Crying for Caduceus
Michelle So
The onco. doc read Gleason 9 like a one-way ticket to a carnival ride. I was
fifteen and told the story wasn’t just about me. I was the Sun. Still
dreaming: Pandora shuttles, 12-day cruises, and Pacific expeditions. But
my platform was a gut-wrenching terminal germinal diagnosis.
Precaution ensued. My mama traded her apron for a three-piece suit. It was
calling, falling, bandaged, bruised. Ginseng, jujubes, and oatmeal stew. In the
midst of all the mayhem, my mother’s sisters and my grandfather’s wife piled
peppers and preventions before the surgical knife. We waited.
Confined: the world was sitting in an early-ish febrile state. Isolated, I raged to
live whilst death wouldn’t wait. I erred to the way of the train—it beckoned to
the lost, the weary, the poor. The alcoholics, the homeless, the bangs with tattoos.
My stomach—a prune. Clenched. Tracing yellow skid marks to my veins.
They say a lost soul knows when she’s home. But I ran masked and sobbing when a
man coughed and another pissed in a cup. I welled up—I felt sick of myself. With
Grandfather hanging by a thread. I was stretching taut to a frown. Disobeying.
Fifteen miles away, riding the only bus toward Chinatown.
I wish I called it pretty: the husky sky casting 10 hues onto tear-soaked eyes.
But I barely noticed the khaki-slacked Ah-yi with her Pepsi-Cola recycling cart.
Wizened willow of the West-side metro stretching her olive-gnarled claws
bequeath a snake plant, wrapped in yesterday’s headlines, into my heart.
Michelle So is a student at Yale University. Michelle So is an Ecology & Evolutionary Biology major from Los Angeles, California.
ABOUT THE ART | Untitled by Eleri Phillips, 2024. Eleri Phillips is a student at Yale University.
