CÉZANNE’S APPLES Cheryl Hindrichs
“Your head’s too small.” I looked up from the open pages balanced on my lap into marvelously wide eyes. She sat perched expectantly, her knees very close to my own, waiting, I suppose, for an explanation. Which was easy enough, but a rejoinder ripped across my mind—“Your legs don’t work.” I swallowed it down. Her mother glanced up with latent hostility from her phone. A fouryear old, a treasure, I smiled at her, they say what we won’t, don’t they? See what we no longer can because we have strangled too many thoughts. Her phone dinged. The girl wheeled herself adroitly around my island of waiting room chairs. After a serpentine tour, she sped back, leaning far over my knees. I hoped she would ask about the book in my lap, comment on its bigness perhaps. But, here it came again, insistent now, a note of concern, “But… your head. It’s too small.” I could smile now, “Yes, it’s rather small. But I’m rather small altogether.” She looked at my legs, skeletal knobs sheathed in jeans, looked at my gloved hands and heavily muffled torso. She fixed her eyes again on me with a look of consternation. A woman that was tall, quite tall, but also small somehow, and so there was something not quite right—perhaps it was the head that didn’t quite fit? The nurse called my name. The girl had wheeled away like a shot, and I followed Mustafa into the hospital’s bowels, sharing in a certain rue familiarity as we passed the apprehensive first-timers—their wide eyes, sudden yawns, clutched phones, and fretful tossing of magazine pages. “I’ve got – full head CT, sound right to you?” In the room with the massive machine like a humming portal, Mustafa arranged blankets and pillows as best he could on the plank, a kindness that would dull the bones of my pelvis and spine against the unforgiving plastic. Now there would be time to think, during the rituals of the CT scanner. The whooping of the ghost in the machine’s ring began circling my head furiously, then stillness, then the ferocious knocking and rapping—flaunting the civilized disembodied voice, “Please hold your breath.” A poltergeist, it would pierce the veil, tell the truth beneath the flesh of the skull which, for two years now, began to appear, clearer and clearer in my bathroom mirror. 15
