Share the Pain

The splash of boiling soup on the fingers of my left hand happened on a hot, sticky night, as we served supper in the crowded kitchen. The huge vats were at floor level, stirred by strapping workers with bandanas and streaming, shining faces. The soup bubbled, fat pooling in small circles on its surface. I stood at the counter to pass each waitress her tureen, and suddenly — was it the slip of sweaty fingers on a ladle? — my hand was in agony.

The camp nurse took my scalded hand out of the pitcher of water and examined the whitened gash across my fingers.

“That’s a third-degree burn,” she said, an understated woman, steady amid the swirling fun.

The cream and swathes of white bandages could not take away the throbbing that accompanied me night and day. It was a haze of pain, dizzying inside the miserable dorm room, torment outside in the sunshine. There was a night I just couldn’t take it and opened the nurse’s screen door as the camp slept.