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I Dream of Names and Cancer

When I was four, I killed my first ant. It didn’t have a name. Of that, I was absolutely certain.

My own name isn’t important to you right now, although it’s likely you’ll learn some version of it soon. I think you’ll end up learning a lot about me in the coming days; some will be true, most will be false. There is a crucial element that will be missed, simply because it’s unknowable to anyone else. Anyone but me.

But I’m going to share it with you.

At the age of 19, as a soldier, I killed my first person. He had a name. Of that, too, I was absolutely certain. And he changed me.

My act of violence led me to learn who he was and what he meant to others. And, at the same time, I learned something essential about myself. Something I was unprepared for. I recoiled in profound, uncomprehending terror.

Today, I work in a hospice. No one there knows what I’ve done. No one there knows who I really am. They think I’m there to work, which is technically true. But I have more tasks than those given to me by supervisors. One particular task – one I’ve prepared for and dreamed about – is to be done today.

Today is when I learn whether or not I’m going to die.

Today is my 522nd birthday. Believe it, don’t believe it; it doesn’t matter to me. When I killed my first person the age of 19, I did more than take his life. I assumed parts of him. He was a left-handed blacksmith’s apprentice named Pierre Gaultier. The moment he breathed his final breath, my left hand lost its sinister clumsiness. I instantaneously understood the basics of metalworking. And I learned his name. I felt his name. It was as familiar to me as my own.

It was the most horrifying moment of my life. The most disorienting. And that night, using my newly dextrous left hand, I tried to cut my own throat. The blade passed over my skin as if it were iron. I later hanged myself from a beam in an abandoned abbey, only to dangle uselessly for three days before I was found and cut down by a local derelict. I begged him to help me take my life, but I didn’t have enough money to make it worth his while. When I killed him in a rage of frightened and confused desperation, I absorbed his alcoholism.

The following centuries were a haze of blood and drink. I’ve absorbed countless talents. Countless traits. Countless vices. But the names – the names aren’t countless. There are 7,339 names inside me now. 7,339 clusters of memories to haunt me.

This all leads to today. For 500 years, I’ve stayed under the radar. I’ve hidden in the shadows and killed and killed and killed, hoping to absorb any knowledge someone might have of another man like me. Another man who shares my curse. But I’m unique. No one is like me. Every open throat and subsequent transfer of name and ability has yielded nothing useful.

Nothing useful, that is, until last month. He was a man called Gustav Brennerson and along with his name, he transferred to me his influenza. It was the first time I’ve ever been sick.

The hospice here has 44 beds. 41 are filled.

41 opportunities.

I dream of names and cancer every night while I’m taunted by the false death of sleep. Tonight, wherever it is I lay my head as it seethes with 41 new names, I pray it seethes with something new. Something malignant. Something terminal. Something that will end these centuries of hideous wandering.

I dream of being eaten alive.

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The Day I Started Believing in Ghosts

ghost

Our family home is famously haunted. By famously, I mean it’s mentioned in the town’s historical records and kids under a certain age won’t ring the doorbell on Halloween. That kind of thing. I’m 24 and I’ve lived here all my life, aside from college. Over the course of those years, I’d never seen anything out of the ordinary. My mom lived here for almost 70, though, and Dad for 50, and they claimed they saw actual ghosts many times. Their parents, too. And so on.

The house was built in 1729. Like most houses nearing their 300th birthdays, it’s had its share of problems. Still does. Obviously, it’s undergone a ton of maintenance over the course of its life, but it was always patch ups rather than overhauls. Therefore, it’s drafty. Everything sags. The electrical system is awful. The plumbing system is even worse. To top it off, all those things make some type of noise: whistling, creaking, humming, groaning, etc. To a superstitious person, it would be easy for them to associate any number of those things with the paranormal. Members of my family, for example, simply think all those natural explanations aren’t good enough.

Unlike most hauntings, the “ghost” we have isn’t a single, recurring entity. The best Mom was able to explain from what she’d seen was this: she’d be doing stuff around the house and something would catch her eye. She’d turn and look, and there’d be the ghostly image of someone who used to live in the house. Sometimes she knew who it was, sometimes she didn’t. They’d be going about their daily routines, entirely oblivious to the fact Mom was watching. One time when Mom was getting out of the shower, she saw the ghost of her grandfather sitting on the toilet, reading the newspaper, while her grandmother brushed her teeth. The moment she yelped with surprise, they disappeared.

I was home during my summer break after my first year in college when Dad died. It was as devastating to Mom and me as anyone would expect. After I returned to school, I started getting emails from Mom talking about how she’d seen Dad around the house. All the sightings were in line with the kind of thing she’d told me about in the past, but I started to worry about the frequency of the reports from her. She was claiming to see him a couple times a week. Before his death, they’d only seen previous residents of the house once every few years. To make matters worse, it seemed like he was scaring her.

Over Christmas break, I convinced her to see a therapist. She began having weekly sessions, which did very little to help with her stress. Her sightings of Dad occurred as frequently as ever. This went on for years.

Following graduation, I moved back home. I got a job at a local accounting firm and started paying off my student loans. Living rent free with Mom was going to make that process go by much faster. I had another reason for living there, too. Mom’s health was in decline. She’d get sick often and spent most of her time wandering aimlessly around the house or sitting in Dad’s old recliner, watching television. I worried about her being alone, so when I wasn’t at work, I made it a point to stay at home. I figured it was the least I could do.

That said, I didn’t want to spend all my time sitting around. I figured since I’d be inheriting the house at some point, I could get some work done to make it feel a little less, well, ancient. There was plenty of old stuff in rooms no one visited that could be brought up to the attic and potentially sold, so I took my time after work and on weekends to deal with it. I hauled lamps and record players and shoeboxes filled with knickknacks up the narrow steps.

Ever since I was old enough to climb the stairs to reach the attic, I’d hated it. It was always hot and stuffy and incredibly dusty, and now that I was filling it with more and more junk, the stuffiness only intensified. I’d been claustrophobic for as long as I could remember. No one else in the family suffered from it, so it appeared to be my own special cross to bear. I did my best to ignore it during my frequent trips up there to drop stuff off, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t go as fast as I could to get back down those steps to the cool and spacious second floor.

On the morning of Mom’s 70th birthday, I got up early to make her breakfast in bed. French toast, fried eggs, and spicy sausage. I tiptoed up the stairs with the tray, carefully opened the door, and walked in. She was staring at the ceiling with a look of terror on her face. Her breathing was labored. I left the tray on the dresser and rushed over, asking her what was wrong.

She didn’t answer. Her wide eyes locked on mine. I reached in my pocket for my phone to call 911, but she grabbed my arm in a grip tighter than I thought her frail body could produce.

“Jeanette, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I stretched my other arm to get my phone from my jeans pocket, but Mom grabbed that one, too. I struggled to get loose while asking over and over what happened and what was wrong. She just kept talking over me.

“We needed money. He made me, Jeanette.”

The grip on my arms loosened and Mom’s labored breathing slowed. Then stopped. I finally dialled 911, but it was too late. I checked her pulse. Nothing. I performed what I knew was a useless attempt at CPR. I stared at her and cried until the ambulance arrived.

I went through the funeral preparations, service, and burial in a fog of misery and confusion. Months went by, and while my mourning period had tapered off, what Mom told me as she died hung like a low cloud over my day-to-day activities. Even though I’d started therapy to help cope with everything I was dealing with, those few sentences plagued me. I’d sit in the house alone while the words danced in my head. I realized I had to move away. I had to sell the house and go away if I wanted to get the closure I so desperately needed.

All the stuff I’d brought to the attic needed to go. When Mom was alive, I kept it because I thought we could have a tag sale at some point and she could tell me what to sell and what should be kept for sentimental purposes. Nothing had sentiment anymore. It all had to go. I rented a dumpster, had it delivered to the front yard, and I got to work bringing it all down.

It was an unbearably-hot August. The attic must have been 120 degrees and the process of moving all the junk was kicking up a lot of the dust. I cursed myself for not having a mask or anything, but I was on autopilot to get it all down and out as quickly as possible. I ignored my claustrophobia as best as I could, and in the space of three days, got the vast majority of the stuff from the attic into the dumpster.

Around noon on the fourth day, sweat was pouring down my dusty, filthy body as I worked to take the last few boxes out. I’d gotten into old stuff that’d been there for as long as I could remember. Lots of Dad’s winter clothes and high school yearbooks and stuff. It was by far the dustiest part of the attic. My chest burned and clumps of fuzz floated through the air like volcanic ash. I became acutely aware of my breathing and started to feel dizzy. I felt consumed by the dry heat and could swear the room was getting smaller as I stumbled toward the last of the boxes.

I lost my footing and fell face-first into a pile of boxes in the corner. They crashed to the floor and one split open, spilling its contents. My head hit the ground and I gasped, gulping dust into my throat. I coughed and hacked up gobs of dust-loaded snot. The walls felt like they were squeezing my shoulders and I felt the ceiling, despite being six feet above my head, pushing me into the dusty floor.

Something flashed in the corner of my eye. I whirled around, the thick string of saliva hanging from my lips whipping around and slapping the side of my face. The ghostly figure of a woman stood in the middle of the room with a camcorder on her shoulder. It looked like she was crying. I shrieked and scrambled like a crab to get away.

The figure didn’t respond to my noise and movements. It just kept sobbing and pointing the camcorder. I realized it was my young mother. While the walls and ceiling spun ever closer to me and dust furred my tongue and the back of my throat, I turned around and looked in the direction the camera was recording.

My young father was lying on his belly on the filthy floor. Pinned underneath him, open-mouthed, struggling with all her might, and gasping in lungful after lungful of dust, was a girl no older than four. I blinked three times in rapid succession as disbelief, horror, and revulsion swept through me. The images disappeared. In their place were the contents of the box that had split open. VHS tapes and a broken camcorder.

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An Unlucky Samaritan

When I was 17, I was in a head-on collision with another driver. I think I was unconscious for a minute or two after the impact. When I came to, I was confused and couldn’t feel any pain. I couldn’t move much, though. Something was pinning me. A downward glance showed me what it was. There was a metal rod impaling directly under my knee, through what the doctors later told me was my patellar tendon. It had pushed through the tendon, lifted my kneecap, and driven itself up the length of my thigh. It wasn’t too deep inside; I could see it bulging under my skin.

A minute later, I felt everything. I screamed and screamed, thrashing for a bit before realizing any movement only intensified the pain in my knee and thigh. Then I looked out the cracked windshield and saw the other driver. His devastated skull sat on his neck like a mashed fruit. I could see his tongue lolling out of his ruined mouth. Without a lower jawbone to hold it in place, it hung down to his Adam’s apple. The remaining eye stared, unblinking, at the damage its owner had caused.

Another wave of impossibly acute agony surged through me, blurring my vision and forcing me to bite down on my own teeth until I felt at least one molar crack. Some part of my consciousness registered the fact I was hyperventilating and worked to calm my breathing. A couple moments later, the wave had passed. I realized no cars had come upon our accident yet. I tried to reach into the back pocket of my shorts for my cell phone, but there was no way the rod in my knee would allow that much movement. In exchange for my attempt, the unbearable pain resumed.

Once I’d regained my senses, I looked again at the remains of the other driver. There wasn’t much I could make out. It looked he he’d had a beard; hair was puffing out from the skin of what might have been his cheeks. Even though he was the one who’d caused me all this pain, I felt bad he was dead. No one deserved to have that happen to them. While I studied the gore with morbid fascination, the man’s neck jerked and sent the fleshy wreckage of his face flopping back and forth. He jerked again. This time, his shoulders and torso moved as well. I gagged as the movement forced his head downward and bits of his crushed brain oozed from the hole that was once his face.

The man continued moving as if he was enduring a terrible seizure. My pain came back. Unable to bear the sensation, I blacked out. It couldn’t have been very long. When I came to, there was something wrong with the man’s body. Something I couldn’t understand. The hole where his face had connected to his throat was stuffed with something. It slid out in a thick, wet mass onto the twisted steering wheel and dashboard. From my vantage point, about six feet away, I could only describe it as a worm or snake. Still, it was unlike either of those things. The body was grayish-white and oozed heavy, milky yellow discharge from gaping pores which covered the entirety of its length. That length increased as I watched with growing horror.

The return of the pain in my knee was unable to overcome the fear sweeping over me at the sight of the monster. Over ten feet had unfurled from the carcass and had draped itself along the dashboard. It was lying on surfaces coated with pulverized glass from the windshield, and I could see chunks of it sticking in its pores as it moved. The thing didn’t seem to mind. Once another few feet came out, I saw its tail end finally discharge itself from the man. The parasite squirmed off the dashboard and onto the crumpled union of car hoods. The viscous, milky slime clung to every surface it touched and kept the creature connected to the contacted surfaces by thin ropes. It uncoiled completely and its full length lay wetly on our cars. The smell coming from its body was thick and putrescent with a revolting, cloying sweetness. I struggled not to retch, not wanting it to hear me.

The pores stopped oozing. An unsettling, peristaltic ripple passed through the thing’s body. Ugly flatulent sounds leaked from each pore, and I saw something moving inside them. With an explosive jolt that caused me to jump in shock, bright red tendrils burst out of its pores. Each one was about as thick as a pencil and every pore contained at least 20 of them. They grew and grew in length, some laying flaccidly on the cars and some erecting themselves and flopping around like severed electrical cables.

I screamed when a couple of the tendrils brushed against me as they grew. But seconds later, every one of them pushed downward and dragged the main body onto the surface of the road. An 18-wheeler was driving toward us. It screeched to a halt and I watched an overweight trucker stumble out of the cab and run toward us. First he looked over and saw the dead man was far beyond help. Then he saw me and my look of pain and terror. He opened his mouth, presumably to say he’d call 911, but the tendrils leapt into his mouth and throat before he could get a word out.

The trucker grasped the thick cord of tendrils invading him and tried to pull. More shot out from the thing in the road and wrapped themselves around his fat form. Over the course of a minute, the main body had been pulled over to the trucker. Gradually, the tendrils retracted from the man’s mouth while the body forced itself into his throat. The putrid seminal fluid again began to leak from the creature as it pushed deeper and deeper. A little while later, it was inside. The man was soaked from head to toe with the vile substance. But he no longer looked afraid. He just looked calm. He turned around and walked back to his truck, leaving a trail of milky-yellow slime. I heard the engine start and the truck drove away.

Another car noticed us soon after. The paramedics were called and I was brought to the hospital. I never told anyone what happened. I assume everyone was confused about what the slime was, but I didn’t hear them talk about it. All they were concerned about was the wound in my leg, which required two years to recover. I never saw the parasite, or any hint of it, again. It was another five years before I’d conquered my fear of driving. I’ve done my best to forget about what I saw. No matter how hard I try, though, I still shudder when a truck passes me and I see the driver through his open window. I know that thing is still in one of them. At least one.

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My dad was a safety officer at Chernobyl during the meltdown. Before he died last year, he told me about something he saw that night. I can’t keep it to myself.

I won’t give a long backstory because it doesn’t matter. Basically, he got the job through a former schoolmate of his who worked in some mid-level Party position. Dad was down on his luck at the time and Egor happened to see him at a local tavern. They got to talking, and Egor pulled some strings and gave him the position. Didn’t matter that he wasn’t qualified. “Half the guys aren’t,” he was told.

Anyway, dad started working there in 1984 and did a pretty good job. He did what he was told; most of it was just checking dial readouts and making sure pipes were sealed and whatnot. In late 1985 and early 1986, he started noticing far more Party representatives coming in and out of the plant. Usually the visits were limited to compliance officers and hazardous materials supervisors when radioactive material was moved in or out. But these weren’t plant specialists. They looked like they were Politburo. He told me he recognized a couple of them from televised speeches, but he didn’t remember the names. He just knew they were high ranking.

On the night of the meltdown, Dad was doing his usual valve and dial checks when Politburo members, accompanied by soldiers with kalashnikovs, streamed down the hall toward the reactor area. The soldiers were wearing radiation suits. The Party members weren’t. He tagged along a few tens of meters away and went up on a high catwalk where he could see all of them. They crowded around the cooling pools. Dad made an effort to act as if he was staring at the pressure readouts in front of him, vaguely noticing they were rising as he watched.

This was around the point when the lights cut out. Apparently this wasn’t abnormal for the plant; the electrical systems were under maintained and all the electricians on staff were tasked with more critical work. Even with the lights not working, Cherenkov radiation cast its characteristic blue glow over the group and illuminated the politicians and soldiers. The water in the pool started moving.

Now, dad wasn’t a nuclear engineer. Still, he knew whatever was happening in the pool was abnormal. He’d been by the area plenty of times and never once did the water move like it did right then. It sloshed with turbidity and looked like it was coming to a rolling boil. He glanced at the dials in front of him and saw the temperature and pressure in the loop system was dramatically higher than it should’ve been. As he was beginning to sprint across the catwalk toward the nearest alarm station, he saw something that made him stop.

What he told me didn’t make much sense at first. You have to figure someone running at a dead sprint to pull an emergency alarm at a nuclear power plant wouldn’t stop for anything. But he stopped. And he stared. Something had floated to the top of the boiling water. The way he described it, it was dark, grayish red, almost shaped like a person, but much bigger and dreadfully deformed. It floated, facedown, in the pool. The Party members didn’t react but the soldiers raised their rifles at the thing until one of the politicians barked an order at them to stand down.

A moment or two later, the thing crawled out of the pool and raised itself on thick legs to stand before the gathered crowd. What dad said he remembered most about the thing was its head. It sat directly on its lopsided shoulders and it had no eyes, no nose, no ears. All that was there was a gaping hole. Not even a mouth, but a hole. And inside, the same blue glow from the pool shone out onto the faces of the people surrounding it.

Someone else in the plant must’ve noticed the temperature and pressure abnormalities and pulled the alarm, because sirens began to blare and diesel generators were galvanized into action to force the cooling cycle into overdrive. None of that mattered to dad, though. He said the thing approached the soldiers, one by one, and without any of them putting up a fight, it pressed the hole in its face against the top of each of their heads and they started to dissolve. First their suits melted, then their skin began to blister and char. The thing moved its maw downward until it nearly reached their legs, which dropped to the ground in a smoldering heap.

It then did the same to the assembled Politburo. All but one. She stood in the middle of a pile of steaming legs and hips and crotches and stared at the atrocity. Then, she screamed at it. It’s something dad said he’s repeated to himself every day since. “залить соль на почве.” Salt the earth. As the words left her mouth, the geiger counter dad was forced to carry with him at all times exploded into life at the same instant the politician burst into flames. He could swear she smiled as she burned.

All this was finally enough for dad to make a break for it. He knew he’d been irradiated badly, but he took some solace in the fact the ticks from the counter slowed quickly as he left the pool area. Right before he was clear of the room, he took one last glimpse at the thing. It had begun to melt. As soon as its body began pouring through the metal grate, the water below erupted into a mass of superheated steam. Dad avoided being scalded to death by about half a second when he turned the corner and slammed the door behind him.

The rest of the meltdown played out more or less like it was eventually reported. Dad was able to get out before the main explosion. He lived with the profound guilt of running by his colleagues who still didn’t know something truly catastrophic was about to happen. He believed his thyroid cancer was payback for his indifference toward them during his escape.

The iconic photograph of the radioactive “elephant’s foot” in the basement of the power plant stood, framed, on his dresser for the rest of his life. As he told me this story, he confessed he kept it to remind him of the implications of the politician’s words before she was devoured by flames. “That thing will render the area around it uninhabitable for a hundred years,” he sighed. “And it’s melting through the ground, even today. If it hits groundwater, it’ll explode like a dirty bomb and make the disaster in ‘86 look like a firecracker. Russia, Europe, North Africa. All irradiated.”

He died a couple days after he shared his experience with me. I just have no idea what to do with it all. Obviously, he could’ve made the whole thing up. But I don’t know why he would. He doesn’t have anything to gain now that he’s dead. Maybe some of the other survivors or their kids can corroborate parts of what he said, maybe they can’t. Either way, if it’s true, there is so much more going on with that disaster than we’ve been told. Even now, as that radioactive slag melts into the ground, dad’s story almost makes it sound like the meltdown was just a precursor to something far worse. Something plotted. Please, if anyone can give some advice or insight, it would be appreciated. I don’t want what he told me to be true, but “залить соль на почве” terrifies me more than I can bear.

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Teeny Tiny

When I was little, Mom used to hold me and say stuff like, “oh Katie, you fit so perfectly on my lap! You’re so teeny tiny!” I loved it. She’d keep me warm and hug me and I felt so great. I’d always go to Mom if I felt sad or scared and she’d just scoop me up, saying “what’s wrong, my teeny-tiny girl?” and I’d tell her what was making me upset and she’d always always always make it all better.

The most vivid memory I have was the day I turned 10. It wasn’t of my party, which I vaguely remember being great, it wasn’t the presents, some of which I still have, but it was when Mom had me in her lap that night and had tears in her eyes and said to Dad, “Katie’s getting to be a big girl, huh?” I don’t remember what my dad said, but there was no denying it: I wasn’t her teeny-tiny girl anymore.

At 10 years old, I was about 4’10”, maybe 100 pounds. I was growing fast. Both my parents are tall. I remember being scared. The scale kept going up, and by the time I was 11 I was 5’2”, 120 pounds and getting boobs. At that point, when I was sad, mom would hug me tight and say the right things, but it all felt different. She never cradled me. She never had me in her lap. I felt cold and lonely even though I was never really cold or lonely. I just wanted to be closer to her like I was when I was little.

So I decided to get little again.

Mom started to notice when I pushed around my food on the plate, trying to pile it up on one side to make it look like I ate more than I really did. “You’re a growing girl,” she said, kindly but firmly. “You need to eat.” I couldn’t leave the table until I was done.

That night after dinner, I remember lying on my back on the bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling the food in my stomach. Mom’s words “you’re a growing girl” echoed in my mind and I felt so sick that I ran into the bathroom and threw up. I was really glad I had my own bathroom so they couldn’t hear me puking. After I was done, I felt so much better. Lighter and smaller, even.

Mom was so happy to see me eating normally again. She’d worried aloud that I might be getting the flu, so seeing me chowing down like my old self pushed those worries right out of her head. What she didn’t see was how I went to bed afterward, and while the bathwater ran, I was throwing it all up. I did this every day for years.

One of the sad truths about throwing up your meals is you don’t lose all that much weight. I actually gained more. Sure, I’d get rid of what I’d eaten, but probably twice a week I’d be lying in bed, wide awake, fingering my collar bones, hip bones, and ribs, all while obsessing over food. Something inside me would snap, and I’d run to the fridge or the cabinets and eat until I felt like I was bursting. Then, exhausted, I’d go back upstairs and pass out on my bed. Calorie-for-calorie, after those twice-weekly binges I was eating more than I would’ve if I’d been healthy. Except I really, really wasn’t healthy. And nobody knew.

All this built up to the last few months after I graduated high school. I was 5’11, 175 pounds. 17 years old. There was absolutely nothing I hated more than my body. I was constantly lonely and wanted to try to take my mind off it all. I decided to get a job. When I told Mom I found a position at a place that recycles old medical gear, she was proud of me for taking the initiative. It was bittersweet; I knew she was starting to see me as an adult. Not her teeny-tiny girl. I felt like a complete and utter failure.

The recycling place where I worked dismantled big machines that hospitals used and sold the parts. I was the receptionist. I took phone calls and helped set up deliveries. The people I worked with were really nice, and after a few weeks they gave me a key so I could get there early and have coffee ready and work orders printed out. One night, after everyone left, I went back there and let myself in.

To this day, I still feel bad about breaking their trust.

A couple days earlier, my coworkers were bringing in an old machine. They were all wearing heavy gloves and had on breathing gear like scuba divers. When they were done, I asked what it was. Apparently it was something hospitals use to give radiation therapy to cancer patients. I didn’t know too much about that, so when I got home I went on Wikipedia and did a lot of research — and then I got my idea.

When I let myself in that night, the place was empty. I made a beeline for where they had that radiation therapy machine and I investigated it. Most of it was completely dismantled. What I was looking for was conveniently labeled and brightly marked in a massive lead container. It took me a while to get the cover off. Lead’s so heavy! But after I did, I saw a round metal part that looked like a wheel. I picked it up, rotated the mechanism, and it opened a little window in the front. A faint blue light was inside. I held it up to my eye and looked in. Nothing but that light. I figured it was probably what I was looking for.

I brought the object home with me and locked the door of my bedroom. I worked to pry the thing open with a screwdriver, but it seemed locked from the inside. Eventually I got frustrated and I turned the wheel again to open the window and pushed my screwdriver into the blue stuff and tried scooping it out. It turned out to be pretty soft. A lot of it broke as I poked it with the screwdriver, and when I turned the wheel upside down, the pieces tumbled out onto my desk. Now I could see how pretty it was. It was like chunks of glowing blue clay and sand. I gathered it up as best I could and put it away, save for the little bit I was going to use tonight.

One of the things I’d read about radiation therapy was that it made the poor people with cancer really skinny. They just totally lost their appetites. I couldn’t believe it was true. I’d always had such a big appetite. I kept telling myself I needed to be really careful when I took this stuff because if I get too much of the radiation I could get cancer myself. I took a pinch of the blue clay, put it in my mouth, and swallowed it with a gulp of water. It felt warm going down even though the water was cold. Since I’d gotten home from the recycling place I’d been pretty warm, in fact. Cozy. Like a little puppy under a blanket.

That night I woke up sweating worse than I’d ever sweated in my life. The bed was totally soaked. Gross. Water weight wasn’t really what I wanted to lose, but it was better than nothing. I took a shower and changed the sheets and went back to bed. My stomach ached a little.

When I woke up the next morning, my stomach hurt and I threw up a couple times. But, I wasn’t even remotely hungry. That alone made the pain in my tummy pretty much go away. I didn’t need to eat! Mom asked if I was bringing leftovers to work from last night’s dinner and I lied and said we were going to get a pizza. I hate lying to Mom, but I didn’t want her to worry. There was no need to tell her I wasn’t hungry.

At work, they’d finished disassembling the machine and started sending it out to wherever they send those things. I’d been really careful to put the canister back exactly as I left it. No one checked to see if the little wheel was still there.

The next few days were uneventful, aside from my stomach ache getting worse and having to puke once or twice. I’d barely eaten anything since I started taking the radiation medicine. Whenever I got woozy from lack of food, I ate an apple or a fat-free yogurt and I was fine. I was still sweating a lot. When I got on the scale, it said 168.

After a week of eating nearly nothing and faithfully taking my radiation medicine nightly, my stomach ache got really, really bad. I’d stopped throwing up, but this time it felt like I needed to go to the bathroom. I went, and it was awful. There was so much – I was shocked. I’d apparently eaten and kept down way more than I thought. I got on the scale after, though, and that helped me feel a lot better. 161.

Over the next couple days, one or two people told me how pretty I looked. They asked me if I lost weight and I said yeah, maybe a few pounds. I beamed. Over my whole adolescence I’d done nothing but get bigger. Now, finally, I was shrinking and on the way back to teeny tiny. I didn’t feel too great, though. My tummy was constantly having me run to the bathroom and it still hurt afterwards. I figured I was getting rid of all the extra fat. 158.

I was in the shower about 10 days after I started taking the medicine and I was horrified to see some of my hair coming out. That was bad. Really, really, really bad. I stopped washing it immediately and let just the water rinse away the remainder of the shampoo. I got out of the shower and took like an hour blow drying my hair because I was too scared to use a towel that might pull more out. When the mirror was unfogged and my hair was dry, I checked to see how noticeable it was. There was a good-sized patch of bare, red scalp about 2” wide above my left ear. I pushed the hair around it to cover the patch. Some more fell out. It had to be a nutritional deficiency from all the meals I’d been missing. I put on my Titans hat and got dressed. When I brushed my teeth I noticed a little blood in the sink. I made a note to get some multivitamins after work.

I didn’t shower the next day because when I woke up that morning, there was more hair on my pillow. My scalp was getting pretty visible. It looked prickly and raw but it didn’t hurt. Since I was off work, I stayed at home and looked online for all the nutritional deficiencies that might cause my hair to fall out and my gums to bleed. Most of the ones were covered by my multivitamin, so I tripled the amount I took just to be on the safe side.

I had to go to the bathroom five times during the 15 hours I was awake. By the last time, I was incredibly light-headed and so thirsty. I weighed myself before I started downing water and my radiation medicine. 150. The medicine helped me lose 25 pounds in under two weeks.

Mom hugged me the next morning before I went to work. She ran her hands up and down my back and she made a remark about how skinny I’d gotten. Then, she said it: “remember when I used to call you my teeny-tiny girl? I miss those days but I love you just as much as a grown up.” She let me go. Pain, nausea, and despair washed over me. Without warning, my lightheadedness came back with a vengeance and I stumbled and fell on the kitchen floor. My hat fell off. With my head spinning, I vaguely remember Mom gasping, “Katie what happened to your hair?!” before I violently threw up on the floor and myself. It was all blood. I passed out to the sound of Mom screaming.

I don’t know how much time went by at the hospital. I wasn’t completely unconscious, but all I remember up until recently were images of doctors in the same scuba gear as the guys at work, and they were saying meaningless words like “cesium” and “sloughed” and “gray” that didn’t mean the color.

Today, I can’t move or talk and I’m writing this using a cool keyboard they gave me that can pick out letters using the movements of my remaining eye. I’ll be dead soon. I’m not too fun to look at anymore. My hair’s gone. And my jaw. And my skin. The nice doctors are giving me medication that helps me manage the pain and keep me alert. They asked if they could do tests and experiments on me to help understand what ingestion of the radiation medicine does to the human body. Apparently there was a Japanese man a few years ago named Hiroshi who got a similar level of exposure and the same stuff happened to him. They said it would help other people in the future if they could compare our two cases. Of course I let them.

I can’t eat food anymore. My esophagus got cooked away. Same with my stomach. The doctors are keeping me hydrated with a tube in my butt. I don’t really like to think about it. I guess all the excitement I get as I wait here is when they weigh me every six hours to see if I’m able to retain the fluids they give me, or if it all seeps out into the sheets. They hoist me onto a pad and a little machine voice says a number. This morning it said 72. The next time it was 66.

Mom and Dad have to wear those scuba suits when they come visit. Mom’s always crying because she’s not allowed to touch me. Dad just stares. Right before I started writing this, Mom bent down and started whispering to me some of the stuff I remember her saying when I was small. I closed my eye and imagined being warm and safe on her lap, just like a hibernating little bear. “I love you, my teeny-tiny girl,” she sobbed. I would smile if I still had a mouth.