"This Is Your Voice, Okay?" by Megan Wildhood

This Is Your Voice, Okay?

When you say “ph,” I say, “huh?” Ph. Huh? Th. Huh? Fff. Huh? I don’t know why it was ten years before I’d had enough of looking at my brain — baby brain I demanded long past the stage I was also asserting I was not a baby — and made my mom keep my scans on her phone until I was old enough to get my own (phones and scans, as it would turn out), but this F-sound business probably wasn’t it. My mom loves me in a high-pitched way so, although her heart could barely walk those six months we lived in the hospital for the last three rounds of my treatment, she let me look inside my head every day, starting then. My tumor, which also looked like a mini-brain, sat on my cerebellum, and it could have gone either way: paralyzed me from the waist down or stopped my breathing in my sleep when no one was around to hear me not-screaming. The chemo to kill it took the top off my hearing, too, before I learned to talk, so my mom had to tell me later about how there were three different sounds I was F-ing up. When I read out loud, my face kind of does the F now, but you’d have to tell me if there’s enough of a difference for you. I’m not as confident as all that, but I can sometimes coach myself by replaying my mom’s encouragement when I was fumbling, learning how to talk: this is your voice, okay, dear? This is just your voice.
I’ve got a scar on my neck that makes me look like the first person they tried to upload to immortality. You’ll always be able to see it because my hair isn’t going to grow back fully. When I got to middle school, the other kids asked if I was dressed up as a human who could unzip this suit I’m wearing and peel it off to reveal what I really am — an alien. I don’t like to do this thing everyone around me does, which is to make up reasons for why terrible things happen and call them “lessons.” I don’t think there are reasons. I’m not okay with doing that, but I’m more okay with it than when people jam things like childhood cancer for one sibling, and not the others, into life lessons.
My cancer was among the phive threaking percent — what, that’s just my voice, okay? — that is genetic in a 50/50 kind of way, yet I have two, live siblings who both still own their bodies free and clear and are young enough that they like to look at my brains, too, and to think shaping their hands into guns and shouting pew pew pew at the scans is helpful. They’re too young to understand time, so they think they’re saving me. I think they saved my parents. Also, there’s one on the way, so there are a million things to do, and they’re the same things as yesterday and the day before. We have to keep doing the same things over and over again, because death? Inflicting consciousness on another human being is not a choice I would have made, and I’m actually not sure when it would have happened — 13 months ago from the looks of my mom, but theoretically, I mean. Dad’s been out for “the season,” a much longer one than the past 11 ones I remember: we got ginormous rain. Like unarguable-evidence-of-climate-chaos-rain, and a whole lot of the older saguaros burst.
Now, that’s something it turns out you — and even I — can hear. It’s quieter, naturally, I think, with a pitch between mom’s first-child love and helium escaping a balloon slowly, which is why I didn’t know that exploding cactus is what I was hearing out my window all those spring-to-summer nights. I didn’t think to ask, but I don’t think Mom knew either, and Dad wouldn’t have known because he can’t hear stuff like that anymore. Mom estimates that it took three seasons of cactus duty — you have to remove the dead or too-big ones, preferably before they blow, with a jack hammer — for him to figure out he needed ear protection, which was, of course, too late.
“How’d you know there was a problem in the first place?”
“I whispered our good nights like I have every night since your treatment started, and he didn’t.” She looked at me, and then said, “He wasn’t asleep, and he wasn’t ignoring me,” before I could ask.
“When did you get my dogs?” I asked instead. Two Portuguese water dogs, so dog hair is a condiment in our house. Mimmy and Jasper seem like names I would have given dogs, but no one gets two huge, hairy dogs after they already have one kid, let alone four, so it seems like they might have been there before me. I sometimes dream that they will be after. Flipkick, the third Porty they rescued, died after only a few years of us having him, just like I have a 75-percent chance of doing. Remission doesn’t erase those odds. Nothing does, so why get all weird about life? Other sixth-graders don’t get that, and not even I, who didn’t choose to exist and probably wouldn’t have, want to die alone.
I don’t know if it was because of those odds or because my gramma thought my hearing loss meant I couldn’t hear anything — which might be because she can’t really hear anything — but she gave me these shoes with pictures of the silhouettes of the alders in her backyard that I’m pretty crazy about climbing printed on them because she thinks I need visual I love yous. Or she thinks this is what high-schoolers of the future will wear, and she thinks there is such a thing as good omens.
The night she gave them to me, I woke up cold and drenched from a dream that there are tumors strapped all over me inside, and the chemo this time is like walking through an oven for your veins and makes me translucent, so I look like a road map. I don’t know where I would lead, though. I’m not okay with meaninglessness, but it makes the most sense at this point. I shout thank you into her right ear, which still, I’m told, registers some sound, and she laughs two laughters before waving her hand at the slanty lines of sun on her blue shag rug.
On her wall is a framed poster with her favorite quote from her favorite movie: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” So, life is . . . bad for you and only given on special occasions?
“How you feeling there, fuzz?” Fuzz because of how I talk, not the longstanding state of my scalp. But her love is so powerful that I feel even that as love.
“Tiny.” It just comes out. A synonym for small that doesn’t have an S or a TH or a P because my brain has gotten good at helping me avoid thounding thmushed in the face. I may not be able to hear those stupid sounds, but I know what they feel like in my mouth.
“Stay that way for as long as you need to.” She nods resolutely and strokes my hair behind my ear. “Except that voice.” Her rocker creaks like a cactus. “Nothing going to stay small about that, okay?” I salute her.
The way she talks about the saguaros, no wonder that’s where my dad is every summer. Also, when they burst, they sound like joints cracking but with a little more music or tone or something. It’s still one of those that you probably wouldn’t say you’ve heard if someone had asked you, even if you had heard it, like a baby mountain goat (squeak toy), or how a towel snaps when your mom is having impromptu quiet time in the bathroom and you walk in (more like a camera shutter than you would ever guess). But not like a stillborn baby, which is the same as a not stillborn baby because not all babies cry when they’re born, the doctors say and say and say and say. Sometimes, they say, it just takes a while to know you’re here, okay?

Megan Wildhood

Megan Wildhood is a creative writer, scuba diver, and social-services worker, known for her large, idiosyncratic earring collection. Her poetry chapbook, Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), ruminates on sororal estrangement and volleying the challenges of growing up on the planet that’s nearly on fire. An excerpt of her novel manuscript was published by AMP, Hofstra’s literary magazine in May 2019. Her other work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Sun, and Yes! Magazine. She regularly writes for Real Change and Mad in America. She wants to connect with other weary humans around issues of mental and emotional distress, creating real community from the ashes of individualism and finding real hope, if only as an act of defiance, in these tattered days. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

Headshot: Megan Wildhood

Photo Credit: Staff