AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes. They took the skin from my inner thighs. Once when I was seven. Again when I was ten. Then thirteen. Fifteen. Then eighteen.”
Oh my God.
“Why… in so many stages?”
His head remains bowed as he speaks. “The damaged skin stopped growing when I was seven, but as I grew, it would stretch the skin out until it almost split open, or stop me from moving properly. I could barely bend left or right at one point. And… the pain.”
Oh my God…
“I’m so sorry.”
I remove my hand from his back but he remains where he is, unmoving. “You were seven when…”
“Yes. It was a car accident. My back took the brunt of it. The skin. The muscles. I broke four ribs and my arm and my pelvis. Two arteries were severed.”
“Oh my God.”
“They’re not exactly sure how I survived that part.”
“I… I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago,” he says as if to reassure me, though melancholy hangs from his words.
“Your spine. It wasn’t affected?”
“I fractured two vertebrae. I couldn’t use my legs, and I lost bladder and”—he shudders in a frayed breath heavy with despair to the point that I wonder if I should tell him to stop—“bowel function for about four months.”
“Grey,” I whisper, aware that his tone, that of a man destroyed, is out of character for him.
If it were just a car accident, albeit a terrible one, he wouldn’t be turned away like this. There’s something else there…
“But I was one of the lucky ones. My spinal cord wasn’t severed or blocked. It was just bruised. The operation straightened the vertebrae, removed the parts pressing on my spinal cord. With physio, sensation came back. Well, once the worst of the brain injury subsided.”
“Brain injury?”
“Yes. That took the longest to recover from. Over a year.”
“They put a trach in you?”
“Yes. Between the collapsed lung, the spinal cord and brain injury, I couldn’t breathe properly.”
In those moments when words fail you, you don’t know if you should say something that might seem impossibly trite or whether you should remain silent, hoping that the thoughts in your head can somehow be heard energetically by the other person.
But instead of the solace I would hope he would feel by talking about it in a safe place, he says something which makes me shudder. “I’m a monster.”
I tug on his arm fast, forcing him to turn. “What are you talking about?”
His eyes lift to mine as his hand smooths the hair back off his forehead to reveal a jagged scar carved into his scalp where no hair grows. His hair is so thick that you can’t see it and because his hair flops a little over his forehead, it conceals the large scar at the top left of it.
I raise my hand tentatively, watching his eyes before brushing my finger across it gently and then withdrawing it. “The scars are… just part of a survival story. They’re a sign of how… powerful you are. How strong.”
The words make him grimace. “It was my fault. The accident. Well, mine and… someone else’s.”
I shake my head. “You were seven years old. How could it possibly be your fault?” At his deafening silence, I press on. “Who was driving?”
He lowers his eyes. “A family member.”
“A woman,” I say, not knowing why.
