Jeff Darren Muse

My First Memory of Hurt

Featured in Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope

“I Remember the Dogs” interrogates the aftermath of my earliest memory: when my brother and I wrecked a minibike into a barbed wire fence. Reflecting on our father’s alcoholism and regret, our parents’ divorce, and the profound hold Kentucky has on my life story, this essay examines character. An excerpt:

“It’s June 1975 in central Indiana. My skull is wrapped in a swirl of bandages, my hair unwashed, nearly blond. My sullen eyes look straight at the camera, toward whom I can’t recall. But I remember posing for that portrait beside a hazy, half-grown cornfield, where my parents had built a brick one-story next to Mom’s mother, Grandma, and her quiet second husband. Though he wasn’t in the photo with me, my brother, Alan, stood nearby, his blood-soaked dressings from a shoulder wound oozing beneath a T-shirt. Twelve years old with coke-bottle eyeglasses and already a muscular chest, he was ‘built like a Burkhart,’ Mom once said, referring to Buck, whom Grandma had married first. I was tiny—three and a half feet tall, forty-five pounds or so—but in bandages I looked like a war vet just home from Vietnam. Sixteen stitches laced my head, sealing a jagged five-inch gash. Two more on my nose. Six through my left eyebrow. The black threads dangled in my peripheral vision, stinging and swollen, and I dabbed at the ones in my crusty nostril as if I’d broken my face. I’d never felt hurt like that. It’s my first memory of hurt.”

—

Dear Park Ranger is now available through independent booksellers! Check out Bookshop.org to purchase it online through your favorite store or to locate one close to you.

Likewise, visit Homebound Publications, Dear Park Ranger’s independent publisher, which explores “the intersection of the natural landscape and the interior landscape.”

And don’t forget Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads, which offer numerous ratings and written reviews in addition to what appears on Kirkus Reviews.

Read praise from fellow authors or a bio for Jeff Darren Muse.