The Mark On My Back Was A Hole Long Before I Understood Guns

I was born with two marks that never made sense to my mother. On my back, just below the left shoulder blade, there is a round puckered spot, small and neat, like a pencil had been pushed into me and pulled out. And on my chest, more or less opposite it, there is a smooth pale patch with no hair, ragged at the edge. My mother took me to more than one doctor about them. Nobody had a real answer beyond calling them birthmarks and sending us home.

I always knew, without being told, that something had gone through me. Front to back. I did not have the words for it when I was small. I told my mother something had come out of my chest here and made the hole in my back there, and she used to hush me because it upset her, this small person talking about being shot through before he could ride a bike.

Because that is what I described, though I did not have the vocabulary for it. I talked about a snowy road. A road between trees with snow banked up on both sides, and cold, cold like nothing I had felt in my warm life, and a truck, an open truck with men in the back, and being made to stand by the trees. I described the sound as a slap, not a bang. I said it pushed me forward. I said I fell into the snow and the snow was warm where I fell, which confused me because snow is not warm.

My mother thought I had heard a war story from an older relative. But the men in my house did not talk about such things, and I was describing it before I was old enough to have understood a story like that even if I had heard one. I described the buttons on a coat. I described a man who would not look at me and another who did. I described being cold and then, suddenly, not cold at all.