I’m going to take a month off from the weekly question and do something I used to do for the National Post in August. Instead of writing The Bookless Club, I’m going to do a short story each week. To make this a more challenging project, send one word that you’d like to see incorporated into a story to thebooklessclub@gmail.com
This week’s words are echo, pearls, waterfall from Jeff Benna, Lorraine Herbst and Pat Grier, respectively.
THE RESONANCE OF MAGNETIC IMAGING
The nurse handed her a key on a lanyard. The instructions were simple: take off your clothes, put on this smock, tie it just so, put your things in the locker and then go and sit on one of the chairs in the hallway. The last thing she did was hand her two paper slippers. As she walked away, she said, “You can keep your socks on if you want; it can be cold in there.”
… put on this smock, tie it just so …
Amy was wearing a sweatsuit so the task took only seconds. She shuffled along the corridor in her smock and paper slippers and took a seat. It was coming up on midnight but there were two other people waiting. They took no notice of Amy. It seemed a courtesy to not acknowledge them either – no one looks their best in a hospital smock at midnight. They were all there for an MRI. They, too, were there to get a medical mystery sorted out. This thing ran all the time now; around the clock. Everybody needed MRIs, it seemed.
So she sat, quietly, but with mounting anxiety. She didn’t like MRIs. The confinement. The noises. But especially the confinement. The fact that you couldn’t move; that any movement would mess with the process and they’d have to start the whole thing over. She wondered what qualified as movement. Did the contents of your stomach shifting further down their route qualify as movement? Just how shallow did your breathing have to be? And what about swallowing? Was swallowing okay? What about gulping? And why did they have to insert your whole body into that infernal tube if they were only going to be looking at, say, your abdomen? She found herself thinking about the old TV shows where the village sacrifices a maiden to an angry volcano.
For the third time, a technician asked for her name and birthdate. Ten minutes later, she was back and asking Amy to follow her.
The MRI room is big and well-lit. They give you ear plugs, a panic button to press, and they tell you they’ll keep you in the loop.
… they give you earplugs, a panic button to press …
They can tell Amy’s nervous. They say they’ll work with her, but not to be nervous. They don’t want to have to do it twice. So, don’t be nervous. Decide not to be nervous. Understood? Understood. There’s an implied threat.
Amy lies down on the platform and the machine ingests her. As the machine swallows her up, she thinks about the cartoons wherein the villain straps the maiden to the conveyor belt leading to a whirring buzz saw.
The loud pinging and ponging and thrumming and banging starts. The ear plugs don’t really help. She closes her eyes and searches her brain for distractions.
She’s in London to visit her eldest daughter who’s doing a summer internship. Her daughter catches sight of her waiting outside the apartment and runs as fast as she can down the street. Amy watches her for the whole block, running like she’s just been let out from kindergarten, the late afternoon light catching the gold of her sandals. They’re in Yosemite. Her son is maybe four years-old. He gasps when he sees Bridal Veil Falls, exclaiming, “Mommy, what a beautiful faterwall!” The word faterwall becomes enshrined in the family vernacular. Henceforth, all waterfalls are faterwalls. She’s in a rooftop bar with an enchanting man. Outside, an electrical storm worthy of the Marvel universe is ripping up the night sky. The man remarks that the storm pales compared to the sparks flying between them. The Christmas her father presented a pearl and crystal necklace to each of his three girls. She thinks about how it must have felt to make that purchase. How, in his own awkward way, he’d tried to protect them all. She never wears her necklace but she knows exactly where it is. She thinks about the time she saw the northern lights. Witnessed bioluminescence.
The time … the time ….
Oh, when will this be over!
Silence.
An echo-y voice says, “All done.”
The machine spits her out.
Days later the phone rings. It’s a Tuesday evening.
“Hello, Amy. It’s Dr. Murdoch. Have I got you at a bad time?”
Amy replies that, when your doctor calls you at 7 pm on a Tuesday night, there’s a good chance it’s about to become a bad time.
The doctor chuckles.
“Listen, he says, “We’re going to need you to come in. Nothing to be frantic about, but we’d like to run more tests.”
For a moment no one speaks.
The doctor wades into the moment.
“It’s early days yet, but we’d like to rule out some stuff. Really, I don’t want you to worry. This is what you call an ‘abundance of caution’’. Just diagnostics ….. Do you have any free time tomorrow?”
“… we’d like to rule out some stuff.”
The call wraps up. Amy sits still, so still that the MRI technicians would be impressed. After a while, she walks into her bedroom and opens the top drawer of her dresser. Pushing aside a lifetime of trinkets and beads, she sees the pearl and crystal necklace. She slides it over her head and lies down on the bed.
She is not nervous.
She has decided not to be nervous.
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