Dylan Krieger | 9
that morning eight Augusts ago when she burst into my bedroom, having just arrived home from a weeklong church-run mission trip to North Dakota: Oh God, honey—that looks really bad. You’re still doing this?
Her face, like a slim prismatic lamp: its proximity to my shins revealed to her a row of gaping, crusted cuts along each inner slope. She never looked at me that way—hot with worry. I only remember groaning and folding fetally. We need to get you help, I guess. This can’t keep going on.
Later that day she drove me to my pediatrician’s office, and I thought of the first time she’d noticed the cuts—two years prior, when they were contained to the space of my pudgy, 13-year-old wrists. Then she’d just chortled: Ellie—did you do that to yourself? Why?
I don’t know, I lied. It feels good.
Ha! At least I had the sense to just go ahead and do drugs at your age. She sighed sharply through her nose and walked a full basket of dirty clothes out of my room.
But now, outside the doctor’s underwater-themed waiting room, she spoke in a creaky hush: Here are my keys, honey. Please—don’t hurt yourself with them. And then a spacey nod above my head and past the aquarium wall: There are children in there..
I fingered the craggy outlines of the keys, rehearsing their tacit maxim in her old voice: God is allowed to test his elect. But she never offered up her other daughters, only me. Like Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph were youngests. And so is she. Chosen. Foretold of in dreams, where all the sheaves of wheat bow.
She stayed in the bathroom for nearly twelve minutes before she deemed my temptation through. When she emerged, she didn’t check my flesh, but pried open the tiny-armed pocket knife hooked to her keychain for signs of blood or rust. The steel flashed me a smile, and I shivered to think she might know me better when she was like this—a stranger.
But as all the loud-painted eyes of the fish and receptionists tracked our path to the arced check-in desk, I found myself wishing they could only be so strange—at