my little cousin is almost 3
and she is just like me
- or just like I was
when I was 3.
she’s stubborn
and she growls.
I used to growl,
apparently.
she’s a climber, a growler
and an observer
with messy messy curly hair;
it is such a nest, I recalled
the years my mother would
yank
a brush through my ringlets
and I would cry.
my little cousin
knows what she wants,
obviously,
she’s 3.
I was sitting on a bench, listening to
my family
talk about old stories
with my aunt that is now
dying.
she stood in front of me, my little cousin,
staring
quite blankly, like she didn’t need anything.
I looked in her eyes, she looked
in mine.
"you got a ouchie"
she told me.
"yeah? where?" I asked her.
"there," she touched just below
my knee
with her index finger.
indeed, there was a fresh
scar.
and immediately I was buried
in a memory
of how I got that scar.
it was just over two weeks ago,
actually;
and I hadn’t felt the skin rip
until the accident was over.
or I could call it an affair,
or a pit of passion, or I could even
call it a mistake.
"how did you get an ouchie?"
my other cousin asked me;
she’s almost 7.
I was devastated.
I wanted to be upright,
be honest, in a
calm kind of way;
but you can’t do that with children
like this.
I wanted to say,
"a boy gave this to me."
but instead I said,
"oh, I fell a couple weeks ago."
"on the sidewalk?" asked the almost 7 year old.
"something like that," I told her.
"you fall hard and got ouchie!" squealed the almost 3 year old.
she’s too smart, for her age
how did she know
that’s exactly
what happened