Free You Take It From Here by Pamela Ribon Page B

and hack out more of my lung. But it wouldn’t give me too much more time, and I’d be stuck in a hospital bed for six months. I’m not spending half my remaining life in a hospital bed. I’m spending it with you.”
    These are the years when we’re supposed to be taking our bodies for granted, just starting to feel morning aches andpains, not thinking of your parts as failing, as killing you. She’s still supposed to be invincible.
    “Last time I didn’t feel like I had cancer,” she said. “The doctors and tests and X-rays all forced me to acknowledge it was happening. The surgeries and the rounds of chemo made it clear. I remember thinking, ‘Well, let’s just get through this.’”
    Smidge stretched her legs, pointing and flexing her toes.
    “This time it’s different,” she said. “This time I feel it everywhere. It is weighing me down, and I have been in the worst pain. This is no way to live. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to be me. I hate feeling pathetic. And finally: my skin is disgusting. Cancer sucks. The end.”
    “Why is this happening?” I asked, as if there’d be an answer I’d accept. “How?”
    “They shipped me with defective parts, I guess.”
    It wasn’t fair that Smidge had to come over to the bed and hold my fetal shape while I cried. She shouldn’t ever have been the one to do the comforting. But I was grateful she wrapped herself behind me, pushed back my hair, and clucked into the top of my head like I was her child. I slammed my eyes tight, attempting to keep that moment preserved. I needed it then, because I knew I was going to need to be able to bring back the feeling of that moment for the rest of my life. It was right then I felt our time start to run out.
    “Maybe I won’t die,” she whispered. We were like heartbroken teenagers again, just like in high school when some boy wronged us in some way that seemed world crushing. Weeping and exhausted, clutching each other by the bones.
    “Maybe I’ll scare death away,” she said, like it was all just a ghost story. “I’ll be mean to it. But, hey, listen. I’m not getting treatment. And I’m not wasting time having to deal with everybody doing exactly what you’re doing right now. They can cry later. I want my last days to be happy ones. So you get to sleep on this tonight, but tomorrow we get to work, missy.”
    I don’t know how or when I fell asleep, but at some point I woke to find Smidge sitting at the edge of the bed, appearing to be counting the very same floor squares I’d tallied earlier.
    The sound of my stirring pulled her from her thoughts. She turned, her face instantly waking, everything pulling in different directions at once, as she shifted from “neutral” to “on,” like someone had pressed her power button.
    “You look like shit,” she said, not unkindly. “That is some serious cry-face you’ve got going on.”
    My eyelids were swollen thick; I could see them hovering at the top of my line of vision. My lips were equally puffy, like my mouth had just held a convention for bees. The back of my throat was raw from swallowing down too much information, and my stomach burned with all the things I didn’t know how to say.
    “You were talking in your sleep,” she said. “Something about medication, so I’m sure it was me you were talking to.”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Well, it got me thinking, and I want you to know something. You know how you told me sometimes after people die, they come and visit you in your dreams?”
    This happened with my grandmother, who showed up in my dream the night after she died to hand me a pinwheel andtell me always to finish my oatmeal. In college, a professor of mine was in a fatal car accident. I saw him in a dream the following week, where he informed me that he hadn’t gotten around to grading my paper because he left it at Kermit the Frog’s house, but that he called Kermit, who said the paper was a solid B. I remember that dream because I woke