Worry Warts by Peter Derk
“He tells me to say something if it hurts. I say it hurts.”
Fiction by Peter Derk
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Let's talk about my hands.
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It's okay. You don't have to touch them. Just listen.
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You can only see scars on my one finger anymore. If you stand at what's called a polite distance. Three scars up the knuckle, what's left of warts burned away.
In a hospital, the same one where I was born, the same one where my father works, they put me to sleep to set my broken wrist, and they burned away the wart part of me.
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I fell from a thick monkey bar with my arm curled under me. A squeeze and a pop. It didn't sound sort of like a broken bone. The sound was broken bone, for sure. The way ping-pong sounds for sure the way ping-pong sounds.
The way they say you know something in your bones, you know the break in your bones.
The bone didn't crack through my skin, but it pressed, stretched it out. My flesh split in a tiny blood line where my hand meets my wrist. The wrist broke hard enough, the bone pushed hard enough, it snapped apart the band on my wristwatch.
My friend Eric runs into my house. I don’t see him inside from my spot on the grass. I don’t see him find my brother and tell him what happened to my bones. I don’t hear what my brother says when he doesn’t believe him, but my brother doesn't believe him. Me and Eric play tricks like this all the time. We call wolf, wolf, wolf. I don’t see Eric find my mom one floor lower, the place where she folds laundry, and tell her. I don’t hear what she says, but she doesn't believe him either. Wolf, wolf, wolf. I don’t hear how he says wolf enough in that breathless kid way that she comes outside to where I crawled up the one big step onto the deck.
She drives me to the hospital herself. From her house to the hospital, to where my father works. From her care to his. From the place where my bone broke to the place where they know how to fix it. I don't know if I should take an ambulance. I don't know anything about being hurt. Not yet.
I can't get my seatbelt buckled in the back of my mom's station wagon. Can't buckle up with just one hand. I try the whole ride so I don't have to look at my hand, my bone that's just inside, and that makes the ride quick. I don't live far from the hospital. The same hospital where I was born. Where my father works. This broken wrist is the first time I see him at work. See him in hospital scrubs. His same glasses frames, out of style the same way. His same beard, thin and black and grey. All this, but at work. It's the first time I see him somewhere different, where he's different from home. It’s the first time I see what they call his bedside manner, the way he talks to people he takes care of instead of the way he talks to me.
I didn't know the bedside manner version of my father. If he would come covered in blood, someone else's blood from a surgery. That's what happens on the shows with hospitals. I don't know which parts of the real hospital to be afraid of yet.
The bedside manner version of my father is fast. Not his speed from at home. He's fast and quiet here at the hospital where they'll fix me. Not like at home where he sings little made-up songs when he moves around the house, when he steps down the stairs or swings open the patio door to check on the grill. He’s fast, and you don’t hear him. He’s in the room without a song, and he picks up a clipboard without a song, a clipboard with hospital stuff on it. My hospital stuff. His big ears stick out from his head more with the bright blue surgeon's cap over his hair. With the lines of his clothes so straight, his nose is even more crooked.
The bedside manner version of my father is so fast and so quiet, so crooked.
A nurse tries to start an IV on the good side of me, the one where the bones stayed where they're supposed to stay. She takes a couple stabs with the needle and can’t hook a vein. My dad holds my hand. He pushes the needle into the back of my hand. Smooth, slow. He holds my hand and pushes. He looks at my hand while he does it. He doesn't look at my face.
He's in the vein. In my veins. He's in my blood. He's a doctor. He works here. At the hospital where I was born, where they'll fix me.
They lay the bed flat and wheel me away from the wall, away to somewhere else in the hospital. They strap a mask over my mouth and over my nose. I can taste the mask. It's not in my mouth, but the flavor of its hard rubber fills everything around my tongue and in my nose. My dad says to the other doctors that they should burn away my warts while I'm under. My worry warts spread over my fingers. The other doctors, the ones who aren't in my blood and don't know about my warts, they tell me, Point to all your warts.
I take a hard rubber breath.
Almost one for every finger. I know all of them. They're my hands.
I don't say left index, left index, left index. I say Here, and I point to one. I don't say left thumb. I point with a wart finger to another wart finger. Then a right finger with warts on the palm side points to a left thumb's middle crease. Point at my worry warts with my worry warts. I keep going and going. They're everywhere. They're my hands. Warts point to warts and the doctor gets a pad to write on. Middle finger, top knuckle.
Another doctor circles all of my warts with a marker that goes on my skin blue and fades to purple. Some warts are close enough together he just circles both in one circle. I pull away from the marker at first. I don't know which parts of the hospital hurt and which parts don't yet. Then another doctor draws a last blue marker circle for the clot of warts on my left big toe. The circle turns purple like the others.
My dad, he says what he says to his patients. He says it to me, You’ll wake up feeling refreshed and remembering nothing.
I sleep and they set my broken wrist. I sleep and they burn the warts away from my hands. Up and down the fingers, both sides. The thumbs. Burn my worries.
My dad takes the laser for one. Left big toe, circled in the blue marker that looks like purple. He says later the burned wart skin from my hands and my feet is the worst thing he's ever smelled. Opened living bodies and opened dead bodies, infected tissue. The worst thing he's ever smelled is my skin. My hands. My worries burned into smoke.
He tells that story when family friends come over. He tells the story one time when we eat barbecued chicken my dad chars on the grill outside, when Steve and Cindy come over. He's really good at the grill, really good at chicken and corn on the cob, and he tells Steve and Cindy about the smell from my burned skin over plates of his best grilled chicken. They make faces to push my dad's story back out before it gets stuck in their heads. Steve's bald head wrinkles into hard folds up front. My dad's wife, she says my warts, my hands, aren't polite dinner conversation. Not a polite distance. My hands under the table.
I almost cry when he says how my skin, my hands made the worst thing he's ever smelled. It stays an almost cry. The drips stay inside, just by a thin line, the way the bone stayed inside, by a thin line.
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After the surgery, after I wake up with plaster on my arm, after I go back to school and throw up in the school bathroom from the pain pills and tell the school picture lady that I want my cast in my school picture, after all that happens and all that time happens, the skin that used to be warts stays black. My father holds my hands in his. He looks over what's left of my warts, the burned patches where I carry my worry. The worst thing he's ever smelled. He holds my hand the way a lady holds out her hand and a man takes her hand to slip something on her finger. My hand outside the cast signed by my class. By the girl who's my first kiss. By a boy who grows up and murders some people and we see him in the newspaper. My hand outside the stink of the trapped, yellow, dead skin inside the cast. My hand, wrist bent, dotted with the skin burned away to stinking smoke. He holds my hands in his, and he cuts the burned dead pieces of skin away with a pair of scissors.
This time I wish I could almost cry, like the other time, but I cry all the way instead. The drips from my eyes. Bone through skin.
He pinches the burned skin in the scissors. They tear the skin away in big bites. The scissors, they're too big. They pinch the regular skin, the parts that are okay. The parts that never worry. Under all the black and the regular skin caught in the sharp teeth, under that is my blood. Fresh, raw, warm down the three-warter, the index finger that's least polite.
My father holds my hands in his and cuts my skin away.
He doesn't say you'll wake up feeling refreshed and remembering nothing this time. This time he says, Tell me if it hurts.
The sounds of the scissors are different sounds on skin than they are on construction paper or the plastic sleeves of the freeze pops we cut open all day all summer. The way the sound of the piano upstairs is for sure different when the cat walks across it at night. Each cut pulls a piece of skin out of my hand. A short blood trail, my blood, the blood my father's in and my worries are in, a short blood trail smears up the blades.
He tells me to say something if it hurts. I say it hurts. Then I say it hurts again.
He takes three burned spots before he stops. Before he rinses the scissors in the sink. The three you can still see on my left finger, the finger I might use to point if we were at polite distance. The finger I keep put away if we're closer than polite.
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Everywhere I kept my worry goes. The warts go. The three spots stay. They still stay.
My hands carry their worry wherever they can now. They still carry as much. More. About the scars and the burned spots. The easy way a bone breaks under a boy's body. How ugly that word sounds, the wart word.
The bones carry it too. The broken ones and the ones that stayed together.
The blood. The blood of my father, the blood he could put a needle in any time. The blood pulls and pushes worry.
My worry warts. My worry hands. My worry bones, my worry blood. They carry my worries. They carry my father's.
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Header image courtesy of photographer, Amoxi.
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Peter Derk lives, writes, and works in Colorado. His solution to pretty much everything is "Visit your local library.”