They know these kinds of things upset me.

Maybe too easy, really, to say that I've got a fear of scars: too Freudian, perhaps, or worse, too on the nose: like Maureen, who has a fear of mushrooms, and it seems to me, when I give it any thought, natural. Mushrooms live in the moist dark, feeding silently on death--the skin between your toes as much as the fallen sycamore or that old basement carpet. Mushrooms (tumid, fleshy) are wherever death is, gorging on it, and it makes perfect sense to me, on those grounds alone, to avoid them.

A scar in linoleum, or on a skyline, is no different from a scar on a body--a record of violence, incursion, impact, or eruption. A possibly, though not necessarily, unkind contact.

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