velocity

My sister has twenty staples in her head, along a large C-shaped incision on the left side of her skull. Staples are supposed to leave a smoother scar than stitches because the skin doesn't pucker, it lays flat. She's supposed to keep the incision dry, which means that after a shower she has to wear her wet hair up, exposing her half-shaved head and meandering trail of staples. She seems okay with it, and of course it doesn't bother me. The ladies at the knitting stare didn't know what to do. They wouldn't look her in the eye, they wouldn't look at her head, and they spoke reeeeally sloooowly, I guess in case she'd just had some sort of dumbening surgery.

It's strange to watch other people react to that. They keep trying to sneak little looks at it, and my sister keeps turning her incision away from them, not because she's ashamed of it, but because by looking at it they end up talking into her deaf ear. One of the women at the store almost walked her in a full circle; she would creep around a little to look at the left side of my sister's head, then my sister would turn a little to hear what she was saying, and they repeated this dance for about ten minutes.

And by the way, I cleaned her clocks at Trivial Pursuit. She tried to play the "recent brain surgery" card, but I still count it as a victory.