Goodbye, My Pearl
by Morgan Beck
from Issue 1
Looking at this pussing knee scab, I think how I want to pick it, to learn how its giving crust might feel. I imagine the tug of where the leathered bit would peel smooth off fresh-healed skin and where it would tear: reopened and leaking. Pain and gush and rip where violence dislodged the clotting. A membrane thread pulling longer and longer like a hangnail clinging stretching catching. I could slip my nail right under that tough raised edge. Harvest it in a slow and pleasurable pull. And I would be left with the hard, unwholesome scab. It would seem dry, first, but as I push my fingers together, I would find the squish of it, and it would be under my nail and sticking to the pads of my fingers and embedding its smell in me, wedged in my body.
And this is not even my body, my scab. No, this is not masturbatory picking, but a violation of another’s body, a glorious contamination. One I crave with delicious irrepressibility. An extension of the joy of scraping goop from my eye, snot sliver from my nose, and dead skin from my heels. A cleaning of my grungy nooks, a stripping of discarded bits just clinging on.
I ask, and people (friends, lovers, brief intimates at a party) share the ordinary horrors of their bodies. They send me pictures, describe moments of wounding or recovery. Best, they pull up their pant leg, down their collar, back a bandaid. I have no interest in a stranger’s wound. What I want to see is a treasured—or at least known—body transformed. To become implicated, enmeshed in these corporeal confessions.
Nora’s fly-bitten eyelids puffed until they protruded past her forehead and squeezed out her vision. A skin condition swelled and boiled Sean’s face into unrecognizable droopy skin. The surgeon told Anna to imagine surgery like she had gone to war with a saw and lost. Down her leg, below the knee, the defeat left bruises that transformed the calf into a dead-looking limb, gangrene green and jaundiced yellow. Riley’s ingrown toenail became infected, its greenish skin distended with liquids; wisely, their surgeon wore a face guard to protect from the projectile splatter. Years ago, when people froze off planters warts with use-at-home acid, Ellen dripped and dripped the treatment on her foot until the whole sole peeled off: a thick and inches-wide flap of murdered skin, still knobbled with warts.
Once, over three months, a flesh pearl sprouted out of my palm. My body was ejecting a tiny chunk of old glass embedded in my hand. At first, it was simply an odd, bleeding hole, a relentlessly dribbling stigmata. But as the hole widened, I began to notice something firm and round inside it, a knob the size of a sesame seed. It grew and grew until the hole revealed itself to be an exit. The ever expanding pearl was made of blood vessels and viscera: the bubbly meat you see at the bottom of a deep cut, now expelled as a single pulsing blob. Attached to my hand by a thin, sturdy stem, the skinned pearl bled at the softest touch, and wiggled damply when prodded. It had a constant stickiness, an endless ooze. If I touched it, my finger came away with a thin residue and the sweet scent of pus and dirty bandaid. I knew it needed to be removed. I felt tempted by wire cutters, by my father’s kitchen shears cutting down the spine of a chicken carcass. I imagined the pearl severed and bisected: perhaps it would look like a grapefruit, all those wet pink juice vesicles full of pulp and smell. Instead, I protected it: new daily rituals of cleaning and drying and bandaging emerged. New fears of it catching on something—furniture? clothing? Then, ripping violently, bursting, exploding, yanked out from somewhere deep inside me. Umbilical cord torn and spurting, I imagined it hanging long, the pearl held up, screaming like a newborn.
Last year, Rebecca opened her cardigan to reveal the violent rash that made clear liquid drip from every pore on her back. Every night it wet her sheets, every day her shirts, hardening any fabric it touched into starched stiffness. From Caroline, I received half a dozen pictures of bites and swelling stings and crusty blisters coating their legs, like dense shiny pitch pockets on a tree trunk ready to burst. After getting teeth out, Malcolm's scabs dislodged, exposing the hole where the root had been opened down to bone and nerves, filling after each meal with scraps.
Eventually, a surgeon removed my flesh pearl. Tidy, sanitary. Cauterized and castrated. Just a brief farewell smell of burning flesh as a final icky twinge. There is the steaming smoking pipe of a medical incinerator outside my window. At night when its red lights are visible, I think of that other hospital in the other city where they discarded my pearl. When they took it from my body, it transformed into a biohazard.
Now I wait—too clean, too oblivious to my body’s grisly, vigorous workings—for the next emergence, the next aberration.