A Flash Fiction Story: Scars
By: Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith
It’s when Eve is getting dressed or after every shower that she is faced with something she doesn’t want to see. It’s something she’ll have for the rest of her life while on this earthly realm, but then again, once she dies, no one will really care about this scar that haunts her. That she sees every day.
As she stands looking in the mirror, she sees the thin clumsy zig zag of a knotted line etched between her breasts. It used to be a pinkish red when the doctor first made the incision into her skin, and she sewed her up a couple of minutes later. To others, it would just be a zig zaggy line, but to her it means much more. It is more than a physical mark on her skin, it is a mark that goes as deep as her emotional scars, mental scars and spiritual scars. It represents the scars that go unseen, from the family that raised and abused her for the first ten years of her life, and it is the scars of the homes she lived in afterwards, when she felt all alone and no one understood her, because she made similar cuts on her arms and no one bothered to ask her about them.
She remembers the day, she received this cut, actually gave permission for this cut to take place, and then watched it morph into the scar it is now. She absently runs her fingers down it, and instantly she is taken back to when she was lying on the doctor’s table, her breath quickening as she heard the plastic wrapping fall from the needle and the OOMPH sound escaping her lips as the needle entered the soft tissue surrounding her breast and how the needle made the area go numb.
Her doctor chatted away with her, as if it was a normal every day routine to make an incision into someone’s chest. For the doctor, maybe it was, but lying there, Eve wondered anxiously “why have I given permission for this, for someone to hurt me? Even if it is in a controlled environment?
The doctor looked down at Eve and asked rather cheerily “How’s your day going?” “It’s going okay, Eve replies back. Her teeth almost grinding together as she looks down and sees the incision that has been made. She doesn’t want to get dizzy from glimpsing at the incision, but as she starts to look away, out of the corner of her eye she sees a peanut sized lump appear between the scalpel and blade her doctor holds in her hands.
OMG! she thinks, that was inside me? She wonders what caused the lump to form, how it formed and why it formed, but she’s also glad it is out of her. Her doctor puts the lump into a vial and says “We’ll send it to the lab, but I really don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Back to the scar, she runs her finger down it, marveling at how in minutes, hours and months a scar can form, whether its physical, emotional or mental. A scar can tell a story, but you have to be careful who you show and tell it to.