Nathan again.

Nathan sat on his bed, wondering what to do. It was cold. January. He had thick socks on, but the floor was hard wood. His mother was calling him for dinner, but the floor was hard wood. If he walked with socks on the wood floor, he would slip. He wouldn’t fall, but he would be able to feel his feet slipping away from him with every step. It was how he got to the bed, and he had hated it.

He could take his socks off, but then his feet would be cold. That’s how it had been when he’d gotten up that morning, and he had hated it. His mother called him again. He wished he hadn’t taken his shoes off. He wished his mother hadn’t taken his rug to be cleaned.

She called for him again, and he could hear her foot steps coming up the stairs. He wanted to go to her, but he couldn’t.

There was a toy truck on the floor. It had been his father’s when he was young. It was metal, not plastic like Nathan’s other toys. He liked it best because the doors really opened, and he could put his little finger inside the driver’s seat and turn the tiny metal steering wheel.

The truck had a wide bed. Nathan was small for his age, and he could fit his foot onto it.

As his mother came to the door, he jumped for the truck. He would land on it, and it would roll all the way to his mother, and they could walk down the hall because it had an old rug that made his feet itch when he wasn’t wearing socks but he was wearing socks so it would be okay. But he missed the bed of the truck, and instead the heel of his foot landed squarely on the sharp edge of the bed, and his mother screamed as he lurched to the side and fell on his arm, which hurt a lot, but not as much as the sole of his foot which felt like it was bleeding.

He sat up and twist his foot to look at the bottom as his mother rushed over and threw her arms around him. There was a tear in his sock, and he could see his torn skin below it. He wasn’t bleeding then, but when he squeezed his heel blood began to ooze from the jagged cut along his foot. His mother screamed and grasped his wrist, wrenching his hand away from the injury.

She carried him to the bathroom and set him down on the edge of the bathtub. She rolled his socks off, throwing them carelessly to the side. She then found a washcloth, wetted it in the sink, and pumped liquid soap onto it. She folded the cloth in half and rubbed the two sides together to get the soap to lather. As she was doing this, Nathan had pulled his bleeding foot onto his lap and began picking at the cut with fascination. He even forgot about how cold his feet would be now. If he pulled one way it hurt a lot, but if he pulled another–

“Stop that,” his mother snapped. Nathan stared up at her in confusion. He wasn’t sure why what he was doing wrong. “You’ll make it worse,” she continued and kneeling before him with the washcloth, cradling his foot gently with one hand.

“But then how will I know how I work?” He asked.

His mother frowned as she scrubbed his foot. “You can ask a doctor. Or read a book. But don’t hurt yourself.”

“How do they know how I work?” Nathan asked.

“They just do,” his mother snapped and scrubbed harder.

The soap stung and the pressure from his mother’s adamant washing hurt, but Nathan didn’t say anything. Instead, he sat wondering why the soap and the rubbing hurt in different ways, and how he instinctively knew the stinging was from the soap and the dull pain was from the rubbing, and then there was another pain from the cut itself, which was sharp and more like the soap’s sting than the rubbing’s ache.

His mother had him turn around and wash his foot off with the water from the bathtub faucet. Then she let him dry his foot himself with a towel while she found gauze and medical tape under the sink. She covered his cut with gauze and taped it in place.

“Can you walk?” she asked. Nathan carefully stood and nodded. The bathroom tiles were like ice, but he wouldn’t slip.

It didn’t occur to him until later that she had really meant, “Does it hurt to walk?”