anti:freeze

I. Dancing in the living room with my sister, and her fist accidentally knocks out my front tooth:

raw gum tissue and stringy flesh, a hole I could not keep my tongue from pressing into, the carnivorous ridge of a new bone poking through. I remember a hard wad of cotton pressed into the hole, my jaw chomping down to hold it there while I bled, and how the cotton soaked up all my saliva - sucked it like a vacuum, until that hole felt raw and dry and hard. And then the wound began to ache. Treatments, I learned, could feel worse than the injuries.

II. The adhesive from an EEG irritated my scalp, and a lesion bloomed along my part:

One sharp prick from the tooth of my comb, and the skin split open. No matter how I held my head, the tiny ulcer remained visible, so I tried to speed its healing with a tissue and antibiotic ointment. I applied the ointment with my pinky (thinking this finger touched the least surfaces, had the least chance of spreading something icky), then covered it with a small bit of tissue - like the chin of a teenage boy after a shaving accident. I wondered whether this small patch of scalp would go bald, if sores damaged the follicles forever, and I imagined the empty follicles as deep holes, straight through the dermis, into my skull. Holes I could never fill in.