A Kindness of Skin

The boy came to Ilen with a cut across his palm and mud on his knees. He had fallen against the mill gate. His mother said he had been told a dozen times not to climb it. She was angry because she had been frightened.

Ilen washed the cut. It was deep enough to need stitches, but the boy sat still, watching her hands. When she drew the first thread through, he said it no longer hurt.

'That's good,' his mother said.

By the third stitch the skin on either side had drawn together. Ilen removed the needle. There was no wound to close. The boy turned his palm over twice, pleased with it, and his mother took him home.

That night, Ilen's daughter woke crying. A cut lay across her small palm. Mud had dried in the crease beneath her thumb. She had slept in a clean bed. She had not been near the mill.

Ilen washed the mud away and found a sliver of paint in the wound, the same dull blue as the gate. Her daughter said she'd dreamed of falling. She remembered the sound of the boy's mother shouting before she hit the ground.

Ilen stitched her hand. This time the cut stayed closed. She waited beside the bed until morning. At breakfast her daughter could hold a spoon, though she kept looking towards the door when someone spoke too loudly.

The next patient was an old man with a burn from a cooking pot. Ilen treated it without stitching. When the blister faded under her cloth, she stopped. She asked him to wait outside while she checked her own arms. Her skin was clear.

At home her daughter was setting a cold kettle on the stove. She jerked away before she could light it, clutching her wrist. A fresh burn had appeared there. She said she had seen a kitchen she did not recognise, and the old man's wife standing at the doorway. She could describe the crack in its floor stone.

Ilen went to the man's house. The crack was exactly where her daughter had said. He thanked her for treating him. His wife offered bread. Neither of them noticed that Ilen could not look at the stove.

There were rules, then. A hurt taken away had to settle somewhere. It chose the person nearest to Ilen, or the person she loved most. Ilen did not know which possibility was worse.

She shut her door to patients. At dusk the boy from the mill came back alone. His mother had cut her foot on broken crockery and would not let him fetch help. He was trying to be brave about it. Ilen walked with him, carrying her bag, and found his mother seated on the floor in a pool of water and blood.

The cut needed pressure and a clean bandage. Ilen did that much. She would not touch the needle. The boy's mother watched her and understood only that the woman who had helped her son was refusing her.

'Please,' she said.

Ilen thought of her daughter at home, asleep with a stitched hand and a burn on her wrist. She thought of the boy who would have to wait for someone else to walk from the next village. She took the needle from her bag.

She stitched with her left hand while supporting the woman's heel in her right palm. At each pass of the thread, she held on more firmly. The woman's cut closed. A matching wound opened across Ilen's own palm. It hurt enough to make her drop the needle.

That night her daughter slept without waking. Ilen bound her own hand and sat by the fire. The wound carried a memory of falling crockery, a wet floor, a child's voice at the door. Beneath it was another memory, much older: someone else's hand held over an injury, someone asking whether she was sure.

Ilen had never heard that voice. She knew she had answered yes.