The skin around them was red in a way that was not just irritation.

She spent nine of her twenty-two dollars at a walk-in clinic on Halsted at eight-fifteen that morning, giving a name that was not hers, paying cash, and a physician’s assistant who did not ask a single question about the bruising on her forearm cleaned the wound, closed it with adhesive strips, gave her a starter course of antibiotics from a sample cupboard, and said, quietly, at the door: “There’s a number on the back of this card.

It’s not for me.

You don’t have to call it.