Vise

4″ Scout vise made in U.S.A. by Darron Birgenheier, flickr

There was a radiating pain that traveled from the right side of her neck and shoulder to her fingertips. A breast and thyroid cancer survivor, it terrified her. Months before, a couple of months before the outbreak of the pandemic, she declared her own freedom from a drug that would have prevented relapse. The drug had hobbled her and she was tired of feeling old in midlife, of making excuses for her immobility, of being embarrassed because she did not look old enough to be moving that way. It had been worse than chemotherapy, especially because no one had told her this would happen. People rang a bell on their chemo ward last day of treatment, people sang and clapped. There were no more bells for this interminable, solitary journey. She would have had to stay on the drug for five years. Although she had grown her hair back, she was moving like she was one hundred and if she was moving, she was in pain.

Now there was this new thing she couldn’t face, this new pain she couldn’t pay for. A nurse for her oncologist had said over the phone it sounded like muscular pain and so she went to a chiropractor. He was able to get her to the point of mobility but he also pressed on the radiated flesh of her right side in a way that broke her down again though not completely. And she couldn’t afford him after a while. And she was avoiding doctors again like she did when her right breast flared with cancer, but now it felt like there was a valid reason: the pandemic.

The pain almost kept her mentally alive some days, she was on a routine of over the counter meds and CBD oil. Every several hours, there was something new to take. Every few weeks, she researched and dug for help. Her fear could be killed with an occasional television series streaming binge or a belt of alcohol, a glass of wine, just enough to keep her going until the next day.

She couldn’t find a job. She had plenty of education, but much less job experience. There was pressure now in her family that she find a job. When she was married and later when she had a son, no one wanted her to do anything but keep a house. Even writing was discouraged. Now that she was middle aged with no work experience, almost zero, as well as juggling pain and anxiety, family could only seem to be happy when they thought she might work.

She was the husk of a used body, the kind you might throw onto a pile of other used bodies on the outskirts of a city, bodies whose sole function might be fuel in the burning or at least nurture for the soil for they were useless otherwise by society’s standards. She was so angry some days she thought she might already be producing fuel but really it was just a bit of noxious gas, dissipating and aimless. The desire she felt to go toward a direction was often thwarted by anxiety, either that or its seeming opposite – despondency.

She was able to see the tops of a tall stand of pines from her apartment window. It reminded her or her girlhood in South Carolina. How beautiful was the wind through a pine forest, its swishing like the sifting of dry grain, the needles glistening in the sun. One day she may lie at their feet and fall asleep and not get up. If she cannot afford the rent increase in a pandemic, if the pain gets worse, if she is squeezed by despair or hunger. She would never have advocated giving up, having fought so hard during years of suicidal ideation, divorce, cancer, diabetes. And yet how many pressures add up to the end? She knew this is one thing that perhaps she had never put seriously to herself until now. Pandemics, she was finding out, may turn out to be the final pressure vise.

But she was pretty sure that even if homeless and ill in her sunny climate, she would not give up. She could see herself as the crazy singing patron who came into the public library thirty years ago and sang her reference requests or the coupon lady with tons of flyers cutting and cutting all day at one of the tables.

She had been a librarian at the time, a time before her marriage. Such patrons and other lost souls, many of them homeless, many of them unwashed and mentally ill, were legendary among the staff. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t stop living by her own hand, no matter what. Even if no one would claim her, even if she could barely claim herself, she imagined would go on, she imagined she would sing and sing and sing, alone and to trees, to her aged dog, to the dirty streets, to God.