Flesh Wounds (excerpt)
"The only useful thing my mother ever taught me about bodies..."
This is an excerpt from a work in progress, a memoir with the working title Flesh Wounds. I’ll be sharing periodic excerpts from this manuscript here on Substack for paid subscribers. Please feel free to leave feedback.
The only useful thing my mother ever taught me about bodies was not about my own body, but someone else’s. I was seven or eight and we were walking through downtown Cleveland to go to the department store where my grandmother stitched respectability to glamor as a seamstress in the bridal department. I was excited, wearing a dress I liked and shiny mary janes, because it was a special occasion: we were going to meet my grandmother for an employee-discount lunch at the fancy tearoom on the tenth floor. My mother was looking forward to it too. She had told me twice since we got out of the car that she was planning to order the chicken pie.
Suddenly a man stepped out of the proverbial alley, whipping open a long coat. I remember a startling morass of dark thick hair that seemed to extend unbroken from his face to his socks.
