Hydra

Charlie asks when he can walk again.

 

He’s sick of the feeding tube pumping liquids down his nose. Sick of the dirty sock taste in his immured mouth.

 

Of course he doesn’t say thisCharlie lost the ability to speak weeks agohe writes it laboriously with unblemished hand. Small blessings, I think. Most people lose the functions of all limbs.

 

The Hydra manifests in degrading handicaps. With Charlie, it began as a cough. I prayed it was bronchitis. Clutching his hand in the clinic while he told me Mom, you’re hurting my skin, thinking make it pneumonia, please God, make it cancer.

 

The doctors say he’s young, he’s healthy. He can live for years.

 

Gray tendrils around his face and legs until he’s a fungal lump on the hospital bed and already it’s snaking towards his eyes.

 

* * *

 

Charlie don’t look in the mirrorwhere did you get that anyways?

 

Charlie hurls the mirror against the wall, glass everywhere in the isolation room, and he’s trying to pull the mantle of flesh away from what had been his mouth, the thing caging his voice and turning screams to muffled whistles.

 

Charlie calling me, over and over.

 

I take a sliver of glass and make a jagged cut, blood pouring over shaking hands. Outside, people cry out, running steps down the hall. I don’t have much time. I widen the hole to hear the words again, to hear his song again, although by now we knoweveryone knowshow soon the flesh will slither into place, harder, thicker, the more you cut away. A hydra of cells, always returning.

 

I rock Charlie in my arms, both of us crying. No comforting words from the worst mother in the worldjust silent joy in hearing my child’s voice through the sobs.