August in review (so far)

I used to think I had little free time in medical school, but clearly I'd forgotten what it's like to have a real job with a fixed schedule. This month, I haven't had time to do much outside work, except try to maintain my skeletal social life with a couple of friends, one of them from work. I'm more-or-less satisfied, but I can't imagine what residency would do to someone more outgoing than myself. Or someone married with kids.

Anyway, since this blog has an audience of maybe ten people, I'm keeping it as a project for my future self. It's something for sixty-year-old me (hopefully I make it that long to peruse if she wonders what her twenty-something self was doing. So here goes:

1. Work: lots of cancer, and becoming more independent. Three autopsies so far. Learning to recognize simple things under the microscope:

Epithelial inclusion cyst of the ovary; from before I worked out how to use the microscope camera

Hyperplastic polyp of the colon, after my picture-taking skills improved

Hiking trip one: more like walking with a really nice view

I've finally gotten tired of vegetating for weeks, so I've decided to explore the Garden State. For someone who's been living here for about fifteen years, I know very little of it. I'm an inside kind of person, and for a long time, I didn't have a car. Never saw the point of the expense when public transportation in the area has always been reliable. Or, "reliable". At least there is public transportation.

Anyway, talking to my brother inspired me, so last weekend I explored one of the parks running along the Hudson River with my friend Chris. We didn't venture far away from people, and we walked basically in a straight line, but there was a lot of nature. And non-city smells, like water, trees, earth, and flowers. And mosquitoes, which were less nice, but I suppose they enhanced the afternoon.

A bridge leading to New York, which I should probably know, but I didn't check Google maps. I want to say George Washington Bridge, though. It's fairly close to where we visited.

Flash Fiction: Teeth in the Fog

1 - The Merchant

Supply and demand. The fog has been great for business because . . . supply and demand. Before, a man trying to make a living at the square had a market bloated with glitter and frivolity.

Food couldn't be just food, it had to be nurtured in the cleanest of farms, the animals serenaded by the sweetest of virgins every morning. A coat couldn't just shield a body from the cold, it had to be the perfect cut and color so the body looked slimmer, younger, richer. And the brands . . . no one of consequence would use anything that didn't bear a proper insignia.

The fog purified the system to its simplest form. Food, never mind its history, helped your hollow ache in your belly. The coat was a barrier between your skin and the teeth in the air. Younger people don't seem much significance in a brand anymore; they sort through piles of hand-me-downs for something that fits them without a thought for letters, prints, or stripes.

2 - The Parent

Not smart to have kids no more, so of course people want more. It gets lonely in the dark--lonely, cold, and dangerous. You have a kid because even if the teeth don't get you, hunger and sickness will hobble your back and squash your lungs. Maybe your kid will go hunt for you then, though the odds for that aren't good.

It's a bad investment either way. Kids die more often than not, their little noses clog with the sooty leftover of oily scales and fragments of insect limbs. A sleek, hunter dog would be a better bet. They don't need more than crumbling concrete, empty pipes, and what little meat you can't scrape off the bones of things they kill for you.

People keep trying for kids anyway. There's some instincts the fog can't kill.

3 - The Technician

They write in a language that once ruled the world. The commands flowed through a contained logic born from the abstract envisionings of a class of people with no skills to fight the fog. Their poems now live in sheets of paper dyed black with soot, the words painted in white wrung from the bellies of vanquished teeth.

Eventually, disciples will string together commands without understanding what they mean. The old technicians can't explain their meaning without their old tools any more than they could teach what 'sunny' means to someone blind from birth.

Or after the fog.

4 - The Hunter

There's a craft to growing old in the fog.

Without the comforts from before, no one can get much mileage out of a human body. Bones don't get as strong as the once did, a person's reach remains stunted, and deep restful sleep is suicidal when no one can predict when the wind will take a nasty turn. There isn't a human left that never huddles under their bed as storms slam teeth against their windows, teeth hitting glass, wood, cloth, or cardboard. Only the mournful rumbling of a hungry belly is worse.

It's easier, for the belly at least, to be alone. It takes hours of patience and focus to kill a single, skinny, rabid deer scurrying from building to building, obscured in the smog. The loneliness that eats at your every thought is an ally every time you don't have to hand over a piece of game, longing for every strip of stringy muscle you'll not rip off the twiggy bones.

5 - The Child

Orphans scurry from tower to tower, eyes glued to the ground for scraps. They fear the fog, but not as much as they trust their ears and noses. They're the ones that stay out longest when the bell signaling incoming storms ring, then come fastest when the wind subsides.

So they're the ones who find the carcasses left behind by the smog, and they're the ones who dig appreciate how the teeth in the fog have stripped away the skin and cooked the meat. They might look feral to those who retain the sensitivities of days past.

But they're not. They've just never seen the sun.