Benign? There’s a bomb in my chest. Lodged inside me. Growing, forming, ticking. But is it ticking? There’s a bomb in my chest that could explode and kill me slowly. Maybe. The radiologist says “come back in six months to see if it changes.” But there’s a bomb in my chest. Is a bomb even a bomb if it will never go off? Do harmless explosives exist? Is the fuse lit? Is the flame slowly inching its way towards detonation? Or will the thing just sit there, stuck inside me? Innocent and innocuous, loitering and taking up space? Not a ticking time bomb but a harmless piece of junk? Only time will tell. This mass in my chest doesn’t come with a countdown clock. I can’t relax. I can’t trust my body. I can feel it through my skin: hard and round and nefarious. Next week they’ll remove it. I’ll never know if it was really a bomb, but it won’t have time to kill me.
| Kara Crawford
12
