Needles and Pins

There were cats living in Mark’s basement. Boxes that he’d taken from the stack near the registers at Liquor Mart, filled with old t-shirts that at this point had begun to smell like urine and feline angst. He has been allergic as a child, determined after numerous visits to the family doctor and endless pokes from allergen packed needles. His skin would rise up angry. He’d taste metal under his tongue and his gums would itch. His face would flush, reminding him of the b-vitamins that his mother forced down his throat to “keep up his energy”.

There were so many days he went off to school tearing at his pale skin, drawing furrows down his arm and under the legs of his jean shorts. Days that he’d sat in agony through math class or science desperately trying not to scratch his crotch, even though it felt like someone had filled his pants with fire ants or a handful of dirty beach sand. His mother was convinced that there was something she was feeding the family that wasn’t agreeing with his “fragile system” and Dr. Lyles was damn well going to figure it out before he started high school.

“But even after months of being a human pin-cushion and suffering endless small explosions on and under my skin. I felt like an out of control experiment.

But had mom ever thought past the whole milk yogurt, seven-grain bread or various nuts and berries, she might have noticed that whenever any one of the 11 cats sat on my lap for any period of time or coated a favorite sweater with their bits and pieces, that I’d erupt in out of control fits of coughing.

Our house was a shelter of sorts for every stray that my mother found dragging ass down any sidewalk or path in town. It was as if she was on a mission. She’d head out to pick up broccoli and a bottle of 2% from Casey’s General and come back with a three-legged calico she’d found poking around near the dumpster. Her car was a pinata of fur and cat dander, that any gust or draft would blow into the air like dandelion fluff. I breathed it in, deep. It lived in me while I slept and I carried it with me when I left the house. It was moving in my blood like slow poison and it was miserable.

But my mom kept on insisting that it was food borne and the stabbing continued until graduation, when I informed her that I was so full of holes that I could feel a breeze on my back when I was walking straight into the wind.”