My skin is tinged green for almost two months. The nipple, a soft pale blue. “Areola,” my partner jokingly corrects me whenever I flash my aching, tender breast as I complain (more often than not). July smog has settled across the city, and a sticky staleness wafts in through our open windows. The air is saturated not just with thick heat but also with the amount of whines rolling off my tongue. I’d like to say I took the procedure well, that I have the pain tolerance of a nonstick pan against the likes of steel wool, that I suffered as women in history so often do: sitting docile and pretty, my tongue locked behind closed lips, nowhere to be seen. Unfortunately, these peculiarities do not exist in my genetic code. 

As my bruised breast and I wander around the apartment naked, clutching a bag of frozen brussel sprouts that I purchased two years ago and somehow still haven’t ripped open, I give voice to complaints, one after another. Variations of, Yes, fine. The world is burning and Yes, our planet is shriveling up and Okay, I know bombs are slipping from the sky like terrible fireflies alight in the night but my boob is killing me. Pain is a funny thing; It makes us selfish. By the end of it, even my voice is grating on me. It is ugly, I think, whenever I stand naked in front of the mirror, twisting this way and that, vying for a look at the bruise and the small offensive mark at its epicenter. Ugly, and angry, and mottled blue. The bruises last six weeks after the biopsy. Shifting and undulating colors like I’m back in middle school, donning a technicolor mood ring. Awfully dramatic, even for me. 

Almost two-hundred miles away, on a different day– a much cooler February morning, Mary-Jane Reiter, now forever Mary-Jane Hoffman, is holding her toddler while sunlight slices through her kitchen window. Hands wrapped around a body that stubbornly clings to the chubbiness of newborn days. Not even three years old and she’s already picking pieces of herself out of him, duplicated DNA woven into something entirely new. She sees the same dark wavy hair and peach skin, so much softer and paper-thin than her own. His eyes, too. Smaller and rounder than hers, but the same shade of deep brown echoing her own adoration back. After 9 months of growing beneath her flesh, she still feels his ghost lingering inside her. She still misses those gentle, restless kicks against her ribcage waking her up at night. Two years ago, he did not exist. Now? He’s invaded her heart, cracking it wide open like an egg while he snuck into the space between the pauses of her rising chest. 

I am not like Mary-Jane. I am not a mother despite now being in my thirties, unless you’re counting my two cats. While I adore them, even when they are awake and screeching in the dead of the night trying to summon demons, that love, I’m sure, is not the same love felt for a firstborn. Instead, we simply cohabit the same one-bedroom flat in a tentative truce and occasionally, I’m given permission to scratch their backs. Each day when I leave them and step outside, I am greeted by the smell of dog urine wafting off the hot sidewalk and a barrage of metal buildings stretching into the clouds. There are no fields. No green emptiness yawns and gapes around me while I wait for my Merchant Marine husband to drive back from Base each evening to our small farmhouse. I’m not a stay-at-home mom– it’s just not in my cards, at least not yet. And most notably, I am not, during my twenty-third year alive, going to experience a brain aneurysm shortly after placing my son in his highchair, resulting in a sudden, volant death right there on the faded brown flowers dotting the linoleum floor. 

I’m told to go to the radiologist multiple times, by multiple doctors, before I actually go. Like notes in Tchaikovsky’s no. 9 crescendo, the emails and texts and phone calls keep coming. Polite doctoral reminders of the possibility of looming death. Dodging these warnings becomes second nature; Something I’m quite adept at. If they think they’ll manage to corrode my resolve, it won’t be likely. I embody the greatest values of a hermit: ever stubborn and elusive. During the assault, my parents are in the midst of packing their lives up and relocating to a 55+ retirement community; a time of stress, despondency and something akin to stale excitement. Whatever spare focus I muster is centered on them. I pepper them with the same questions they hounded me with during the weeks leading up to my freshman year of college. Our conversations revolve around, Do you need this and How about buying that and What about this, but in a shade of blue. A strange shift in balance leaving me feeling unsteady. 

Two days before the move, my mom sends me a picture of the fridge, slathered with yellowed grocery lists and unimportant phone numbers and postcards from the past. If they hadn’t lived in this house for thirty years, I’d be skeptical there was even a fridge standing behind all these papered layers. Old family photos are scattered across the door held up by different magnets acquired in gift shops from the furthest corners of the world. Dozens of younger versions of me smile back. In some, I am sandwiched between my sisters. School photos and prom; backyard barbecues and graduations. One showing my bangs sawed off at an angle that should have sent me to a sanatorium with scissors hidden far from reach behind locked doors. Our refrigerator serves as a looking glass into the past, eras documented and exhibited for all to see. 

Amidst the memorabilium of questionable fashion choices and awkward phases, there is another photo. Black and white and towards the bottom, half hidden behind my sister’s 9th grade soccer portrait. Torn edges aren’t enough to distract from the woman with pale skin and dark eyes piercing back at me. At 18, my grandma Mary-Jane was all long limbs, accentuated by the white dress clinging to curves that surely are reminiscent of my own, in the sense they are similar to that of a pubescent boy. Where I have looked like a scrawny, unnourished preteen my whole life, she looks like she has stumbled off the pages of a fairytale. Snake-hips and willowy joints that she wears with ease. The same aesthetic prettiness my father had when he was young. Sharp edges and hollow cheeks, softened only by the smiles stretched across their faces. I might have the same ingredients but somewhere the recipe was muffed, left too long on the stove. 

At 18, my grandmother does not realize she will be married within the next two years, birth a boy in the year after and slip into the infinite world of slumbering death only a couple of years later. Her life is marked by celebrations left behind. It’s unlikely today’s technology could have saved her. Google tells me aneurysms are ticking time bombs, hidden beneath the surface of our skin until the day a tiny blood vessel balloons and bursts free. Besides that one lonely photo of her stuck to the fridge, there is no other proof she ever existed. Nothing depicting my Grandma. Nothing to tell me whether she revered spicy food and black tea as much as I do. If she loved spending time down at the creek, like me, alone with just her thoughts and shrieking birds. Nothing to tell me if she is responsible for the laughter my dad and my sisters and I all share, loud howls that have no volume control. Cradled in my palm, my phone vibrates and gyrates, the jingle of notes rising above the tune of what ifs. This time, I pick up. 

‍It’s probably nothing, the nurse tells me when she shows me the ultrasound results, her thick eyeliner smudged and crinkling over the wrinkles of her eyes. My eyes float back to the screen. An unassuming white blob on the upper quadrant of my right breast. Probably nothing. I have lived my entire life on this planet gambling with the odds of probability. I probably won’t be fired for accidentally using my boss’s company card to order those edibles I most definitely did not need. That swollen bug-bite on my leg for the past week, staring up at me, angry and red? Probably won’t turn into sepsis. I’ll be okay, at least, probably. The technician sneaks glances at her Facebook (she’s of that era) and rolls her gum to the other side of her mouth before she prints out a paper and recommends that I schedule myself in for a biopsy, now that I’m 30 and have passed some invisible checkpoint. 

A lifetime has passed since my grandmother’s death in the ‘50s. Her son has grown up, raising children of his own, each of us born blinking up at him from under eyelashes with her same eyes. Warm and mousy brown. Where love and fond memories should be, there is nothing. Just an empty, vacuous hole. It is a strange feeling to miss someone you never knew. To miss a voice I have never heard and the feeling of arms that never had a chance to thin and wrinkle, wrapping around my shoulders in a tight hug. Something inside her wasn’t working right. A faulty mechanism that chose my Grandmother that Tuesday morning as its next victim. 

We each are finite moving pieces, floating through our days. It is only a matter of time before something inside us goes awry, probably. This is not exclusive to cancers and aneurysms and painful parallels in between. For some, death comes decades sooner than others, that something lurking beneath our skin, about to combust and break free. It is this reminder that has me being a proactive, responsible adult, heading to the ends of the earth: the only clinic available is in Queens. I carve nearly three hours out of my day switching between two trains and a bus and then walking thirteen blocks while the sun siphons globs of sweat across my brow. Gone are the comforting high-rises, the skyscrapers dipped in shiny hues of steel. Squares of vibrant grass sitting in front of the buildings have me questioning if I’m even in New York City anymore. 

I don’t remember much of the biopsy itself. Just the flapping ugly blue gown and the crinkle of paper that makes me think of the sandwich wrappers from my favorite deli growing up. One of the technicians asks me if I’m allergic to anything and I must have said no because in the next moment she’s slathering my breast in clear jelly, poking and prodding in a way that feels reminiscent of Adam Dunbar in the 10th grade: equal parts methodological and unenthusiastic. (I should have known he was gay when his gaze shuttered at my c-cups). I don’t remember if there was any pain during the procedure. Just a strange noise akin to someone pressing down on a colossal stapler. Click-clack. Click-clack. Small pieces inside me being siphoned away with each clang. 

The pain did come later, but in the thick of it, all I feel is a strange pulsing sort of numbness that has traveled up to my brain. I count the tiles of the ceiling while the two technicians talk about some show on Netflix they’re both binging that I haven’t seen. Beyond the bright light blinding me, there are thirteen tiles across– fourteen if I’m rounding the half tile by the door. You’re a bleeder. The doctor, who looks like she could be both the age of someone in their senior year of high school while also looking like she has two kids she takes to the park with all her stylish mom-friends donned in workout gear, tells me. She looks up from my assaulted breast to flash a smile as if I should be proud of this. I’m also a crier, I want to tell her. The slightest sniff of any emotion sends tears fleeing from behind my lids. My body has never done a good job of keeping the fluids within me. I pissed my pants in the second grade because I was too shy to ask for the wooden bathroom pass. So instead, all I do is grimace up at her, my eyelashes soft and wet. 

Off the top of my head, I can think of approximately eight other things I’d rather be doing than laying with my breasts splayed out under the bright light getting a hollow needle shoved into my boob. Blood has stained the gown an ugly brown. The age-defying technician tapes me up with a wad of gauze while telling me the results will come back next week but not to worry. I’ve been doing this for almost ten years now. My eyebrows scrunch up at that because what the fuck kind of genetic and drug cocktail does one need to age backwards Benjamin Button style. What you have is just a small six centimeter fibroadenoma. We’ll keep an eye on it but you’re probably all set for the next six months until your next mammo.. 

When all the paperwork is cleared away and I have changed back into my own clothes, I am released back outside, like an injured animal being rehabilitated to the wilderness and beyond. The glass doors open and I am swallowed into the hot sun. I suck in a big breath of stale Chinese food from the storefront next door. I can’t tell if I’m relieved or upset that I just dropped $2,000 on what my partner has deemed, the world’s smallest breast reduction. The first nurse did tell me I’d probably be fine but I feel a curdle of foolishness worm its way inside me. We are all dying; each of us only having a set amount of finite days left before time wears our bodies down. We will probably be fine tomorrow, and the next day, and next week, too. As I walk to the bus stop, my partner sends me a text: a photo of him crowding our cats on the sofa. Come home to us! Underneath the warmth of my fresh wound and the stickiness of summer days, my heart flares a bit brighter. I will be okay; This, I am certain of. 

Published 2nd September, 2024.


Evelyn Freja is a young writer based in New York City, where she lives with her partner and their two fluffy cats. Her work has appeared in Entropy Magazine, NPR, and NYU’s literary magazine, Dovetail.

One of her recent pieces, "Painful Probablys," offers a poignant exploration of family history and the fragility of life. In "Painful Probablys," Evelyn reflects on the generations of family members who came before her, focusing on the emotional and physical legacies they leave behind. The piece delves into her personal experience of not knowing her grandmother, highlighting how this absence has shaped her understanding of life’s impermanence. By examining the gaps in her family history, Evelyn confronts the reality that life and the human body are ever-shifting and can be surprisingly fragile. Through this lens, the piece captures the essence of how our connections to past generations, even when incomplete, influence our perceptions of our own existence. Evelyn’s contemplation of her grandmother’s absence serves as a broader meditation on the vulnerability inherent in all human life.

Outside of writing, Evelyn enjoys baking new recipes, finding it to be a satisfying creative outlet that complements her literary work. She also draws inspiration from wandering the sunny streets of New York City, where the city’s vibrant energy and diverse neighborhoods offer endless creative stimulation.

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