Autobiography of a Skinless Mind: 1: Girl
by Shaina
When I was six, I started crying
in the backseat of our minivan on
the way home from Sports Authority. I
said “Dad, are you kidnapping me?” He
said “no,” as parents say to their
children’s invalid questions |that
is not a fact|. Perhaps
that was my first encounter with
context-lifting. |The mind exits the
situation and looks at it like a story
prompt in grade school: what do you
see here?| The easy
path was to re-enter the daughter
self and feel the leather of my new
glove and see the hard new metal
bat and think of the softball that would
be played. Solution for a plush bodied
human. Days
come when your chipped off pieces are
patched up with tin. Such armor
prepares us for extended lifting, enables full
sight. I went into the
home of a strange man, and I
said, “are you my father?” He, being
of tin as well, did not answer, knowing
the question was not altogether invalid |this
could be so|. Only his eyes were foreign,
but then I hadn’t seen a mirror in
days or
weeks. With the tin, as it goes,
blood forgets itself, occasionally.