They Call This Condition Benign

By Kory Wells

/ Flash /      

At 12–

One of my mother’s best friends—she has two, both named Nancy, and in this memory they blend together—picks me up after school. From the teacher’s parking lot. Usually I catch the bus. “Your mother’s doing okay,” she says. “It was benign.” Which means not malignant, I think. These words are only weeks old to me, and I have trouble remembering which is good and which is bad. It will be decades before I know they aren’t pure opposites.

My dad is with my mom, Nancy goes on. She’ll be hospitalized a couple of nights. I’ll have to help around the house—that breast will be sore for a while. So she still has her breast. But she would’ve either way—she’d made the surgeon promise, even if he found cancer, he wouldn’t take that breast today. Nancy has relief on her face. I look away and nod my head. I don’t want to discuss breasts anymore. 

At 13–

Late on a Saturday, we pull into the back of the school on a charter bus, all the parents waiting up close to the building, under the awning, like night is something you have to shelter from, same as rain. Most parents are looking as bleary as I feel, but here’s my mom, my dad right behind her, his hand loosely on her bare midriff, both of them smiling. It appears they've had a fantastic week without me. My mother wears a short-cropped peasant top with white wide-legged pants. The other women are giving her side-eye. She seems not to notice.

“Who is that?” I hear the boy in the seat behind me. I don’t say anything because he wouldn’t believe me. On the second day of the trip, he poked me on the shoulder through that gap between the seat and the window. I turned around and looked at his freckled face. It was pointy like a rat’s. This was the first time we’d spoken. 

“Are you a member of the IBTC?” he asked.

My mind ran through our school’s various clubs and activities. Beta Club, FFA, yearbook, band, sports—I couldn’t place those letters. 

“What’s that?” To this day I hate that I took his bait.

“The Itty Bitty Titty Committee,” he said. He didn’t laugh or smile, but he looked pleased with himself.

I rolled my eyes and ignored him the rest of the trip.

Now I gather my travel pillow and my small duffel and slump off the bus, his question about my mom burning my ears. I shuffle toward her open arms, her tan, tight abs a kind of beacon.

At 27–

It’s a cliché to call the baby’s mouth a rosebud, but there it is, pink and petaled and undeniable. A tiny blister raindrops my daughter’s upper lip, a translucent pearl formed by the friction of feeding after feeding. We are before. Before the insistence of hunger works her mouth, then blooms into an open cry. I swaddle her at my breast, which is hard and buzzing, tell her we have to learn to be apart. Before she is four months, I will go back to work. Oh, honey. Before she comprehends language, she understands tone, understands croon. Still, she locks her eyes on mine and howls as I keep my milk-stained shirt closed. I’m disappointing her, the first of countless times. Yet in the next moment she opens her mouth toward the bottle’s nipple, golden imitation I tease along her lower lip.

At 50–

Months have passed and my love and I finally lie together again, months since the surgeon carved a perfect C around my pale areola, a word I shun because I don’t know which pronunciation to prefer. Air-ee-OH-la, uh-REE-uh-luh—what does it matter? Are we now after, or a new kind of before? When the surgeon cut a door to something inside me, she left me keening—a grief and shame I can’t explain. Though the scar is light. Though my love has always accepted me as I am—both our bodies have become soft cornucopias, paunchy with imperfections. I look at the C around my nipple and think of all it could mean—cancer, chorus, crown. “Still no feeling there,” I confess. His gaze is an insistent song. I swallow my sorrow. That breast. His mouth. We press on.