No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

“Everything’s wrong with her,” another nurse said, almost without thinking. “With us!” she wanted to shout. Everything wrong with us!

Something of her old voice returned to her here, the one that stamped her born in 1987 and that had seemed so in danger of disappearing.

The koosh ball was accidentally thrown away, and little did the landfill know what was coming: the blue bursting star of everything she knew, never smaller by one ray.

The doctors had asked for the brain, with so much hope that it was almost tender, as if they loved her too. “Do you think she would mind?” her sister had asked, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and saw rockets shoot across that internal black dome. “No, I don’t think she would mind at all,” she had responded, and now that the act was accomplished, it gave comfort: as long as people were looking at that mind, it was still active in the world, asking and answering, finding out about things, making small dear cries of discovery. It had, the doctors confirmed, only ever kept growing while she was alive.

Once, she had visited a little island with shocking white beaches and had worked her bare toes into its famous sand, which was used to make the glass for all our screens. There the sky was so crystal, and the sun so hot, and the air on her skin so unmediated, and the trees so full of koala bears, that she felt either like she had gotten inside the phone completely or else had gotten out.

She wondered was it worth it to show up, hear a little music, and then leave?

Someone at some point slid her phone out of her pocket and she lifted off her feet, lighter. Her whole self was on it, if anyone wanted. Someone would try to unlock it later, and see the picture of the baby opening her mouth, about to speak, about to say anything.