Glimpses of a Girl’s Life
by Krista Puttler
Haley’s Comet passes Earth once every seventy-five years. It appears often enough for us to remember the dinner table arguments over whether it is named after a boy or a girl, but rare enough for us to wonder if it ever visited at all.
On a grey autumn day, when the wind whipped between the bare maple tree branches, an Army Chaplain knocked on a young woman’s front door. She answered wearing a grey cardigan buttoned tightly around her swollen belly. The Chaplain held his hands in front of his chest, just long enough for the woman to recognize the patch on his left shoulder: two letter As configured to look like a jousting helmet. He pressed a single dog tag into her palm, and grief transferred from body to body, up her arm, down her chest, and into her womb, soaking in like rain on a parched ground.
Later that night, the delivery nurse checked the woman’s empty, yet still swollen belly, nodded, then walked over to the bassinet in the corner. Kirsten had wiggled out of her blanket. She was crying. She had never felt cold or alone before. The nurse expertly swaddled Kirsten, lifted her out of the bassinet, walked over to the moonlit window, and swayed the baby to sleep. Kirsten’s mother lay on the bed, too sore to shift position, and gripped the dog tag until it cut into her palm.
At three years old, Kirsten found a mouse shivering in the long grass beside their house. She crouched down, folded her body together, chin on knees, and stared at the mouse. It had eyes as dark as the sky just before a storm. They did not blink. Kirsten slowly moved her arm away from her knee and out to the mouse, one finger extended. She touched the mouse’s rough fur, a snarl of hair against her fingertip. The mouse closed its eyes and buried its nose beneath a blade of grass.
Kirsten’s stomach pains started later that evening. Kirsten’s mother found her rocking behind the bedroom curtain, hair tinted gold in the moonlight, rubbing the words stamped into her father’s dog tag. Her mother lifted Kirsten’s trembling body, removed her sweat-soaked pajamas, and placed her into the bath. As Kirsten’s mother scooped water into her hands and up and over Kirsten’s shoulders, she whispered the words written on the little disc of metal.
That night, Kirsten lay propped on pillows in her mother’s bed, her body aflame like the sky right before the dawn, each inhaled breath a shard of blinding light to her abdomen.
By morning Kirsten was vomiting, unable to drink the water her mother offered.
By noon, she was bundled onto a gurney, the dog tag passed from child to nurse to mother. They whisked Kirsten away, down a bright sterile corridor and through a swinging pair of operating room doors.
Her appendix has ruptured.
The inflammation is everywhere. Even her pelvic organs are involved.
She may never be able to have children.
At five years old, with a thin metal chain around her neck and the dog tag safely tucked beneath her blouse, Kirsten went off to school just like any other girl. She played house with her dolls, played Mama to her teddy bear family, and turned ordinary tap water into dragon-berry tea. But sometimes at night, when a sliver of moonlight appeared beneath her bedroom curtain, the scar on Kirsten’s belly would burn like a match. If she removed the chain from around her neck and pressed the disc of metal into her scar, the fire beneath the ridge of sutured flesh would ease, and Kirsten could return to counting the stars again.
One afternoon, at eight years old, and after a day of rain, Kirsten walked out of her house and down the sidewalk, the cement panels as slick as mirrors. The rainwater flowed along in the gutter next to her, pooling around a pile of fallen leaves, then disappeared down the gurgling drain.
The sidewalk ended at an empty lot overgrown with dandelions and clover. Kirsten stopped at the cement edge, her toes just touching the grass. The wind blew all around, rustling the clover, confusing her search for the four-leafed one she knew would be there. She closed her eyes, waited for the wind to quiet, and then opened her eyes again.
A single yellow leaf lay on the ground in front of her feet. She picked it up by its stem; it was unlike any leaf she had ever seen before. The stem had many tiny lines all packed together along its length. Then as the stem flattened into its leaf, the lines, its veins, remained straight, without a single branch, just like a dainty fan. Kirsten stood up and shaded her eyes with her hand. A ginkgo tree stood at the far end of the empty lot, its leaves a sunburst yellow, its branches pulsed with a golden light. She looked back down at the leaf and twirled it between her fingers. Somehow, when all the other trees were making leaves with branching veins, the gingko had remained, steadfast, unchanged.
One morning in the shower, at twelve years old, Kirsten looked down between her legs, and for the first time saw the red splatters on the porcelain between her feet. She crossed her legs, but the red kept falling. She screamed to her mother that she was dying. Her mother rushed through the bathroom door and drew back the curtain. She looked down at the splatters of blood mixed with water, crumpled to the bathroom floor, and wept.
At eighteen, while her mother was still asleep, Kirsten removed the chain from around her neck and placed it on the kitchen table. The words on the dog tag were rubbed smooth, the ridges just a faint impression in the dulled metal. She took out a yellow ginkgo leaf from the inside pocket of her jacket and tucked the stem underneath the metal disc. Then she walked out of the door and went to school. She learned about the beginning of things, about where moons and comets came from, about mouse diseases, and human anatomy, and why the ginkgo leaf’s veins stubbornly refused to branch, a botany miracle when miracles were not supposed to happen.
One afternoon, many autumns later, the ginkgo tree was bulldozed to the ground. The little fan-like leaves scattered across the field of clover in flashes of golden light.
Years passed.
Everyone forgot about the comet that was only halfway around its orbit.
One winter morning, when the shifting winds bring the first green smells of spring, a wailing ambulance pulled up in front of the sidewalk by an old woman’s home. Two men carried a gurney up the stairs and into the house. Minutes later, they returned carrying the woman wrapped in bloodied sheets. They placed her into the ambulance and drove down the empty street.
Don’t call her. I’m already dead.
And then the ulcer deep inside her started to bleed again, like a pile of leaves flushed from the end of a drainage pipe, and the doctor pounded on her chest, but could do nothing to save her.
Later that day, Kirsten and a small child were led into the empty resuscitation room. The body was covered with a grey sheet, the monitors silent. Discarded clothing lay in a pile on the ground. Kirsten picked up the top garment. It was half of a grey cardigan cut through with bandage shears up one pocket and just to the side of the buttons still fastened in their place. Kirsten reached into the remaining intact pocket and pulled out a slender cardboard box held together by a piece of string. She untied the string and lifted the top off the box. Resting on a square of pilled cotton sat a brown gingko leaf, the edges curled like tiny parchment scrolls.
Mother, what is that?
A miracle.
Kirsten presented the leaf to the child, whose fingers, clumsy with delight, grasped the fan instead of the stem.
As Kirsten crouched down to comfort her child, staring into the swirl of tears and space, the brown flakes floated down like dust in the afternoon sun and gently came to rest upon the ground.
“There is a gingko tree at the corner of my daughters’ school, and every autumn the leaves turn from dark green to a bright yellow, seemingly overnight. The first time I saw the glowing, golden heap of leaves at the base of the tree, my inner monologue of worries and to-do lists stopped, and all I saw was this blinding, radiant light.” —Krista Puttler
Krista Puttler studied fiction writing at Northwestern University, then went to the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences for medical school. She was an active duty general surgeon in the US Navy and is currently working on her first book, a memoir of her last duty assignment as the Ship’s Surgeon on a deployed aircraft carrier. She lives and surfs in Norfolk, VA with her husband, three daughters, and two rescue pups. She can be reached at kmp152doc@gmail.com.