1

When I got a loft bed, I discovered the wolf in my ceiling. It was his head, outlined, in profile, in the stippling. No other forms ever emerged from the texture, but the wolf was there like a single constellation. We moved when I was 16, and the night sky changed.

2

I put myself in the path, in the situation, and things happen, again and again. At 32, I reached over top of my hot glue gun to grab something and it fell into my forearm. The tip tore my flesh, burning its way through. It flashed bright red for a few days, but it scabbed into a funny little arc. I decided it was a dolphin, jumping artery to artery. In a few months it faded. I can only catch a glimpse of it in the right light.

3

At 8, I screamed from the shower and my brother came running into the hall bath. “What’s wrong?” he asked. He had to draw the curtain to get to me: I was frozen near the drain, pressed into the wall opposite of where the spider was. He couldn’t find it, even though it had been the biggest and blackest I’d seen in my life. There, then gone, and I had to conclude it had been the fuzzy we discovered, a collection of lint dangling from a thread, caught on the shower curtain. The scaredest I’d been in my years, screaming at shadows.

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Writing prompt: A punctuation mark and a bullet wound can take the same shape. Take two meanings for the same shape and plop them next to each other.

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