The Coat My Father Wouldn’t Take Off

I am not going to describe what was underneath it.

I have looked at a great many photographs of a great many injuries in my career, and I have made it a rule never to turn what was done to a victim into a spectacle for anyone else’s eyes, and I am not going to break that rule for my own father.

It is enough to say that he had been hurt, repeatedly, over what the colors told me had been a long time, and that he had been restrained, and that someone had been careful to place it all where a coat would cover it.

I knelt on that bathroom floor and I looked at what my brother had hidden under wool, and the grief that went through me was so total that for a moment I could not breathe.