Purge

She touches the tip of her left index finger on which 
a wart once grew. It isn't there now, but she knows it was there
when she was a child. She did not imagine it, did not imagine 
the various  attempts different people in her family took to 
excise it—small, searing dabs from a Q-tip dipped in muriatic 
acid; frog piss (or so she was told) brushed on its surface; some 
passes from a sanitized razor blade. Who knows now what was true 
and what was made up? In that world, you could burn a tonic from 
reptile scales. You could sleep on pillows of ash or ice or break a raw 
egg into a bowl of water to read messages from the dead. How 
did it finally vanish, melt away into simple skin? She can't explain
how she has no memory of this—no memory except a white
flash, then the blue ceiling; a dribble of water, then its evaporating.