Spirit Surgery

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. A perfectly blended spectrum of light, conjoining worlds.

The carnival grounds were clear, the tents shuttered and locked. Unlike the residual pyrotechnic haze from the evening fireworks that the theme park guests exited through to their vehicles, this late-night tango was an intimate spectacle.

Arriving home still dressed like a carnival wench, Clem remembered their horoscope for that day.

You might feel out of place among the people you’re with today. It’s normal to feel like a fish out of water during this transitional time and to have a heightened sense of how different you are from those around you. Take your time. The curtain will lift, and you’ll feel like yourself again soon, comfortable in your skin.

Peeling back the layers, Clem left a trail of costume drippings. The flowy skirt, white puffy shirt, and a corset tight enough to make friends. Stockings with runs in the toes. Soft suede ankle boots that took 11,000 steps that day, back and forth between the sword shop, the dungeon, and the courtyard stage.

Straight to the shower to put the fish back in the water, Clem’s eyes closed, and a smile welcomed the heat that framed that night’s rendezvous.

From behind the hospital curtain, somewhere on the other side, Dr. Dee came immediately, flipped their archaic pair of black oculars down, and got to work without a word.

Dr. Dee’s hands clasped into the shape of a revolver with two lit fingers pointing straight at the mole on Clem’s back. The one they had been stressing about all day. From forefingers blazed two flames of violet fire, cool to Clem’s skin that was thoroughly heated from the showering waterfall stream above. Spirals of fire penetrated the space between undefined cells where the idea of cancer could cling, and indeed where it did to many, and disappeared any trace of disease.

Dr. Dee worked in time transcended at the speed of thought. Her gun-shaped hands separated, and one palm pressed Clem’s shoulder familiarly, grasped with compassion, and she extinguished the mass of fear that had settled inside Clem’s skin, arbitrary boundary though it was. Dr. Dee massaged Clem’s neck as their work concluded, and the two friends sat in smiles. And they were, still, friends, although this otherworldly dynamic had dominated their relationship since Dr. Dee’s death.

The conversation during lunch that day had almost sent Clem teetering off the edge they usually stood upon. The carnival co-wenches were talking medical talk, the stuff that threatened Clem’s legs to tremor.

“I yelled at him for not going to a dermatologist,” Erin said to the picnic table full of corseted carnival queens.

“Who?” Clem asked.

“My Dad!” said Erin. “He had an itchy, irregular mole, the kind they tell you not to ignore, and he refuses to go to the dermatologist.”

“I don’t understand,” Amber said half buried in a mobile screen, maybe talking to it instead of the table. “Those are the cancerous ones.”

Heads nodded in mumbles amongst them.

“Maybe he doesn’t have insurance,” said Clem, who didn’t, as their arm twisted up behind their back to scratch a new mole. There, in the middle, somewhere unknown where Clem wouldn’t dare look. “Maybe he doesn’t trust doctors. Maybe he’s scared they’ll find something.”

Amber laughed at no one, or someone. “When I go to the dermatologist,” she said, “I want them to find something. That way, they can take care of it.”

“Do they?” Clem asked.

“They always do!” Amber laughed. “And then, they get rid of it!”

“I don’t worry about things like that,” Clem said, incapable of telling Amber how ridiculous her statement was. Incapable, because the words would fail halfway through the explanation of beliefs. Because Amber was lovable and sweet and didn’t deserve to feel like a fool. Because Clem felt too far past meeting her where she was at.

Erin, who was incapable of not asking and of not worrying about things like that, about any imperfection or symptom or sign, looked at Clem and asked, "Why don't you worry about things like that?"

Clem almost said it out loud.

But the others would have listened to Clem's answer because Clem never spoke. Filled the air with words, sure. Moved sound up from the diaphragm on breath that whooshed through the esophagus. Sure. Even shaped it into words with agreed-upon meanings and pushed them out of a jaw-clenched mouth in a way the wenches would’ve understood. But Clem never spoke the truth.

Dr. Dee’s fingers extinguished. No smoke circled where Clem’s skin was now smoothed over in perfectly healed hues of flesh that did not itch. The good doctor flipped their goggles up and looked Clem in the eyes.

“Done!” she said.

“Was it cancerous?” asked Clem, now brave enough to open their eyes to the hot water stream and stare down the shower drain to watch the day wash away, alone.

“Who knows,” Dr. Dee said, already pulling the curtain to exit their space somewhere behind the clouds. She was eternally funny. By Clem’s side all day, quiet as the background, hearing all the unsaid words. Probably blazing them away, sentence by sentence, one unmanifested fear at a time, soothed side by each with violet fire.

That was love, from behind the curtain, so adoring it could make a wench blush.

Comfortable in the space that was no better explained with words, Clem never peeked around the curtain when they danced through the veil each night, formless and sheer as a light-pierced cloud. The two friends nodded in gratitude for their work that evening, feeling but not knowing what they were preparing for. They weren’t ready. Clem had to allow their breath to push the words out of hiding, there behind the curtain, and speak the truth the next time a wench asked, “Why are you unafraid?”

Because I have a spirit surgeon.