This is Tessa

Tessa is my sister. She had food poisoning when we took these photos. She sat on my bed and we talked about this project. She said, "I wish I had a scar." I looked at her, her hair damp and stuck to her forehead, smelling a bit like throw-up. "Have you never had surgery? I've had surgery three times," I told her and she said she hadn't. Together we looked for scars on her body: on her stomach and on her knees, face, elbows. There weren't any. I wondered aloud how she could have escaped injury from her active childhood, a childhood that produced hundreds of photos of her in mid-flight.
Finally we found one, a little vertical line on her left foot. She recounted the story as a I photographed her pointing and flexing it. For a background we used our mom's drawing of a fishing boat.

This is Pat's story. Pat is Tessa's mother. (transcribed verbatim)

I just remember that she had sandals on and all of a sudden she as walking along here, just a few houses away, coming home from somewhere, and all of a sudden there was blood all over her foot. So then we discovered that she had mysteriously cut her foot and I think she was quite proud of the cut because she was only about four years old. I think also she had never experienced anything like that before and when she saw all the blood she burst into a panic state and was crying quite loudly. Of course all we had to do was just wash her foot off with cold water and put a little band-aid on it. So there was a little scar and she's been kind of proud of that scar ever since.