoes landed in my lap. i still want to ask her: what were you doing? were your shoes feeling jumpy that morning? were you trying to tell me something? but she wouldn't know. she wouldn't remember a thing like that. i'm the only one who would remember a shoe making a soft landing on the crotch of my jeans while her boyfriend talked about how much he wanted to break christian's fingers with a hammer. by the time i was performing that monologue onstage, the band-aid was gone. there was a thin red line where the wound had been. everyone else went with a straight dramatic reading. i wanted to do something different. i had this idea to deliver the dialogue in the character of a made man talking to a soldier he'd just clipped. make it caustic. stop once in a while to kick that bleeding piece of earth. i lost my nerve. i did it straight. but i screamed the word "havoc" hard enough to split the left corner of my mouth open. there's a cut healing on the back of that same thumb right now, just below the proximal nail fold. this one wasn't that bad to begin with. it's down to a little pinprick now. in a day or two even that won't be there anymore. the marks i don't want to fade are always the ones made by other animals. a cat who stood on his back legs to hug me like a person gave me some of the best scratches i ever got on my forearms. i didn't think those pink dots and dashes would ever leave me. they took their time, but they were gone before i was ready to let go of the room the marks were made in. an animal who made marks i couldn't see sat and chain smoked cigarettes in that room. i breathed in the thin tendrils of her death haze and prayed for my lungs to turn black. i stood just outside the cased opening and heard her talking about me with her sister. i walked away as soon as she said my name. when i think of that room now, what i remember is walking too fast when i was half awake, cracking my head on a dip in the ceiling, and falling to my knees. i was sure i'd shattered my skull, sure i would see stars before my vision fled, but all i gave myself was a bruise i couldn't see, and pretty soon it wasn't even tender to the touch. 211213 ... kerry gorgeous writing, raze. 211214 ... kerry my brother was a cub scout for a short time. boy scouts seemed more fun than girl scouts--i was a brownie, then had to wear some green sash--junior? i didn't stick around long enough to see what came next. i was jealous when peter's troupe started doing whittling, first with bars of soap and then wood. my dad got him a swiss army knife, and got me one too because i begged. then one afternoon i was sitting on the back porch, where no one ever went, trying out my knife on a large stick, trying to strip the bark. i didn't know how to use a knife and ended up cutting a little triangle into my wrist. it didn't bleed at first, then it gushed. now it's just a white spot, like all the others. 211214 what's it to you? who go blather from