her able hands

I remember this one Christmas when I was maybe nine or ten. It snowed a lot and we went to my Aunt and Uncle’s house for Christmas dinner. I’d had hives—bad—huge clusters of red welts all over my body that itched so much I wanted to scratch my skin with that wire brush my dad used to scrub off the grilles on the hibachi every summer. That wasn’t the solution offered, no. Instead my mom passed me a giant bottle of Benadryl across the back of the front seat to take great swigs off of while my dad tried to navigate the pea green Vega over icy roads. We wound up in a snow bank that day and I recall the experience through a drug haze backed by a wild itching that made me want to strip my clothes off and roll around in the snow. I can still feel the cold, brown glass of the oversized bottle in my throbbing hands. I can taste the stale sweetness and the metallic afterburn. I remember how it felt like I lived inside an itchy pillow.

Bookmark It