The wax is warm as I press my hand into it. Warm and soft, sensual, forgiving.

Miss A tells me to hold my hand still, so I do, waiting patiently, a good girl.

When she says I can remove my hand, I pull it from the wax, cooler now, harder.

Then I skip off to the sandbox, or maybe the easels with their dull, powdery poster paints. Am I there when they pour the plaster? I don’t remember.

But a few days later I come home with a plaster casting of my hand print, which hangs in my parents’ bedroom for years.

[scs_alt]

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I’m  not sure when verbosity crept up on me. Was I always this wordy? Although I am capable of writing succinctly, it’s — shall we say — a challenge. Why use only ten words when I can use 100? Why write a 350-word article when i can flesh out my thoughts so much more effectively in 1,350? Perhaps the only place I’m good at being crisp is with these 3×5 cards, and then only because I run out of room!

[scs_alt]

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The first time I had my ears pieced, it was at the mall.

I’d convinced my mom, after months of wheedling, to let me do it now, in 6th grade, rather than waiting til I was fifteen. Everyone else was doing it! And pierced ears were so cool!

The girl put a dot in the center of each earlobe with a pen, then loaded the piercing gun with the earrings I’d picked out — tigers eye, to honor my cat.

POW! It stung like mad, but there, in the mirror, were my newly pierced ears. I was in the club.

[scs_alt]

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The bars started to angle in around 5th or 6th grade,

but it was age 13 when they slammed shut with a clang.

Worthy and Enough were the property of others.

Me, I was pitiful, a wretch, a pile of dirt.

No wonder I could barely deign to give myself a crust of bread

and a bowl of stagnant water.

It’s all the pathetic creature in the cage deserved,

I thought.

It was a long, slow climb out of the pit, but what I discovered,

as I clawed up the walls, was the better I fed her,

the more she felt she deserved it.

That’s how to feel enough.

[scs_alt]

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