When I lie, there’s a taste like charcoal that forms at the back of my throat. I swirl the lie around my tongue, relishing all the flavor there, and I speak with sparks that snap out from between my lips. The lie is harmless, one I’ve told countless times to the woman on the other end of the receiver, the woman who loves me and who has gone away on a work trip, but who will be home in a few days. I hold the phone up to my ear, and I tell the person on the other end that I miss them, that I can’t wait to see them, that I love them.

As a child, I got a large gash up my arm, and when my mother asked me what happened, I told her that I had fallen off my big wheel tricycle. What actually happened was that I had been playing with the kid next door. He was a boy and bigger than me, with hair on his head so blonde that, when he was in the sun, it turned white, as if he were an old man who was stuck in a child’s body. He was a mean, twisted kind of boy, the kind that eats dirt, or that pulls worms apart to see how each part might wiggle.

We had been playing in the backyard, and I showed this boy a new toy I had just been given. The toy was a doll: one my mother found at a store that sold items that were gently used. I loved the doll, with her rosy pink cheeks; I put her in a yellow dress that I had made myself, my fingers marked where I’d pricked myself with the needle by accident. The boy took the toy and held it in a delicate, sweet way: a side of himself that he sometimes showed to me—this being the reason why I’d trust him with the toy in the first place. He held the doll in soft hands and, before I could grab it back from him, picked up a jagged rock, and with hands too big for the rest of his body, like they were growing and the rest of him hadn’t caught up yet, he scraped, gouging deep grooves into the toy, scaring it. I ripped it from him and started to run. Tears formed in my eyes, and I remember, even now, how the wet heat of them felt as they rolled down my face and into my mouth, turning to salt. He had grabbed me, the rock still in his hands, and that is how I got the cut.

I had been so ashamed, ashamed to have trusted the boy with my toy and ashamed to look at its now twisted-up face, to see the harm I had inadvertently inflicted on it. My arm was bleeding, though I couldn’t feel it through the shame. I threw the toy into a bush, so that I’d never have to feel that feeling again, and told my mother the lie about my big wheel.

The wound on my arm has never really healed. Sometimes, as an adult, I wake up, and it has started to ooze. I take a piece of cloth, and I dab at the wound like a parent might dab at the mouth of a messy baby.

When I tell this lie now, speaking into the receiver and telling the woman who loves me that I miss her, that I will see her soon, that I love her, my wound starts throbbing and kicking at itself. I hang up and turn my attention to the dull pain in my arm, running my finger along the seam of my childhood injury. Over time, the cut has turned an angry reddish-purple color. The cut had been smaller when I first received it, maybe two inches in length, though, as I’ve gotten older, my body growing—skin pulling and puckering in different directions—the wound has grown too, stretching into a nasty sort of crescent moon that starts just below the narrow crook of my elbow, reaching towards my wrist.

When I had first met the woman who loves me, it had been summer, and it had been raining a hot, miserable rain; she had been wearing a yellow sundress. It was the dress that caught my eye; it seemed to pull me like a fish hooked to a line, to her. She was dripping wet, and I was overtaken by this feeling, this compulsion to dry her. We began to see a lot of one another, and she never asked about the wound, how I’d gotten it, or why it always seemed to look bigger on the full moon. She told me, sometime later, that she loved me. When she said it, it felt as if she had always loved me, that nothing had changed, and we had always been this way. I felt no different, and I was left to wonder whether if, when that boy hurt me, something had maybe fallen out of me that can never be put back into place. She was kind and good, and I said it back and have kept saying it back. She does not deserve to hurt.

I run my finger along the scar, feeling the heat and the burning, and what feels so much like a knife that is cutting, and I’m thinking about the woman on the phone, wondering if I should feel guilty for what I’ve said, guilty for the lie between us. But all I can feel is the pain in my arm and the sadness I felt when my mother put my big wheel tricycle out on the street corner because she was so afraid that I might hurt myself again; her wondering how a little girl could have gotten such a nasty cut from something so slow-moving and low to the ground. I had watched from my bedroom window as a young man with glasses pulled up to my house in a blue SUV and put the big wheel in the back, probably taking it to his own children, who would soon be playing on it.

My arm throbs as I think back on the day it was formed, my mother wiping away the blood and spreading cream onto its darkest point, wrapping it in a soft bandage. She questioned me again, asking if it really had been a big wheel accident that had caused the injury, or if maybe that boy next door had done something to me. I shook my head. She never asked about the toy, nor did she wonder about its disappearance, too intent on telling me that I must not play with that boy again. But in my heart, I knew that she knew that the doll had been ruined; that by me being too afraid to speak up, I could not save it, and by not acting fast enough, I might as well have been the one to have disfigured her.

I go to the sink and run my arm under hot water. The wound seems to sizzle, like oil in a pan, as the water hits it. It stings, but I hold it there and hold it there. In the reflection of the window that looks out onto the blank brick wall of the apartment complex next to ours, I’m looking at myself and the ways my face has grown from that little kid; it’s changed, I’ve changed, but I don’t know how, in what ways, and how time has managed to pass me by without me noticing. I am living now with the woman who loves me, who I hold when the sun sets, and in the dark, I whisper in her ear that I love her, and with each word and with the smile that creeps at the corners of her lips when I say it, I am protecting her, keeping her further from the lie. I am sometimes almost convinced that the satisfaction of protecting, after feeling for so long that I am unable to protect myself, that this is love. But it is in those moments, always at night, that the wound begins oozing, making its presence known to me, hurting and aching and tearing itself up; it becomes a mouth, one that seems to have its own voice that laughs and taunts, whispering things until the me and the it are one. When this happens, I can’t sleep. I sit up and think about my childhood shame that has grown into an adult, mature shame. I see the woman who loves me with scars down her face, scars like that broken toy, and I think that I never want to hurt her that way.  

The phone is sitting there on the counter, its head resting in the crook of its neck. I can feel the heaviness of it, it carrying the weight of being a unifying voice between spaces. The cord drapes in looping spirals, which I take in my fingers, wondering if somewhere, in the folds, is the distance between the woman and I, if that distance is love.

I sit and watch the phone as it rings, knowing who is calling, and me not wanting to pick up again. What I would like to do is to peel back my skin, feel the soft spot where both ends of the wound meet, and to step into it, to disappear inside.