She wanted to die of cancer. She’d stopped living years ago. Death was only a formality, something to stop the tedium. She was about to get her wish. Her boyfriend acted like he wanted to die of cirrhosis of the liver the way he drank. No one said anything about that, but cancer? All her friends recommended cancer treatments, and this annoyed her. They told her to get the chemo. She didn’t want to stop the cancer her bone marrow had started to reproduce.
She wasn’t a girl anymore, just old. No one called her anything, thought of her as anything, just assumed she wanted to live to 105. And then one day, she became a woman. By then, she was in her sixties. It would have been sooner, but she had had a fucked up childhood. Growing up, her mother was a daisy and her sister a rose. That left her the thorns, stems and leaves to form herself separate, distinct.
One night, after talking with her boyfriend, she imagined herself in the doctor’s office, standing up and announcing she would not do chemo, have her blood cells reengineered or partake of any other attempt to save what was a life better left behind. She realized that she was a woman, not because of all the usual reasons, but because she imagined, after her tirade, her boyfriend’s response, her boyfriend’s mouth agape before the screaming started. “No, you can’t give up. It’s not fair. And what are you going to do? Die on me? What the fuck is wrong with you? You are not even going to try?”
She imagined herself there in the doctor’s office, the doctor, small, with short, black hair, watching the fiasco that was only scheduled for 20 minutes.
She was a woman because she could be silenced before the screaming even started, and that made her mad. She had become someone who said yes if only there would be no yelling, yes if only she wasn’t called a bull dyke for being strong. As long as she wasn’t hated like Hillary Clinton or Gloria Steinem. She was tired, couldn’t fight anymore, have a strong will anymore. No one told her it got harder with age to be a tough cookie. It seemed that her priorities had changed and now she wanted peace, plain and simple. She would do the chemo. She would learn how to live when the game had changed. And she started with wanting silence. It was all she wanted, like the last piece of pie, the stray leaf in February clinging, clinging, letting go.
CARROLL ANN SUSCO has a chapbook, Bean Spiller, on Variant Literature Press. She also has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and 40 publications, including Anodyne and The Sun Magazine. See her LinkedIn page for a list and links. These flash are both fiction and nonfiction, maybe more non than fiction.
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