Have I told you about the story of my youth? About how I broke my arm and it never grew back? It was one midmorning when Nanay asked me to buy Toyo for the adobo she was cooking. As I lugged the Toyo bottle to my chest and counted the money she had given me, I heard yells of laughter and I looked up. From where I stool I saw two of my playmates swing from a beam of an unfinished house. They called me and invited me to come over. Forgetting the Toyo I was supposed to buy, I happily joined my playmates in the unfinished house climbed up the adjacent beam to my friends five feet off below the ground. There we frolicked like monkeys until I suddenly lost my step and fell. With the ground swiftly coming up to meet me, I poised my arm to take the impact of my drop, lest I hit my head and break my skull. Arms were easily put together, skulls were not, I thought with absolute decisiveness.

I felt a sensation shoot up my left arm as I felt the frail bone snap. There was no pain at first, merely a numbing. Then gradually, pain shoot up my arm, almost making me lose consciousness with intensity.

I woke up to see my mother crying from above me. My arm was in a cast, now I was lucky, my arm had a clean break, and I was luckier I had passed out of the pain of the setting would have been excoriating. I had no crack in my skull, they said. The most that had been damaged was my arm, and that would set in a month. But as for me, all I could think of was that it was a good thing that Nanay was beside herself with grief now, that she wouldn't remember I had forgotten to buy Toyo for the adobo, much more that I had lost the one peso she gave me.

For the next month I behaved as much as I could. They made me stay in the hospital and bored, as I was, I was very careful not to raise my Mother's ire. The scent of michrochome and antiseptic made me sick to the head and until now, I couldn't bear to smell that vile stuff. The issue of the lost one peso was never opened up, and I was careful not to delve into the matter. Nanay never just quite got over my plight. She didn't blame me force the issue. Perhaps, she too felt guilty she had sent me in an errand she could have done herself.

A month later, they took the cast off. Our hospital wasn't the best hospital in the country, and unfortunately, it was the only one in the island. With a lack for simple facilities like an X-ray machine, the doctor had incorrectly set the arm so that a nerve had gotten caught between the two healing bones. Months of hilot couldn't set right and we didn't have the money for corrective operation in Manila. The verdict was final, though. This little accident would cost me an arm, which would never grow beyond the size of a five-year olds.