Gall
- Nov 18, 2020
- 3 min read
by Jacqueline Doyle
I won’t lie, I’m worried about this operation coming up, but my gallstones are near about killing me. My sister Letitia says I’m worrying too much, but then she’s always been all about me, me, me. Like the time she ran over me with her tricycle and fell over and shrieked and blubbered, “Momma, am I gonna have a scar on my knee?” And as usual Momma was rocking and soothing her, not worrying about whether Letitia had broke any of my bones or knocked me out, because I’m supposed to be the sturdy one. “Angela’s built like a truck,” Momma said once when I was a teenager, and didn’t care whether she hurt my feelings. How come I’m the one has to have an operation, then? Why not Letitia? Who’s never been in a hospital in her life, by the way. “You probably can’t wear a bikini after this,” she said. “But you’ve never cared about your looks.” How could I, when everyone always said she was the pretty one? When Letitia entered that beauty contest Momma was all for it. In my opinion Letitia didn’t have a chance. Her eyes are too close together, for one thing, and she’s got ugly knees. But Momma kept saying she had the Dillworth good looks and wasn’t she just a dream, and spent all this money on a pink satin dress and rhinestone tiara and a trip to the hairdresser who gave her curls. “You’re only this pretty once in your life,” Momma said, and we all knew she was thinking about how she was junior prom queen when she was a girl. Momma used to show us pictures and then she stopped, like she forgot all about it, or it was too painful once she started putting on weight. Letitia says she knows someone who woke up during an operation and felt all the pain but couldn’t move or talk to tell the doctors. Of course she’d know someone like that. Of course she’d tell me. No one worries too much about Angela’s feelings, especially not Letitia. Momma said they used to give you something when you had a baby so you forgot how terrible it was later. I should ask for that, she said. But I don’t know what’s worse when you go through something painful. Remembering or not remembering. Like would I feel better if I didn’t remember Letitia stealing my first boyfriend? “You’re just not his type,” she said, “He didn’t want to say so.” Momma didn’t say a word, not a word. She’s not sure she can make it to the hospital next week and of course Letitia’s too busy, which is just as well, but I’m supposed to have a driver take me home and I don’t know who to ask. Letitia’s asked me for plenty of favors, plenty. Maybe after they take out my gall bladder I won’t be so pissed off all the time. I asked the doctor but he said he doesn’t think so. “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” he said.
Jacqueline Doyle’s flash chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. Her flash has appeared in Wigleaf, CRAFT, matchbook, and Juked, and has been reprinted in the “Creative Nonfiction Sunday Short Reads” series and longlisted in the “Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions.” She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be found online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter @doylejacq.
