Skin Cecilia Woloch (bio) Winner of the 2021 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by judge Dunya Mikhail In French, the word for wounded is blessé, akin to the English blessed. As if to be wounded is to be blessed; as if what wounds us is a gift. If someone had told me this, when I was six years old, bleeding from cracks in the skin at the hinges of my wrists and elbows and knees, I would have thought it was another trick of God, of which there seemed many and none of them good. I remember praying at the side of my bed at night, socks over my hands to keep me from scratching myself raw in my sleep, for God to please take this affliction away. Did I even know what the word "affliction" meant? The rash on my arms and legs and neck and eyelids seemed to me like a plague, like punishment. But what had I done? What was my sin? I was six. I believed in magic more than God, but I prayed, anyway, on my knees. I don't know, now, if my prayers were sincere, but I know they were furious, full of hot tears. In the morning, my skin would have wept and dried stiff, so it hurt just to straighten my arms and legs. The skin was scaly and flaky and itched; it itched all the time and, often, it bled. Blood. Maybe all wounds are spiritual. Our word bless comes from the Old English bledsian, bletsian, based on blōd [blood]; originally as in "to mark or consecrate with blood." If I focus, now, on the mysteries of language, can I avoid remembering the shame I felt, the humiliation and rage and pain? But pain is mysterious, too. The dictionary defines eczema as "a medical condition in which patches of skin become rough and inflamed, with blisters that cause itching and [End Page 14] bleeding, sometimes resulting from a reaction to irritation but more typically having no obvious external cause." (Emphasis mine.) The word derives originally from the Greek ekzema, from ekzein, "boil over, break out." I'm not sure when my skin first began to break out, and I'm not sure even my mother could ever precisely pin it down. The when of it as much a mystery as the why, as the what from? My most vivid memories of having outbreaks of eczema are associated with my first memories of going to school; memories of trying to hide my hot, itching hands in the cool darkness inside my desk. Memories of other six-year-olds sneering, "Yuck, what's wrong with her skin?" Refusing to come near me, making a show of flinching away. I'd entered first grade at five years old, small for my age, and without having ever been to kindergarten. My mother had said, famously, "I thought it was cruel to take a child that young away from her mother." Cruel. Maybe it was prescience on my mother's part. I remember how shocked I felt when she and my father left me at the door of that classroom, filled with kids I'd never seen before, all staring at me in my green-checked dress. In my terrible skin. Starting school, I've often joked, was a trauma from which I've never fully recovered. I went from jumping on the bed with my sisters and brothers to only being allowed to speak when called on, all in one steep and dizzying step. Not long before I'd started school, we'd moved from an immigrant enclave on the South Side of Pittsburgh, where we'd been surrounded by extended family, to a suburban neighborhood where the public schools were "better," and where my large, noisy family never quite fit in. And nowhere was the feeling of not fitting in more acute than it was at school. But my mother wondered aloud, years later, if my eczema had been triggered by events earlier in my life. A neighbor who visited too often with her two rowdy little boys, and stayed too long, while I was still a baby in...