To Save a Life

Center your story around someone’s public image and private self colliding.

BEHIND THE MASK

They said in the 1800s that the masks weren't needed anymore. They had cured it! The plague. It was all over. We had done it. We eradicated small pox. We killed typhoid fever. We ended at all. The pus, the boils. We lanced all of the big, eroded, slimy cysts and removed all the abscesses. We did it! Medical science has killed pestilence.

Then, what were the masks for? The bird beaks, the potions, the gothic towers? What were those long nights for, the books written under sooty candlelights? What was it for? The jars full of pickled body parts, the sick roaming from town to town, the people turned away from homes of healing?

Oh god, what was it for?

Today, they discuss desires. Women sit in offices, asking strangers where they need therapies. They give long, drawn out procedures over months and months.

An oncologist sits in her office, holding a trophy. She had done the impossible: a patient cured of lupus. The radiation was administered, doses over months. The woman in the bathroom had wretched tumors inside her, shrunk day by day. The oncologist sits in her office, holding scans of a beloved's legs, her lymph nodes, her blood streams, the pooling life inside this girl.

The oncologist sits in her coat, white and pure. Sterile. She smells of antiseptics: chemical, clean sharp alcohol. She stares at the months of work. Imported chemicals, imported medical bags, imported hospital bed, the months of her patient living in rooms without germs under bright lights which expose all your faults.

The oncologist wears a mask in the operating room. No spit in the wound during surgery. She lances, removed discolored tissues, calls for scalpels 40°, 27°. She dices, clean and easy, leaving the clean and removed the infected. She replaces blood, she checks vitals. She breathes adrenaline and sweats caffeine.

The patient lives another ten, twenty years. Maria, her patient, goes back to her life. She calls and writes and sends flowers to the oncologist's workplace.

The oncologist's name is Elizabeth. She works for sixty hours every week with her mask on, taking the sick to healthy, bringing the dead back to life.

My god, there are masks that we all wear, ways we tie our hair back and put surgeon caps on, wear special glasses and operate tiny forceps to remove tumors and suture the traumatized back together. There are ways to bring the dead back to life.

So we did it. We killed pestilence and ushered in an era of safe, ungodly science which killed tumors and malignant diseases. We killed tuberculous and masked up for ourselves and the world.

Elizabeth sits in her home, warm yellow sunlight pouring in. Her kids play with Maria's kids in elementary school. Maria's kids bring in toys which they share. They both catch the same colds and cry at the same movies. Elizabeth dresses her kids, checks their homework, makes them snacks, and laughs with them when they make a perfect mistake. Elizabeth celebrates with them when they make the lead role in the school play, cheers for them at their music recitals, drives them to their cold, muddy soccer games. Her work is left in a tidy briefcase at home.

Afterwards, on the pitch, Maria's kids and Elizabeth's kids fall over on each other on the muddy, wet soccer courts. Elizabeth's daughter cries: her arm is red and bloody. Maria's daughter scoops her up and brings her to the side of the field.

They ask scientists and doctors: you did it, but did you think it through? Did you ever want to do it? Was it good for humanity? Sometimes, there is the moment between when my breath is held up tight inside me and the answer. When I look out into the vast, screaming world, and say, "I don't know." For Elizabeth though? I think the answer is yes, there was the time she saved a life, and her world was better for it.

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