I had decided to play pirates. The wooden pirate ship was always fun to play on despite the wood finishes being so rough that if you weren’t careful, you could get a splinter. On mornings that it was dewy, the wood almost felt like moss in the moist air. My fingertips would glide smoothly across the wood of the ship while my little feet would try to obtain a grip on the ungraspable planks. This pirate ship was fairly new, with no cracks in the wood, and was pretty clean. The pirate ship consisted of two levels. The bottom level always seemed to be eerie, all dark with spider webs. Yet, it was fun to be down there. Even with the sharp wood chips constantly poking at you in my shoes, I could pretend I was a pirate getting ready for battle. The little circular windows were perfect for pretending to shoot cannonballs. It always seemed to be damp down there. Above the small doorway to the bottom of the ship, there was a plank that led you to the top of it. It was reasonably big, and where I liked to spend most of my time. The top of the ship had an opening that led to a metal pole. I remember the burning blisters I would get from sliding down. 

There were a few rules about the preschool playground, one being no holding sticks. I thought, “what is a pirate without a sword?” I was a determined child. I always found a way to get what I want. A friend of mine who was playing pirates with me pretended to be a sword salesman. Mason, the sword salesman, had long black hair and dirt under his nails, with sweat dripping from every inch of his face. He sat at the top of the slide, sporting a black shirt with race cars on it. I went to him to purchase a sword– well, a stick. I remember the slide being dirty with specks of dirt and wood chips. I went to take a stick, and of course, I imagined it as a sword. I got ready to head back to that wooden pirate ship. I held onto the railing with the stick in my left hand making sure I didn’t catch a splinter on my right hand and went up the plank. As I went up, my feet stomped up the plank, dusting the dirt off of the cracks in my shoes. I left muddy footprints on the wood as I walked around the muggy ship. 

Of all the teachers supervising us, Mrs. Booker was the one standing closest. She was about 5 feet tall and had brown shoulder-length hair. She wore a traditional cardigan blue sweater with white jeans. She started walking towards the pirate ship leaving indents in the sharp brown wood chips. Once she arrived, she stood in a position of disappointment. Her deep brown eyes slowly peered up to the top of the pirate ship, looking at me as if she could telepathically tell me that I should not have had a stick. The moment my name swiftly drifted off her tongue in a dissatisfied tone, my neck started to grow warm with a tingle of fear and guilt. It felt as if fire ants were hastily crawling up my back onto my neck to suffocate me. “Put the stick down please,” she said in a provoked tone that had filled the air with uneasiness. With my little feet squirming anxiously in my wood chip-filled shoes, I had calculated a response that could have and almost did cost me a heavy price. 

Simplicity left me with the nimble response: “no.” Mrs. Booker's eyes erupted into a rebuking stare as if a lion was on a hunt and missed catching its prey. Rapidly, my little hands repleted with mottles of dirt grasped onto the stick as Mrs. Booker reached up towards me to snatch it away from me. I felt as if I were in a video game; the sky had turned blood red and the bells of a boxing match had rung, me and Mrs. Booker in the rink fighting for a stick. The intense series of my little eager grunts were nothing to compete with Mrs. Booker trying to tug the stick away from me. Suddenly it was as if my eyes filled with a scarlet red color, drawing my attention to get a better grasp on the stick. As I began to tug even more aggressively, the little fragments of bark trickled down to the ground slicing through the rage-filled air. Eventually, after the boundless pushes and pulls, Mrs. Booker gave up. As she gradually lifted each individual finger off of the stick, the recoil began to grow more intense. One by one her fingers swiftly drifted off of the bark-infested stick. 

Once she let go of the stick, my little arms holding the now-almost-bare stick sprung towards me like a fighter jet. And just like that, the stick that I had pretended was a sword ended up stabbing me, straight in the eye. I let out a wretched screech as the pain shot up from the bottom of my now pain-infested eye. As I rapidly shoved the stick away from me, my little hands did all they could to try to take the discomfort away from my eye. Mrs. Booker quickly ran up the wooden plank to come and assist me with my eye trauma. The stinging rapidly spread through the millions of tiny veins in my eye. Mrs. Booker helped me off of the ground, slowly standing up as the joints in my legs made a cracking sound. She walked me down the wooden plank, and across the playground back into the school. The sharp, dark brown, and damp wood chips in my shoes were unnoticeable compared to the ceaseless cruel pain in my eye. 

When we walked back inside, there were other kids taking naps, all bundled up in their nap-time blankets with their little hands. After Mrs. Booker laid me down with my Blues Clues-themed blanket, she promptly got the attention of the Head Mistress. The Head Mistress, Mrs. Donaven, picked up the seemingly old black plastic telephone which had sat on her brown wooden desk and nimbly pushed the numbers in while simultaneously looking at the paper which had my emergency contact information. She began to explain what had happened in a tense tone while Mrs. Booker continuously bit her brittle nails as she constantly checked on me. 

My parents rushed over to the school extremely nervous and tense about what they were going to witness. Somehow they both arrived at the same time even though they were coming from different places. I remember them both rushing in the door as I sat in the dark room, still, with my blanket and a finding Nemo-themed ice pack. I got up, kicked the blanket off of my dirty white socks, and went to hug my parents. They briefly talked with Mrs. Isakoff before they rushed me into the car and began driving to the hospital. I was in despair at the thought of going to the hospital. As a kid, the hospital seems like a prison that once you enter, you might not come back out. 

We parked right outside of the sign that read “E M E R G E N C Y” in big red bold letters. I had not a single clue knowing that my situation would be deemed an emergency. My dad carried me inside while my mom walked with us searching through her handbag full of coins and coupons scattered everywhere for all of the information needed to get me help. My dad and the doctor had taken me back to a room while my mom gave the nurse at the reception my information. As I walked back behind the doors where a doctor must be with you, I got my first whiff of the eerie smell of cleanliness, with a hint of blood and death. Ultimately, I had no clue what I was in for. When I had opened my non-injured eye, I saw a bunch of nurses rolling someone who had been bleeding, a lot. I quickly closed my eye again and put my head on my dad's shoulder. We eventually got to the room where my dad gently placed me onto the bed with sheets that had blue diamonds on them and little white lines in between. One of the nurses brought in eye drops that numbed my eye so they could get a better look. Unfortunately, those weren’t the only eye drops I received that day. After two hours of evaluations and countless eye drops, they realized that my cornea had been scratched and damaged. They told me I was extremely lucky, and that I almost had gone blind in my eye. 

Luckily for my imaginative self, the last thing the hospital staff did for me before they released me from the hospital was bandage my eye and then assign me a black eye patch. What could have been the worst day had suddenly taken a sharp turn for the better. I was officially the ideal pirate I had always dreamt to be! After spending some days at home resting and healing, I went back to school. The day I went back, I had one thing in mind. I looked forward to recess. I resumed my role, as the determined child turned perfect pirate! Running onto the plank, emboldened by my whimsical black eyepatch, I picked up a new stick, began playing pirate with my friends, and yelled, for all the world to hear: “En Garde!”