The yellow-harnessed safety patrols came to seem scarier to me after the safety movie. The entire school was assembled; we first-graders marched into the auditorium last while the older kids watched us. Big numbers and visual static fired on the huge screen, large as the stage itself, pulled down over the red velvet curtain.

The movie concerned terrible things which happen to children who aren’t careful. One girl walked home from school every day along a path that required her to go around a train yard, but that way was long and not as interesting as the parked trains, so the girl decided to take a shortcut, which means she broke a rule I didn’t know: Never Walk Under a Parked Train. I’ve never been on or near a train, but still it’s something I don’t know. How many rules don’t I know? The girl walks under the train, it’s dark under there, there’s a rumble and then everything swirls around into sirens and there she is in a hospital, bandaged and covered with cuts and dark shapes as if the dark under the train got on her skin, a tube in her nose, and bags of blood hang in the air next to her bed and maybe she won’t live. Some children won’t live, not if they’re not safe. Don’t Cross the Street without Looking, Don’t Take Candy from Men: the movie’s horrible and the horror’s thrilling, too. The movie makes you think your body is vulnerable, subject to invasion, cutting apart; that means you have a body, are a body. Like the moldy pages in my reader, the movie’s shocking, physical. Seeing blood is like seeing Valerie’s poop: it comes from inside you, can’t always be held in, makes trouble, makes everything shriek and stop. Walking home from school: step, step, my legs, step, swing, my arms, look, swivel, wish, my head. Soul way down in there, little winged me, little shoot, like when you cut open an onion and there’s that new green hidden in the center, wanting to shout its way out, but be careful: lose your body and the soul jumps out, like the little man my grandmother told me jumps out of the log in the fire when you hear that pop—that sound means he’s broken free of the wood that held him. But you don’t want to break free, do you? Body feels strange, alien when you stand back from it: rub the back of your neck, just where the hair starts: whose hair, whose head?