My nose bled on my first day of kindergarten. Other kids were climbing a ladder to slide down a metal ramp. I did not understand why. What was the point? When old Miss Kettle began to yell at me to climb the ladder, a single drop of blood must have plopped on my white cotton shirt. Right over the heart. I suppose that it came from my left nostril, but it just seemed to appear on my chest, as if somehow a wet red pearl had labored through my flesh, sprouted through my skin and absorbed into the spotless material. At the time, I considered that possibility.
"Damn it, Mort!" Kettle yowled. "Go lie down on the bench. The big bench over there by the door."
With that, the day improved. Turned around. Became something I could learn from while also relaxing and being mildly entertained. Schooling at its best. I lay flat on my back upon hard cool oak, staring at the 1962 Chicago Public School ceiling of cracked flaking sky blue lead-based paint. I listened to the way boys and girls tried not to communicate with each other and the way the teacher thought she was controlling the class with her cracking voice. I paid little attention to what I already knew--the morning's substantive moments about counting without using fingers and about the word "apple" beginning with the letter "A". My focus was free to follow the flow of details. A fly entered the classroom twice but left only once. The smell of dead flowers followed Miss Kettle wherever she went. A light breeze from beneath the door kept licking my left cheek. Somewhere, a clock was ticking.
"Mort! Mort! Are you still bleeding? Mort!" Kettle sprayed spit when she said my name with her gray head of gray hair, gray puffy skin, gray empty eyes, gray thin lips, and gray cracked teeth hovering without a silver lining over my salivia-annointed face.
"I don't know. Maybe I am." The answer was an honest one, and it also enabled me to spend the remainder of my first day of school resting in peace on the bench. For the sake of clarity and candor, I must admit that I knew my nose was no longer bleeding, if it ever was. But Kettle's flaccid face asked me if I was still bleeding, not just my nose, and I simply could not presume to have absolute knowledge of my overall physical condition. Maybe a stubbed toe-nail, or a scraped knee, or something inside of me that I would not even know about until it was too late to be saved, was still bleeding. And regardless of what the facts may have been, because of the sheer possibility of blood, my response was quite truthful. Pure. Innocent.
--Mike Davidson