Picture it: Southern Indiana 1996.  I was down in that part of the state with my ex on an extended visit to his hometown.  Although it definitely had its issues, it was a friendly place.  We were staying with his mom, whose house (like many) was up against the woods.  At night the back yard was always eerily still and often foggy.  The spookiness was peaceful and we enjoyed it very much.  We liked to go out there into the woods at night just to get a little freaked out and have some fun.

One day my ex and I were sitting at the table playing three-handed spades with one of his sister’s friends, Michelle.  It was near evening, and we were faced with a boring night ahead of us with nothing really to do.  That’s when we had the idea to have a little party.  We were going to call a couple of people over, but first we decided to go out into the woods and clear a spot to have a camp fire.  We took the long walk through the yard and began picking our way through the brush until we found a spot way far back (it had to be deep in the woods for greatest effect), and we began clearing out a space.  It was really easy, and we took a lot of the brush and piled it up for kindling.  After moving a couple of logs to act as benches, we all sat down facing our would-be fire pit.

I have a lot of experience with building campfires, so I suggested that we start a good fire for about an hour so we could put it out and cover the embers with dirt.  I liked to do this because it made it really easy to re-start the fire a couple of hours later after we came back with our company.  I know you’re thinking that I could burn the woods down, but suffice it to say that I know what I’m doing.  So I built a small structure of wood to get things started, stuffed the kindling below it, and lit it on fire.  We all sat there, leaning forward, watching the fire take hold.  It was still light outside, so we had plenty of time to get back out before dark since we didn’t have any flashlights with us at the time.

After watching the fire for a little bit, I completely spaced out.  I sort of jolted back into alertness and looked up at the trees.  It was dark outside now.  I looked down at the fire and it was burned out.  I said, “Oh my God, I really spaced out for a while there!”  Michelle said, “Whoah, so did I!  I think I was almost asleep!”  Then my ex said, “Yeah, I did too.  Man, it got dark really fast.  Let’s find our way out of here and call everyone.”  We threw my pile of dirt on the fire and walked towards the direction of the house.  We were a little creeped out by the dark, so we moved really quickly and got out really fast into the yard.  We arrived at the house shortly after that and went inside.

On the way back, I scratched my leg on something and it was really irritating me.  As soon as I got into the light I was able to examine myself.  Barely above my right knee there was a piece of metal wire sticking out.  I thought that I must have run into some old wire fence or something like that.  It looked like one of those little strands of wire that’s usually bundled with lots of other little strands to make a cable.  I pulled on it to remove it, but it was stuck.  So I pulled harder and it finally snapped off.  

While I was rubbing my knee, Michelle came over and said, “Did you hurt your knee, too?”  I nodded my head, as she was showing me her knee.  She had a bug bite in the same place where I had my wire.  We brought the coincidence to the attention of my ex who didn’t think much of it.  He was wearing jeans, so nothing happened to him. We didn’t end up having our little party that night.  We didn’t seem to feel like it, and none of us wanted to trudge all the way back into the woods.  Michelle went home and we went to bed.  

The next morning, I noticed that my little wound was healed and there was just a bluish-gray dot on my knee where the wire had been.  It looked like a tattoo of a little dot.  It’s still there to this day.  We saw Michelle later, I showed her my dot.  After I showed her she said, “Oh, I wonder how my bug bite is doing,” and pulled up her pants leg.  The bug bite was gone, and there was a little bluish-gray dot just like mine.  Weird!  So we checked my ex’s right knee.  Same thing.

As years went by, we all had the same little tattoo, and they never went away.

So, what happened to us?