Childhood Memory of Something Small, by Saskya van Nouhuys

I am a child. I am at the beach. I am lying on a towel waiting to get warm again so I can go back into the waves. I play idly with smooth bits of glass and dried sea weed. Then, restless, I scan the people around me, looking for some entertainment. I focus on a tiny blue-black spot on my mother’s right thigh. I ask her what it is. She explains that when she was a child she sat on a pencil. It punctured her skin and the tip broke off inside her, and it has been there ever since. I marvel at the absurd notion that my mother was once a child.