Free Live a Little by Kim Green

out a protest, he literally scoops both sets of erect fingers deep into my internal organs, as if I am dead and he is conducting an autopsy without the appropriate excavation tools.
    “Stop it!” I cry out involuntarily.
    He lessens the pressure slightly. “Mrs. Rose, you have a severe vata imbalance. I’m just trying to assess the state of your intestines and upper colon. Relax. I know it’s uncomfortable, but most of my patients start enjoying the release after a while.”
    Release? Enjoy? While?
    Cowed beyond speech, I lie back and try not to groan while horrible Dr. Minh tugs and pulls at my flesh and everything vital underneath. I try to maintain an open mind about the wonders of Eastern medicine but cannot imagine what medical benefit this torture is bestowing on me, the victim. Tears slide down my cheeks. All in all, I feel my performance is befitting an inoperable cancer patient who is having her internal organs pummeled and being denied a burrito.
    “Okay, all done. You can sit up now.”
    Shakily, I raise myself. To my embarrassment, the thick roll of flesh around my middle has jumped my underwear like an Olympic hurdler and spilled over, revealing the hated ridges of pale stretch marks and the thick coffee-colored line from navel to pubic bone that has lightened but not disappeared in the fifteen years since I last gave birth. For some reason I find it tolerable to be accused of carnivorous behavior but not to be visibly overweight. I can handle cancer and even Dr. Minh’s idea of restorative massage, but I cannot handle this hippie-biker-doctor person charging me with overeating my way to breast cancer.
    “It’s interesting,” he says, those amber eyes weighing mine. “Your pulses are fine. Your chi’s a little off, but that’s to be expected. I do have some suggestions for you. And a treatment regimen. I think we can do a lot for you. Are you going to be seeing an oncologist?” Minh must be the new kind of Chinese doctor: savvy, reimbursed by the HMOs, and ready to copilot with a cutter.
    “Yes. Meissner over at Stanford,” I say faintly. Thoughts of burritos have flown out the window along with my spleen.
    “Mrs. Rose, why don’t you get dressed, and Karen will show you to my office.” He slips away. I hear him conferring with beastly Karen, who has probably donned a Darth Vader helmet against my toxic incursion into her habitat.
    I jump off the table and quickly throw my clothes on. Karen comes back and leads me to a beautiful room with French doors off the garden. Dr. Minh is pouring himself a cup of tea. His desk is just as big as Meissner’s. On it are two photos: one of him with Xia Chi-Hong outside a pagoda, and another of him with a petite Chinese woman with a punk haircut and a baby in a papoose.
    “Green tea?” he says.
    “Please.” Predictably, even though the man just finished torturing me in the name of integrative health care, I want to please him.
    We sit down. Karen hands him a few messages. I see her finger, blunt of nail and too dirty for a respectable health-care professional, slide against his neck for a second.
    “Mrs. Rose, have you ever seen a picture of a colon?” he says as a way of segueing into my treatment plan. Frankly, I think it needs improvement.
    “Um, no.”
    Lo and behold, Dr. Minh has one on hand! He whips it out and lays it on the desk. It isn’t a real photo, thank God, just a series of illustrations.
    “This is what a carnivore’s colon looks like.” The organ in question is rotund and engorged, like a boa constrictor that has ingested a rat.
    “And this is a typical herbivore’s gastric system.” The slimmed-down version fits comfortably among its friends, some of which I can identify as gallbladder, stomach, and rectum.
    “Look at this.” Dr. Minh moves his finger over the third drawing. The figure is trim and content-looking, considering that he is sliced in half crosswise. “Have you ever considered giving up food?” he