Bite

When I was in kindergarten, I had a habit of biting other kids if I got pissed off at them. After I had bitten several kids, the teacher told me that »Biters wet their pants,« Eager to test her hypothesis, and demonstrate my familiarity with the scientific method, I bit the boy next to me on the arm. I believe his name was Marshall, but that's not important. What was important was the fact that I did not wet my pants. I tried to convey this to her shortly afterwards, but she was too busy smacking my ass with a ping-pong paddle.

Bites is what the bedbugs do
when you're all snuggled and sound
and you wake up with the scrathing fits
when no one is around

Why didn't I bite him? I sure felt like biting him. »We can't approve your loan,« he said. He was all over stripes (regimental, pin-, you know.) »The two of you don't make enough to live in [this town].«

My partner argued. I twisted my feet around in my shoes and scratched a scab on my arm and looked out the window. Thinking back now, I wish I had just bitten him and gotten out of there.

What a lot of unacknowledged GBH there is in childhood. I remember when I was very little -and my jealous sister even littler – that she seized my big toe as it floated up at her end of the bath and took an excruciatingly painful, very large and absolutely intentional bite out of it. She got away with it – amid all the blood and tears on my part – by piously claiming to our parents that she was »so-o-o hungry...« (even though we'd just had supper).

This fascination with things that are tiny. Bite-sized. Small cookies and small candy bars. Things that you bite. But are baby polar bears bite-sized, too? Except the other way around – tiny things that will bite you?