Protocol
 Larry L. FontenotFor once, through the door, bring anybody but a doctor. Fetch someone who will not open me up and close me off like a shut-down diner or a child’s vacated room. Invite someone who knows a kiss in the crease of my knee is the path to secrets. Bring a lover, man or woman, I don’t care. Just someone to watch me undress, reveal scars that gnaw the skin once so perfect that angels denounced it. My roommate told me during her last stay that she had dreams of men making love to her. She had whispered to voices in the dark. The nurses had laughed kindly. They knew all about her dreams, her spoiled plans, the length of her incision, the width of her chances. She soon became a nuisance, a hostile cellmate banging the tables, cursing doctors. “They would have killed me if the cancer hadn’t got me first,” she claimed in my dream of her. Once, in a night humming with stares, she touched me, leaving me hungry for the drip of morphine. There’s a sign down the hall hinting at what we wish: “What Cancer Cannot Do,” it says. I don’t believe it. Treatment is like a talk show: everyone seems convinced cancer is character building. I built my character long ago, sealed it safe behind my face. No one knows me, not even my visitors, who come to grieve. They stay, and we pass the time with scrabble blocks. But there will be no triple word points when the lawyer opens my will and says, “She left nothing, because everything she had was inside her.” Larry L. Fontenot |