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First Love By Shaindel Beers December 4, 2007 Anxious for the nine o'clock break, at eight-thirty I would light the porch, line the sink with gauze, cotton balls, peroxide, austere tools of love wanting him to bring his hands to me small, delicate hands an artist's or surgeon's displaced by the lack of a diploma twisting wires ten hours a day. When his Grand Prix rumbled into the drive, I would look not at his face but his hands and nightly make the same, sharp sigh when I had counted ten like a new mother, knowing that metal which cuts bricks could lay siege to fingers too. I'd fold his hands in mine like folding sugar into butter and lead him past my disapproving parents to my makeshift triage under the fluorescent buzz of bathroom lights. Awed by the horrid beauty of miniscule rivulets of blood, the muted glitter of metal shards just under the skin, I'd begin my gentle ritual of tweezing out steel slivers, flooding the red rivers white with peroxide, softly blowing away the sting then, I would send him back, bandaged, with a sandwich, to the big, block building just outside of town and return to my geometry. About the author: Shaindel Beers is a Professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies. She listens to the Prairie Home Companion because Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, seems surprisingly similar to Argos, Indiana, her hometown. | | | |
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