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Excerpt from essay by Sejal Patel

My daughter and I were waiting in the emergency room when she told me. I looked at her, my spunky, carefree eight-year-old. Her long legs dangled off the edge of the examination table as she tried to negotiate the crinkling paper beneath her. Above her head hung a broken cuckoo clock, its arms frozen in an awkward salute.

We were here because she had fallen down the stairs, running to show her older sister a Lego creation. My husband and I heard a cry, followed by the sound of a hundred plastic bricks raining down on the landing. We found her lying on her shoulder, her sister by her side, a rainbow wreckage in their wake.

The ER physician had ruled out major injury, but ordered x-rays, so for the last hour we'd been waiting, my daughter and I, in this windowless room, with its bored buzz of fluorescent lights. Seeking a distraction, I'd asked about school. It was a conversation we had daily, so I'd expected no new updates. She might tell me again that she loved learning about Wilma Rudolph in social studies, or that she could imagine how her bones would look in the x-rays because she had studied the skeleton in science.

Instead, calm but serious, like the narrator of a blurry black and white film, my daughter told me what had happened a few months earlier on a playground near our house. A girl had approached her.

"Your skin looks like poop," she'd said. "You need to take a shower."

Full essay by Sejal Patel

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