Positive

1. READING THE RESULTS I don’t move, but the inside corner of my right eye turns glassy, then shatters, hands focus more sharply. I don’t move, but the pigeon shudders on the sill. The door opens to a maze of wallpaper, family photos— their bliss-frieze burns the last unaffected corner of my sight, like molten Karo. My husband’s mouth collapses, and the air about his shoulders has crystallized. We don’t say a word, all the noise is around us, the letter, half-folded, on the desk, an albatross, a dove. 2. POSITIVE Because in those days there were no words for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning: enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools of butter, little sides of sautéed onions, paper cups of pure sour cream, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, no ice, as chaser, but now when the call comes I’m sitting in the kitchen with two plastic funnels over my breasts and the pump on the coutner with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table, milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word heroin makes me feel the lovely way a body can go slack from inside out. 3. A SINGLE DROP I’d never paid much mind to my implements, but now I paint “Fire Engine Red” on the handle of my razor, a single drop on my nail clippers, one long stroke on my lethal toothbrush to cordon off my blood, I tend and sop each splash or seep, soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets— every bleeding gum, torn hangnail, paper cut, scrape, gully  of cracked lip another hazard, each infectious throb now forever watched as I patrol my body’s raging arroyo in the family bathroom, to keep my children safe from me. 4. PAPER GOWNS X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing those delicate petals (gaping, cold through the sleeves). He asks me to extend my palms: the motion is of pushing away. Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft tup, tup, tup, along my spine, as if checking a cantaloupe. There is a piece of gum beneath the windowsill, green imprint of a thumb. We’re talking percentages, genotypes, we’re talking bundled pharmaceuticals. Studies, it seems, are inconclusive. I try to look at the big picture: a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash, neither in, nor out. On the insurance card, raised numbers, black ink worn away. There's a girl on the street with her head back, the strap of her dress falling carelessly.