Soft, Spotted Animal

It is evening, the last weekend in August, and I am trying to remember what it is like to wear shorts. Sundresses and bathing suits too. I sit on the granite-studded shores of Lake Wahwashkesh in northern Ontario, stretched atop the gray wooden dock of my boyfriend’s family cottage. I study clusters of lanky conifers across the bay, tracing the ebb and flow of their cragged boughs and admiring their resemblance to the trees in Emily Carr paintings. Summer does not end before September anymore. My joints swell in the dry heat; my long track pants warp from an afternoon’s worth of sweat. The polyester pools around my ankles, sticks to my knees.

I am reaching for a time before scars but cannot find one. How did it feel, baring my legs? Inviting the evening up around my thighs? The picking started before memory. In old family Christmas cards and elementary school yearbooks, they are always there: pink and red spots riddling my cheeks, spattering my legs and arms.

I am in the first grade. My parents beg me to leave the ones on my face, just for the week — just until after class photos have been taken. When Picture Day arrives and I am coaxed into a frilly dress, there is a deep, blood-filled circle on my forehead, halfway up and just left of center. In the thumb-sized square picture proofs that I find a decade and a half later, the spot glints like a small, crimson gem.

I am in grade four, possibly five. I have moved to a farm, an hour northwest of the city, and my limbs are covered in horsefly bites turned open flesh wounds. As he watches me peel off thick cotton socks and shin guards in the passenger seat after soccer practice, my father suggests, gently, that there might come a time when I will want scar-free skin.

He means well. Still,