Page 23 - WTP Vol. V #1

sure what that something was. My parents’ divorce and my father’s cruelty only made mat- ters worse, and soon I began hiding in my room on the days I stayed with my father, pounding my thighs until they bruised, trying to make myself pay.
failures. There were plenty of reasons to hide, to change clothes in dark corners at summer camp, to keep kids from seeing those scars and what I needed to keep from them—my hideous story.
Early one morning when she was about two weeks old and still hovering around a pound and a half, we were having coffee at home when the phone rang. The worst call imaginable from the
(continued on page 29)
I don’t remember being ashamed of the marks on my body, marks that ran (and still run) in the four cardinal directions, dividing my body in quarters. But I was barely surviving the shame of what they signified—the evidence of my body’s
Inheritors Series 14
mixed media on masonite 15'' x 12'' By Nahum Flores
14