My ankle is tied in a knot, equipped with a spring mechanism. The woman who built it is a biologist studying the lichen colonies holding down rocks, boulders, and in one case, a whole mountain.
The woman was chopping firewood on her sister's property and happened to cut a piece of wood very squarely: it was the width of her hand. She gazed at the ripples, from which she could draw parallels to similar earthly habits of lichen. She looked more deeply, pressing her forehead to the square block of wood so that it appeared to be larger than she knew it to be. The woman squeezed her body between the lines in the wood grain. Once inside she grasped striations in either hand and pulled. She wished to see more closely; hypnotized, the woman spent the rest of her life pulling the block of wood tighter and tighter.
It was only after she had been at it for a long time—for several times the length of a usual human life span—though not longer than lichen would live, the logistics of which, thanks to her considerable years of study, she was able to apply to her own practice—it was only after this lengthy commitment to increasingly closer inspection of that hypnotic specimen she had chopped from a tree fallen on her sister's property that the block of wood was so compressed and pressurized that when I fell off a slippery, dirty boulder while running to blow off steam that the increment of wood was so tiny and fierce in density that it was able to pierce the skin of my ankle upon the impact of the fall.
I, too, was compressed, everything: stressed out of my mind, out of body, and I am under the impression that only when two environments are identically pressurized can they collapse into one spatial identity.
I came to the conclusion about the woman in my ankle in the same way that I came to know that the rest of my body houses other spring mechanisms. I learned it by noticing the sun's spring mechanism, the lichen's, the heart ventricle's mechanism, the vernal release of plant life every march. And once I knew about the woman in my ankle, once the ligaments had healed—and I do wonder if that woman helped in the process, so tender and specific was she with her attention to the wood grain lines—once I was walking similar to how I did before the fall, the woman said, “I am finished."
I do not know if she was able to find anything within the splinter of wood that lives in my ankle, or how deeply she was able to go, but she took my hand before she left, and holding it, her gaze rested on my eyes and I know she was resting because she could have picked me apart with her eyes had she not been resting, could have slipped between the striations of my iris, could have stepped into my soul. She did not do this but rather held me in her focus and then let go of my hand and walked away.