writing from
Scars Publications

Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

This writing was accepted for publication
in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book...
Waterlogged
Down in the Dirt, v144
(the April 2017 Issue)




You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:
order ISBN# book


Waterlogged

Order this writing
in the book
Study in Black
the Down in the Dirt
July-Dec. 2016
collection book
Study in Black Down in the Dirt collectoin book get the 418 page
Jan.-April 2017
Down in the Dirt
issue anthology
6" x 9" ISBN#
paperback book:

order ISBN# book

Pheochromocytoma

Joseph Kraus

    “That’s what it is all right,” Maggie says. She sits atop the examination table spread with a strip of tissue paper whose crackling beneath her always makes her question if she’s really supposed to sit on it. The end of that paper, where she’s mangled it and possibly infected it, will be torn free, disposed of, and replaced as soon as her time with Dr. Daniels comes to an end. “The nurse who took my blood pressure said it was up, didn’t she?”
    “Now Maggie-” Dr. Daniels replies.
    “Didn’t she?” Maggie doesn’t need his affirmation. “She takes my blood pressure every time I come here, and it’s always normal. That’s the only symptom I wasn’t sure about, but now I’m sure.”
    “It’s probably elevated because you’re getting worked up. You have to calm down about this.” He’s scrolling down her annotated medical history on the computer that is attached to an extension arm so he can wheel around the office on his stool and take his information with him. He barely manages to look her way when she comes in, always gaping at that screen no better than anybody under thirty on the bus or the streets these days, afraid to look up from their phones for fear of missing something when all along they are missing everything.
    “At night it feels like I swallowed a goat.”
    The comparison causes Dr. Daniels to look away from the computer, frowning to let her know she’s exaggerating, except he never grew up with a Toggenburg named Bernie who bucked at the gate of his pen out back to escape until the latch finally gave way, Maggie’s father sending her to track him three properties over where he could undoubtedly be found gnashing up Mrs. Watt’s sunflowers. When Maggie would finally corner him and secure her hand around one of his horns with Mrs. Watts crabbing from her porch for Maggie to keep that goddamn goat off her property, Bernie would hitch his head back and forth as she tried to get the rope around his neck, finally resorting to bursting forward to crash the roots of his horns into her belly just below the rib cage. That’s exactly how it feels now, forty years later with Bernie and her father long gone from this earth, a force as hard as horn and skull, enough to knock her over, only now Bernie is ramming her from the inside and can buck and buck, but will never get free. “It’s worst at night.”
    “What else is there?” He has abandoned his searching through her history to gape at the chart of lungs on the wall, the insides filled with pink bulbs and arrows swooping around to show the paths of air coming and going.
    “Cramps, especially in my legs.” Though the real pain isn’t due for hours, she kneads one thigh with her fingers like she did the night before, the polyester leg of her Ben Franklin uniform scratching the skin underneath. The inky veins squiggle across the carved out bones of her hand in a way that makes her have to look away, examining the lungs herself, though that isn’t her problem. Where is the hand that thirty years ago clasped Jerry Tuttle’s as they walked along Callhoun Road after ditching Spanish class together. She had never before skipped a class, rarely even stayed home sick because that just meant more time for chores, but was so easily convinced by Jerry’s insistence that they couldn’t possibly sit in class when the sun was shining so brightly outside. On the walk home when she wasn’t looking at those sideburns that informed the world Jerry didn’t live by their rules, she stared at her own hand swinging between them because simply feeling his hand there in hers, feeling his tender fingers and leaky palm, wasn’t, and could never be, enough.
    “But last night it felt like every muscle was pulling at once.” She goes on without him prompting her. “And my skin is like a sheet. I looked in the mirror and thought I was dead, and I couldn’t stop sweating, and my heart beating out of my chest. It’s everything they list. It couldn’t be anything else. I can barely make it through work. David, my manager, complained I was freaking out the customers.”
    “It could be a lot of things. You have to be careful of the internet.” This coming from a guy whom she’s seen punch in her symptoms on his computer to find out what he’s dealing with and what medications work best, learning to be a doctor as he goes along. Maybe he should look up something about bedside manner. “You can punch in any symptom and find a hundred conditions associated with it. And everybody who can make a website has a diagnosis. These days everyone’s some kind of medical expert. You have to be careful buying into it. It could send you over the edge.”
    “I didn’t find this on the internet. I don’t even have a computer. I read it in a book.” She has the book right in her purse, Differential Diagnosis, but thinks better of producing it. She chose it from the box marked Free out in front of the World’s Book Store mostly because its obnoxious lime green cover caught her eye. It was happenstance, and what if she hadn’t noticed it, hadn’t walked by that store on her way to get coffee because for once she didn’t want to sit alone out back in the concrete walled break room that always makes her feel like she is waiting to for some cop to enter to start an interrogation, sometimes wishing that were the case so at least she wouldn’t have to drink her coffee alone. What if she threw the book into her closet, another free thing that in the end isn’t worth anything, and never stumbled onto what was inside her? Who would’ve ever known? The sweat running down the inside of one arm sends a tremor through her.
    “There are tests.” He is back to looking at the computer. “But you were in not six months ago, and we ran blood, urine, nervous system, and even an MRI, though I didn’t think it was warranted. I just thought it might put your mind at ease. Sometimes that’s all it takes. I don’t think the insurance company would approve another round of them. These things don’t just pop up overnight. We would’ve noticed something irregular back then.”
    “Don’t bother. I don’t need a test. It’s right there, on the adrenal gland.” She presses her fingers down into her abdomen until she feels a knot there, producing a peristalsis that runs from her pelvis up her throat to her tongue where she clamps her mouth closed and gulps back the nausea.
    “Have you slept at all lately, Maggie?” He leans close, but keeps his hand cupped around his mouse.
    One more swallow just to be sure. “Insomnia. That’s part of it. Who could sleep with the cramps and the pain? And knowing all the while it’s growing.”
    “I could prescribe something for that. Not getting enough sleep will bring on any number of problems.” He is already typing it into his computer to whoosh it off to her pharmacy of choice that she provided him long ago. Problem solved.
    “I’ve taken those pills. All they do is cover up what’s really wrong. You just want me to forget what I have. There’s no pill going to fix this. I need surgery to get it out. Now.”
    Bernie comes at her again, driving his horns through her belly, dividing her flesh, but stalling at her spine, folding her over onto herself and pushing her lumbar vertebrae out in a hunchback. She vaults forward on the table, nearly leaping off, the paper underneath her crackling with the same sound it had Christmas morning so long ago, and she slides her hands underneath it like she did the flaps of tissue paper within that clothing box so big she could barely hold it on her lap. She knew by the size and density of that box that it was a coat before she even removed the lid, knew which one too because she had shown her daddy the Nil’s white Penny Down coat, had slipped it on while with him at the Peppermill indoor mall 10 miles away from their house during one of their infrequent trips into town, had swiveled in front of the three piece mirror and swanked across the floor for him so he could see just how fresh she looked in it and so there could be no doubt in his mind which one she wanted to replace the thread bared parka she had worn at least one winter too many. He even scooped back her bangs from in front of her face and said she looked really pretty in it, so much like her mother that he could hardly believe it. She thought for sure he’d gotten it for her, but she should’ve known better after seeing her only other Christmas present, a pair of clunky tan Caterpillar work boots that promised to wear like tree stumps on her feet but would also be something she’d grudgingly appreciate when every puddle in the field no longer drained through the cracks of the ancient leather pair she had been living with for too long. She should’ve known that the clothing box was just a little too dense feeling to contain the fluffy white jacket that he had told her would never be practical with all the work she had to do around the farm, even though she assured him that she would wear her old parka for nasty jobs, be extra careful when she did wear it doing everything else, and clean off anything she got on it before it could even dry. When she pulled away the tissue paper, it should’ve been no shock to find a Carhart winter construction work coat that would be so much warmer than the Penny Down coat she had requested and be as durable as tire tread, but would guarantee her slot among the select group of farm boys who started their day at least two hours before everyone else, arriving to school with wind chapped faces, mud streaked hands, bags beneath their eyes, and pig shit rimming the souls of their boots which promised to keep everyone all day as far away as possible.
    A hand falls onto her back. “Maggie, did it happen again?”
    She slowly sits up straight, shedding his hand and rattling the paper again like she had when she’d folded the paper back over the coat that she knew would keep Jerry Tuttle from ever thinking of asking her to skip Spanish again. “Yes, usually it’s only at night, but it must be getting worse. It needs to come out.”
    He sits back on his stool, but seems leery of taking his eyes off her. “Just take the pills. Let’s get you rested. You couldn’t undergo surgery in this condition anyway. Let’s just wait on it, okay?” She doesn’t miss his eyes flicking toward the clock in the corner of the screen.
    She slides off the table, tearing in half her section of paper like she wanted to do to the piece in that box. She wouldn’t have skipped Spanish with Jerry again anyway, not after the first time she told her dad why she was kept after school and lost an hour of daylight, her confession bringing silence to the house the two of them shared since her mother died of lung cancer years before, only the slither of his belt slipping free of its loops and outside the wind hushing across their three acres and shuddering against their loose windows with the realization that she might look out any one of them for as far as she could, and not see another house nor aside from the animals in the yard, another living soul.
    She slips past Dr. Daniels out the door, hearing her name as she makes her way to the waiting room, dodging a guy in his forties being led by a nurse to an examining room where he will undoubtedly receive a clean bill of health after already providing them with his insurance information back at the front desk because somebody needed to pay for the delivery of all this useless information.
    Her legs begin to seethe as she steps up onto the bus, and the college kid driving sees something in her face that compels him to ask her if she’s okay, reaches out to help her up the last step. He’s better at acting concerned than Dr. Daniels. On the ride home, a mother with her two kids riding next to her in the seat ahead of Maggie keeps glancing back to evaluate the woman huffing breaths in and out, either willing Maggie to shut up or deciding if she needs the Heimlich or something.
    Pain churns in her belly by the time she walks the two blocks and arrives at her first floor apartment. The dwindling sun floats in a haze through her patio door on the plains of airborne dust, the wall that surrounds her patio blocking most of it out along with any kind of view aside from the tips of the swing sets in the neighboring daycare center, the shouts of play that usually sprinkle into her boxy living room gone quiet for the day. The approaching evening drags like funeral gowns from every protruding piece of furnishing, decolorizing the print hanging on the wall over the couch of Van Gogh’s ‘Cypresses’ that she used her 33% Ben Franklin discount to custom frame, the fields turned to concrete, the sky to slate, and the cypress to a raven’s wing.
    The red light on her phone blinks singly, and she punches the button, switching on the lamp as she does, but only producing a basketball of light against the enormity of the dusk.
    “Hey Mag, it’s Gal.” After Gal sees her seven and ten year olds off to school each morning, she works the register at Ben Franklin until she’s due to meet them coming off the bus. She was working three today next to Maggie on two. Three months before, Gal, having had her kids visiting grandma for the weekend, asked Maggie to grab a drink after work, but after Maggie’s insistence on having to go home without any particular reason why, Gal hasn’t asked again, maybe just hasn’t been free of her kids since. They still chat between customers, but Gal’s never called here, doesn’t even have the number.
    Gal explains how after Maggie left early, they got slammed, and Dave had to hop on a register to get the cattle through, something he never does while running the show in the day and a main reason he applied for assistant manager in the first place, to avoid customer interaction at all cost. “He got really pissed off about it,” she says. “I wouldn’t think about calling in sick tomorrow.” She leaves it at that. Dave pissed. That’s something new. He’s attending community college to get his degree in communications and is sure he’s going to be some hotshot, on location, TV announcer for the local station when he finally gets his degree and can tell Ben Franklin Crafts to kiss his ass. He’d have canned Maggie long ago if she weren’t so in with the owner, had already known him a decade back seven years ago when Dave was just sixteen and turning in his first applications to everyplace in town, praying for anybody to give him a chance. Now he wants to recreate Ben Franklin in his own vision with a young, vital, fun staff. The young always think things would be so much better if nobody old was around, never can seem to recognize where they and everyone else are headed eventually.
    Maggie retrieves the green book from her purse and drops it on the coffee table next to a hard cover of Gray’s Anatomy and a crummy plate on which she had toast that morning. Maybe she will check through it one more time, make sure she isn’t wrong. She’s been through it a dozen times already, though. Nothing else matches so exactly.
    She spent last night tumbling in sheets soaked cold with her sweat, glued to her and then peeling off as she tried the to find perfect position to quiet the yanking in her thighs and the battering in her belly, all the while not inhibiting the stampede in her chest which might stop cold if she didn’t give them the necessary room to run.
    The only thing that got her through to morning was promising herself it was the last night of this, that when she told Dr. Daniels, he would promptly cut it out of her. He never will, though. How can he know what’s wrong with her body when he doesn’t even look at it, let’s her sit on that table and tell him all about it, while he nods and sighs and wonders if he’s yet displayed enough concern to show her the door? She can get a different doctor, but he’ll say the same thing, probably won’t even agree to see her if the insurance has given up on her.
    Bernie butts her just to make sure she doesn’t forget him. He was at it the whole way home. He wants out. “Just take the pills, Maggie.” She mimics his exasperation with her, but her attempt falls dead in the room like a desperate comedy routine that some sap has only ever tried in front of his mirror and his mother, both of whom howled and assured him soon enough he’d be able to quit his mail carrier’s job to make people laugh full time.
    Maybe Dr. Daniels is right, though. She has the old bottle somewhere right below the sink. Maybe if she only gets some sleep and gets a handle on things, he will open her up to see how wrong he was.
    She goes to the bathroom and flips on the light to see in the mirror how years have ruined her, the brown in her curls gone to lead, her cheeks withering peaches sinking into themselves, and her eyes slithering beneath the plastic lenses like pebbles at the bottom of a stream. The closest thing she wears to make-up is the Chapstick coating her lips in wax, and the only jewelry is a beaded chain wrapped around her neck and attached to those clunky frames to prevent them from shattering to the earth and leaving her a squinting mole trying to find her way around.
    She recognizes herself like never before, the woman who dodders along the sidewalk oblivious to the people glaring as they dart around her with someplace important to go, the woman who carries on a conversation with herself at the grocery about what to make for dinner unaware of the strange looks she’s getting from all the passersby, and the woman who buys one scratch ticket each week sure this will be the week she’ll hit the jackpot but never quite sure which ticket she should choose this time and deaf to the line of sighs and grumbles behind her as she stands at the counter and points from one to the other and then back again.
    God, she used to hate those women. A cramp seizes her thighs and releases, sending her against the open door and slamming the knob into the wall. Bernie spears her for good measure, and she gladly drops to her knees, away from the vision of herself that couldn’t be true.
    When did she stop wearing make-up? She sure remembers when she started, about the time she received that coat and needed some color to offset the brown shell that had consumed her. She would hunch down in the seat as soon as the bus pulled away from her stop, staring into her oyster shaped compact and caring so much who stared back at her, painting over her chapped lips, powdering over her freckled Opie cheeks, and lining black sludge along her eyes to sharpen the corners into stingers. Jerry noticed the change, but instead of asking her to skip Spanish again, he offered her a ride home in his car, dropping her off where her bus was supposed to so she could walk down the road and into her driveway like any other afternoon. Unbeknownst to her father, that was how she began getting home every afternoon for over a month, until that one afternoon Jerry drove into one of the subdivisions not too far from school and up to the split level that was his house, while nobody else was home. That was the day he took Maggie away forever.
    From her knees she opens the cabinet beneath the sink. The pain comes again, not blunt this time, but searing, not the root of the horn but the tip, sinking into her. She latches onto the cabinet, feeling the top hinge give enough that it will never close right again. She claws out the package of toilet paper, the three remaining rolls tumbling from the plastic onto the floor around her feet, her fingers fumbling through a tangled strip of gauze and over crust covered bottles, shoving them out and spilling something goopy over the floor, the wet coolness of it finding its way into her ancient leather shoes like so long ago the rainwater in the fields.
    She’d been over two hours late by the time she got home that night, well after the day was shot, and her father stood in the living room fresh from out back, unshaven from the morning and work pants doubly soiled from doing both their shares, his features shading as the sun descended on the day. He didn’t say anything to her, just stared until she answered a question unasked. “I was just with a boy from school.” He didn’t respond, his only movement a dirty hand reaching to grasp the back of the rocking chair in front him, his fingers compressing in a fist around a spindle as the silence expanded between them and reached critical mass. “We just went over to his house for awhile.” Still nothing, and the silence came again with the compelling need to fill it. The rest came out piece by piece, his face sometimes tilting ever so slightly at points he knew she was holding back, she inevitably telling him more than he needed to know, right down to them doing it on his parent’s bed. Anything to keep the silence at bay. She should’ve told him how Jerry had asked her more than once if she really wanted to, helped her trembling fingers with every button, ran his fingertips across her body with no more pressure than the touch of a summer breeze, and molded himself into her after it was over to make sure she knew she wasn’t alone. His arm wrapped over her body was the only thing keeping her from crying into his parents’ lilac smelling sheets for no reason she could discern except maybe the dawning realization that he had taken her so far away from where she had existed every other day of her life, leaving her to wonder whether coming home with him was the best thing or worst thing she’d ever done. The longer he held her, the more she knew the answer, would’ve told her dad that it wasn’t having sex with him but lying together afterward that had delayed her so much. That was the part she remembered most, the part that meant everything. She eventually just said, “He really cares about me,” but she wasn’t even sure of that herself.
    Her father broke his silence. “He does, huh?” He nodded as he said it. “I bet he loves you. Because he knows he hooked himself a sure thing, some gal willing to come over anytime his parents are away. ” His voice was a fifth of whiskey and 200,000 cigarettes later. He and his wife, two chimneys in love. He had quit after she died, but the stink still oozed out of his clothes, could never be completely expelled from the pockets of the house, and never could he manage to cough up all that gravel left over in his lungs. She knew he had since been sneaking them now and again too, when he was stuck awake in the middle of the night remembering his wife with glass in hand or when things got so tight with the bills coming in that trying to hold onto the farm felt like carrying a Buick on his back. He probably had a dozen sticks while waiting for her to show that afternoon. “Guess that’s what I got for a daughter now. A goddamn sure thing.”
    She wasn’t really sure if he was telling her or asking her, but she shook her head just the same. He dug a hand in his back pocket and pulled out a flat bottle half gone. Must’ve taken it into the fields with him. He sloshed it back in his throat and went on. “But I guess I knew that all along. Now come on over here. Show me.”
    She remained by the window and glanced out, but beyond the pane was nothing but miles of open land with only one road cutting through it that was only ever traveled by them or Tom Douger who lived alone a couple miles down and was too old to drive at this time of night, too old to be good for much of anything. She started toward him, and he reached for that belt, unbuckled it and pulled it free from the loops, but that night, he didn’t use it on her backside, slung it instead over the back of the chair where his fist had just been, and there it stayed until morning.
    She looks straight down between her bent thighs at the rolls of toilet paper melting into the puddle of silky brown liquid. A bolt hits her, and her legs pinch together. Not tonight. She fumbles into the cabinet below the sink for the pills, but in the darkness retrieves an artifact, a Gillette double edged Knack safety razor her dad every morning had dragged down the flaps of his cheeks, curled along his jawbone, and chipped at the strip under his nose. For some reason, she included it with the small box of items she claimed from his pigsty of an apartment following the stroke that took him five years ago, 20 years after he lost the farm trying to work it himself. Back here using the old blade still petrified with cream from the last time he shaved his face, she ran it along her legs, achieving the closest shave she’d ever had, but in the process turning her calves into a crime scene. She bought a new box of blades, but instead of throwing out the old one, tossed it into the top bathroom drawer where each time she retrieved her hair brush, she eyed its body there at the bottom melting into rust and cautiously avoided catching her fingers on either of the two edges.
    After that first time, she continued to use the Knack razor for another month with improving skill, though still hacking herself at least a couple times each go round, causing the insurance guy she was seeing at the time to joke that her legs sure would be a whole lot nicer without all those scabs. She went back to the Bic, ten-to-a-bag, pink plastic disposables soon after, but it’s been a couple weeks since she’s found the energy to use even one of them, not that anybody nowadays is running his fingers over her calves, or even getting a peek at them. Not even Dr. Daniels disrobes her anymore.
    She rotates the bottom of the shaft, and the top of her father’s old razor hinges open like the electronic glass doors at the grocery store. The double sided blade she removes is corroded along both edges from disuse. She gets herself to her feet, her shoes slipping in the spill and her thighs knotting up into fists. The reflection of herself melts around the edges as her vision fails, and she stops looking before she loses it all together. The muck on the blade remains stuck under the water from the faucet, forcing her to slide a nail along the metal to remove it, the edge catching her across the pad of her thumb. She shuts off the water and pops the thumb into her mouth like a sucker. Sharp enough.
    She sets herself down on the toilet as another burst comes from her belly like somebody shoving a broomstick down into the hollows of her pelvis. Her throat emits a moan as the stick burrows through her organs knocking them aside. The blade quivers in her fingers, nearly dropping and being lost forever. She sets it delicately on the edge of the sink when the pain subsides, knowing another bout is not far behind. She unbuttons her pants and strips them away down to her knees, leaving herself naked from belly button to knees, a hash of blood appearing on the inner waistband of her pants from her sliced thumb. The single hand towel hangs off kilter from the bar, smudged with the something that looks like the mustard she slathered on last night’s dinner of microwaved hotdogs. She needs to throw the whole set of towels in the wash, should be washing her towels and sheets every week whether they look like they need it or not. Who knows what’s growing or burrowing in that thick fabric?
    She positions the blade between two fingers and watches as the flesh of her belly palpitates. It’s not Bernie in there but something that breathes separate from her, will grow and steal from her to live, steal until it steals more than she can give. Her legs stretch out in a narrow V in front of her, the waistband of her pants shackling her knees and her shoes punched against the wall in front of her. One more night, and maybe it won’t be so bad, not this bad. Then the thing hits her hard enough to squirt vomit up onto the back of her tongue.
    She closes her eyes and runs the razor three inches straight down rib to navel, but when she looks, it’s left nothing but a course white line like the scratch of a fingernail. “Get rid of it,” she says. She should’ve ordered Dr. Daniels to do so back at the office, should’ve refused to leave until he did.
    After that night her father had deemed her a sure thing, he couldn’t stay away. For too long he’d been biding the isolation of not having his wife anymore, trying to sweat it out during the long days of work and drinking it away during his nights like a dark curtain drawn around his memory. Maggie supposes she made him feel something again, something as her pleas, shouts, and struggle relented to silence, tears, and rigidity, some kind of comfort from being close to another person in the darkness with the bourbon that made him forget who it was, nothing more than a dream to take him through until the sun rose again with a crashing headache and the brutal line of tasks awaiting for them with no time to speak or even look at each other, both holding onto the belief that it had never happened, that tonight would be back to normal, them resuming being just a father and a daughter again.
    She brings the razor back to the start and this time pushes the corner of it downward, denting the skin, pushing deeper and then piercing it. She keeps her eyes open and draws it downward by inches, a pink agitated fissure appearing behind it and the blood surfacing like spilled ink in the fold, pink stained to black, the blade occasionally slipping free from the path so she has to back up, find it again, and continue on. It feels and looks like nothing more than a line drawn down her belly with a red ball point pen, but by the time she gets to the bottom, the top has started to ribbon over the side.
    She let Jerry invite her over one more time after the first, but this time the tears did come, so many they had to change his parents’ sheets afterward, and when he tried to comfort her by wrapping his arm around her, she shrugged it off and curled into herself until he told her they really needed to get her home. Never again would she see the inside of his house or even look his way in Spanish class. He knew his sure thing was over, but a few weeks later he did step up to his responsibility without questioning the decision she made for the both of them, just grateful to be off the hook. She expected nothing except for him to skip school to drive her, give her a hundred bucks that nobody in his family even missed, and wait outside in the parking lot for it to be over so they could commence forgetting they ever even knew each other.
    Inside the frigid room, cowering within her gown atop the vinyl examining table, she told the doctor flat out, “Get it out of me.” He paused there and looked at her as if he’d never met a girl before who’d requested such an atrocity be done to her and him never before having to perform it. For that instant, he didn’t look like he could. He did, though. Dr. Flores. He was a doctor who knew when his patient was really sick.
    “Close,” she says. The word sheds spittle from her lips. “Very close. I promise.” She isn’t through yet, though, and begins to cut the line once more, pushing blood out from the seam. Her forehead feels like cold mayonnaise. She swallows over and over, but her mouth is always full, saliva slopping over molars like waves hitting the sea wall. A single trickle of sweat courses down her cheek and plops onto her hip. She travels the entire three inches, and the air sizzles in the wound, devouring all her body’s other complaints. She controls it now. No damn sleeping pills needed.
    The razor leaves her fingers, falls flat on the side of her belly, but with a shiver of her body, rattles to the floor. She’ll need to find it again. Blood filters through her ashen pubic hair, strings down her thighs, and plinks into the toilet water below. She’s always wondered if Doctor Flores missed something in her back then because as she climbed into Jerry’s car, she felt it heavy in her and continued to feel it as she stared straight ahead during the interminable ride home, has felt that something left behind carried with her all these years.
    She reaches down to try to find the blade, but she can’t look down, and her fingers don’t even hit the floor. It’s an impossible search. She remembers something, though, opens the drawer next to her and dabs her fingers around the bottom until she finds it, sliding her fingernails underneath to pry it loose from its fusion to the wood. It’s a miracle that she retrieves it without cutting off a finger, but she comes out with the blade he’d left for her in the Knack razor.
    Whatever it is inside her is buried. It’s no wonder Dr. Flores couldn’t reach it with his hooked blade, nor Dr. Daniels with his urine tests and MRIs, but there’s no hiding now. With enough swipes of her father’s razor, she’ll get there eventually.



Scars Publications


Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.




Problems with this page? Then deal with it...