by Beth Kanter
She stares at the sticky notes on her laptop, her bathroom mirror, and her refrigerator door, the ones on which she has scribbled the word breathe, BREATHE the fluorescent squares scold and when she covers her ears to muffle their sound she wonders, as she has for some time, if Saturday will be her 53rd birthday or her first birthday for in her bone marrow, her brain, and her teeth, four of which have cracked this past year from her nighttime gnashing, she feels that she has existed far more than 365 days and nights, a trip around the sun she would wish on no one, no one except the ones responsible for short circuiting her impulse to take in air and humanity, and, if she is being honest, which she is, she wishes worse on them, a lot worse, so she starts a wish-on-them list, she turns over a breathe notes and writes “three-hour-long dentist appointments,” “therapy bills denied by insurance,” and “mirrors covered in garish yellow reminders,” she puts the word “reminders” in tiny lowercase letters because she has run out of room, which she believes proves that nothing that can easily fit on a square can move her closer to knowing how old she will be this weekend for how could she possibly answer the question of her age when her legs wobble like a one-year-old learning to walk while at the same time her knees and ankles throb on winter mornings like a 53-year-old forced to re-learn how to stand, which is another way of saying she doesn’t know if that make her 53.1 or 1.53 or, 54 because 53 and 1 equal 54 but that is simple math and nothing is simple anymore and while she doesn’t remember much math she does know that in order to get full credit, and someone should take credit, she must show her work but it’s still not enough to show how she arrived at this moment, a moment in which she is both old enough to be on the edge of death and not old enough to be dead but certainly old enough to think about what it must be like to be old enough to be dead and perhaps that is because a piece of herself, a piece that once made her herself, no longer gets adequate blood flow because of the ghastly thing, the thing that haunts her, the thing she found out last year, the thing that leaves her not understanding if that piece of her gets birthdays anymore, or if it even wants or deserves a birthday anymore, which does not quantify what has been lost, which sounds like division, long division, very long division, division so long that it falls off the page, the page she is using to show her work, which is just another way of saying she no longer knows how many candles should be on her cake come Saturday because how can she use numbers that line up in a row to count what does not line up, so she decides that she no longer will give her age when asked for the simple and not-at-all-vanity-related-reason that she no longer knows, similarly she has decided to cross out the word happy from any cards she receives on Saturday so they only will say birthday, the happy redacted as it has been since learning what she now knows, the thing that has cracked her teeth and god knows what else, the thing that has lead to a life full of sticky notes demanding her breath, the thing that prevents her from solving for X, all of which is another way of saying she will only mark her birthday by marking up cards because that is the only thing she can do to make the past year, the first full year of her life knowing what she can never unknow, erase, or crack, count.
Beth Kanter’s work has appeared in a variety of publications including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Writer, Identity Theory, Idle Ink, and the Chicago Tribune. Beth won a UCLA James Kirkwood Literary Prize for her novel-in-progress, Paved With Gold, and the short story on which it’s based won the Lilith magazine fiction contest. When not writing, she leads creative nonfiction workshops. You can read more of her work at bethkanter.com.
Emerge Literary Journal 