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Show lower half of his body when less than an hour old. He spent the first few months of his life in continual and, what can only be imagined as, excruciating pain. Why the nurse left the room, how she could have pushed the wrong foot pedal, how she could have misunderstood his screams are questions maybe Pele can answer. My parents asked and then asked again, but they were only told the nurse had been fired, let go that night, poor compensation for a baby born into flame. Numerous skin grafts eventually repaired the skin on Bryan's thighs and feet, though he screamed, holding his body board straight, for months and would sleep in leg braces his first year because his legs had grown misshapen in the incubator. To prevent infection, my mother could only touch her baby with gloved hands through a hole in the side of an oxygen tent. For weeks, Bryan was not held, had no sense of a world outside pain, forgot the smell of his mother. This time my father was not given a choice about whom to save; rather the goddess decided on her own the outcome. I understood little. At some point I stopped asking when my new and nameless brother would come home. My mother must have gone to the hospital during the day while I was at school, but she met me at the door of the house every afternoon, and my life seemed unchanged on the outside. School brought enough for me to worry about without also considering the larger injustices of the world. Because I now went to public school, Fairhill Elementary, I had to take the bus every day. This required walking down Swanee Lane to the bottom of the hill where I would stand on busy Nutley Street and voluntarily enter a vehicle that would 57 |