Original Writing: Cancer
She was a petite woman, frail in that way that makes others speak more softly to her, as though volume alone might break her.
Her daughter is her polar opposite. She is bright and alive. Laughs loudly and calls adults by their first name. When the Doctors poke her, she pokes back, and sticks out her tongue for good measure.
Between the two of them even seasoned professionals found it hard to say the word.
Cancer.
Six years old should have been an age of magic. It should have been an age of fingerpaints and bedtime stories and that fragile and precious illusion that the world was just and fair.
She wonders why her mother is crying. How do you explain to a child that knows nothing of death that it's growing inside of her?
So her mother forces a smile, and she doesn't cry again in front of her.
She saves it all for when he daughter can't see. Then, she cries like her eyes have no other use. Then, in her few stolen moments, she prays.
Remission was the name for God on her lips.
But remission is rare. A word tossed about in television and movies where cancer is handed out like candy because the only way the writers could think to define their characters was through suffering. As though suffering was humanity's sole definition.
Some days, she thinks they might be right.
Chemotherapy. Doctors with patient voices try to explain the procedure. From what she can gather, they're going to give her something that can kill her, and hope the cancer dies first.
When the first chunk of her daughter's hair falls out, she calmly tosses it aside. She doesn't stop smiling until her daughter is fast asleep. Her expression is solemn and composed as she walks from the building. She doesn't make a sound until she gets to the parking lot.
It's only then she screams.
