Splinter Girl

Nya moaned a moan that echoed through the vintage kitchen. That splinter in her thumb was too deep to dig out with tweezers.

“No! You are NOT using a pin,” Nya shouted at Mama, who shrugged her shoulders and buttered the toast.

“Granny, you made me climb that rickety, tall fence,” Nya said.

Granny cackled. “Four rails high and we climbed it. My sliver commemorates our magnificent effort. I shall wear it forever, in remembrance of you.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Nya’s scowl was canyons deep. “I hate my splinter.”

“Set the table,” Mama said.

Nya complained to God in her evening prayer. “Get it out, “ she said, adding, “PLEASE,” because she did sound a bit rude and demanding.

The sliver was still stuck when the sun rose. What the heck!

She displayed the splinter for show and tell. “We chased our runaway dog straight over a four rail fence. Spike came home on his own. But I am stuck with this splinter forever.”

“Splinter Girl,” shouted that stinker classmate Joe.

“Splinter Girl!” “Splinter Girl!” Her classmates repeated. The nickname stuck.

“They call me Splinter Girl,” Nya complained to Granny over ice cream.

“Keep frowning and your brow will wrinkle forever.” Granny grinned. “Don’t I know that!”

Nya ignored the splinter as she bowed the “Minuet in G.” She thumbed through script pages, memorizing Kate’s lines in Taming of the Shrew. She sucked the sliver in her thumb when she took her college entrance exams. And her biology finals. And her MCATs.

She meant to become a veterinarian but somehow, after Granny died, she wound up a surgeon. Some days, she removed splinters.

On the day she married, Pastor Rod asked, “Joe, do you take Splinter Girl to be your wife?”

Joe startled, then said, “I do! But if it’s all the same, I prefer to take Nya.”

“No more Splinter Girl,” Nya asked, with a wink.

“Oh, always Splinter Girl,” Joe said, kissing her furrowed brow.

Granny laughed some thunder at that. Raising a splintered angel wing, she rained happy tears on Spike the Third, who, in true doggy fashion, enlarged a hole in the gate and snuck away down the lane.