You’re in kindergarten. You’ve been invited to a friend’s house to play.

The mothers sit nearby, sipping coffee, and you and your new best friend practice cutting circles at the table, cutting them the way Mrs. Grady insists: the four corners of each sheet snipped away, then the eight corners snipped, and so on, snipping corners, only corners until you hold a perfect circle.

You can’t stand doing it this way. You reach the point where there are thirty-two corners to cut, only you don’t know that then, you can barely count to twenty. You look at your friend and she’s humming while she snips.

The table is littered with tiny white triangles and when you exhale, hard, on purpose, several of them flutter to the floor. You think of seagulls at the beach, the way their wings catch the sun, and you exhale again, more forceful this time.

Your friend smiles in appreciation of the migration you’ve incited, but she doesn’t stop snipping and humming. You take your scissors and slice a smooth arc around your paper, foregoing the corners. You twist the paper in your hands and your scissors snag a little, but mostly they travel smoothly through until the end and you hold up your masterpiece: the anti-Mrs. Grady, an appalling disc-like object, warped somehow. Off. Not right.

Your friend’s circle is large and beautiful, perfect really, and when she sees the mess you’ve made of your paper, she giggles and moves to cover her mouth and when she does the scissors slip and fall into her thigh and she freezes like that, the tears coming to her eyes and you freeze too and are about to alert the mothers, summon them to help, when she mouths instructions not to tell, not to say a word.

You look down and the scissors are standing out of her thigh. There’s blood spilling, trickling a red river and her perfect circle drifts downward and you’re secretly glad her perfect circle is ruined with blood, the red spreading from the center out, and you open your mouth and scream and the mothers come running and your new friend was right to instruct you not to tell because her mother yells at her and slaps her and asks if she’s an idiot and your mother says we’re leaving now and you linger a moment and stare at your friend’s thigh, though she’s not your friend anymore, you’re sure of it, and you’re sorry for the mess you’ve made of everything, the faulty circle, the triangles breathed onto the mother’s carpet, the blood that’s all your fault anyway, and you reach for it, reach for the perfect circle, the one the girl who is no longer your friend spent so much time perfecting, doing right, and you grab it before you’re pulled out of your chair by your mother and you tuck it under your shirt and take it with you and nobody sees and that night in bed you hold it up to the light and where the circle is red you can see partly through it and you decide right then to keep the circle forever, to fold it between the pages of a book and you whisper to it for nights how sorry you are and then you forget it, forget all about it, lose it to time and when it comes tumbling out as you’re packing up boxes, moving into an apartment all your own, by then you can’t remember the story of the circle and stare and wonder what had happened to you in your past, try to recall how your blood had smeared the circle, you finger the edges and marvel at how smooth they are, wish you could go back to the time where everything you did was just this perfect.

Theresa Boyar (www.theresaboyar.com) lives with her husband and two sons in Helena, Montana. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Juked, Florida Review, Tar River Poetry, Storyglossia, Wicked Alice, Blood Orange Review, and Salome. Her poetry chapbook, Kitchen Witch, is forthcoming in September 2007 from Dancing Girl Press.