The Beautiful Kind

One summer when I was a kid, my mom thought there were alien bugs burrowing around in her skin. So she took any sharp object handy (needles, scissors, razor blades, etc.) and dug in. She has countless scars all over her body as a result. She even dug into the corner of one of her eyes, and got a major infection, and had to wear an eye patch for a while. She thought the bugs were coming from food bought from Dierberg’s, and had big plans to shut them down. She’d point out the bugs to us, in a slice of wheat bread, for instance, but we never could see them. Very confusing for a kid. My dad finally intervened when she started trying to carve into us. She even hauled us all down to a parasite clinic in the city to be checked out.