It is early in the morning and I am in a taxi cab. There is a man driving the yellow car and he is foreign. He smells. I cannot place the smell exactly, phantom cigarettes, spices, and flatulence. The cab smells like weeks of sleep in the same bed. It smells like dirty sheets.

"Where can I take you?"
"Mass General" I tell him, and then I look out the window as if I have not seen the city before. I pretend the buildings are beautiful and new. But everything is really covered in ice and salt. I am watching the people on the sidewalks and I secretly hope that one of them slips on the ice, takes a real fall, something slapstick and hilarious. But nobody falls.

I have a suspicion that the smelly man took the long way to the hospital. I don't know the area well enough to curse at him and so I pay him seven dollars and then I stand in front of the hospital, quietly, as if it is a church. The hospital is tall and glass, and there are ambulances everywhere. Some have blaring sirens and others sit quietly, waiting for the next old woman to pick up the phone about her husband's faulty lungs, heart or liver.

The front doors are made of the clean kind of glass. I wonder who cleans these doors. I imagine an older woman must clean them every hour on the hour. That's how clean the glass is.

Inside, the white floors and soft shoes upset me, miniature implications that everyone should just remain calm. There is a desk with the word HELP strung up above it. A woman sits at the desk wearing coordinating jewelry and smiles at me.

"What can I help you with today, dear?"

Her smile is so wide, so big. It is as if she is making up for the bad news that I have not heard yet. It is pre-pity.

"I need to find 225 Ellison," I am saying, as if I am another girl who is calm and not yelling loudly on the inside. There is a roaring lion perched inside of my left ear. I feel like vertigo.

"Just take a left and use the E elevator," she says too kindly. She has a fluorescent smile and I see it again.

In the silver elevator, I stand next to a man on a gurney and a black man dressed in scrubs. The man on the gurney is covered in clear tubes and he smiles at me. I can see the pity oozing out of his mouth. I smile back a bigger smile because I pity him more. This is how it goes here. It is like bartering.

When I get to the second floor, I find room 225. A man with a gentle voice quietly asks me to fill out paperwork and change into a hospital gown.

My handwriting is very sloppy as I fill in my name, bra size and history. I check little boxes to let everyone know that I am not lactating, menstruating and that I do not have any metal rods in my head. I date and sign the white sheets. The man with the gentle voice takes me to a small room. He hands me the gown.

I take off my silver ring and slide the earrings out of my ear. If I do not take out the metal, the MRI machine will rip it out of my body at a horrible angle. The jewelry will rip through me like gunshots from inside. That's what the doctor said. He said once there was a man who had a sliver of a bullet left in his knee after he had been shot. Years later, when he got an MRI, the machine tugged the metal out of him and he was shot again, from inside out.

I take off my t-shirt, sweatshirt, bra and jeans. I fold each article of clothing into a perfect square and stack them neatly as I remove them, as if by being tidy I will be spared all of the cancer, tumors, and cysts they will find beneath my skin. I slide a faded blue hospital gown against my skin. There are two ties in the front that I knot together.

I sit in a chair and wait for the Spanish nurse to call me in. I look down at the gown and wonder if anyone has died in this gown or if those gowns get throw away. I imagine it saves a lot of money to reuse the gowns, but it just seems unethical to make patients wear hospital gowns that have encased a dead body.

The Spanish nurse surprises me. She is nice, but besides that she is wielding a large needle. I wasn't expecting this and so I turn my head when she slides the silver into my arm, a prick that I must take a deep breath for.

"All done!" the Spanish nurse says cheerfully.

I look down at my arm and see pieces of colored plastic hanging against my skin.

"What the hell is this?" I ask her.
"Oh, that's for the IV."
"What IV?"
"We have to put the contrast in."
"The contrast?"
"Well, we're going to inject you with the contrast so we can see your breasts better on the machine."
"Oh." And the tears are pushing at me now. I do not know how to be an adult at all of these hospitals, these death Mecca's. I want my mother here, so she can explain all of the terminology and technicalities.

I look at the temporary needle in my arm and I begin frantically thinking of my funeral and what they will find leftover, in my bureau drawers, when I am dead. I wonder what they will think of all of the things I have kept, the bits and pieces of life, when I'm gone.

In the background, the doctors and nurses argue over body parts.

"Do you want to check out a breast or a liver?" says a doctor.
"I'm sick of doing breasts, you do the breast," says the nurse.
"You always get the livers."
"If I have to look at one more breast today, I'm out of here."
"Let's flip a coin over it," the doctor says and they both laugh. I do not think they are funny.

Another nurse comes to get me, another sympathetic face. She takes me into a room and above the door is a sign that says "X-Ray in progress". It is like a recording studio. In the room, there are needles, sinks, pieces of machinery and trashcans for medical waste. In the center of the room there is a big beige tube with a table that slides in and out. The table has two holes cut out for my breasts.

"Just take off your robe and lay down on your stomach," the new nurse says, while the Spanish nurse unfolds a screen to place in front of a giant window in the room.

"We don't want any peeping Toms, now do we?" she says.

I smile at her faintly and do as I'm told, and lay down on the table, my breasts filling the two holes and then hanging in the air while I shiver against the chill of the machine.

The new nurse slips a black rubber ball into my hand that is connected to a wire.

"This is your panic button," the nurse says. "If the contrast makes you sick or you get claustrophobic, just press this and we'll get you right out."

I rest my head on the pillow between my arms as the Spanish nurse slips the contrast needle into my IV and presses it.

"The contrast is going to feel cold in your veins," the new nurse warns. "But that's totally normal. If you feel your throat start to swell up, then just hit the panic button. That only happens to one in one hundred thousand people, so you should be fine."

The nurses press a button and the table with the holes for my breasts slides back into the beige tube. The IV jumps inside of my skin as the contrast is injected into my veins. All around the needle, I can feel a slight burn and then my veins feel chilled, cool, from the inside out.

Then there is a succession of loud clicks, and then a whirring sound that is piercing. On the microphone, the nurses say soothing things that pipe into the room where I am surrounded by a giant whirring magnet. They say "It's just a little while longer, Sarah" and it sounds patronizing. I want to fight them.

There is a metallic taste in my throat, a cool silver taste, the contrast coating the back of my throat. The snaps keep coming at quicker and quicker intervals, and the soothing voices hush "Be very still, Sarah. Be very still."

I think about the Glamour shots being done of my tits. I wonder why we haven't made room for a feather boa, maybe some glitter, a little bit of pressed powder.

Then I think about the lines they will draw beneath my breasts and then the scalpel. I think about the blood that will slide out from my skin, and how the doctors will not care because they are used to all of that liquid red. I think about my ribs wrapped in white bandages, about weeks of vomiting, about the removal of the evil things. Part of me wants to be cut. The other part wants to go to Mexico where the doctors' secretary can't call my cell phone and I won't have to hear her voice lilting with reminders about how they just don't know anything for certain.

When the magnet is done, the nurses pull the needle out of my veins and I feel woozy as they show me the door.

"Can I see the pictures?" I ask the Spanish nurse. I want to see what the insides of my breasts look like, my ribs and my boobs electric-shocked into black and white frames. I wonder if I could maybe see my heart, if the magnet was strong enough.

"No," she says. "You can't."

And in the back of my mind, I just hope she finds cancer. I want them to cut me open and remove the worst parts. I hope that my MRI screens are illuminated on a white board and that a giant black tumor blots out most of the picture, an ink blot under my skin. I hope that my veins and tissue, glowing like Las Vegas billboards, show them how nasty I am inside.

I think about the cancer as a slow friend creeping through me. Maybe it has already conquered my breasts and has moved on to other things. Perhaps my lungs and lymph notes have joined in on the party. I think about the way the scalpel will feel. I think about the thin, precise line of blood it will leave behind. I think about the months of not working, about the chemotherapy dropping weight from my body, about becoming bald.

And by the time I am outside, by the time I have walked back through the clear glass, I have convinced myself that cancer might not be so bad after all.

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...