The Hiccups

Agent Orange

The warning sign. The brain-coloured duvet cover, the one with the retro design, reminds me of the rich stews with lamb shanks I ate to build up my blood cells. For me, brown and tan and black belong to that dark death week when the chemotherapy was about vomit and phlegm and feces. During each cycle of the cell-death phase I was terribly constipated, a side effect of the anti-nauseants. Now I can't stomach the sight of the thing—the duvet fabric—but I can't throw it away so I decide to fashion it into a pleated skirt.

The Winged Painter is on uptown and I go, wearing my new skirt—its only outing. I open the gallery door, walk in with a sense of morbidity, a feeling that tightens itself around my stomach as I make my way through the foyer. It's the neutral-toned walls that do it to me, the muted sterilization of it all: the gallery looks and feels too much like a hospital.

Mid Day in Summertime. The Circus. Bay of Angels. I find that I am drawn to them completely by their colour. The Wolf Pit. I feel myself salivate at its vibrancy: yellow, indigo, mint green, satsuma. I breathe in deeply and lean forward. My hands grip the seams of my skirt as I steady my legs which have begun trembling. I run my tongue through the gap in my teeth and it feels swollen, alien, and coated with a thick layer of dust. Someone comes up behind me, a sudden voice out of thin air. She startles me. "Are you okay?" It's an older woman. Middle-aged. My age and healthy looking, I think, and I slink away, discouraged.

Stench has a trajectory. There's an oil-painting full of clouds on a sunlit sky in the next room. I can smell the synthetic liquids even though I'm standing two feet away. I can almost see it too, a glittering plague hovering in the air, arching from the canvas to the end of my nose. I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, something metallic and ancient, the smell of blood on the wall. I imagine my mouth opening wide—a vacuum, a cave—my teeth gnawing against the think ridges of thick paint gathered at the hem of the laminate frame. I want to bite down on the tiny blisters of oil and let the serum rush through my lungs, heart, and liver; to flood myself in nitrogen pinks and electric reds, to let the colours violate my blackness—an echo, a stain.

Later that day, at chemo, I spot a like-minded woman in a fuchsia tracksuit and a neon yellow headscarf. Her complexion is pale and murky and she wears a worried, knit-brow. I immediately recognize myself in her cormorant expression and think that I shouldn't have worn this skirt. Brown is lifeless, dreary, and draining. The woman smiles, a brazen phiz, as if to say, "The soul cries out."

When I get home I will bury the skirt in my back garden.