The Land of Uz

It’s the first night I’ve slept over at Gerald’s. Yes, I am dating someone named Gerald. I asked if I could come up with a cooler name for him, something modern, geometric, all sharp angles and dangerous overtones—Axel, Gunner, Blaze—but he declined. Gerald’s cute in an awkward way, wears rectangular glasses and ties patterned with the kinds of animals people shoo from their garages: hedgehogs and raccoons, neon-colored lizards if he’s feeling a little feisty. He works in strategic data solutions. I have no idea what this means. I’m just a high-school English teacher, a recent college graduate with poems languishing in obscure literary journals. For whatever reason, Gerald loves this about me. He was impressed when my short poem about pain relievers (My heart has been broken / by so many men, / each night I fall asleep with / acetaminophen) appeared in Paper Fan Quarterly. He swoons whenever I tell him things like “we’re all islands unto ourselves” or “metaphor is just a writer’s way of imposing meaning on a chaotic universe.” Instead of dirty words, I whisper literary terms in his ear. Climax. Euphemism. He thinks this is clever. His name is fucking Gerald. We had our third date tonight. He took me to Olive Garden, ordered both appetizers and dessert. Certain amorous activities transpired afterward. I guess you could say things are getting serious.

We settle into his bed, holding each other. This should be a tender moment, but all I can think about is the spaghetti I ate earlier, all that tomato sauce that just got jostled around my stomach. I’d specifically asked for no sauce, but they put it on anyway, and I didn’t want to make a scene. Even though Gerald wears goofy ties and is named Gerald, I still can’t bring myself to tell him I’ve got severe acid-reflux disease, and unless he’s got an extra pillow somewhere to keep my head elevated, there’s no way I can spend the night.

“Hey, Ava,” he breathes into my ear. “Say something sexy. Just one more word before we go to sleep.”

I shrug. I’m trying not to burp, or anything worse. “Zeugma.”

“Zeugma,” he repeats slowly, relishing each syllable. “What’s zeugma?”

“It’s like . . . well, an example would be . . . ‘she stole his heart and his wallet.’”

“Ha ha,” he says. Poor Gerald. He’s genuinely amused.

“So, basically only one of the objects of the sentence is semantically suited for the verb. See? One’s figurative, the other literal.”

“Do another.”

“Um . . . let’s see . . . he swallowed an aspirin . . . and his pride.” A certain enchanted look in his eyes prompts me to keep going. I can’t remember the last time a man looked at me like this. “He buried his hopes and his father. She regurgitated useless facts and last night’s dinner.”

“Genius.”

I disentangle myself from him and raise myself up against my single pillow. “I’m not a genius,” I tell him, and this is true. Not a genius, but smart. Smart enough, at least, to have won a Fulbright to study literature at Trinity College in Dublin. If I were a genius, I would’ve admitted to myself I was too sick to apply. My senior year at Duke was a blur of mock interviews and missed classes, résumé workshops and doctor visits, the sickest I’d been since my diagnosis at seventeen. A month after winning my Fulbright, I was informed I didn’t pass the medical clearance. Even though I was accepted into a handful of master’s programs, my gastroenterologist said I needed to come home, stay in a low-stress environment for a while. I asked him how long a while was, but he didn’t say.

Physically, I’m in Georgia, but my brain’s stuck overseas. I should be there now, hiking verdant cliffs, sending home tacky leprechaun postcards, stumbling home from pubs with dark-haired boys named Cillian and Fergus. I could’ve been that mysterious, bookish girl sitting in the corner of a small café, enjoying a glass of milk (never tea or coffee) and a volume of Beckett.

Really, I’m not in Georgia or Ireland but holed up inside my belly, nestled there like some hibernating animal. Sickness is its own terrain, its own country.

“Okay,” he says, “I’m gonna try one.”

“Try one what?”

“A zeugma.” Scrunching up his face, he stares across the room, his eyes landing on a nondescript painting of a fisherman—yellow raincoat, white beard: a misplaced Captain Ahab—standing on a dock at sunset. This is the kind of art Gerald hangs in his apartment. “He sunk his boat and his, his . . .”

“His credit score.”

He smiles at me as if I’ve just told him I love him. “Brilliant. Do another.”

Something that tastes like tiramisu coated in parmesan cheese creeps up my throat. “I’m afraid I’m zeugma’d out for the evening.”

“Something wrong?” he asks.

“Do you have an extra pillow?”

“I’ve got that one throw pillow in the living room, but . . .” My face must cause him to trail off. “No, no pillows for, like, actual sleeping.”

“Oh.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Well, uh—um, sorry, this is a bit gross—I get bad acid reflux if I don’t have two pillows. I need my head elevated or else it just kind of . . .”

“Oh, well, these are all I’ve got, but maybe—”

I’m already up, getting dressed. This is how it always goes. My therapist told me it might be best not to date until I had my symptoms more under control, but I met Gerald in line at Walmart (he was buying a large book of sudoku puzzles) and thought it’d feel good to contradict her. Empowering, maybe.

“You don’t have to leave,” he says as I sling my purse over my shoulder. “You can have my pillow, if you want. I can just use the throw pillow.”

Earlier this evening, he showed it to me. Cross-stitched by his grandmother, the pillow depicts two nuzzling bunnies, a heart floating above their heads. He told me he put it out only due to a sense of familial duty. I have my doubts, though. Picturing him tossing and turning all night on that throw pillow, a tortured, sleepless martyr, makes me feel even worse. Dizzy. Nauseous.

I can’t hold it in anymore. I throw up all over his bedroom floor.

“Oh, goodness,” he exclaims softly. This is really what he says: goodness.

My favorite kind of poetry is nonsense verse. Gibberish words, ridiculous rhymes, no logical progression—nothing captures the human experience better than this. After my date with Gerald, I decided to memorialize the evening in a double dactyl:

Higgledy-piggledy 
Poor Ava Slate
Once again brought down by 
Something she ate.
It’s catastrophical 
Gastroesophageal
Reflux that caused her this 
Miserable state.

Yes, that’s my full name, Ava Slate. The kids in my class just call me Ms. Slate. Sometimes their parents write “Mrs.” when addressing me in emails, presumably to taunt me, to rub it in my face that I’m making poor romantic progress with someone named Gerald. I hate being called Ms. Slate. It makes me feel like a widow, a lonely spinster who takes in stray cats. Honestly, I’m not too fond of Ava Slate in general. My first name’s a palindrome, my last is a writing utensil—it sounds like a pseudonym you’d find on the back of some self-published poetry chapbook. I guess you could do a lot worse.

Gerald, for instance.

He left a message on my phone this morning. I’m not sure why he tried to call when I didn’t even stay to help clean up his bedroom floor last night.

While most of the teachers at Altamaha County Magnet School teach three classes, I’m teaching only one. The principal wouldn’t have pulled these kind of strings for just anybody. I have a certain reputation here. Valedictorian 2012, student-body secretary, founding editor of Lemonbiscuit Literary. My parents were the ones who talked the administration into giving me a lighter teaching load. Because I was deemed incapable of handling a year of heavy research, my parents think I’m incapable of handling anything. They want me lying on the couch, sipping ginger ale and watching The Price Is Right. They keep trying to bring me soup in bed. Campbell’s, but the thought still counts. They cut my poems out of magazines (Sad Dog Review, All-Purpose Flour) and hang them on the refrigerator with alphabet magnets.

The class I’m teaching is tenth-grade Honors English, a course I sat in years ago, scribbling subversive limericks in the margins of Nathaniel Hawthorne stories. Back then, I endured a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride each morning for the opportunity to attend a slightly better high school (“a magnet school,” I reminded my friends at home every chance I had) than the one five minutes from my parents’ house. I felt certain I was destined for someplace greater than South Georgia, and so do these kids. They’ve been deemed special, anointed, because of their excellent standardized test scores; they come from as far as three counties over. They’re the ones who will win scholarships to faraway schools, become pro-choice in college, and not come back once they leave. When I told them on the first day of school that I’d just graduated from Duke, they looked at me sideways, the way you look at prune-shriveled grandparents in nursing homes.

“But why did you come back here?” they asked. “There’s nothing to do.”

These kids never want to shut up, are always asking me questions, so I made up a new rule to slow them down: they’re allowed to speak only in iambic meter, which they usually fail to do; instead, they just avoid modern English.

“Miss Slate,” Polly Wilkinson says, using a spondee instead. She’s the only student I have from my hometown. I’ve known her since she was a little girl, a pudgy soprano in the Methodist church’s children’s choir. She’s slightly overweight, her skin red and splotchy, the best writer in my class. Sometimes when we read poems aloud, she actually starts to cry a little bit.

“Yes?”

“Art thou feeling well today?”

A valid question. I’d just left mid–Macbeth lecture to throw up my lunch. Before class, my lifelong best friend, Gisberta, had taken me to a sandwich place. When she noticed the new rasp in my voice, she asked if I was all right, and in an aggressive show that said yes, I was indeed all right, I’d left the tomato on my turkey club, ordered extra mayo just for emphasis.

I say to Polly, “Oh, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Art thou certain thou art well?”

“I mean, I’m here.” I give a weak smile that melts Polly’s little heart. “Can’t complain.”

Another hand shoots into the air. From the back of the classroom, Henry asks, “How dost thou chemo treatments go?”

Oh, yeah. I kind of told them I have cancer.

The only person my age with cancer I’ve known was a girl in my junior-year British Romanticism class. A pain she occasionally felt at tennis practice turned out to be something much worse. Osteosaroma, a growth in the knee. She limped around campus in a pink brace, clutching her boyfriend’s arm for support. People held doors open for her, were moved to tears whenever she scaled small staircases. Such a brave girl, they said. Whatever secret fear or pain she felt she channeled into an essay with some melodramatic wordplay in the title—“Bracing Myself,” “A Leg to Stand On”—that won a contest and was featured in Seventeen magazine. I have no idea what she’s doing now. Coming up with clever names for nail-polish colors, hobbling through weeping crowds at half marathons. Osteosarcoma is hexasyllabic but conforms to no meter, too beautiful and dignified for double-dactylic nonsense verse. Compare that to gastroesophageal reflux disease.

Today isn’t the first time I’ve left class to throw up, and my students have noticed. Rumors started spreading: that I have mesothelioma and never called the 1-800 number, that I’ve contracted a rare but deadly STD, that I have terminal cancer. Naturally, I went with the most attractive option. What was I supposed to tell them? That drinking a glass of orange juice feels like a knife to the gut? That an illness most people overcome with a can of ginger ale has me shackled to prescription pills, imprisoned in South Georgia? Maybe I ought to have related my disease back to our coursework. I could’ve told them my stomach, that leaky cauldron bubbling with acid, would make an ideal set piece for a production of Macbeth. Mount a play inside my body, I would’ve said. Make this wreckage into art. They wouldn’t have understood. I got the same reaction in college, boys willing to kiss me until my lips began to taste like whatever we’d just had for dinner.

You can see, I hope, why I lied about the cancer.

Having spent the past four years studying literature, I know how to tell a lie. If you’re going to tell someone you have cancer, don’t choose something obvious. No leukemia, no lung cancer. You have to pick something nonspecific that really captures the essence of the disease. No organs in the title, nothing too common. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for instance. I have no idea what non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is, but my students are under the impression it causes a lot of indigestion.

“Chemo’s tough, but it’s going pretty well,” I tell Henry. Even though he scored perfectly on his verbal PSAT, he pays attention only when I’m talking about my cancer. Shakespeare doesn’t engage him. This is the kind of drama he wants, immediate and dangerous, playing out in real time. “Good news, though: the doctors said I might have ten years left instead of five.”

Relieved applause.

“How’re you gonna spend your last five years?” someone wants to know.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll travel.”

“Where?”

“Hmmm. Portugal, maybe. Greece. Ireland. If I’m well enough to travel, of course.”

“Your husband must be happy you’ve got more time,” a girl in the corner remarks.

“If I had a husband, I’m sure he’d be thrilled.”

“Oh.” Remembering that she’s supposed to be using iambs, the girl asks, “Dost thou have a man thou date?”

I narrow my eyes in a sinister way to establish credibility. “Men are scared of me.”

The room falls silent, perhaps in fear, until Polly speaks up. “Thou must really suffer,” she says in a quiet voice. I think there might be tears in her eyes.

Her meter’s all over the place, but I don’t tell her this, just nod. “Yes,” I tell her. “Yes, I do.”

I tug at my hair as though I’m adjusting a wig, eliciting sighs of pity. What kind of sicko does this?

If you type up a prayer request and send it to Miss Sheila Carmichael, secretary at the First United Methodist Church, she’ll print it in the Sunday bulletin. Please keep Reggie Sykes in your prayers as he undergoes hip-replacement surgery this week. Lift up Kathleen Anderson, who starts dialysis this Friday. Pray for Gerald, who’s still dating someone who threw up on his bedroom floor. Yeah, I called him back. Earlier this week, he took me to see some cheesy rom-com at the Regal Cinemas. He didn’t flinch when I asked for no butter on our popcorn. In fact, he said butter messes with the integrity of popcorn’s flavor, whatever that means. He actually wore a tie to the movie theater, this one dotted with bright green parakeets.

The movie chronicled the trials and tribulations of a young American couple backpacking across Europe. I paced myself with the popcorn, one piece at a time, and tried to immerse myself in the film. Aside from a slight stabbing pain in my stomach, I felt pretty okay. Gerald kept trying to maneuver his arm around me and chickening out, the poor guy. We’d already had sex, yet he couldn’t bring himself to touch my shoulder. The couple on-screen was astonishingly adept in foreign languages: they fought in hissing Italian, made up in doe-eyed French, gave directions to weary peasants in rapid-fire Russian.

Gerald whispered in my ear a line lifted from the movie: “Je t’adore, ma cherie.”

Then his hand became more adventurous, or perhaps resigned itself to a more accessible region of my body. He placed it on my knee, let it slowly travel up my thigh before stopping, rigid, mortified. I was fine with this. I liked the way it felt there. The couple boarded a plane, never once reached for their sick bags. How nice for them, I thought. Gerald passed me the popcorn, but, feeling that the invisible knife in my stomach had sharpened, I declined. I tried not to think about the parakeets on his tie and focused instead on his hand, its dull bravery. I watched the screen: rolling green fields, cows in sun-drenched pastures, our beloved couple running through the rain to take cover in a pub.

Ireland. They’d gone to Ireland.

I felt Gerald’s breath in my ear again. This time, he spoke in English. “Ava, are you okay?” His hand left my leg and wiped a tear from beneath my eye.

“I want to go home,” I told him.

So he took me home, walked me to the door, kissed me good-night, all that. My parents weren’t even up. It was hardly ten thirty. Living at home at twenty-three isn’t as bad as you’d think. Free rent, all my medicine paid for. Granted, it’s not great, either. At the behest of my therapist, who thinks I need to get out of the house more often, my parents keep dragging me to different social events. Dinners at the McPhersons’ house next door, brunches with my mom’s Bible-study group. I’ve become an expert at rearranging food on a plate so it looks eaten. Sunday mornings, I go with my parents to church. I don’t have the heart to tell them my mouth hasn’t opened during the Apostles’ Creed since I was seventeen.

Mom, Dad, and I have been regulars at the FUMC as long as I can remember. When I won the annual middle-school poetry contest in sixth grade, Miss Sheila asked me to start contributing Bible poems to the bulletin. My first one was called “Bible People” and went like this:

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, 
Moses shouting “Let my people go!” 
Jesus made water turn into red wine, 
Methuselah turned 969.
The Bible is full of people great and small,
But the best one is God, the greatest of them all!

When I first came back home after graduation, she asked me to send her a new poem, so I wrote one about Job:

There once was a man from the land of Uz, 
Whom the Good Lord tortured simply because. 
He killed the man’s wife
And fucked up his life
Then dismissed the whole thing with a shrug.

“I’m not so sure we can run this,” she told me with a nervous laugh.

Believe me when I say I know how to take rejection. Four years of bad dates in college have prepared me for this. I’ve recently published a few better poems in independent journals—Flat Soda, the Hopscotch Review, Lobster Ferry Press. Maybe one day I’ll work up the nerve to submit to more prestigious places. I decided to send the Job poem to a place called The Newer Testament just for the hell of it. Their masthead says they’re devoted to promoting subversive religious humor. Publish this entire planet, this whole cursed realm, I wanted to tell them.

After Miss Sheila read my poem, my mom explained to her that I’m sick and “just trying to process things.” Miss Sheila hasn’t listed my name in the bulletin, though. I mean, what would she even say? Please pray for Ava Slate, who’s having trouble digesting tomato sauce. Lift up this poor girl whose lipstick print ought to be smeared on the Blarney Stone. Send a guardian angel down to keep her from going on another date with Gerald, who wears exotic birds on his ties and uses words like integrity to describe popcorn. Really, just pray for Gerald. He keeps insisting he wants to see me again. Clearly he needs God’s help more than I do.

My gastroenterologist is named Ted. I like to use this against him. I never call him Dr. Mackler, or even Dr. Ted. Just Ted. Teddy, if I’m feeling particularly audacious. You can insult somebody with their own first name if you use the right inflection.

Ted and I have been seeing each other regularly since I was seventeen. It’s the most stable relationship I’ve ever had with a man, and easily the most intimate. He’s seen the scarred lining of my stomach, the charred walls of my esophagus. He knows more about my bowel movements than anyone else ever will. We talk about literature, too. Not my writing—his. Yes, Ted the gastroenterologist, the man who probes intestines for a living, is a writer.

“I’m really quite good,” he told me during our first appointment. I’d made the mistake of telling him I founded our high school’s literary journal. “Whenever I have to write letters to other doctors, everyone in the office will crowd around to see what I’ve written. They say I have a distinct voice.”

Today he’s doing the usual abdominal exam. I lie on a table while he pokes and prods and asks me what hurts.

“I was sorry to hear the Fulbright didn’t work out. That hurt?”

“Oh, well, it’s whatever. And no, it didn’t.”

“What about this? Your mom says you wanted to study nonsense.”

“That’s partially true. I wanted to study the influence of nonsense poetry on Joyce and Beckett. Or maybe Joyce and Beckett’s influence on nonsense poetry.” Whenever people ask about my research, I keep doing this, pretending I can’t remember my own idea. Usually I say James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but this is Ted I’m talking to. I use last names to intimidate him. If he’s a real writer, he ought to know the people, the jargon.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

He gives what I imagine is my appendix a quick jab. “Did it hurt?”

“Oh, sorry. No.”

“Sounds like you don’t quite have things figured out.”

“I said no, it didn’t hurt.”

“I mean about the nonsense.”

“What?”

“Does this hurt? What I’m saying is, do you actually know what you want to study?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not good.”

“Hold on a second, Ted.” I sit up.

“How is that not good?”

“You felt pain when I pressed on your upper abdomen. We’re looking at potential esophageal ulcers here. You having esophageal ulcers would be a very bad sign.”

“No, I meant I know what I want to study. Wanted to, anyway. I mean, why else would I have applied for a Fulbright?”

“So, it didn’t hurt?”

“Wait, actually, yes, it did.”

“Are you sure?”

This is usually how it goes. Confusion, nonsense, the whole Vladimir and Estragon routine. Ted tells me how he once received some less prestigious grant to research gut flora in Sweden, then moves on to the novel he’s been working on for the past decade. As it turns out, gut flora figure quite prominently into the plot, a multigenerational saga told through the plucky voice of the family’s youngest boy, Quentin, who longs to escape the chain of Catholic priests his family has been producing since 1798, so he can become none other than a gastroenterologist. I’d like to ask him why all the priests in his novel are having sex, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings too much. He’s an old man who’s spent his life talking with strangers about poop.

After the abdominal exam, he has me do a barium swallow, a procedure that allows him to X-ray my digestive system, and finds a cluster of ulcers, tiny craters in the junction between my esophagus and stomach.

“Well,” he says, studying the X-ray.

“Well,” I say, and the word takes on an incantatory quality, as if we are both trying to will me into wellness through some ancient pagan spell.

Once our appointment is over, I stand outside my car in the parking lot, letting the September sun cook my skin. I’m pale, burn easily. My phone buzzes with another text from Gerald: I want to see you. To be honest, I’ve been avoiding his texts since our date last week. He keeps sending me zeugmas:

The food came and so did the check 
Wait no
He made up his bed and his mind
The stars twinkled and so did her smile 
I am the champion of zeugmas
haha just kidding, that title belongs to you :) 
heeeey Ava
you okay???

I read his last text again, study it like a poem. He wants to see me again. What for? So I can excuse myself from our table at Chili’s to vomit in the ladies’ room? So he can scrub more of my half-digested food out of his carpet? What the fuck is in it for him? I don’t know what causes me to do it, but I compose a response: I want to see you too.

My thumb hovers over the send button, but I don’t press it.

“My oncologist says the cancer’s getting worse, that maybe he was wrong about the ten years. There was a tumor that didn’t show up in the initial X-ray. He says I only have three left.”

“Art thou sure about this thing?” Polly asks.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

We all put down our copies of Macbeth and cry together. I love being a teacher.

I’m at the Applebee’s bar with Gisberta. Since her wedding last summer, our friendship has become a thing that exists entirely in restaurants. This is the only decent bar for miles. We take what we can get. Gisberta is drinking something that looks radioactive, bright blue liquid contained in a mason jar. I ask the bartender to put a little plastic umbrella in my glass of water. I want people to think I’m drinking straight vodka.

Gisberta is half-German and beautiful, high cheekbones and blond hair. Pretty enough to get away with having the name Gisberta. Practically the whole restaurant is in love with her. She’s been having a lot of fun turning her wedding ring around her finger while men attempt to flirt with her.

“That poem was hilarious,” she keeps telling me. I can tell she’s just trying to be nice. “Everything you write is hilarious.”

She’s talking about the Job poem, which was picked up by The Newer Testament after all. They’ve got incredibly quick turnaround. Too quick, really. Maybe it was a mistake to submit to a website that still has a brown background and yellow text. There’s actually a hit counter at the bottom of the page: 8,090 total website views. My parents, long-standing suppliers of potato casserole at church luncheons, opted not to hang this particular poem on the refrigerator.

“It was shitty doggerel,” I say. “Everything I’ve written lately is shitty doggerel.”

“Dog-a-what? Don’t be modest. Guys are super into poets. Like what’s his name—Gary?”

“Ger-ald,” I hiss, feeling defensive. My tone is nasty, mean. Her name is Gisberta, which is way worse.

“Are you still dating him? Do you write him romantic sonnets?”

“Shut up.”

“Are you dating him or not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

I haven’t texted him back, don’t plan to. He’s better off this way. Let him have some alone time with his hedgehogs, his parakeets, creatures who won’t throw up on his bedroom floor.

“I should just go home.” I look at my menu and spot something called cheeseburger egg rolls. I want to burn this place to the ground. “Fucking Applebee’s.”

“No! You, Ava Slate, are not leaving here alone tonight.”

“Ha, right.”

“Come on, forget Gerald. You’re smart. You’re a poet, for fuck’s sake. You won a Fulbright. Look at you! That dress is amazing.”

As a former English major, I’ve been trained to notice this kind of phrasing as a means of sly insult. The dress is amazing, not the girl who’s wearing it.

“It looks like a bag on me.”

“No, you’re waifish. Supermodel skinny.”

“Whatever.”

“You’ve got that sexy raspy voice. Guys are into that.”

“The guys here are only interested in you.”

“They’re just intimidated by you, that’s all.” She looks at my glass and smirks. “Men are scared of girls who can hold their liquor.”

Except I haven’t drunk alcohol since my freshman year of college. It was my first and last time. The girls in my hall were gathered in somebody’s room, sitting in a circle on a blue shag rug, passing around a bottle of something redolent of nail-polish remover. Everclear, I think. We were all in our pajamas, hair in disarray: one of those hazy midnights with nothing to do but get ourselves in trouble. Everyone was giggling at nothing, running into furniture on the way to the bathroom.

“Come on, Ava,” they all kept saying, “aren’t you going to drink anything?”

I hadn’t said much all night. Aside from my senior year of college, I was sickest during that first semester, nursing my first ulcer while trying to navigate the foreign land in which I’d been abandoned. On that blue rug, I thought we all looked like islands, a little archipelago. Everyone was blurting out secrets: I’m cheating on my boyfriend! Jason from down the hall has a crush on me! Katie is fucking her chemistry professor!

Even though we were crowded into a tiny room, I felt far away from everyone, shipwrecked on some remote, faraway shore. I wanted to join them. I wanted to share my secrets, to take part in this unorthodox communion. Inhaling deeply, I announced, “I can’t drink alcohol because I’ve got acid-reflux disease.”

Silence. Everyone stared, then burst into hysterical laughter. They must’ve thought I was joking, or maybe they were too drunk to understand. I wanted to sink into the ocean, let it erode me completely. What I did instead was drown myself in Everclear. I took that bottle and chugged it until I couldn’t anymore, everyone cheering me on. When I spent the next day in the hospital, too dehydrated from all the puking to keep anything down, they were all too hungover to visit me. Whenever I closed my eyes, though, I could see their smudged inebriated figures applauding me. I could hear them chanting my name.

Right now, in this goddamned Applebee’s, I’m thinking about doing it again. I want to feel bombs bursting inside me, fireworks, bottle rockets. I want people to watch in awe as I explode. Swiveling on my barstool, I turn to ask Gisberta for a sip of her drink, but she’s all the way across the room talking with another man, twisting her wedding ring around her finger.

She left behind that blue stuff, though.

I hate to admit it, but I texted Gerald: Hey, this is kinda out of the blue, but I’m in the hospital. You definitely don’t have to come but I thought you should know. An hour later, he showed up with a sudoku book, several back issues of the New Yorker, a package of fuzzy socks, and a Mylar balloon shaped like a bumblebee. He also brought a pillow, one of those goose-feather things. In case the nurses didn’t bring me enough, he said.

They’ve got me hooked up to an IV, pumping in fluids or something. Things are kind of messy. Lots of puking, a bleeding ulcer. I’d rather not go into details. Aside from my parents, I haven’t had too many visitors. Gisberta stopped in for a minute on her way to work, said she was in a rush. There’s a Hallmark card from her on the nightstand. Ted, that unsentimental fucker, hadn’t thought to bring me anything, just came by and talked about his novel for half an hour. I kept zoning out, wondering where I’d fit into a book or play, what Shakespeare or Aeschylus could possibly do with a girl like me. The tragic heroine generally stumbles into weeping brooks, cleaves her heart in two with a dagger. Imagine a greasy-haired Cordelia sweating in a hospital gown, Helen of Troy coughing blood into a tissue. Tell me, who should weep for Hecuba when she carries her tragedy around in her stomach, when she wants for nothing but a warm, familiar hand on her knee?

“I brought my mom’s homemade carrot-soup recipe, for whenever you get out,” Gerald says. He’s not wearing a tie, thank God. The strategic data analysts of Southwest Georgia are enjoying their weekly Casual Monday. “One of my favorites. I tucked it in the pages of the sudoku book.”

“Thanks,” I croak, my voice staticky and hoarse.

“Geez,” he says, sinking into the chair next to me. “I didn’t know how bad off you were. You’re in the hospital. I was talking to your mom out in the hallway, and—”

“My mom?”

“Yeah. She was saying you were supposed to go to Ireland. I had no idea you were so sick. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrug, sparing my voice.

“You know what else your mom said? She said she thinks you’re secretly drinking up all the orange juice in the house. She’s really worried about you.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “And I am too.”

Now I’m thinking of Achilles, King Henry, the mighty Beowulf. Armor clanking through the aisles of Walmart as they scan the selection of puzzle books. Swords traded in for balloons and socks. I see demigods and warriors with cell phones pressed against their ears, their mothers rattling off carrot-soup ingredients. Broth, celery, the scratching of pens. There’s heroism in all of this, I realize, an absurd brand of valor. Wasted sacrifice.

“It’s gonna be okay, though,” he says, “because one day you’re gonna be better, and you know where you’re gonna be? Right here.” He points to one of his New Yorker back issues. “Right between these pages, that’s where. Or in Ireland. Doing your research. Teaching at Harvard, Yale, wherever. The world is your oyster.”

“No, it isn’t,” I say, my voice a jagged whisper.

“Sure it is. I promise.” He tries to grab my hand, but I pull away.

“You don’t know where I’m going to be. You don’t have a fucking clue.” I flinch at my own cruelty, and so does he. “I’m sorry.” I pause to clear my throat. “Please, just leave.”

“But why?”

I try to tell him, but the words get lost in a coughing fit. Even when I compose myself, the words won’t come loose, are still stuck in my ravaged windpipe. Finally, resignedly, I mouth for him to please go.

“But—”

I just shake my head. It’s all I can do.

Gathering his magazines, he gets up and gives me one last sad look. “Goodbye, Ava,” he says, and I wince at the sound of my own name. Unpoetic and blunt, like the end unit of some lost Shakespearean insult. You pigeon-livered, plague-sored, poison-bellied Ava. You are as a candle, the better burnt out. I am sick when I do look on thee. I am so, so sick.

Once a week I go to therapy. These meetings, of course, are confidential.

The quality of poetry in the church bulletin has fallen substantially. Not that my Job poem would’ve helped any, I guess. Last night, I looked it up in The Newer Testament with intentions of maybe texting the link to Gerald, patching things up—he was nuts about that painkiller poem, after all—but discovered their website had been replaced with a bright flashing banner: DOMAIN NAME EXPIRED. Beneath this message were links to virtual churches and chat rooms where one could converse with sexy Latinas. I closed the browser and went to bed.

My parents are fond of coercing me into going to church, think it’s good for my spirit or whatever, so that’s where I am, looking over the bulletin instead of listening to the preacher. This Sunday’s poem, written by nine-year-old Yasmine Pope, is simply titled “Jesus.”

His hand can heal
The sick and the lame, 
The blind and the deaf 
Praise His name!

“Amateur,” I mutter under my breath.

“You say something?” my dad whispers to me.

“Oh, no.”

I’m sitting between my parents in our regular pew, and we turn our attention back to the preacher. He’s still on the prayer requests, all these poor people bearing the consequences of some secret wager between Heaven and Hell: Reggie Sykes is suffering complications from his hip-replacement surgery. Kathleen Anderson isn’t adjusting well to dialysis. Someone’s grandfather is dying in Atlanta. A mother gave birth to a stillborn child. Everybody’s got fucking cancer.

“Any other prayer requests?” the preacher asks.

Toward the front of the church, a familiar figure stands up. Short, blond, arms splotched with eczema: Polly Wilkinson. All I ate for breakfast was toast, but I can feel it creeping back up my throat.

“I want to put in a prayer request for my English teacher, Miss Slate,” she says, her voice quavering. She actually turns around and smiles at me. “She’s been in the hospital with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She’s out now, but she could still use our prayers.”

“Wait, you mean Ava Slate?”

She nods vigorously. “Yes, sir.”

Everyone stares at me, and for a brief moment, I relish their stunned pity. How tragic I must seem, how noble, a cancer patient who suffers in silence. But then Mom squeezes my arm, not in a comforting way. “I’m afraid there must be some kind of mistake,” she says. “Our Ava doesn’t have cancer.”

The preacher breathes a relieved sigh. “Okay, phew. That’s what I thought. Glad to see you’re doing well, Ava.”

Everyone laughs in a claustrophobic way. I wonder if it’s possible to will myself into spontaneous combustion. The preacher moves onto the next tragedy, car crash off State Road 6, but I’m still stuck in the last one. Polly turns around and stares at me, asking all the questions iambic meter won’t allow, but I don’t return her gaze. I’m not even here.

Where I am, there is no State Road 6. There’s just me, nothing else for miles.

Polly’s parents filed a complaint with the school about me. The principal was unduly sympathetic; she said what I did was wrong but forgivable, if I wanted to stick around. I didn’t. It was unhealthy, working in a place with so many Rand McNally maps.

A substitute is teaching my class while they look for a permanent replacement, meaning today I’m free to go to Walmart with my mom. Spending time with her is the least I can do, I suppose, after last week’s scene at church. I keep trying to come up with apologies—Sorry, I didn’t mean for you to find out about my fake cancer!—but none of them feels quite right.

“Did we miss anything?” she asks, pushing the buggy down the cookie aisle.

“Give me a sec to decipher Dad’s handwriting.” I scan the list. “Looks like yogurt . . . Dr Pepper . . . unintelligible scribbles . . . DJ?” I squint, read it again. “Oh, OJ. Orange juice.”

Mom stiffens. “He can pick those things up later.” She lets out an awkward laugh. “Punishment for poor penmanship.”

“Okay,” I say. We roll on in silence, past rows of Zebra Cakes and Moon Pies, snacks I haven’t touched in years, relics of ancient history. “I didn’t drink any of it, you know,” I tell her. “Just wanted to clear that up.”

She breathes in deeply, like she’s about to say something, then thinks the better of it.

“I wouldn’t do something like that,” I insist. “I’ve never even liked orange juice in my whole life.”

Mom is quiet for a moment, but then she says, “That’s not true. You used to love it. I used to buy the ones with Donald Duck on the side.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You used to love Donald Duck. We had all those Mickey cartoons on VHS tape, and you’d watch them over and over. I remember you’d be in hysterics whenever Donald Duck came on.”

Her face is wistful, teary eyed, provoking multiple reactions in me. I want to slap her, hug her, grovel at her feet. Instead, I silently follow her into the checkout line, one register over from where I first met Gerald. While we wait, I pull out my phone. For what feels like the one thousandth time, I reread an unanswered text I sent last night:

Hey, I know things ended badly in the hospital but I was gonna send you this poem I wrote that was published online but I guess the editors or whoever didn’t pay their bills because the domain name expired . . . their domain name expired, and so did my poem. Ha ha but anyway if you wanna read it text me and I’ll send it (again REALLY sorry, please lets talk)

I guess I thought Gerald would answer, you know? He’d really offered me his pillow.

After shopping, I go by the school to collect my stuff. Had I been teaching today, we would’ve gone over figurative language, all those complicated evasive maneuvers poets are so fond of: litotes, hypallages, zeugmas. How to say a thing in the most inscrutable way possible.

Emptying out my desk, I’m confronted with the flotsam of an abridged career in teaching high-school literature. Confiscated fidget spinners, broken pens, indecipherable notes passed between giggling friends. I unfold them, try to interpret their gel-pen hieroglyphics, all curly tails and heart-dotted I’s. I used to write in this language once. Boys would pass me notes: Do you like me circle yes or no. I had one of those pens that let you write in any color. Blue, green, purple. There’s a card for me, signed by the whole class. A rabbit holding an ice pack to his head, the words “Get well soon” floating next to him. Here’s a roll of Tums, a mutilated paper clip, a stick of peppermint gum to cover my breath in case I get sick. I remember the giddy thrill of circling yes, the smugness of circling no. Every day a fist uncurling, revealing a delicious surprise.

My mom’s not just imagining things. I really have been drinking the orange juice, a few sips here and there. I’ve been drinking it for the same reason other girls slit their wrists.

“Miss Slate,” a voice says. “Why dost thou have your head put down?”

I lift my head from the desk and find Polly Wilkinson standing before me, rocking back and forth on the heels of her tennis shoes. Her cheeks are pink, her forehead shiny with sweat; judging by her gym shorts and the flute case in her hand, I assume she’s just come in from marching-band practice. I guess I’ve been sitting here for a while.

“Hi,” I say.

“How dost thou do this afternoon?” she asks in a barely audible voice.

Then the room goes mute. This silence persists for several seconds, me staring down at the ephemera covering my desk, Polly swaying uneasily like a ship at sea until finally she bursts out in a bruised voice, “Thou hurtest me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Dost thou really not have cancer?”

“No, but—”

“Art thou even sick at all?”

“Well . . .”

“Canst thou answer what I ask?”

“For God’s sake, cut it out with the fucking Shakespeare shit.”

She puts a hand over her mouth. Tears well in her eyes. John Donne and Walt Whitman make her cry in class, and now I guess I do too.

“Hey, hey,” I say, rising from my chair. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

She refuses to look at me.

“Hey, Polly. Come on. I swear I didn’t mean it.”

Sniffling, she asks, “Are you sick, though? Or was that all fake too?”

“No, it was real.” I think about placing a comforting hand on her shoulder, but instead I just stand in front of my desk, leaning the back of my legs against it.

“Then what is it?” Polly asks with a little hiccup. “What’s wrong with you?”

I hesitate. “It’s hard to explain.”

“I knew it. You’re lying.”

“I’m not, though!”

“Then tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s just this stomach problem,” I say, feeling absurd. “Acid reflux.”

She makes a face. “It’s that bad?”

“For some people it gets really serious. I get ulcers and stuff. Makes me sick a lot.”

“Oh,” she says. Something in her hardened expression relaxes. “So, you’re not going to die in three years?”

“No.”

“Not even in five years?”

I shake my head. “It’s not like that. It’s not terminal.”

“That means you’re going to live?”

“I’m gonna live a long time,” I say. The words feel like a prison sentence.

The corners of her mouth turn up. She’s smiling. She even lets out a little laugh. “Oh. Good.” She laughs again. “I’m so glad.” And suddenly her arms are wrapped around my middle, her flute case banging against my hip. This embrace lasts only a split second, and then we’re apart again, her face shy, eyes roaming the tiled floor. “Bye, Miss Slate,” she mumbles, then disappears.

There’s nothing left for me to do but finish packing, take down my decorations. The lace curtains, the string lights, the plastic bust of Shakespeare in the corner. I’ve tacked glossy poetry broadsides all over the room. We’ve got the entire Western canon here, its coy mistresses and dreary ravens and lonely clouds. There’s enigmatic punctuation from Emily Dickinson, delightful gibberish from Edward Lear. I strip them from the cinder-block walls and hold them close to my chest. Reluctantly, I stow them away in cardboard boxes, wondering when I’ll see them again, when they’ll have another chance to speak. If I could live anywhere, I’d choose the white space between stanzas, that sweet breath between words.

With the broadsides packed away, I return to my desk, rake the clutter into the wastebasket and cram what’s worth keeping into my purse. I pick up the metallic nameplate on my desk, watch it glint in the sun. Ava Slate, it reads, one last poem to carry home.

Read more from Issue 18.2.