I wrote an email today in which I described an episode from several years back, when the back of my knee was infected by a mysterious tick, and the doctor at the hospital was certain I'd have to have my leg amputated half way down. I went home thinking I was about to be crippled when Gramps, the German Shepherd in the house I was living at, attacked the welt on my leg and chewed out the poison. Then he licked the wound for days straight and eventually I got better. I don't even have a limp now or anything.

Then I think of Sterling, who has to live with her missing fingers every day. Two fingers aren't the same thing as half a leg, she'd be the first to admit, but still. I know it's especially tough for her because she did that shit to herself. She has to live with the story.

Once I asked her how it looked, her two fingers cut off clean from her hand, right there on the thick, lacquered wood of the paper cutter.

"It had a grid across it like graph paper," she said. "The blood ran into every nook and cranny. The cut was clean and straight. If not for the shooting blood, I would have been able to get a close up on a cross section inside my body, right there where those two fingers abruptly ended. My fresh stubs. They looked like the inside of a pocket pizza--round, factory squeezed disc of cheese in the center, surrounded by layers of sauce and meat."

Show Me Your Wound.

Raymi's Wound.