Alary Things | Hilary Fair
Millie fills her chair. Fills the room with her voice. Arms crossed over plump chest over pink robe, she asks if I want to see something amazing.
I do not.
I want to continue staring into my iPhone at a cheeky-bottomed swimsuit I will not buy because I cannot afford it and because my ass is soft and pocky from sitting through too many COVID-years inside.
It is Monday and my mood is drab as the gray-beige paint in here, the misting rain outside. I’m immune to the peppy, highlighter-pink of my gown. Unmoved by the stickers stuck to the mirrors promising: You are beautiful.
Millie leans in anyway, holding out her own iPhone. Despite myself, I look. On it, a picture her daughter took of a lone cirrus cloud, its wispy, fleeting body immortalized against a blue Kitsilano sky.
Here in Ontario, spring has been endlessly damp after the darkest winter recorded in seventy-three years. Here in this mammography lab, Millie and I sit in our robes, waiting for techs with gentle hands to lift and tuck and squeeze and photograph our tissues.
“An angel wing,” I say, lingering on the image.
Millie sits back, satisfied.
An older woman once taught me to look for hearts. I find them easily now—in tree burls and beach stones and, once, a clump of cat litter.
A tech appears, beckoning to me, and I leave Millie behind. She’s still in her chair, still has arms crossed over plump chest over pink robe.
Neither of us knows, yet, what our scans will reveal. Or that the sun will peek through today. Or that in the coming weeks I will think of Millie when I notice the alary quality of other things: the arc of a rain-soaked cedar frond pasted to a shingled roof; the curve of a dried milkweed pod backlit by sun and lake and sky; a photograph from an animal sanctuary, showing a cluster of kittens, their tiny bodies feathering out from a shared food bowl, creating a patchy-but-perfect wing.
About the Author:
Hilary lives near the shores of Lake Huron (in Canada) with a high-energy husband and a high-energy dog who prevent bouts of quiet, writerly isolation from lasting too long. When she can focus, her essays sometimes win or get short-listed for awards and published in some of her favorite places—The New Quarterly, Event, and Prairie Fire, among them.