In Which Miss Jill Loses A Wrestling Match With A Record Player

I have to preface this entry with the disclaimer that I wrote these paragraphs for my writing class and there are some major factual errors. If you ask me to write about a scar, you are forcing me to embellish, because I am not athletic and have no scars. Most of it happened, but not in the same night. Furthermore, all of my earliest memories involve high school basketball games (my baby blanket had basketballs and the head of a brave Indian warrior), so if there was a game, we were probably there.

While my father was bravely leading the Preston Indians to victory against rural Idaho’s basketball elite, my twenty-five-year old mother spent yet another night of solitude with two baby girls. My placid little sister languidly nibbled on a toy as I slithered around the apartment in a frenetic trance, leaving a path of unparalleled destruction in my wake. Unfortunately for me, we both revealed our dominant character traits very early in life.

Shortly after I attempted to recreate the Nazca lines on the living room floor with a pilfered crayon, my crime spree violently ended as my colossal forehead lost a dual with a record player. As blood poured from my contorted face, I like to believe that I felt a pang of remorse as I faced immortality in one of the most iniquitous moments of my young life. Amid the din of my banshee wails, my mother looked frantically for the doctor’s phone number. My sister continued chewing, unfazed. In rural Idaho of the early 1980’s, doctors were in short supply and a future arsonist was the closest option.

Fortuitously, he exhibited the same finesse in restructuring my forehead that he employed in torching his home for the insurance money, because the only evidence that remains of my indiscretion is a small, nearly invisible scar.