Day 115 - Black and Blue

 BLACK AND BLUE

Prompt - Black and Blue : Write about a time you've been physically hurt

I'd not long turned five years old.  No doubt I have memories that predate this time, but none as vivid as this one, which would mean that on my very first day at school I turned up with my arm in a sling.  Yet even the initial school day isn't seared on to my consciousness like the event that gave me the injury.

We lived in one of the middle houses in a terrace of eight.  The back garden gate opened on to a dirt path that ran along behind the other gardens in our half of the block, to a Y shaped junction that, to the right, took you past the garden gates of the first four houses in the next block, and on the left out to the street.  It was a narrow path, just about wide enough for a wheelbarrow, with weeds sprouting, gravel scattered, ridges of mud baked hard by the incessantly dry summer weather.  

I ran along the path.  Where I was running to, who I thought I was going to se, I have no idea.  But I was running from our gate towards the junction, as fast as my spindly white limbs would take me. My uncalculating child mind, focussed only on whatever goal it had, was not yet equipped to assess the complex relationship between speed, mass and the coefficient of grip available on that dried up surface.  My thoughts said Left, my body said no, the dust and grit offering no adhesion to my plimsolls, and I fell feet first, to the full length of my short skinny body, and dragged along the ground.

I cried.  I howled.  All I knew was pain.  (And, probably, embarrassment.)  Through my tears I appealed to my father, now standing at our gate.  I forget his exact words, but they were along the lines of telling me to get back up, I wasn't really hurt, stop crying about nothing.  But I didn't, I was and I couldn't.  Eventually even he could see, through his laughter, that his assessment of the situation might be a bit flawed, and he came to get me, carry me back to the house where my mother fussed and probed and determined there was something wrong with my arm.

It was only a minor fracture.  Greenstick they call it, common in the growing pliable bones of early youth.  I would do it again a few years later, but to the other wrist.  But I don't recall that one, or the various sprains and other injuries one accumulates through growing up. Not like that one sliding, slipping moment and the burst of pain it brought with it, the laughter of my father, the sense of, very briefly, being alone in the world.  Perhaps that hurt me as much as the damaged limb?