The Collagist
>She tells me I’m breaking up
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| Ronnie Gaubert @ Avatar Review |
Chad Simpson on his mother’s mastectomy and acts of obscuring @ The Collagist.
A week after her mastectomy, my mom’s head throbs. She feels every couple of minutes like she is about to puke.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )She thinks it’s the flu, which has been going around, even though she’s only left the house twice, for trips to the doctor.
I ask her what she’ll do if she has to throw up.
“I can’t hear you,” she says. “You’re breaking up.”
I have seen the incision, an eleven-inch gash that runs like a crooked smile from her sternum to some hidden place beneath her armpit. It’s pink near the stitches, tender-looking.
A couple days ago, when Mom asked me if I wanted to see it, it didn’t look like the kind of thing that could endure much retching.
I ask her again what she’ll do if she gets sick, and again she tells me I’m breaking up.
It’s not the connection. It’s the way I hold my phone—pointed toward my left shoulder instead of my mouth—while I pace around the downstairs of my house, from the kitchen to the dining room, to the foyer, then back to the kitchen. Over and over, I walk in this loop and talk into empty air.
>But what if you have experience and no language?
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| Ugo Untoro |
Jeneva Stone explores the limits of words @ The Collagist.
(1999) One image that rises to the surface now is a brightly lit hospital room on the pediatric floor at Georgetown Hospital. In most of my memories, the rooms there are shadowy—perhaps because we turned off the overhead lights during the day—or the room is dark and lit by the glow of the box-shaped light over the bed and the green and red lights, the blue glow of the monitoring devices.
But in this memory, the room is very white-bright.
I think that Robert, my son, now two years old, had stopped taking food and liquid by mouth—he ate and drank, very feebly, for a year after what was an undiagnosed breakdown. We spent two hours or more on each meal. One little bit of feta cheese to the lips, push it in, see if he could masticate it without spitting it out by accident, and so on. Followed by an eight-ounce bottle of PediaSure, which took him nearly forty-five minutes to drain.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Robert did not gain any weight that year, and he barely grew in height and head circumference. One day, at the end of a long week of spending most days trying to get much food in him at all, he just refused to open his mouth at all, all day.
altimoniere 