Natalie Kusz

A hole was worn into the snow, and I fit into it, arms and legs drawn up in front of me. The dog snatched and pulled at my mouth, eyes, hair; his breath clouded the air around us, but I did not feel its heat, or smell the blood sinking down between hairs of his muzzle. I watched my mitten come off in his teeth and sail upward, and it seemed unfair then and very sad that one hand should freeze all alone; I lifted the second mitten off and threw it away, then turned my face back again, overtaken suddenly by loneliness. A loud river ran in my ears, dragging me under.

I was always waking up, in those days, to the smell of gauze soaked with mucus and needing to be changed. Even when I cannot recall what parts of me were bandaged at what moment, I remember vividly that smell, a sort of fecund, salty, warm one like something shut up and kept alive too long in a dead space. Most of the details I remember from that time are smells, and the chancest whiff from the folds of surgical greens, or the faint scent of ether on cold fingers, can still drag me, reflexively, back to that life, to flux so familiar as to be a constant in itself. Years after the Seattle Children’s Hospital, when I took my own daughter in for stitches in her forehead, and two men unfolded surgical napkins directly under my nose, I embarrassed us all by growing too weak to stand, and had to sit aside by myself until all the work was over.

In the cabin, Dad was on the bed and our mother was working high up at the counter. Shy for a moment because Mom seemed very busy, Ian waited until she was still, when the milk powder was mixed in a pitcher and she leaned into the stove, stirring dinner with a wooden spoon. He said, “Mommy?”

“What, baby,” Mom answered him, biting the cuticle from her little finger, turning the pot handles inward.

“What happened to Natalie’s eye?”

“A dog bit it, son.”

He considered. Mom bent her knees and looked in at him. He said, “And then what happened?”

“She had to go to the hospital and get it fixed.” My brother fell into his thoughts again, and when he said nothing else, Mom rose again and went back to her work.