autobiographical fragment #1

Remember, this is pretty raw & unedited. I make no claim that it qualifies as good writing . . .

The allergy shots weren’t working, but my mom took me once a week anyway. Most of the kids in the waiting room were younger than me. I was in fourth grade. I’d recently figured out how to use vanishing points to draw cubes and conglomerations of cube-like shapes that receded toward a lightly-sketched horizon line. My favorite thing to draw was the entrance, seen from slightly above, to what I imagined as an infinite labyrinth of colorless stone walls. I always scribbled in an anonymous little stick figure standing at the entrance. He looked symbolic of something, official, like the figures on restroom doors. I drew so many of these labyrinths that doing so became fairly automatic; yet I offered one to each friendly adult in my life, hoping that the adults would believe I’d drawn it up on the spur of the moment, with no forethought, just for him or her. I loved the praise.

But when I gave one of these drawings to the bee-hived nurse who’d poked my arm every week for the past year or so, she didn’t praise me. Instead she asked what it was. Duh, I thought. “It’s a labyrinth”.

“And what’s that thing?”

“A guy who’s going through the labyrinth.”

“Oh.” Then, “that’s interesting.” She chuckled nervously, set down the drawing, pulled some serum from the bottle with my last name on it into the needle. “Here it comes.” I watched the needle disappear into the backside of my upper arm. As her thumb pushed down the plunger, I wondered why I never felt the liquid rushing inside. She pulled the needle out and had me hold an alcohol-soaked cotton swab over the point of injection.

“So I hear he’s going to camp,” she said to my mother. Why hadn’t she asked me?

“Yeah,” I interjected. “New Life Ranch.”

“That’s a wonderful camp,” she said to my mom. “You made a great choice.”

My mom looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. I could tell from her half-smile and arched eyebrows that she’d rather not have been interrupted.

“That’s what we hear. His friends love it.”

The nurse told me I could sit down. Twenty minutes later, the place I’d been given the injection had become red, hot, and swollen, like a huge mosquito bite. The nurse sighed. “Maybe better next time. Don’t itch it.”