The doctor said she would live in a nursing home, confined to a wheelchair, crippled by pain. That was thirteen years ago. Instead, Mirissa D. Price is a 2019 DMD candidate at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, spreading pain-free smiles, writing through her nights, and, once again, walking through her days. As a Huffington Post blogger and emerging writer, Mirissa has publications in Yellow Chair Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Tuck Magazine, and more. Follow Mirissa’s writing at https://mirissaprice.wordpress.com/. The Differential Diagnosis of Terror I can tell you why your heart scribbles in irregularly irregular markings on the printout of an ECG, and I can tell you why you’re living on the edge of cardiac dysfunction when your chest starts to burn. I was trained to understand senility in your drawing of a clock at half past ten, and I understand your dyspnea when you start to pant after two steps of work. I can explain to you the difference in your blood pressure from when you rest to the moment when you rise, and I can deduce why your bones ache now that you have aged. I was taught to hear your triumph through your words, and to use caution when calling your pain a chief complaint. But I never took a class in how to comfort a refugee of terrorism, and I never felt the pulse of a man taking cover from a bomb. I only can imagine the smell of flesh turning grey under scalding flames, and can’t even picture the arrhythmia of thoughts that must traverse your mind when trapped in the hatred of an extremist plot. Because that’s what it was – Hatred that turned you from a Turkish brother to a patient, victim of a blast at 18:40, a time I wouldn’t even recognize on a clock. And that’s what it was – Extreme violence that impeded the sinus tachycardia of your heart in a moment I couldn’t even begin to diagnose the condition of a terrorist who saw no other meaning in an irregularly irregular rhythm than as that – a target. And I wish I could interpret this violence, too, as a mere fibrillation without consequence, an electrical anomaly in LED lines, because then I wouldn’t see your bloodied body as familiar, your tears as misdiagnosed pain; when I was trained as a doctor to look for solutions buried in the physiology of a fracture, and after Paris, Beirut, New York and Ankara, I still have no scientific rationale for what the news tries to explain. The Color of an Oscar ‘Needle lace’ - that's what the store clerk told me. Only the best attire for the Oscars. And the winner is. Never the blacks, to be politically correct. But it comes in red, mauve, and skin tone. She said, in a store five blocks from the QuikTrip. Where an unarmed man was shot. He was brown, though. I noticed, in the microfiber rubbings of my sofa. But at 4:37 p.m., the death certificate only had four boxes: White. Hispanic. Asian. African. American, they called this spectacle of stars on commercial break. I pick mauve. The color of my flesh. One Click Away I feel dirty sometimes when I turn the lipstick out of the tube, I think it’s the shape; and the color, so ripe, like a pop-up notification on my msn homepage. And that’s how I get my news – in dirty little pop-ups of what google says I should read like the breaking story that Cesar Millan’s whispers are damning to my golden retriever’s carefree clicks of his salivating tongue. And though my dog is two-thousand miles away, I can hear those carefree clicks each time I follow the internet’s lure to the next trending topic – because trends define our nation’s focus: on a woman with bi- paternal twins, a medical anomaly, a personal curiosity. I turn to the comments often, before finishing the content, wondering what hypotheses are stirring to explain the miracle of two men fertilizing one woman within the same ovulatory cycle. I’m sure the reporters asked that question, the same way I’m sure they asked ‘how’ could a baby die unvaccinated, but that’s not their job, or is it - stirring the pot of Facebook uproar, and ‘uproar’ happened to be highlighted in the article, linking me to news of middle school graffiti – art and swastikas burning the minds of children. They really are just children when they first log into Facebook, onto e-mail, when they first browse across the tale of lawmakers proposing a break from Eastern Time. And if not for hashtags, those kids wouldn’t know it’s a story, replayed the same each year, planting seeds of progress in the hidden truth of complacency. I would call it that – complacency, our acceptance of dual core processing speed of ideas in a society still running on dial-up. But I control-plus’ed on the jpeg clock on the http page on the digital tablet of the news, and I found that crack in the space between two and three, the twenty-fifth hour. They never taught us to read like that in school, when we still read news on the ink-stained pages of rolled-up paper, in the days when I didn’t know about 9/11 because I didn’t know how to read, because I wasn’t yet tall enough to reach the remote, control is what I’d call the dirty little secret that news is happening faster than I can click, and creativity is how I’d paint the pop-up reality that msn tells me what to know, as I choose the screen magnification suitable for opioid overdose. And I wonder how I’ll explain to my kids that I feel dirty sometimes, to read that Trump is done debating and to know that their seventeen-year-old babysitters have a voice in our future without their hands ever touching the grease of printer-pressed reports, without my hands absorbing the sweat- smeared tone of importance that ink once gave to news that Times have changed. Wait for the Second Ring I wonder if Obama used a landline to call Putin - for the prestige in tangled cords, after all after all the children were bludgeoned by terrorism for over five years, just remember, and this weekend when one-hundred thirty died near Damascus, for our leaders to pick up the phone – I wonder if the Syrian residents listened at the door once that last thirty-one mattered. To the news - it sounded majestic declaring peace in hushed whispers, all the men sent to war with their wives, all the leaders setting deadlines they’ll change; but I wonder if Lavrov and Kerry wore white while talking - about what color they’d choose to sign their names in history, though in retrospect, a history book only buries white words scratched in principle, under ink of real change, and I have to wonder if the Oval Office plans to use a fax machine in The Event: when they actually sign a cease-fire diplomacy – it’s tradition in the digital age to return to basics of humanity: We will not kill We will not fire We will not devastate with words no one entrusts to hold power; and I have to wonder if Obama put Putin on hold when his secretary called, “Come and answer.”
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