Jennifer Wade Hesse

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

It feels like someone is pressing a match against—no under—her skin. 

Like her skin is a thin blanket, and if she peeled back the corner, she’d reveal the burning match stub pressed up against her joint. She pictures telling the doctor this. Then decides against it. 

She’s tried to explain medical sensations before with terribly banal results. She’s not sure she’s ever gotten the correct treatments, but she doesn’t know if it’s her inability to explain, or the doctors’ lack of imagination. Do they have any idea how hard it is to think and speak in analogies, similes and metaphors, and then try to convince the science-minded that something is wrong with her?

‘It hurts.’ isn’t exactly true and neither is ‘it burns.’ 

She calls her sister, the nurse.

“It’s a pressure and a weakness with just the touch of purple pain that starts at the point where the burning match head is resting in my joint, under my skin. It glides up my leg but also ebbs and flows, like waves as the tide comes in, getting worse. Then the tide recedes. It feels like if I tried to stand on it, I’d fall down. But, of course, I don’t.”

The nurse says matter-of-factly, while munching a cracker, a Triscuit by the sound of it, “It’s nerve.”  But that’s no explanation. What is the nerve doing? Misfiring? Dying? Sending tragic ‘mayday’ signals to a brain too absorbed in trying to describe it to understand the dire nature of it? 

“Pins and needles, right?” says the nurse, swallowing what has to be Diet Coke.

“No—fireworks, but tiny. Sparklers along the inside of my leg. It fizzes.”

“Yeah. That’s nerve.”

“So what do I tell the doctor?”

“Nerve pain in your leg. Starts at the knee and goes up to the hip.”

“Do I tell them about the tides of pain? Do I mention the fizzes?”

“Just say it sometimes aches and you get pins and needles.”

“Can I say it throbs?”

“Can you walk on it? Can you carry on a conversation while it’s happening?” Another Tricuit splinters and dies through the phone line.

“Well, yeah, but…”

“Just say ‘aches’.” There is a swish and slurp of soda, then, “Listen. It’s not a big deal. You don’t have to call the doctor yet. Wait and see if it happens again. Anyway, lunch is done. I gotta go. Bye.”

She looks at the dead phone in her hand. She hasn’t even mentioned the growing, no burgeoning, pressure with mild navy blue pain spilled into it that waxes and wanes behind her ear on the left side. That’s surely something malevolent. She pictures an air bubble in a pipe. She pictures the sketch of the elephant inside the snake that Antoine de Saint Exupery drew. She pictures the bulb of a frog’s throat. None of these are right. 

She thinks of her husband, another nurse, saying, “Well, my urine has been dark. I just want to get checked out, so we’re running a couple of tests.” Tests that revealed the large dandelion puff of malignancy that would have stayed hidden for a couple more years if not for his mindful attention to his body. She thinks of the two extra years they had before another, more deadly, pappus drifted and settled into his colon. Those two almost perfect years. A gift born of self-awareness and early medical intervention. Because he had used the right words. He had described his physical symptoms in exactly the right way to make the doctors see and understand that something was not… Well, not right.

She rubs the back of her neck on the left side. She mentally examines her left knee, trying to sense weakness or pressure. Is it significant that they are both on the left?  It’s definitely sinister. She allows herself a wry chuckle. Sinister—of, on, or toward the left hand side. Would the doctor even get that?