In Short – Issue 4 (Winter 2026)

January 31, 2026

Image credit: Kara E Riggleman

Secret Garden

By Martha Petersen

TW: This piece briefly mentions sexual assault.

When I first became chronic, I bought the not-quite-skin-beige compression sleeves to hide my bloated left arm, my sausaged fingers, the permanent swollen-ness caused by lymphedema. These days, though, I’ve given up pretending. When I shop at LympheDivas.com, I scroll past “Solids”—skin tones, grays, fuchsias. Past “Patterns”—Diva Dots, Camo Pink, Starry Night. I stop at the category titled “Inked.”

Magnolia

Last month, as I smeared red Expo marker across my classroom whiteboard, a student in the course after mine—communication—asked, “Is that a real sleeve?”

Up close, the Magnolia pattern—scarlet blotches interweaving thorny black vines—is thick, printed fabric. But from a distance, it could be ink injected under the skin.    

“You’re hiding your tat? A tat inside a tat,” he said. 

“Medical compression,” I answered. “But I like where you’re going.”

“Thought you were being a smartass.” 

He laughed, and I laughed. From the back corner, a girl hiding her face behind a sheet of bangs near-whispered, “I just got one—a knife.” She traced an outline on the side of her rib cage.

“Ouch,” I said.

“Feels like a rug burn,” she said, then retreated into her phone.

I nodded and smiled, wished them a good class, then shifted my thoughts from tattoo needles piercing skin to the parking lot and the long drive ahead of me.

Begonia

Last week, while waiting and waiting in my therapist’s office, a man sitting across from me—black boots, salmon-pink plaid shirt—said, “I thought you had a sick tattoo, and then I looked again.”

We clients prefer the silence of anonymity, the piped guitar music, the personal space of our phones. But that day I wore Begonia, with its maze of burgundy petals winding from fingertip to shoulder.

I rolled my sleeve up enough to expose my pale plain skin, my veined wrist. “Nothing’s here,” I said.

He unbuttoned his shirt cuff and latched it up to the elbow, revealing an inked green snake circling his forearm. “I got this one done after me and my wife . . .” But just as he started, one of us, I don’t remember which, was called.

While unleashing monsters from the past, I prefer to stare at my therapist’s feet. This day, he wore loafers without the usual pizza-ed, dinosaur-ed, striped socks.

Of course I noticed, and of course I asked. “No socks today?”

We’d talked about pain and ways we cover pain and at some point he mentioned his tattoos, among them an owl and a tree, both for wisdom. 

He pointed to his calf. “Dragon tattoo. Six hours in the chair.” 

“Ouch.”

“Hurts like hell,” he said. Then he asked about my hurts over the week—Intrusive thoughts? Flashbacks? Nightmares? How often? How intense?

He is an intrepid therapist; he hardly ever says the word rape. 

Secret Garden

Yesterday, sorting through baskets of hex nuts at Home Depot—time to fix a cracked porch post—a woman touched me on my shoulder and whispered, “I love your sleeve. I’m jealous.”

“It’s not real,” I said, turning toward her.

I wore Secret Garden, a sleeve mapped with dark, ashy blooms. I rolled it up, this time as far as my elbow, as far as it could roll, exposing the latticed knifework scar running the length of my arm.

“Breast cancer?”

“No, nerve transposition surgery, then the lymphedema. All this swelling.” 

She touched the safe, unscarred side of my elbow. “Does it stop you?”

“No,” I say. I cannot wear a wedding band, cannot play the piano for long stretches, cannot always make a fist, the constant ache. “Not much.”

On her wrist, she wore an inked black Sunshine, petals surrounding the “e.” 

Because the scroll was thick, I asked, “Did that hurt?”

“Not then. Not really,” she said. “But now . . . We have matching tattoos, my daughter and I.”

We stayed in that aisle for some time, sharing the sufferings of our bodies and our souls, comparing our scars, our chosen outward signs. 

Tonight, I lie next to my husband, my cheek against his shoulder blade, against the patch of skin on his back freshly inked in turquoise spikes—a compass—the pole pointing not to North, but to “M,” my first initial.

“Why did you do this thing you’re not allowed to do?” I ask him. “No one would believe you’d do this—you, a church man, a high priest!”

Weeks before, I’d taken him aside and whispered, there’s something you need to know, after thirty-one married years here’s what you must understand—and I told him about dank, shadowy cabins. I told him about the men.

“This is for me,” he says, “so I will feel the things that happened, so I will hurt too the way you’ve hurt, so I will know the lives of girls—that sometimes girls are raped by men—because I can no longer just go about my day as if these things don’t happen to my loves, and I thought that pain would kill me, but it wouldn’t. So now, I wear you on my back.”

What I know: Pain cannot be solved with pain. 

I roll Secret Garden onto my arm, hoping it will keep my lymph vessels emptied while I sleep. His tattoo is past the crusting stage. But still, I rub Vaseline into the wound, the bright lines of the compass pointing somewhere we still might go. We’ve traded scars for art—mine a removable covering while his permanent, deliberate, hidden until this moment beneath a religious garment and a white, ironed shirt.  

Martha Petersen writes from the beautiful but prickly Sonoran desert in Tucson, Arizona. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Great River Review, Brevity, Salamander, Best American Essays 2020 Notable Essays, Witness, and others. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches creative writing at Pima Community College.