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I'm delighted to place my story, "Restoration," in Volume 7, 2007, of The Healing Muse because it's a great fit. The Healing Muse is the annual journal of literary and visual art published by SUNY Upstate Medical University's Center for Bioethics & Humanities. This journal welcomes fiction, poetry, narratives, essays, memoirs and visual art, particularly but not exclusively focusing on themes of medicine, illness, disability and healing. I'm in distinguished company, for it's a thick journal filled with fine explorations and examples of the ways we live in and with our bodies. Written as a section of my book, Knowing Bodies, a memoir of travel in Bali and through cancer, the opening paragraphs of Restoration follow.
RESTORATION Eleventh floor: etched glass doors, art deco lounge, all quite tasteful. Magazines on the blond Parsons table, Vogue, Elle, New Yorker, an upscale selection replacing the non-selection of the lower level waiting rooms (Cancer Society brochures in Radiation in the basement, various Medical Center brochures in Oncology on two, outdated People magazines in Short Stay on five). And, wonder of wonders, windows through which we who wait can watch Seattle's pale November sun warm the gray buildings stepping down the hill to Elliott Bay. I assumed a wait and settled in, pulling a yellow pad from my backpack to note these distinctions and add this snarky comment to my journal, 'Clearly I have arrived.' (Like most patients, I tried to show a proper attitude.) Such elegance held more promise than actuality for the two of us in the waiting room. A frail woman in her mid-sixties had been wheeled in and parked in her chair. Neatly dressed, but definitely not Vogue, not Elle, she wore a shoe on one foot and a pink slipper on the other, and above the slipper I could see her ankle and lower leg, splotched red and cruelly scarred by burns. And me? No visible scars, but neither Vogue nor Elle, a candidate for a breast that was not a breast but a mound of silicone sheathed in muscle. Reconstruction, like Vogue, deals with image. Substance--delicious nerve endings, breast as organ of perception--was no longer an issue. We wouldn't talk of such things there. Although cancer treatment redefined my body as object, artifact, and construct, I resisted as identity splintered and new patterns coalesced, for even a cyborg may feel nostalgia for a lost unity, however illusory. And yes, I knew I'd always been a part of a complex human system--never a pure child of nature.
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Last update: Friday, February 15, 2008 at 10:38:24 AM. © 1996-2006 Cecilie Scott |
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