Collage

(A collage attempt, trying to figure out Canva)

There is this amazing book that is an art journal made by a woman as she guided her husband through his final illness. From that, I starting playing with making collages — digital ones. I started to get a little nostalgic about the days of multiple magazine/catalogue deliveries, and the pleasure of cutting out pictures with your hands. That was the start of today’s flash fiction.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedShe holds the magazine very close in her lap while she tears out the picture, small bit by small bit, just tiny tears, never enough noise to alert the receptionist or the other people in the waiting room.It is such an inherently selfish place -- the doctor's office, She need not worry so much about it. She could tear out whole pages and stuff them into her sleeves so that the ends hang out and she could run around the room flapping her arms like a bird, trailing brightly colored paper feathers. No one would take much notice. Not in this place. This liminal space, where the limits of your senses are the limits of your own skin, no further. Every mind, brain, and bit of awareness trained on that spot, that lump, that little misshapen freckle (or the hole where it used to be) and what is written on some bit of paper in the office just beyond the softly closing doors. All conscious thought wonders whether it will be a sit-down-in-the-comfy-leather-chairs-and-chat kind of visit or a go-directly-to-the-exam-room-and-put-on-a-paper-gown kind of visit, and which is better. She tears a centimeter at a time around the picture that caught her eye, the echinacea flower in the foreground with a background field of undifferentiated wildflowers. She wants to separate this single flower and believes that if she does so, perfectly and without notice, she will be escorted back to the room that means "clean" or "benign" or "no evidence of disease," and she can go on living as if this is the last and only time she will have to sit in a room with her fragility.