You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Disease’ category.
Once I bought the dog, there was no turning back. Even a get-well beanie-baby bloodhound from the hospital gift shop becomes an imperative for me: he must now be delivered to the woman who shared Mom’s hospital room, even though Mom’s back home healthy and I’m just here for paperwork. The dog cajoles me that his faultless sniffer can track a few tumor cells per billion, so I follow him to six and a right off the elevator, and sure enough, outside Gloria’s door, her husband is collapsed in a chair weeping, and my shabby gesture feels like flowers to her funeral. Dearly beloved, I’ll say, Gloria—if I have her name right—the oldest of seven siblings, never felt the need to bear children because, she told my Mom, she had raised her brothers and sisters. Wasn’t she special. Over several dreary afternoons, while Mom (Bed One) chatted with callers about their bouquets, Gloria (Bed Two) raged to me against her brain, brain surgeons, hospital indignities, and about her “kids,” who were too put out to visit her this lifetime, and about her job at the diner and the waitresses who wished her well and who had sent the punny card with the little dog who said: Heal! Back to today. The trail has led the dog and me to Gloria’s door. Her husband, weepy but chipper, tells me: Go on in. Take ten minutes for me. She’s alert and expectant. And when I see she sees it’s only me, I wish I were all six of them bursting in with trivial gossip and thoughtless positivity, but I and the little dog who knows better than anyone else what’s going on inside her head will have to do. She hugs us like a mother to my own sweet mother’s son.
Original Copyright © February 25, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 03, 2026
He shows his hands as bidden. Across each palm, and flecking the edges also of his bare soles, doily patterns of lesion and wart: the arsenic array. His hands outstretched toward the inspector, palms up, thumbs east and west, elbows extended from his deflated torso, his fingers cupped to receive whatever is freely given or falls from the sky, he doesn’t beg, he isn’t grateful, doesn’t wish or want, has no questions, gives from his poverty, can’t be helped. His cupped hands are as likely offering as asking. They seem empty, but in their lines they trace the journey of the king’s advisers to this desiccated village with its wells tapped deep into poison. The women are too weak to walk to clean water. The children wither inward from the fingertips and toes. In the land of flood and drought, too much water kills what too little water doesn’t. For the ancestors, pests that mutated in water that pooled when the floods receded took off the weak and weary. Longevity disfavored the thirsty. Then workers, sent by the king to tap the artesia, planted pumps within steps of the huts, so the villagers weaned themselves from the pools, and drank and bathed and boiled their grains with pump water whenever they wished. Now those wells are poison, too, and workers have painted the handles red but not dismantled the old pumps. Healthful water has been tapped a short walk away, to no avail. He denies the old well was better than the pond, and anyway wanting better is striving and striving is shameful. He was content to have no king, have no pump, to drink pond water, drink red water, or do without. If the well outside his door goes dry, he’ll cup his hands and accept the dew.
Original Copyright © 1997
Revised Copyright © February 15, 2026
Very Short Novels 
This Novel is a close relative of The Question from more than 25 years ago. I've edited it substantially and…