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.

Years passed and I grew up and mostly set it aside, the way you set aside a strange dream. But when I was a young man I met an older gentleman through my work, a man from far away who had lived through terrible things as a boy in a country torn apart, and one evening he told a small group of us about the winter his village was cleared. He described a road between trees. He described the trucks. He described how they were made to stand by the trees, and the sound, which he said was not like in the films, more like a slap, and how the snow went dark and warm.

I had to leave the room. I stood outside in the cold and pressed my hand to the smooth patch on my chest and the puckered spot on my back and I shook. He had described my marks from the inside. He had said things I had said as a small person and been hushed for. He did not know me. He had no reason to invent it. He was simply an old man telling the truth about the worst day of his life.

I never told him what it did to me. It felt like too much to put on him, and I did not want him to think I was making his grief into a story about myself. I just listened, and afterward I thanked him quietly, and he held my hand a moment longer than was usual and said, you understand, and I said yes, and it was the truest yes I have ever said.

I am not asking anyone to believe me. I know exactly how it sounds. I only know what I carried before I had any way to have learned it, and I know the marks are on my body still, front and back, and that somewhere in the world a road between snowy trees swallowed a great many people, and that one of them, maybe, did not entirely go.