Pity the Doctor, Not the Disease Science in its tedium reveals that every spirit we spirit ganks a solid half hour from our life spans. So says my doctor, a watery, Jesus-eyed man, and hard to suffer with his well-intended scrips for yoga and neti pots, notably stingy with the better drugs, in situ here amid the disinfected toys, dreadful in their plastic baskets. Above his head, the flayed men of medical illustration are nailed for something like décor. The eyeball scheme is best, with its wondrous canal of Schlemm, first favorite of all weirdly named eponymous body parts. It's just a splotch of violet on the diagram, but without it our aqueous humors would burst their meshy dams and overflow. Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul... is what I quote him as he thumps my back with his tiny doctor's tomahawk. But he's used to me. We have an understanding. What he means to miser, I've come to spend most lavishly. And I feel fortunate again to be historically shaky in the maths, enough to avoid making an easy sum of my truly happy hours, or nights curled sulfurous on my side, a priced-to-sell shrimp boiling in anxious sleep. If we're lucky, it's always a terrible time to die. Better the privilege of booze than the whim of one more shambolic butcher shelling peasants in a wood, our world's long spree of Caesars starting wars to pay their bills in any given era's Rome. Turns out, Longfellow's stomach did for him, and he died thirsty, calling for more opium. Free of the exam room now, I spot the same busted goldfish in his smeary bowl beside the door where he's glugged along for years, a mostly failed distraction for poxed or broken children. I raise my fin to him, celebrate the poison we're all swimming in, remembering the way you say cheers in Hungarian: Isten, Isten, meaning, in translation, "I'm a god. You're a god." Sundays after church, she shucked the grip of shoes, peace beings of neighbors, the puce-faced elders and pilly felt hangings, and that soft, sad man with his sorrows, no business of hers. Looking up where he drooped, Where there's smoke, there's fire, she thought, choosing one adult fib that seemed, for once, more possible than not; she felt him contagious, a man with his torso gouged like that, of no-thank-you troubles and terrible holes. She was sorry for him, though decided their story likely a lie, unlikely stories abounding, aplenty, for little girls to buy. But she wanted no truck nonetheless, nuh uh--and what had she done?--how bad could she be?--and whose son was this, this sad, soft man another would hurt like that? So Sundays, she shucked and ran and climbed, the birch in her yard no scourge. Who'd put, she thought, a gift worth having at the end of a whip? Such adult nonsense; if she needed beseeching, here were the leaves now candling their verdigris, in spring, where a girl could be redeemed, only as sorry as she considered necessary, sewing herself into what anyone who really looked could see was something true. Reckless, she went, farther, higher, climbing clean into the birch's crown, its limbs growing greener and thinner, the girl now certain it was only a father who'd do that to a kid and call it a lesson. How lovely that spirit, this girl at the top, knowing no one could reach her. Excerpted from Come Hither Honeycomb by Erin Belieu All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
