Act of Nature
At ten, floating pains in her hips, girl was told to avoid extremes. So when daddy pulled back the sheets, she focused on the eternity between no and morning until those hips raged against intrusion and devoured themselves. They escaped into the black hole of metal and plastic replacements. Immutable.
That should have been the end of it: The hips are gone; the father is dead.
Now right hip-- that so-called dead thing, picks up shrapnel all the way from Bagdhad and Belfast, fields icepick marrow messages from homeless eyes in a nearby doorway, holds the terror of a bullet the next-door-neighbor sends into her mother's heart. That hip that did its best to say no once upon a ten-year-old nightmare.
Is there anything more extreme than silence?
War happens on battlefields in distant lands. And illness is an act of nature.