I asked my mother about the strange ring on her arm, expecting some clumsy childhood story, a fall, a surgery, anything ordinary. Instead, she named a disease I had only met in textbooks: smallpox. That circle was not damage, but design—a scar left by a deliberate wound meant to save her life. A bifurcated needle, dipped in virus, pressed into the skin again and again until the body learned to fight what might one day try to kill it.
Those tiny craters are the last visible traces of a war already won. They speak of crowded clinics, anxious parents, and doctors who knew the risk of doing nothing was far greater than the pain they caused. We walk now in a world where smallpox exists only in labs and memory, but on the arms of our elders, the victory is still quietly, stubbornly visible.
