Pawn.

My aborted baby brother might be twenty-one years old now. He might be in his second year of university, majoring in mechanical engineering or political science had he rolled a seven and gone to back to school instead of moving forward four spaces and taking a year off after graduation to travel Europe with just a backpack and Robby, who might be his best high school pal.

We might be a triad instead of a duo, middle child syndrome rearing its ugly head when little sister feels she doesn’t fit in. We might still be poor, the old green bungalow down the street from the half way house too small for so many feet, hand me down’s a disastrous confusion of gender from sister to brother.

We might be different people with different values in a different city with different partners and a new outlook on life. We might be less tired and less sick or maybe we might be dead instead.

We might still be a family who celebrates holidays together with cousins and aunts and uncles and we might still go to church. The car on the highway might not  slide over the median and put grandfather in coma on his way to visit us, but we might not know the taste of ocean and squish of rain boots on soft sand in November.

We might be accountants instead of artists and we might not believe in reincarnation. My cat might be a dog or a fish and you might not be as beautiful or well-spoken. There might not be a familial history of addiction to drugs and alcohol and women and gambling and maybe we might know how to talk to each other about sticky feelings.

I might have a relationship with my father before I’m old enough to be a mother but I might not be as close to my mother as I was when I was a child.

That mother might make the right decision, not having him.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Ectomy.

Lackluster cherry cheeks drained of filling, eyes dulled to weather beaten matte finish unable to reflect sunlight, moonlight, bar light, life light – self pity convincing conscience the short breath was neglect for the gym where ability to climb stairs and self respect were left in the bottom of the tin dented locker, a wet towel molding; the self-conscious tugging of shirt sleeves in crowded rooms, a hand cleverly cupping the heaving lump of neck to hide the nervousness of not knowing, to hide knowing the doctor – seven years trained and thirty years practiced – wasn’t sure what it was.

Faking wellness to mask tiredness in favor of social engagements and upward mobility to ensure no one suspected a thing, that thing. Long lonely nights spent rationalizing pain as alcoholism, alcoholism as nicotine addiction, addiction as broken heartedness; despite the inward self-directed therapy sessions, there was no stopping what was coming, – the lump, large and hard and growing and growing and growing – uncontrolled cells wrapping cold fingers around wind pipe, bullying vocal chords into submission, making it near impossible to walk and talk simultaneously.

The fear cutting it out would cut out creativity or love or laughter or youth or beauty, the knife a night-thief taking it all away. Vanity trumping reality: sacrificing slender nubile body and quick young mind for the advancement of medical science.    

The long wait for the quick whisk down the hospital hall: gown tied tight, naked body goose prickled and trembling under worn-thin white and blue striped blankets; the paper cap and paper slippers, the anesthesiologist-led pep talk outside the operating theatre, the parade of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven attending nurses and surgeons, the narrow bed with hard foam pillow, the bright dome light inches close to cold nose, the pin prick of needle seeping sleep, the farewell wave before the recovery room wake up full of drugs and dry mouth, the sleepless overnight stay, carting IV to and from bathroom, staring in relieved disbelief at the narrow red line running raised and wide, staples chomping incision tight, the nurse tapping at the door, please remember – pee into the cup.

The long morphine journey into morning, the stampede of students poking, prodding, asking : how do you feel?, the slow stumbled dress behind white curtain, the cold-metal nip of scissors cutting staples loose, the chorus of recovering patients a groan-cry-heave-huff-cough of good morning’s and take care’s. The blurry car ride home, the long overdue couch-ridden rest of countless television series and T-3’s, the midnight jump to consciousness a pinch of pain and reassurance, the struggle to sit up a cause of cut muscles, hand on back of neck to protect fresh stitches. The sleep, the sleep, the sleep.

Peeling tape and scabbed scar a show of recovery and admission of appropriately hallow neck, breath an easy call. Smoothed line of neck a pretty reminder of health, wellness the show of support through helping hands – the get well’s and we love you’s a perfect medicinal concoction.

The understanding this is but a blip – the two week recovery an infinitesimal speck of time lost.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Ed Said.

Ed said: the note of G, the color red, one earth day – twenty three hours and fifty seven minutes – are all born of the same harmony. C sharp and blue-green, one earth year – the same.

The harmony of sound and light and time and being all wavering at equal frequency.

The chakra a grounding force of connection and earth energy; the slowest vibration an earth toned root; the fastest, a tidal pull in and out.  

Ed said: the alpha wave, the awareness of you and me and the world around us – exists as an energy field.

So, let’s get lost, let’s fall off the hook, let’s touch the vibration, let’s get held in the sound: sound, which came before music, before language.

The simplicity of the echo of time: the mallet to gong a tangible vibration telling stories of settlement and struggle and triumph and change.

Deliberate and slow, Ed said: do you hear it, the hook of tempo? Can you feel it, the vibration of experience? Can you see it, the reverberation lapping like waves?

It’s the sound of healing.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Broken Butterfly Wings.

Lying in dream, hospital bed covered by a shed of broken butterfly wings, the doctor says: you’re pregnant.

Real life me, she knows nothing of swollen belly or hard contractions or broken water.

Push, the doctor orders, pressing cold cloth to my now beaded brow.

The pain, its real life hurt and dream me lets out yelps of an unforgiving uterus.

It’s a push and a push and a push and it’s over. I stand, gown clad and confused, at the end of a long corridor, hospital fluorescents flickering dream confusion.

Deflated belly, the pang of empty stomach, I ask for the baby.

Baby? the doctor asks. Why, there’s no baby.  

Hands on soft flesh, I feel tight skin that’s never stretched.

But the pain? I ask.

You’ve been eating broken butterfly wings again, the doctor says. Stern brow, steel rimmed glasses, pocked nose, pinched mouth.

We’ve told you, they aren’t good for you.

I nod, I know.

They’ll be gone soon enough, glint of knife a broken sparkle of light.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Playin’ Odds.

He doesn’t tell me I have cancer.

Instead, he says: adenomatous polyposis. He says: genetic abnormality. He says: follicular thyroid carcinoma.

I say: I’m fucking tired of the Latin, doc.

He says: it’s nothing. A small incision and we’re through here.

The date wrote down in my schedule and his, a handshake out the door and he doesn’t know I spend the night googling big words.

The Mayo Clinic, it says abnormal cells grow rapidly, lose the ability to die. Apocalyptic influx of undead cells – night of the living cancer.

The Thyroid Foundation of Canada says this type, it’s not very common. Only 15,000 people annually in North America. North America, the land of opportunity and 516,766,000 people. A 2.9% chance of diagnosis.

The Medical Association says it’s a consequence of allelotyping of follicular thyroid carcinoma: frequent allelic losses in chromosome arms. My arms and no cross to bear.

The thyroidectomy, it starts with a drug: an anesthetic huff or injection. Monitors for heart rate, for blood pressure, for blood oxygen, for blip-bloop back up to the doctor’s slice chorus.

A day’s stay in the hospital for good measure and I’m home with neck pain, hoarse voice, thyroid hormone therapy. Didn’t really need that part of the endocrine system anyway.

The success rate in excess of 95%. A lil’ better odds round the table than the first hand.

But no one tells me I have cancer.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Old Blood.

“You from the Cayman Islands?” words muffled through paper.

Catching armpits on crutches, patient chart pinched between central incisors, his foot is broken.

“No, I’m not.”

“You should be. Your last name – it’s the same last name of the foam cup king. You know the one – the baron who invented Styrofoam coffee cups. He owns half the Cayman Islands! Yeah, I bet you’re related. Look at you.”

One stiff leg jutting out in front of him, he teeters, totters, tick-tocks, flops onto the black physician chair, a resident student hand flying out to stop ancient bones from tipping over.

“You ever been exposed to radiation?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yeah, you know. Chernobyl. Radiation. Know how they discovered Chernobyl?” he turns to the second student standing shy in the corner, How to Memorize Quickly and Efficiently: A Guide’s nose poking out of her white coat pocket. Wide-eyed owl eyes dart around the room – she’s not sure how to answer this particular question.

“No, sir. I don’t.”

“Turns out – “ the back of his hand taps my shoulder.

We should be sitting in a bar over beers.

“ – turns out, the cloud, it went east and west. The first traces of radiation were actually found in Sweden, probably even over in England.”

The students, all three, nod, smile, nod. One reaches for a pen as though to write it down: east and west, check.

“If you’re not from the Cayman Islands, where’s your family from?”

“Uh, England, mostly.”

Bearing weight on just one leg, he stands, tugging on my shirt collar.

“Come on, get up.”

Soft and pale, cold fingers reaching around my neck.

To his students: “Did you feel this? What a great day for you to be here, huh? Look at the size of this!”

I am a showcase medical mystery, prime time television programming complete with montage back-story.

Sipping cup after cup of Dixie’s water, all three medical students take turns touching me.

I am the miniature pony at the petting zoo, matted mane and dirt-caked hooves.

With his back to me, he talks: a language I don’t understand. The students, they nod and write important Latin words in tiny notebooks they’ll pour over later in preparation for the big exam.

Turning back my way, he has a needle in one hand and an alcohol soaked cloth in the other.

I am the proven thesis of an experiment gone wrong.

“Lay down. Good. Now, you’re going to feel a little pressure here.”

Needle digging cold metal, a pin prick pushing suprasternal notches, pushing sternomastoid, pushing cricoid cartilage. Heaviness begging fluid, begging old blood, brown blood, begging cells, ruined cells.

“There we have it.” Vial glinting fluorescent light, dark and full.

“The tumor, it’s hemorrhaging.”

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Supernumerary.

We talk about pets and god and art and memory.

The philosophy comes easy and when he says to me, it’s like I’ve known you all along, I laugh but don’t talk. The words, they’re not tongue-tip close, and the giggle, it bounds up out of my throat before I can slap a hand over puckered mouth, lips quavering in a smile long ago forgotten on late nights alone when, through anomalistic months on repeat, from perigee to apogee and back again, the moon lit cracked floorboards of lonely bedroom late.

He says: you remind me of a song and make the morning better even without coffee and tomorrow we should do it all again because this is the way it’s supposed to feel and, ignoring internal somersaults shaking up breakfast, I say: please, yes, please, the words an awkward waver in a pitch of voice I’ve never heard tumble out of my own mouth, three syllables barely discernable, words stuck.

A slow fade into patterned bed sheet flowers where touch transcends talk, I am chameleon purple and blue and gold and gone so far. Behind inky night-cloak draping closed lids, dream and wake melt, puddling between bent limbs and rumpled sighs.

Puzzle perfect, loop to fit indent, a tessellated match made. The asperity of the past infinitely smoothes out in front of us, learned lessons of lost love shelved for another day, a rainy day.

The supernumerary of us exceeds expectation.

xoxo
M.L. H’art

Wahton.

Waiting.

in line, too long, impatiently.

Wait for.

your turn, the weekend, it.

Wait until.

The Call.

Hello, she says, hello how are you feeling? Have you been well? Sorry for the wait.

The wait: stationary readiness and the hold of expectation; a pause – please catch up! Be available, attentive and attending – be ready to realize the unrealized.

The result?

Inconclusive, she says. The results, she says, well, they aren’t enough.

You see, the cells, the ones scraped out of you, are diluted. All wet with fluid and inconclusive. It’s likely, she says, it’s nothing. No need to worry, really. But it’s always best. Best to get a second opinion.

Second opinion, differing point of view – an alternative solution.

Surgery, she says. It’s a possible solution.

Steady handwork, manual extraction, the deep sleep before the slice.

The excision, she says. It will be an excision.

Excision. Resection. Exorcism. Exorcismus.

Out, out foul spirit.

Swapping letters, Catholic school girl habits reaching for the rosary. Please god…

So, she says, we’ll see you again in just a few weeks time. Till then, just relax and…

…wait.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Graves.

I slept with the butterfly, allowed it to flap up inside, flutter by hymen, forewing flickering cervix up to vulva; pushing proboscis past anatomical barriers, this butterfly trembled through cardia and corpus, tickled curvature, great and less. Thorax and tarsi prickling pharynx and larynx, a long climb up the vertebral, it dug its palps right into my throat, stole my words.

Laying out the long length of the line of neck for the doctor to take a look, the curve of shoulder to clavicle exposing stretched skin between sternum and scapula, the jugular-pulse an internal lug of blue blood, I am naked.

Baring my shield, an oblong door to the heart of the throat made of steel valour, which – if I had the parts – would bare the peculiar angle of forbidden fruit consumed, I am under the watch of Drs. Galen and Wharton, standing shoulder-close, notebooks in hand.

A pin-prick dig around inside and I am under the microscope – a look-see hide and seek game of who knows what’s next, optically scoping dark corners of neck inferior to expose a constellation of consequential symptoms caused by iodine and tyrosine and thyroxine racing metabolism around and around the trachea rings, so early in the morning.

The butterfly regresses: from flutter to reverse metamorphosis to chrysalis – hard pupa shell tucked tight. Too delicate to touch, the disc of forming butterfly wings running the same length of the tracheae, a yellow-green-red patterned witch who, if let loose, would thief milk late at night.

But this butterfly-lover of mine refuses to let go.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Anamorning.

On the step just out the front door, he’s waiting for me again.

Every morning for the past four, he waits, his nose a nervous twitch-tick he can’t control – flaring nostrils scrunching the bridge.

Each morning following me down the path toward the train, his gait a lumbering trip-hop-step, he asks if he can call me Mary-Ann.

My name is not Mary-Ann.

He, despite his bombastic vocabulary and apposite collared coat indicating a learned life, doesn’t understand.

He is agitated most on the days when I am late.

The alarm clock a sorely beaten snooze-foe nursing wounds from my refusal to arouse from furrowed bed sheets until the panic of losing my job to the comforting folds of dream eject me, sleep-fuzzy and stumbling, toward the bathroom, the routine a blind-eyed bang-on precision performance: the hair-comb, toothbrush, face-wash, hair-tie, cheek-pinch, eye-flutter, sweater-zip, good-bye combo (today, a judges’ score of eight-point-five) launches me out the door just in time to see the train fly by two minutes earlier than the day previous.

He stomps his paddle foot, the toes spreading wide at the helm of his rough-worn shoe, an impatient tippety-tap as, its face disappointed and arms raised in ten-to-eight fright, he flashes the reflection of first-light sun off his pocket watch into my eyes further curdling my already pea-soup thick frustration.

I try to keep my head, but he’s impatiently tapping my shoulder: Mary-Ann, Mary-Ann. How’d you get so tall?

xoxo

M.L. H’art