Editors’ note: We will be taking a one-month break in the miCRo series; we’ll be back with our next in early August.
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this flash essay, Mary Ardery gives us what seems like a portrait of the quotidian: watching Netflix, stopping at the grocery store, texting a long-distance boyfriend. But underneath those everyday experiences are concerns about women’s health, specifically a doctor not listening to the narrator, who has difficulty speaking back with what she knows to be true. Meanwhile, her pregnant sister is hearing about the size of her unborn baby through comparisons to animals and fruit.
Benevolent Ruler
My sister’s unborn baby was as big as a striped skunk that week. Or, romaine lettuce.
weird combo, I texted back with a heart.
That night, my bra felt too tight while I was watching Netflix, so I undid the clasp and pulled it out one sleeve of my sweater like changing clothes at a middle school sleepover. I tossed it onto the couch.
It was still too cold, but I’d been sleeping with the windows open. Ladybugs were getting in, polka-dotting my apartment. I found one in my bed and texted my long-distance boyfriend: please kill the bugs when we live together. He responded: that’s playing into gender roles (three dots typing) but okay.
The next day at the campus health center, the gynecologist explained something I knew to be medically inaccurate. I asked questions, but not as many as I wanted. I felt the hot-helpless-angry kind of tears rise in my throat, push behind my eyes.
I left with a prescription I knew I wouldn’t fill, and went to the grocery. I said no thank you to the Girl Scouts hawking their cookies by the shopping carts. I said it with a smile straining my face. When I got to the lettuce, I thought of my sister’s baby. I went back and bought six boxes of cookies.
At home, I put the groceries away and drowned a ladybug in the kitchen sink, then got a text from my boyfriend: check for a package. It was a new bathrobe so long and so plush I looked like an ice queen. Some days, I am a benevolent ruler who lets the ladybugs live.
I thought of how easily I could be made to feel small in an exam room. I got angry and ate a sleeve of Thin Mints for dinner. Meanwhile, my sister sent a picture of the chicken she’d roasted on a bed of local root vegetables. One time, the app measured her baby in Starbucks cups stacked together. A baby made of lattes.
In the morning I went to the couch to put on the bra I’d discarded. I got the clasp hooked on the first try because, on occasion, I am very good at containing myself.
I made toast and drank coffee. I scrolled through my phone and found an old note titled words for a love poem. The only word on it was stay.
Mary Ardery is the author of Level Watch (June Road Press, September 2025). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. Visit her online at maryardery.com.
