Knee Jerk by Brian P. Katz

car was abandoned on Whitaker Place -- a yellow hatchback with an orange racing stripe, a missing tire, a dented hood, smashed windshield unreasonably intact, and the driver's side door slightly pried ajar. This was a new plaything, a jungle gym, a prop, a club house. Frankie and I, both eight, immediately took to the car and began creating possibilities: Cars were meant to smash into sides of buildings; cars were meant to be destroyed in head-on collisions or highway pile-ups; cars where meant to run over people; cars were meant to be driven by adults. This wreck was our Dodge Charger, our Grand Torino.

Frankie loaded his frail body behind the wheel and I found myself running down a garbage laden backstreet with a siren blasting behind me. My crime: the stealing of one million dollars from First Federal. I ran towards the car, fully aware of its immobility, ignoring the repetition of "Freeze" and in Bionic Man fashion jumped and rolled off the hood. But escaping unharmed I found myself running down a different alley -- sooner or later I would have to be caught, all criminals are eventually caught. The cop car ran into me and I smashed into the windshield, shattering the glass into smithereens; or, I jumped onto the bumper, ran on top of the hood and threw myself onto the broken windshield.

While rolling down the glass, a shard slid under my kneecap. The pain was not as immediate as the blood. I was amazed by my own authenticity as I slid off the car. Frankie took one look at my painted leg and dashed off in "I did it" fashion. I was abandoned with the car -- a strange connection between boy and thing. But unlike the car I was bleeding.

I instinctively clutched my thigh in a hand tourniquet. I trailed across the street, pulling my leg with my hands as if rendered from my body. Opening the door to the apartment with a whine, my mother stepped from the kitchen, tea cup in hand. The lines of her brow spelled out my judgment. She fell to the floor, one hand clasped her heart and the other rested on her forehead. Everything was as it was on television -- my mother's melodramatic faint, the color of my blood and the amount of it, and the sound of the shattering tea cup on the floor.

I limped to the bathroom and reached for the nearest towel to soak up the mess. My mother remained on the floor.

I called my grandfather, conveniently a doctor, and when he arrived he attended to my mother -- his nonchalance to my condition was a matter of being conditioned by his family’s hypochondria. I sat on one of the dinning room chairs, carefully, almost feline, surveying the room in its mess of self all over the place. My grandfather took one look at the skin and corpulent, gleaming baubles of fat and stained bone and we were off to the hospital with my mother's towels still soaking up the blood.

I was awarded a series of Frankenstein stitches and a few remarks of how lucky I was (looking at my knee now, I can barely make out the scar). The wound was carefully, to my dismay, covered and protected by sterile pads and white tape.

In school, my stitches became a parlor trick -- I could bleed on cue by flexing my knee and stretching my stitches and the gash. This was the most popular I had ever been.