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WHAT HAPPENED TO ME IN NEW YORK by May Marcel |
7/6/12 |
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One day in August I woke up and Luke said, What's that rash on your shoulder? I looked in the mirror and there was a small rash on my shoulder. It was three brown dots in the shape of a radioactive symbol. It was perfectly symmetrical. The next morning when we woke up Luke said it was bigger. He said it looked like meningitis. We looked online for "meningitis rash." I didn't think the rashes in the pictures looked like mine. Luke found me a doctor to go to. Everyone in the office was Finnish, or what I thought to be Finnish. I sat on a plastic chair in the waiting room a long time listening to the Finnish people talk. They spoke so beautifully. The room was hot. I sat there sweating for a long time, looking down at my rash. It looked like a messy radioactive symbol with drips. Everyone looked at me because I wasn't Finnish, or because of the rash on my shoulder. I looked around the hot room and down at my meningitis rash and started to cry. Luke tried to comfort me but I didn't want him to. Then the nurse called my name. She led me into a small room, and I began to cry harder. I touched my rash and cried until Dr. Laakkonen came in. He also was Finnish. He looked at my rash and shook his head. It was not meningitis. He said, The body is fighting inside itself always. We must let the body continue its small fights. He put his hand on my cheek and called me Lovely Child. He let me cry until I stopped. I asked if he minded the heat. Oh no, he said, I will never. He took me back to the waiting room. On the way there he said, You are a good and very fine girl. The rash went away, and I moved to a new city and it all went fine.
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May Marcel is currently working on a collection of poems translated from the Maori, and a book of hand-drawn maps. She lives in Chicago.
Art: Leak in Logic (2011) by Greg Allen-Müller.
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