Stigmata
A man finds a wound where you'd expect a nail. He finds answers where you'd expect God.
It started on a Tuesday. A small wound on my left wrist, right where you’d expect it. I don’t mean where you’d expect a cut. I mean where you’d expect a nail.
I am not a believer. I want that on the record.
The wound didn’t heal. It didn’t bleed much either — just enough to stain my sleeves, just enough to make my coworkers look away. My doctor said dermatitis. The second one said stress. The third said I’d like to run some tests and never called back.
By the second week it had a shape. Round. Deep. Too clean for a rash, too symmetrical for an accident. It looked —and I say this with the vocabulary of a man who hasn’t set foot in a church since his mother’s funeral— deliberate. Not self-inflicted deliberate. Deliberate the way a sentence is deliberate.
My sister sent me a link to Lourdes.
I didn’t go to Lourdes.
What I did was this: I set a towel on the kitchen table, the white one from the bottom drawer, the one we used to wrap my daughter’s knee when she fell off her bike, years ago, when there was still a we. I boiled water. I took the filleting knife from the magnetic strip above the stove. I washed it with dish soap, then rubbed it with alcohol from the first-aid kit, which had expired in 2019.
I sat down. I turned on the overhead light, the fluorescent one that makes everything look like a morgue. I appreciated that.
Then I opened my wrist.
Not along the wound. Into it.
The first cut was shallow and the pain was specific. Not sharp — specific. A hot wire threaded through meat. I could feel layers give way separately: skin, fat, something fibrous that pushed back against the blade. I breathed through my nose, counting. I gave myself five-second shifts. Cut. Pause. Wipe. Look. Cut.
My hand cramped on the fourth pass. I set the knife down on the towel and flexed my fingers until they obeyed. The blood had reached the edge of the table. I folded the towel inward —the white was gone now, all of it— and continued. If anyone had walked in, they would have seen a man in his underwear hunched over a kitchen table at 2 a.m., performing surgery on himself with a fish knife. I’m aware of how that looks. I continued anyway.
I should say: by this point I was not entirely sure God didn’t exist. The wound had started weeping on Fridays. The first one was Good Friday — I know, I know. Every Friday after that, same time, same slow red bloom through the gauze. No doctor had an explanation. And I am a man who needs explanations the way other men need prayer.
I spread the wound with my thumb and index finger, the way I’ve seen butchers open a seam in pork. There was a small sound — not a tear, not a snap. A wet resistance, like peeling a label off glass.
The kitchen smelled like copper. Then like something older — raw iron, a drawer no one opens.
I wasn’t looking for proof. I was looking for a mechanism. If there was something sacred in me, it would be here. Under the fascia. Between the tendons. A mechanism, a density, a cause. Something that was not meat.
The tendon was right there, slick and pale. Below it, the vein pulsed — calm, ignorant, still pumping as though nothing had changed.
And beneath the tendon, pressing against the vein, there was a mass.
Small. Hard. The colour of something already dead. Shaped like nothing anyone would pray to.
I touched it with the tip of the knife.
It didn’t glow. It didn’t speak.
But it had a smell. Faint, wrong, nothing like blood — like old noodles, like a wet blanket left in a bag for days. I knew that smell. Not from any church. From the vet. Years ago. They opened the dog and showed me what had been growing inside her while she still wagged her tail.
My hand had gone cold. The fingers moved, but slowly, like they belonged to someone else. I sat there for a long time. The light buzzed. The blood cooled on what had been a white towel. Outside, I think, it was Friday.
I closed the wound with butterfly bandages from the kit. I washed the knife. I put it back on the strip. I poured the water out.
Then I called the doctor —the one who never called back— and told him I wouldn’t need the other wrist.
Well, that was creepy!