Numb

It's the middle of summer in the northernmost part of Iceland, which essentially just means it isn't snowing for a couple of months. It's a month since my 12th birthday, I'm tired after a long day of harvesting remote fields by myself on one of the tractors on the farm and heading back home on it at a leisurely pace. I'm completely relaxed and not really focusing on the road ahead and suddenly find myself stuck on the tractor in a muddy cesspool that intersected the road.

After a few minutes of unfruitful attempts to dislodge the tractor and only succeeding in burying it further in the mud I give up, jump off and head for home on foot whilst daydreaming.

I wake up from my reveries by loud curses coming from the direction of the cesspool, the farmer has discovered the tractor and he isn't too happy about it. In fact, he's closing in on me with long strides that escalate to a sprint.

I've seen that type of sprint once before; that time my 8-year old brother had wrecked some delicate machine part or other by tinkering as he loved to do and his blood father ran after him like he was some unruly dog and gave him a vicious football kick in the rear side that made him fly a few feet up in the air before coming crashing down again.

Curiously enough, I never saw him doing that to any of the dogs on the farm.

I remember not saying a word, not caring about anything else than me not being on the receiving end of that field goal and my brother sobbing quietly in a crumpled pile on the ground while the angry man evaporated out of sight in a cloud of fury.

No doubt he retired to his master desk afterwards where he busied himself with postcard chess. He always fancied himself as a brilliant chess player but I don't remember us having played a game of chess more than once. I beat him, then he beat me. We never played chess again.

I'm running away as fast as I can but his strides are longer and he eventually catches up to me in a slight indentation between two rolling hilltops that hide us from plain sight from the farm below. He kicks my feet out from under me in mid-sprint and starts raining punches and kicks down on me as I lie there prone. I'm not feeling any of them land and I don't cry or make a sound, although I hear them and see them I simply gaze indifferently up at him as if he wasn't affecting me at all which enrages him even further.

A mind trick I learned from one of my books was to imagine yourself standing beside your body, measuring the incoming pain as it rolls in and quietly calculating a discomfort score that belongs to someone else. That way, you never feel a thing...somebody else does.

I'm intent on not giving him the satisfaction of the slightest whimper from me, I'm prepared to die rather than do that.

He eventually tires of the futility of it all and angrily struts off downhill back to the farm, muttering and cursing me loudly all the while.

I wipe away the dripping blood from my nosebleed and do a quick inventory check to see if all my teeth are still present. They seem to be even if it is a bit difficult to tell with the lips being swollen and the tongue bitten through in several places so it's a bit numb and unfeeling.

My right index toe seems to be broken, it takes a few weeks to heal but grows back slightly crooked as the bone re-attaches itself without proper support.

After this I carried a pocket knife on me for the rest of the summer, a 12-year old cub imagining I could slay a dragon with a toothpick.

I probably would have, I'm glad I didn't.