anticoagulant author-ity...

Yesterday morning, she ventured alone back into the phlebotomy labyrinth...the requisite pre-surgery bloodletting. I called her during the day, at noon, and asked about the labyrinth. I interrupted her lunch at The Italian Store, an Arlington eatery. "Everything was fine," she exhaled between bites of antipasto.

Hours after the excursion she punctuated her pillow talk. "Wrote something...while I was waiting at Georgetown." I expected her to reach for a journal. Instead, Daniela skipped a few steps to her office and returned with a scrap of paper...a receipt for purchases made at Heidelberg Pastry Shoppe. 3"x 7" is an unusual size for stationery. I rotated the receipt and read.

The oncology tax is anything but regressive. Each transaction within the metastasis experience is also a tariff. Yesterday's currency was hemoglobin-based. She paid, as she has before. However, this time she did not dissolve herself in the collection spectacle. Her anthropological sensibilities surfaced and she stepped outside of the labyrinth...drawing emotions and ink atop an ounce of cellulose...basking in a re-emergent and authorial confidence. Her penmanship managed to trace, among other emotions and ideas, an outline of her old self.

(Click on the picture to peer at her prose.)