Beyond 10,000 by Reece Gritzmacher

Photo by Leon Liu on Unsplash

You can’t stop dancing the night you learn your breast requires incision. Call your body a fountain of movement. You moonwalk sloppily from kitchen counter to trashcan. You spin in stockings. It’s not that you want surgery. Unlike many friends, you want to keep your breasts, whatever your pronouns. Unlike other friends, you don’t want reduction. Not to what some could call honey and bumble B’s. Okay, no some. Okay, no one. Okay, nauseous. No need to call a boob honey, Honey, but here’s where the right one bumbled: it grew a lump. That lump is keeping on.

You remind yourself not to run but look at you bounce up stairs. For dishes? Your journal? A tissue? Any excuse to step between here and there. There, there, the radiologist didn’t need to say, but she did say you’ll need a surgeon. And, even though you are just 29—short of 30, boob adulthood—a mammogram. You keep moving because you’ve been under strict orders to not increase your heart rate or engage in strenuous activity and you hit your limit. On your evening walk tonight, you were faster than yesterday. But you weren’t breathing hard, you told the air. It’s not as though you want your biopsy site to ruby. It’s not as though you seek infection.

The good news is the lump isn’t cancerous, your radiologist began. With an opener like that, you knew there’s an And. But. Even so.

Noncancerous but the lump could behave so—spread to other tissue, blossom and bloom your breast into an unbreastlike flower. But let’s stay away from any birds and bees metaphors. There will be no pollen here. 

Six months ago, you absentmindedly checked your breast while in the thick of busywork and your fingers met rubber within an instant. Call to campus health clinic two minutes before close. Emergency ultrasound. 6-month follow-up this week. Sudden ultrasound-guided core needle biopsy. 

You walked slowly for two days, post-biopsy, slower than pre-Industrial Revolution glacial melt. Lingered in Ace bandage. Iced with frozen spinach. When the greens thawed, you placed them back in the freezer. FDA-approved assistance? FDA still hasn’t approved the best chance of ending this pandemic.

You could only hibernate for a day and a half, and only on these terms: still get your 10,000 steps, however sluggish.

13,500 yesterday, oops. There’s a world you must see. No turtle in sight, and herons might be gone for the summer, but look: ducks, squirrels, coots, bluebirds, and one luminous goldfinch.

How to say you’ve considered your mortality since age 12? You made peace with the possibilities before ever placed beneath hands or a scope?

So: you will dance. You will steal movement. Become a thief of motion. In a month or two, you’ll be put under. Cut with scalpel. But now? Thrill at this body, this body—all yours.

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Reece Gritzmacher lives in Northern Arizona in a mountain town surrounded by ponderosa pines, but grew up hugging trees in the Pacific Northwest. Their poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming on Barrelhouse, Sundog Lit, Bending Genres, Ghost City Review, and elsewhere. They are a Tin House Summer Workshop participant and hold an MFA from Northern Arizona University. You can find them at www.reecegritzmacher.com.