“Six Months, Three Surgeries” by Jordan Davidson
On Fridays, we watch Tom cheat on Ariana in bright, trash TV colors while my mother grows fist-sized abscesses on her thighs and screams the dog back around the table when he tries to rest his head on her lap-side injection sites. He lopes sweetly off; he didn’t mean to. None of us mean to, but my brother and I, leaving dishes with oil filming in the sink, sinking cars into concrete piles, piling our tongues in stranger's mouths -- we are pathogenic, fomites. Our mother says so. While gathering infections, I miss my father in intensive care, instead visiting someone else's gigantic bones strung up in a Connecticut basement. A medical marvel. My father, skeleton twisted under the same grotesque growth, is no marvel. He goes under anesthesia above ground in California, dying seventeen times in one day: once a hallucination, all the rest in English class (Obsessed, perform the compulsion, be disordered). Thought, performance, thought again. Cause of death: tumor. Or medical malpractice. My own misrepresented malice. I have forgotten how to swallow; I prescribe myself a dose of exile. Need brings me back, to be needled. What I call a flareup the doctors call paranoia, but still they run my blood tests, pinning tubes in the crooks of my arms. My mother's daily shot fights off her blindness. My father's dissects his tumor. We have become a house of needles. I quarantine by habit, and spread infection by nature.
After two more Fridays (Tom and Ariana and I mid-breakup), I pass my bill of health. My mother falls into debt on hers, allergic to the IV. My father pays the dues for both of us, locked in his office. His skull will never be the same again. Our water runs with antidepressants. I change doses. And, at the end of it all, my brother will still have crashed the car, seven thousand dollars leaking oil down a sidewalk drain. The dog and I wait–bitter, exhausted, sick with sertraline–for his homecoming.
About Jordan Davidson
She/Her/Hers
Jordan Davidson is a Coloradan currently studying physics at Yale University. Coming from a family with a myriad of chronic health issues (and dealing with a few herself), she's always had a morbid draw towards illness and hospitals, which is often expressed in her writing. Her previous work has been published by Little Engines, ZNB Presents, and Gingerbread House, among others.