EMMETSBURG: Eighteen

John squinted against a scalding pain as the young nurse cleaned the gash running across his palm. It was about as much emotion as he cared to show. She left the room for a moment and John studied the wound. He could see deep into his hand, past the bulging yellowing fat pads, the sinewy red muscle, bluish veins and glimpses of gleaming white bone. He’d come as near as he cared to losing the hand. He counted himself as lucky, still it was just about as good as John could expect with his luck.

He was more concerned with infection. Bad enough and he’d lose his hand for sure, and then where would he and Anna be? He’d seen enough of that in the war to know it was the danger. He’d seen men die by infections from wounds much less severe. When a bug got in the wound and took hold there was just no stopping it.

It took all of twenty stitches to close the wound. The nurse wrapped up his hand so much that it just look sort of silly, as though she'd accidentally covered a baseball with the hand. Down in the lobby Sister Dougherty gave him a sympathetic smile.

John sighed, realizing that his hand was all but useless, holding it up and turning it before his eyes. That wouldn’t do, of course. It meant that he would have to sit still a while, and that was just something John couldn’t stand. Couple days at most and it would have to come off. Fresh air and a bit of cautious use, he thought would do the trick, at least that what the most stubborn part of him wished to believe. What the mind believes and the heart concedes are as different as night and day.

It didn’t hurt, at least not as much as John feared that it might. Of course it was still a fresh wound. He’d taken a kick from a horse as a boy, busting three ribs. It wasn’t until they started to heal that the pain grew almost unbearable. For now there was just a warm sensation, and the feeling of two self-determined slabs of meat moving against one another. And there was also a sense that the assumption of his body’s inviolable space had been breached, like the betrayed body of a woman.