Graceina Samosir
I was twenty-two and it was a doctor’s office without an examination table. Instead—armchairs, incense, potted plants. Homeopathic.
My mother suggested this doctor because she believes in the power of the body the way other people believe in heaven.
I pointed at a poster of plants. Under each one was a list of medical properties.
“Medical properties sound like something from Monopoly,” I told my mother.
“This isn’t a game,” she said back.
I wrote my symptoms on a clipboard. They seemed like things a woman consumed by vanity would be punished with if this were the bible. I’d grown a dark, stiff mustache. Acne sprouted over my cheeks. I’d gained weight. My hair fell out in clumps. I couldn’t let anyone grab it during sex anymore. I told my mother so. She massaged her temples.
“Of all the things to worry about,” she said.
We understood the power of the body in different ways. The doctor came in.
“We’ll start with height and weight,” she said. I stepped on the scale and then I saw my feet. I’d left my boots on.
“I left my boots on,” I told her.
“That’s okay,” she said, “the number doesn’t have to be perfect,” and I wondered why I hadn’t learned it that same way.
She looked at my paperwork.
“Hair loss?” she asked. “It’s beautiful. Natural curls?”
“Yes,” my mother said. She touched my scalp. “Ever since she was a girl.”
For a moment, it was hard to breathe.
The doctor moved on to my menstrual cycles. I told her they’d been gone for a long while, but that I didn’t mind so much. She frowned.
What she said next made my mother draw in air sharply.
“I was thinking that,” my mother said.
I wasn’t. When I did start thinking that, I started thinking how maybe I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about condoms breaking.
I could tell that this was the wrong thing to be thinking because the room was filled with the kind of silence that comes after a vase shatters.
The doctor reached into a cabinet and pulled out a tiny green bottle. She handed it to me and said that it would help to fix the part of me that was broken.
I wondered, suddenly, if it was possible that I was losing my fertility because I’d forgotten to care about it. Like a child, running away in the wake of neglect.
So I took it.
I didn’t want to have swallowed the liquid in vain, but I suppose I knew, even then, that I did so only because I couldn’t stand the way my hair collected in strands on my shoulders—the curl of them like white fibers shaking loose from soil—that it had nothing to do with what could or couldn’t grow within me.
And yet, still, that night, I didn’t sleep. I stayed up, waiting. Hoping to feel it fix me. Hoping to become better. Something closer to the woman the homeopathic doctor and my mother believed I could be.
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Kieran Mundy's work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Joyland and Hobart, and has been recognized in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2017 and 2019. She's the recipient of Gulf Coast's 2020 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, judged by Jenny Offill. Kieran holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Oregon, and her work has been funded by the Vermont Studio Center. She currently lives in Bend, OR where she is at work on a short story collection.