February 13, 2023

10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine
By: Patricia Smith (2017)

Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train 5 engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.   Who shot you, baby? I don’t know. I was playing. You didn’t see anyone? I was playing with my friend Sharon. 10 I was on the swing and she was— Are you sure you didn’t— No, I ain’t seen nobody but Sharon. I heard people yelling though, and— 15   Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked you a little sideways, made you need air differently. You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard. I ain’t seen nobody, I told you. And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street, 20 or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway, we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:   an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor 25 underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren’t all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything, no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce 30 the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.   Oh, and they’ve finally located your mama, who will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering Jesus’ name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls shut. Perky ol’ Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from 35 his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums a wry tune no one will admit they’ve already heard.   Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through Sharon’s body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.

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