1.
Maybe, that morning, I was singing. I know I was happy, caught up in the golden light, the rhythmic swish of broom straw. I walked in front of my house, sweeping clear the sidewalk of yellow hackberry leaves sticky with sap. Nostalgic musk of autumn—leaf rot and a neighbor’s fire—wafted on the cool air. Something rustled on the ground near the crape myrtle. Just a small rustle, but I jumped, then froze. Long ago on this very concrete I unwittingly swept a silent snake into a sprung coil, and still, years later, I startle at every little sound. Still, years later, I’m questioning—how well I see in the fading light, my courage in any wilderness. When I heard the rustle again, I crouched and studied the yews, expecting a cardinal or sparrow to flit from their evergreen branches. Instead I spied something small and furry in the ivy ground cover. Something I couldn’t name. Not a chipmunk, I decided as I watched, not a mole, but like a mole. I went inside right then to look it up.
Shrew makes me think of Shakespeare, of England, of a woman screaming obscenely at a snake—indeed, the word’s definition as a scolding, malignant woman may have preceded the meaning I focus on now: small insectivorous mammal. Long pointed snout, very small eyes, short velvety fur. Thirty years on this same little knoll of land near the river, all my life in Tennessee, and I’ve finally seen one of the most common mammals in the North American wild—if you count my yard in town as wild, which I do. A soft burrower some might call cuddly, the shrew was intent on its business among the fading ivy and fallen leaves. Nothing that would harm you or me. But consider the venom stored in ducts near its incisors. Capable of paralyzing mice, voles, rabbits, even cats. A hungry shrew can consume a body much larger than itself.
2.
When the nurse called to say I needed a second scan, she did not have to say right breast. I already knew. The pain had burrowed inside me like a tiny woodland shrew, its mouth clamped and constant on some root deep in the hill of my flesh. When did the pain begin? Maybe with the corporate takeover. Or after my husband quit his job. During the hellish commute. When the kids graduated, or the dog died. Or earlier, when rumors escalated. When the pipes leaked. When the ceiling fell. When I couldn’t quit saying yes.
The first time I visited the surgeon, her hands on my lymph nodes sent a current of peace through my neck, then my whole body. I knew I would be okay. That did not stop me resenting the scalpel. Afterward, when she said she’d left a marker in my breast, something for future radiologists who’ll read my future mammograms, I thought first of a stone monument in a historic battlefield, a solemn reminder: something violent happened here. Then I thought of BINGO—how, when I was a kid, we’d make little heaps like mole hills of our round cardboard markers before someone started calling our luck. B-9. G-54. But then the surgeon pinched her thumbnail to forefinger and said, Like a small seed, and I thought of my mother reciting the gospel. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed. Though my own belief is unsteady, each time the surgeon touched me I knew she was ordained. Later, she spoke unfamiliar words: hyperplasia, metaplasia, duct ectasia. Here’s all I understood: she’d never seen anything like what she took from my body. A thick yellow-tan material. Benign, she said. Necrosis, she said, plus something she didn’t have a name for. Of course I looked it up when I got home. Localized death of tissue. I’d been dying inside. I could’ve told her that.
Kory Wells nurtures community through writing, storytelling, and arts initiatives. “In the Undergrowth” will appear in her forthcoming collection from Harbor Editions, The Body Shelters in Song. A former poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she is also author of two poetry collections, most recently Sugar Fix from Terrapin Books. Her poetry has been featured on The Slowdown from American Public Media, and her award-winning creative nonfiction appears in Blue Earth Review, Nashville Scene, The Plentitudes, Salvation South, and elsewhere.
