Butt Quest

I caught it too late. I took a fastball to the knee and the lump slowly receded, but shortly after disappearing it had babies. The lumpy babies were tender on the back of my calves. I had hoped that maybe it was some forgotten bruise from a hard slide into home base.  Coach had said those kinds of injuries happened to him when he was coming up in the AAA’s— happened to Clarkson and Wilmont, the pros and the amateurs— that it was the game getting to know you. 

That being said, I didn’t think baseball was why my bones started burning from inside; like someone was scooping the marrow out with a hot knife. Obviously, I went to the nurse, because that’s what kids do when they want to go home early. Our school had one small, raven-haired nurse: Nurse Esmerelda. She was not from here in many ways.

“Where wrong, honey?”

I pointed to the back’s of my legs. “They kind of burn.”

“Lay."

I laid down on the small bed, my head in the pillow that had seen the sweat of a hundred sick children. I felt her pressure my spine with two fingers, working down to the small of my back. She was getting close. Close to my butt.

Would she touch it? Could she? She could. No one had ever touched my butt before. Most days, I forgot I even had a butt. I clenched my cheeks. My butt. What did it even look like? My pulse quickened, echoing inside of my butt. She could be taking pictures of my butt, putting it on the internet.

“No, my legs.” I hurried her along.

“Si, si.”

She wiped an alcohol pad on my calves and began massaging the largest lump, pushing it, squeezing it with her thumb and forefinger.

“Well?”

“Dios mio..”

“Dee’s oatmeal?”

“A disease from Mars!” she shouted, clicking her pen at me, “From the Transformers! The aliens bring trucks filled with sickness and explosions!”

“What!? What do you mean?!” I managed to scream into the pillow rather than try to sit up.

She started laughing. “I think cysts. Go see doctor.” She wrote me a note for missing half of English Literature, gave me a small piece of chocolate, and shooed me out the door.

I took one last look at Nurse Esmerelda as I left her, she was clutching her crucifix necklace, writing on a pad. 

I don’t know if you’ve had your bones hurt. Let's assume you haven't. It’s a nagging sort of pain. You can handle it at first, but then you take the maximum daily dose of your Extra Strength Tylenol and you wonder when the hell it’s going to get any better. There’s a few hours out of the day where it’s not causing you blurred vision and you think it’s getting better when all it’s really doing is winding-up for a screwball before it launches  makes you swing-and-a-miss so bad you stumble into the bathroom and clench your No. 2 pencil in your teeth so hard it snaps.  

Then you do visit the doctor.

The doctor very quietly takes some blood, sends you to a specialist at the area hospital, making sure to assure it’s “probably nothing.”

Then you go to the hospital for a “follow-up," but not to the good part, with all the medicine and the bandages and the fluids. You go to the offices. You never want to be in an office in a hospital. It means something has gone terribly wrong if you are seated in a comfortable chair and you cannot hear people hacking, inefficiently perishing.

My mother was  in the corner losing at solitaire on her phone. She had some wine. A juice box of wine in her purse, which she carried everywhere, even to work. She had been a secretary for almost 20 years. A pretty bad one: my mother was one of the least organized humans on earth. No voicemail set up. Crumbs all over our computer. We had nine different kinds of cereal in the cabinet but no milk. Two bottles of wine, one box of wine, and no clean glasses. I stayed out of the house as much as I could. I knew it wasn’t good, but she was all I had, and I was all she had. Sometimes, though, all I wanted was a sober parent.

They had one magazine. Good Housekeeping, the 2004 Christmas Special, which I had been reading for 45 minutes. As soon as I got to the 10 Table Setting Tips, a knock at the door. I can still see their shadows clustering outside, the ruffle of paper as they gathered. Three of them came in, divinely white and bespectacled, somber. My mom whispered about the darker-skinned doctor, Dr. Tucker. 

He was ruggedly handsome, broad shoulders, light stubble. 

“Boyyyyy,” mom breathed onto the entire left side of my face. I got whiffs of cabernet, merlot, whatever. I thought maybe I should bring her problem with alcohol up to the professionals. They introduced themselves, but I remembered them as Dr. Pizza, Shorts, and Dr. Sexytime.

“So, Mitchell, how are you?” Shorts asked. He was very short, you know, hence the name. Shorter than me. I kind of wanted to laugh at him, but he was a doctor and you can’t do that sort of thing.

“Hoping I don’t have the space-infection.”

They all got a bewildered look. Tough crowd.

Dr. Pizza’s skin resembled a perfectly cooked slice of cheese pizza with the dark and light patches. He sat beside me and showed me a piece of paper. It was riddled with ten-dollar words. Hyphens. The font was absurdly small. Percentages everywhere, and whatever those little period-chains are called. 

“Ah, I know some of these words,” I said.

“Really? Like which ones?” Shorts asked, emphasis on “really.”

Shorts didn’t think I knew big words, Shorts messed with the wrong kid.

“That one.” I pointed to “Osteosarcoma.”  I didn’t really know that word.

“You know that one, do you?” Dr. Pizza and Shorts glanced at one another. Shorts looked unconvinced. My mother was distracting Dr. Sexytime by asking him about his Ph.D, and kept heavily accentuating the “D.”

“Actually I don’t. I’m sorry. But I know that one!”  Mitchell Taylor Mowrer. My name.

“Well, the other one is a little important,” Dr. Pizza said. He was a nice guy. Probably had good jokes. But the pizza spots were worrisome.

Dr. Sexytime took my mom, presumably because he had some foresight into her being tipsy, and held her by the shoulder. “What do you think that big word means, Mitch?” He asked.

“I have some sort of STD?”

They laughed. As if they knew I was a virgin. As. If.

I tried again, “Ummm, I have..”

Shorts blurted, “It means bone cancer, Mitch. You have cancer of the bones. That’s what it means.” Shorts was not my favorite person. 

“Oh,” I said. “Of the arm?”

“No,” Sexytime added, “From what we could tell, it is contained to your legs. For now. That’s what those lumps are, Mitch. But it’s metastasizing. It’s spreading.”

My mother had gone silent. I feared for her.

Each doctor, one after the other, reached for me, touching my shoulder. 

“Mitch,” Dr. Pizza said, “we need to discuss your plans. Arrangements.”

“His plans?” My mother blurted, “His plans? He’s got school tomorrow!”

“He’s got about a month,” Shorts said, exhaustingly. Shorts, what a dick. I glared at him.

“Thanks.” I told Shorts.

He shrugged.

Mom wailed into Dr. Sexytimes’ arms, her arms completely limp.

I’d always heard that at moments like this, disbelief numbs you; a kind of defense-mechanism. That you float through the haze of dread until you have distanced yourself enough from the initial shock to where you can begin to actually panic or plan.

 I want to meet those people. There was nothing numb about it. It was a suffocating wave of suck that barreled over me, and then went in and out with the tide of my mother sobbing. It’s just that, you know, there isn’t much I could do. All I had was myself. My mother wasn’t going to be the rock I needed. It’s like when I had to take a hit to the shoulder just to get Rogers off first. I didn’t want to, but that kid is about as nimble as a bent nail and I had to make a play.

After a long couple hours we were told that, if we wanted, I could apply for experimental treatments. Basically, chemotherapy is like carpet-bombing your body. It kills the good cells and the cancer cells while you just hope you survive it and the cancer doesn’t. The experimental part of this was that instead of say, napalm, they would use tactical nuclear missiles. Slightly more manageable, but also sufficiently more potent. The catch was my quality of life would be reduced dramatically almost immediately, and the chances of it producing any results beyond giving me a little more time to be sick in bed were slim. 

So I chose not to. I’m still not sure why. I mean, I know why. I just don’t know why I think more time isn’t a blessing. I suppose I’d rather rip the bandaid straight-off then have to peel it hair by hair.

As we left the hospital, the shock of it all had sobered up my mom enough to where she could drive again. Her juicebox was empty, the roads were bare, it was nine at night. She had her lights off for a good mile. By the time we got to the on-ramp, I had to tell her.

“Mom, your lights aren’t on.” 

She robotically reached for the switch behind the steering-wheel, merging onto the empty highway. She was going a blistering 25 miles an hour.

“You’re not going to die,” she steered the car into the right lane. Twenty miles an hour.

“I’m not?”

“No.”

“How am I not?” I asked.

“Because I said so.”

“I don’t know. You also continued to tell me Santa was real until last year.”

“Santa is real and you are not going to die.”

“So if I’m not dying, I can play this weekend?” It was the playoffs. Our big shot to be big shots for a little while. We’d gotten endorsed by two local businesses: Yaco’s Hot Dogs, “Home of the Hottest Dogs” and also B ‘n’ L’s Stain Removal Service, “Where Stains Go to Die.” 

“No. But you’re not going to die.”

“Okay,” I said. 

She was, of course, wrong. I was going to die. Telling me otherwise was not helpful, but I understood. She was the one experiencing the shock. Not me. It was settling into her.  Her husband left. Her son would be next.

When we got home, mom took out a box of wine from the cabinet and set up at the computer. She drank from a plastic sippy-cup shaped like a rocket ship that we’d had since I was a kid. 

I went to my room, prepared my speech for coach. I’d have to explain to him that, not only was I not playing, but that I also had cancer. I wasn’t sure which would bother him more. After a half an hour, I went to check on my mom. A car turned the corner outside and the headlights ran across her, slumped at the keyboard, passed-out, hair over her eyes. I went up to take the cup from her and shut the computer down. I saw she had a funeral home’s website opened, she was looking at the cost of a funeral. Which, by the way, are ridiculous.

I took the remainder of the wine to my room and left her be.

***

On my way school, I called Coach and asked Coach to come meet me on the diamond before the 8AM bell. 

“The what?”

“The diamond. The baseball diamond.”

“I’m not sure I need any jewelry.”

“Coach, can you meet me? Please?”

“Okay, but we gotta make sure the bees don’t catch us.”

I’d never heard him so out of it. Coach was consistent, cool. I’d never heard him say anything that you couldn’t also find in a fortune cookie. Now he sounded like a worse version of my mother when she finds the vodka she hid herself.

I sat in the dugout and waited for coach. At that moment, tracing the lines in the dirt, it made a lot sense to call it a diamond. We hoped that with time and pressure it would turn us pieces of coal into bright, shining diamonds. Baseball was going to be my ticket out of this town. It was going to be my way to buy mom a nice house, a couple cats. It was how I was going to afford to eat burritos from Holy Guacamole! every day.

 Coach showed up from the opposite direction, coming up behind the diamond from the woods. He was sweating. There was a storm-front moving in on the plains, far as I could see it was like God was shading in the sky with a lead pencil. Coach took his hat off, brushing the brim on his mustache and holding it over his chest. He was mining a small, open pouch of gum. I noticed his fingers were shaking. 

“Hey, Coach. Thanks for coming.”

“So what’s on your mind, Mitch? You got the jitters or something?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Ah, boy, you know, you’re our star, you don’t need to worry about a thing except showing up and you’ll still look good, no matter what.” He brushed his fingers across his mustache, rifling through the whiskers.

I smiled, Coach turned away. He had always bounced between being a father and a mentor. I don’t think he did it on purpose. It was just part of his being, and why he made such a great coach.

“Oh, and before anything, I want to tell you I really like the way my mustache feels. It’s like prickly grass.”

I glanced at him. It was nicely groomed. “I’m not nervous about the game, Coach.”

“No? A girl? Or a hummingbird? Those tiny bastards. Got a date? Mitch,” Coach threw his arms open, “why aren’t dinosaurs here? There should be one in that tree. I mean look at that, it’d be great for them. Wait! Yes. I see one. What kind of dinosaur is that?! Is that what you’re worried about?”

There was a deer. 

“It’s because, Coach Terry, because,” I was choking. I couldn’t get the words out. Thunder roared across the sky, a bolt of lighting split the horizon, I fell back onto the bench, sighed, “because I have cancer.” 

Coach remained peering out into the distance at a small cluster of trees. “Where’d that bastard go?” 

He took a small ziploc bag from his back pocket and dug into it, gently massaging his gums. I waited for him to say something. Anything. I’d never seen Coach Terry cry. 

Still haven’t. I was kind of expecting him to, though. You know? But he didn’t. Not even a little. Coach only nodded quietly.

“Bone cancer? Sounds un-American, just like a croissant. Gimme that fuckin’ bagel you pansy. Oh, are you going to be able to play? We need your eyes.” 

“Long as I can walk, I’ll be out on that field. But it ain’t looking good, Coach. I can barely stand for more than a few minutes as is. It’s my bones, my bones hurt. The chemo would just make me weaker and give me a bit more time. I don’t think it’s worth it. I ain’t worth it.”

“Ah, kid. Don’t go saying things like that. My god I want a falafel. Do you smell that? Chickpeas. I can smell it, like it’s coming through my skin.” He sniffed his armpits.

Obviously Coach was tired. It was early. He looked like he’d been out all night. Or up all morning. He just looked worn. But he knew now. I guess I was asking too much to expect him to be upset. He was holding it together just like I had to; he was going to show me how to be strong.

“Coach, what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever gone through?”

“Ohh.” He squinted, “the year was 1832. Down there in Lincolntown, was getting scouted by the majors for a while.”

“I knew it! You’re the real deal.”

“Let me give you some advice, kid. Don’t eat undercooked meat from a truck on the side of the road, filled with some peoples who can’t speak the Lord’s language. And don’t buy a toothbrush from that guy over there.” He pointed sneakily with his thumb to his left. I peered around. There was nobody there.

He continued. “It was bottom of the 7th. We were down by 2. I was on third, achin’ to steal. Rogers was lined up on first, ready to get picked so I could steal home. We had a signal. When I gave him the chin scratch, followed by a quick tap on my boys,” Coach gently tapped his balls through his jeans, “he would make a break for it.”

I knew that one. “The old Winchester Rifle play!”

“That’s the one. So the pitcher, some Cuban named Hernando, Hermano, Hermandez, whatever, he was lookin’ over, takin’ his time. And that’s when it happened.”

“You did it?”

“No, I crapped myself. Completely. Right there on third, in front of the scouts and my family. No remorse was given. My girlfriend. My stomach had been rumblin’ the whole game, but I just thought it was nerves. It was that God forsaken fish flauta. It just flowed out of me. I mean, it poured from me like a deluge from Heaven. I think I had a prolapsed anus. A wild, brown hose set loose. Soaked through my uniform. But I didn’t budge, no. The ump called me out. He told me I couldn’t play like that. I grabbed his face-mask, put my fingers through it like hooks. And you know what I told him?”

“No, Coach.” I was feeling dizzy, hadn’t eaten anything since last night, but he was getting all worked up, so I let him go. “What’d you say?”

“I told him, ‘You’re not my mother.’ But before he could force me off the field, I had a second bout. This time it was comin’ up through my throat All that nameless fish, all of it all over my jersey, leakin’ out onto third. So, needless to say. I never got my chance at the Majors, so I lost a lot that day. But it did give me the chance to coach you boys, and that’s worth more than I’ll ever know.”

“That’s.. that’s so nice of you to say, Coach.” 

He was shaking— his whole arm shaking— while he went reaching for more chewing gum from his pouch. I didn’t know what to do. I thought he might actually cry now.

“What about your mother?” He asked, “How’s she handling it? Is she still feeding the goblins at high-noon?”

“Um, we had a long talk. She’s trying to get my dad out here.”

“Dad, huh? What’s he, an astronaut?”

“No, an electrician. They divorced after I was born.”

“Is she upset? Does she need a hero?”

“I, I don’t know, Coach.”

“I’ll give her a call later. Maybe stop by. Probably tonight. I’ll stop by. She needs me.”

“Okay, Coach.”

“Listen,” he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his old, brown leather wallet and opened it up, sliding out a crinkled dollar bill. “You see this dollar?”

“Yes, Coach.”

“This dollar is worth approximately one dollar.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not even this dollar is worth a whole dollar.” He crinkled it up and threw it at my face.

“Coach..”

“Damnit, son, listen. Listen to me. You need to find something else. This game means nothing. It isn’t enough to keep you alive.”

Between the way the rain was battering the tin above us and the echo  Coach’s chewing was creating, I could barely think. I think what Coach was saying was that, maybe, somehow, there was a chance I could make it. Maybe I could pull this off, I could knock one out of the park, take a lap around the diamond one more time. Maybe I could survive. He was talking a little funny, sure, but I knew beneath it there was the truth, waiting.

“What I’m trying to say is,” Coach put his hands out before us to make two, shapely ovals, “you need to look for the butts. The butts will keep you strong. Can you feel this butt, Mitch? Right here? The one I am groping? Feel it, son. Feel it in your bones.”

Coach took my wrist, pulling. “Do like I do, Mitch.” He made gyrating motions, like he was attempting to contain a sparkling ball of energy between his palms.

I tried. It was kind of weird, really. I mean, I thought this might be just something adults do, that I should learn now, before it was too late— a ritual-of-manhood.

He groaned, “Did you ever just look at a butt, Mitch? A nice, firm, uplifting butt? It makes a man’s spirit soar. A beautiful butt can renew the soul.” Coach leaned in to me close, his gums were bleeding and there was red coating his teeth. 

Coach got down on a knee, crouching real low. He whispered, “Do you know about Him?” 

“Who?”

He reached for more chewing gum, which he softly began to massage on his teeth and gums. “About the Ancient Sumerian Butt-God, Shith’ead.”

“Coach, I’m not so sure that—”

He pushed me on the shoulder, silencing me.

“The legend goes that, long ago, there were only two beings in the Universe. The Void, who reigned over the blackness of space, and his brother, Time, who did all the time shit. One day, as it happens, Time was busy just doing his thing, as usual, and Void became jealous of his Brother. Void thought it unfair how Time could spend eternity doing the same thing and not be bothered. All he had to do was count, to keep track.

Void simply existed to be the thing where things did not exist, his purpose was to not have a purpose. As you can imagine, this was crushing in it’s boredom. In his jealousy, Void decided to do the unthinkable: to create something.”

I couldn’t recall Coach having ever expressing any interest in ancient mythology, yet I found myself captivated. “What did the Void create?” I asked.

Coach stepped back. He grinned, turned to the open baseball diamond and bent over, legs wide, head almost touching the dirt. Coach took his hands and squeezed his butt, looking at me from between his legs, upside-down. 

“A Butt. He created the first Butt, Mitchell. Out of the cold, blackness of space. Void took parts of every corner of the universe and molded the first Butt. The butt was named Shith’ead. Blessed be His name.”

Coach slowly returned to an upright position. I had no idea he was so flexible.

“Shith’ead was so magnificent, so perfect, that Time completely lost track of his work. He became so distracted by the beauty of the Butt Lord that he spent ages admiring Shith’ead’s supple, firm features. Time lost control; with no one to keep continuity, nothing to keep the sequences of the Universe ordered. Chaos reigned.”

“Void couldn’t stop. He began to thrive on the disorder and created more and more Butts, but each was not as perfect as the first, Shith’ead. In the meantime, Time became obsessed with Shith’ead. He would groom him intently, admiring his firmness, pinching him. Shith’ead pleaded with Time to stop treating him like a piece of meat, but Time relented.

“Shith’ead grew tired of the harassment, so he came to Void, his creator. Shith’ead convinced Void that, with Time removed, there was no reason to continue to create more butts. Shith’ead was clever, and the Void agreed that he should move on to bigger, better things: the planets, the sun, the stars, the sky, the sea were formed all while Void had no worries of Time, no constraints. Before long, Void had created an entire race of butts and a Universe for them to call home.”

“All of the butts?”

“All of the butts, Mitch. They formed a race, a language, families. Time saw these butts and he didn’t know what to do. There was so much butt-lust.”

“I’ve felt like that before.”

“Yes, butt-lust,” Coach whispered, “butt-lust is a strong force. And Void knew this. The universe was falling into disrepair. A minute was an hour was a hundred years and then it was a forty-five minutes and bottom-of-the-ninth. With the cosmos and his race of Butts, Void decided he had to do something. Without time, there was no use in continuing. He could very well have spent eternity waiting for something that would never come.

“Void took his distraught, butt-sick brother and retreated to the far corner of the universe to nurse him. Slowly, time began to order itself again. The Butts flourished with their leader Shith’ead there to guide them. Life bloomed far and wide and with it, a society of peaceful butts.”

Coach took me by the hand and led me to the dirt, drawing a frowny-face in the soil with his finger. 

“The Brother’s returned. In their absence, they had both begun to blame Shith’ead and the Butts as a scapegoat for the near-failure of the Universe and the soiled relationship between the Brothers. They saw no choice but to eradicate them, to rid themselves of their own creation. The Butts rallied, they went to their leader and begged for Him to reason with Time and Void.

“Shith’ead appealed to the Brothers for the opportunity to have their own opportunity at creation. The Butts would form a new race to uphold the Brothers’ ideals and obey them without question. This new creature would be a slave to time. They would destroy and rebuild. Create and fill their own voids. Shith’ead said unto them, ‘Lo, let us try, and if we falter, we shall become slaves to our works.’

“The Brothers were swayed, they agreed to allow the Butts this opportunity. With much effort, the first humans were created, though they were butt-less.” 

“We were created...by Butts?”

“Yes, Mitchell. We are all made off butt-stuff.”

“Wow.”

“Yet the Brothers were not pleased. These Humans lacked a certain umph. The Brothers ordered the Humans to enslave the Butts. It was a massacre. With the Brothers’ help, the Humans were too powerful. Though they attempted to resist, it was futile. Time and Void easily beat back the resistance. In the aftermath, the entire race of Butts was destined to an eternity of slavery, existing silently on the backside of humans, because they had so turned their backs on the Brothers, and now would be forever squashed, pinched, and blind to the future as punishment for their rebellion.”

Coach was sweating badly. He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

“I feel bad for the Butts. They just wanted to live.”

“Yes, yes. Though, the Butts rebelled silently in their own way. They created diarrhea, vicious poops, farting, hemorrhoids, and various other butt-centered pains to lash out against their captors. They say that if you listen to a butt long enough, you can hear the whispers of the old-Butts. They say that there is a butt for everyone, and if you find your soul-butt, the wonders universe itself will be revealed to you.

“This is what you must do, Mitchell. You must find your soul-butt. Find the Butt that pulls you from the darkness. Find it and let it show you the way.”

Coach stuck his nose inside the pouch of Big League Chew, taking a long snort. He laid back.

“Take your mother’s, for example. I have a distinct feeling she is the owner of my soul-butt. Now, her butt is wonderful. It’s what I’d call a ‘Wisdom Tooth Butt.’ Looks like those puffy cheeks you get when you get your wisdom teeth pulled. But, man, did you ever look at your mother’s butt, Mitch?”

“No, I can’t really say I have, Coach.”

“Here’s what you need to do. Don’t play. In the next week, take a breather. Rest. Enjoy. I want you to find your butt. Find the butt that says ‘hold on.’ Find those cheeks and grab onto them— with permission, of course. Don’t let go of that butt. Really take it in. Don’t let some disease define your existence. Let the circumference of it, the sweet, sweet radius of the butt of your dreams heal you, brother. Let it take you.”

 I had no idea where I would even begin to find my soul-butt, or what to look for. I suppose it would be a feeling, like the one you get when you eat a slice of pizza and all of the cheese and toppings don’t slide off or burn your mouth, it’s a clean bite, with the appropriate levels of sauce and toppings, and you wonder how something so simple could be so perfect.

Coach put his hand out, he gave me my own pack of the gum he was chewing. “Should you ever need to call upon the spirit of Shith’ead, nibble some of this.”

“Thanks, Coach.” I put it in my shirt pocket.

I decided I would at least try it out. As long as I continued with dignity and respect, there could be no drawbacks, save for, perhaps, a bad butt. 

“I’ll do it, Coach. For us.”  

He walked off into the distance after exclaiming he was going to find the ocean’s taint.

***

Cancer never quite hit me like it had everyone else I’d told. It was just another thing that sucked; a thing that sucked so much it actually lessened the sucking of other things that sucked. When you are being overtaken from the inside-out because your entire body got a wild hair up it’s ass, classwork and projects and homework take on a new level of worthlessness. 

I also figured there was no real point in telling everyone. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. Well, yes, actually I did, but I’ve seen movies, I’ve read books. I know that you’re not supposed to purposefully use things like cancer to get sympathy from others.

If people were going to find I out I had cancer, it was going to be with a bang.

Point being: the week before I was diagnosed, I had an algebra quiz. I had trouble even spelling “algebra”, so this was not an easy task. I did my best, making clever quips in the margins of the paper to score some effort-points, but knew it was a lost cause. I was going to fail. Not only that, but our teacher had lacked a certain amount of empathy. Over the weekend, everything had changed. 

I now had cancer, but with it came the upper-hand. 

Ms. Yancy was not a qualified professional. She smoked in class, at least twice per period, by hanging her head out the window while we did unethically complicated work from her self-published math book that we were all required to purchase. With the certainty of Death came the certainty of freedom. As such, I strolled in, behaving, if I may say, even more pleasant than usual. The windows were thrown open, Yancy casually sitting on the ledge, blowing smoke off the third story.

“Can anyone solve this non-linear equation?” she asked, taking a long drag, glaring at us scared in our desk. “Doubt it.” She scoffed, staring into the distance before approaching the blackboard.

Yancy pretended to not see me— the only student with a hand raised— and continued reading from her own book. She was hardened, it wouldn’t be easy.  For 5 minutes I alternated my arms as she continued to ignore me. She didn’t call on me once. I kept a toothless smile on my face.

If it helps to capture her essence, her full name was Nancy Yancy. So, not even her parents liked her, as demonstrated by that fact alone. I had made many requests to bargain with her passé teaching methods— essentially just running through problems on a blackboard a few times then expecting us to understand the language of the universe, but it never happened. She thought it should be as easy for everyone as it was for her. 

I was tired of it and had nothing more to fear. If I couldn’t handle Yancy, I couldn’t handle cancer, but my arms were numb and shaking. I would wait until the end of class to make my move.

Every day we had a quiz, and at the end of every class she’d collect them, grade them during the remaining 15 minutes, and then wait until we were physically walking out of her class to hand them back to us. She did this so if you had any questions, it was the end of class and she could refuse to answer them. Normally, I just fell mid-line, scooped my C, and left. 

Not today. 

It was 5 minutes until the end of the period. Yancy had handed out a quiz that was so difficult and beyond our abilities that one of the kids actually dry-heaved after sweating in his chair for 15 minutes while she looked over them with her red pen. He looked sicker than me. Nancy laughed, said, “Really, Kevin, really?” and went back to failing us.

I hummed and drew pictures of happy little kitty-cats while she sighed and laughed at the our papers from her desk. 

With a minute of class remaining I spoke up.“Ms. Yancy, do you have our quizzes graded?”

The texting, doodling, reading. Sobbing. All of it ceased.

Yancy dropped her pen. “Yes, Mitchell, and I will hand them to you as you exit, as usual.”

Fish, barrel.

“Oh, well I was hoping you could give me mine now. I’m sure we’d all appreciate that, actually. In case we have any questions, you know?”

The silence. Let me tell you. You could scoop it from a tub and blend it into a delicious, thick milkshake of astonishment. Kevin, the kid dry-heaving next to me, gripped the edge of his desk and whispered “holy shit,” to himself, ducked down low. 

Yancy shook her head in disbelief. I’d thrown her off. “What? Say again, Mitchell?” She asked, sweetly.

“I said I would like you to tell me my grade right now.”

I’m sure you’ve seen westerns. You understand the tumbleweed blowing through a stand-off, rolling between two men who are armed and ready to shoot the other. The town looks onward from the saloon, the stables, the inn. Even the sheriff and the deputy watch, tense. This was Nancy Yancy’s Algebra class, 2012, at Gumboldt High School. We all understood. A challenger approached. 

“Well, Mitchell, I would be glad to tell you. Along with everyone else, what your grade was on your quiz.” She rustled through a stack of papers on her desk. Licking her fingers, smirking through each one.

I slumped back in my seat, waiting. 

“Ah! Here we are. Oh, Mitchell. Mitchell, Mitchell.”

A snicker from the crowd.

“Yes, Nancy Yancy?”

“Mitchell, your grade, unfortunately, does not appear to be what would qualify as a a pa-”

This was my moment. I leaped from my seat. “I have cancer! I have cancer! Haha! CANCER, Yancy! CANCER AND I DON’T GIVE A SHIT WHAT GRADE I GOT!”

And that was how the school found out I had cancer. Assistant Principal Meyer tried to give me a weeks detention; a sufficiently entertaining conversation.

After that, I had nothing except butts to worry about.

Everyone treated me as some sort of minor-deity. Even the kids I tended to avoid came up to at least say “sup” or give me a silent fist-pound. 

“Bro,” one of the boys on the football team said, “bro. Props.” He gave me a hug.

I spent the next few days idly roaming the halls for butts. The first thing I noticed was that there was not a lot of variation. Our school was blessed with pretty good butts. We were young enough to have time on our side. Solid butts. Except the guys. Very few guys embraced their butts, maybe by choice, maybe not. Not even I embraced my butt. 

Between first and second period, I sat on a bench beside the water fountain, exhausted. The halls had mostly cleared-out when Parker Eddy moseyed over. Parker was a grade below me. She was well-liked, kept to herself, and also had Down Syndrome.

She was dressed in a hot-pink tube top and matching hot-pink leggings when she came to the water fountain, putting her stack of binders and books on the backside. I glanced at her, briefly at first.

Then, once more, slowly.

I was appalled.

Maybe it was the combination of the quality of light, shining on the lower-half of her as she bent to sip from the fountain, the water tumbling over her lips onto the grey pan, and the weird gurgling noises she made, but in this moment, Parker had a wonderful butt.

I felt my cheeks redden. Shame flowed through me. My classmates probably saw me checking out the girl with Downs’ butt. There was an urge pushing me to tell her that I thought she had a good booty but I couldn’t get it out of my throat.

I mean, every time this girl took a walk, she got an award. When her family opted to put her in the “standard” English class and she ultimately failed spectacularly, she was “honorarily” passed at a Pep Rally. So, hey, she actually has a good butt, and she was actually better dressed than most of us, even if she wasn’t really aware of it. Telling her that I enjoyed her butt could be the one honest compliment she’d ever gotten from another human.

“Parker, hey, uh, hey.”

Parker glared at me, eyes wide while she was bent over at the water fountain. Her hair was falling into the puddle accumulating. 

“Hey, you’re Mitchell.” She spoke through the stream, the water splashing off her teeth and gums.

I was surprised she knew who I was.

“Yeah! Hi. Look. I just wanted to say that, uh,”

“You have cancer.”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

“Do I have cancer?”

“No, no, Parker. You don’t have cancer.”

“So what do I have?”

 I turned to look around. A few teachers, speaking in the hall in a small group, began staring.  Another girl at her locker was also frozen, her hand on the metal. “Uhh, you’re doing great.” I patted her on the shoulder and scurried off.

Maybe Parker wasn’t the best choice for my first butt-praising. She had a lot of handlers. If she happened to tell absolutely anyone what I said to her, there was really no way I’d not be buried in an unmarked grave. You can’t come back from, “boy tells mentally-challenged they have nice butt.”

It was enough to make me reconsider.

What about for anyone else? Was it even socially acceptable to casually praise someone’s butt? All my life, I thought the answer was no. You don’t tell that to people. It’s a butt. It’s where the poo comes out and what you sit on.  I can tell someone they have a fantastic smile, but I can’t tell them their butt is fantastic? It’s just skin. 

But what if that person is not in the mood? What if they will misinterpret your compliment, or just don’t want to hear it? What if what I say to other people makes them uncomfortable?

I took out my notebook, opening to a blank page. I needed to lay some ground-rules. 

The 5 Butt Commandments

Thou shall not gaze upon a butt hastily or with evil intent. A long gaze never goes unfelt.

  Thou shall not make outward, inappropriate comments to the owner of any butt, regardless of race, age, creed, gender, or religion.

When in the presence of a butt one finds compelling, or in a situation where a butt is displayed with the intentions of lust, respect the butt and its owner, but also allow for the butt to move you to a most peaceful, nurturing state of being.

The butt is not a separate entity from the person, but an extension, and thus should be treated as such. While a butt may command immediate attention, it is required to holistically encompass the human with their butt, and their soul.

Absolutely no touching or filming unless otherwise explicitly permitted. 

I would not allow myself to become one of those cat-calling, butt-hungry fiends that feeds off of salacious compliments thrown, unrequested, at strangers. No, I would not. I would be a respectful, loving butt-appreciator. A connoisseur of butts. A cultivator of cheeks.

But now I had to go each lunch. The cafeteria was like Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars. There was always, oddly, loud, bad music playing from every corner, yet no one had any instruments or visible speakers. A hive, we segregated ourselves. The cafeteria workers and hall monitors carefully tip-toed around our bad attitudes and hormones. We all knew who was really in charge of this prison.

Jimmy was waiting, as usual, with his three milk cartons— one chocolate, one strawberry, one regular— at our table. We always sat right near the exit, across from one another. He was in his baseball uniform. We had practice after school. Well, he did.

“Why aren’t you in your uniform? Not coming to practice?”

“Jimmy. C’mon. I said I’d be there, in the stands.”

“Don’t be a pussy.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Jimmy shrugged, ripping open his chocolate milk. 

I could see it in the way he fiddled with the paper tab, anxiously, his elbows on the table. He peered into the carton, slowly rocking it back and forth. 

“Whatcha looking for in there? Note in a bottle?” I teased.

It wasn’t cool for two 15 year olds to tell one another they actually care. It wasn’t for us to say that when they’re apart, or when one of us dies, they’ll miss them. 

I could tell he was readying some snide retort in the face of my comment, one that wasn’t laden with shallow bromance, but actual friendship. I wanted to divert. I couldn’t handle the sentimentality right now. 

“What do you think about butts, Jimmy?” 

“What?” He asked.

“Do you like butts?” I pointed at the butt of a rather large individual passing behind us holding a tray, the man played on the varsity football team and was wearing those white, skin-tight pants that really emphasized his cheeks. “You know, butts.”

“I don’t know if I like that dude’s butt. But I like her butt.” He nodded a few tables over. 

I knew exactly who he was suggesting. Kayla McCroney. Not a cheerleader. Not in student government. Not a goodie-goodie. She was in band. Tuba. That thing wrapped around her and seemed to pressure the bottom half of her, making her butt bulge out from beneath the brass. It was a wonderful, interesting anomaly to watch.

“But what is it about the butt?”

“Are you being real right now, bro? Look at that thing. It’s immaculate.”

I thought it looked kind of alright. She was always fiddling with it. Just at random points of time, she’d touch her butt, like to make sure there wasn’t anything stuck on it. “Yeah, but why butts?”

Jimmy seemed to lose his composure for a minute. I imagine it was infuriating to question his admiration for a butt. But it was in this critical thinking that I would base much of my future endeavors. Just why should I live for butts?

He finally had a response. “Jesus died for us, for our Butts. On the Cross, with his final breath, and his side wounded from the spear, he said, ‘Father, butts are awesome.’”

“What are you talking about?” I wondered if Shith’ead could be anything like Jesus.

“Let me start over. A butt is,” he drew a deep breath, this was the hardest I’d ever seen him think. “A butt is the closest we will ever get with a lot of people. Strangers. It’s like looking in your neighbors garbage. What does it say about them? Sure, you chalk most butts up to genetics. But what do you dress that butt in? How do you carry that butt? Does that butt suggest an active lifestyle? Do you think that maybe, that butt is an after-thought? Are the breasts more important? The abs? Why the butt, Mitchell? The butt is simply the extension of smile. It’s why I think we should change its formal name to ‘Cat’s Grin.’” 

“‘Cat’s Grin?’” 

“Yes. Imagine a butt.”

“Okay.”

“Got it?”

“I have my butt.”

“See it floating out here. Just being a butt. Do you see how it swoops up to meet in the middle? With two semi-circles on either side?”

“I do.” My butt resembled a very soft “w.”

“Now, put some whiskers on that.”

“Oh my God.”

“Cat’s grin.”

“But so what? Why not backs? Or shoulders? What is it about a butt?”

“Mitch, buddy.” Jimmy wiped a small bit of pink, strawberry milk from his terribly hairy lip. “You need to understand. This is primal. This is not normal. Backs can be sexy.  So can shoulders. But butts,” he took a deep breath, “butts tell a story.”

I guess it made a sense. Still, while I felt instinctively compelled towards butts, I never found myself wanting to outwardly express my interest in them, unlike Jimmy. “Well, what about my butt?” I asked, “Do I have a nice butt?”

“I have never looked at your butt, Mitchell.”

“Well then,” I got up, pranced beside Jimmy, and turned my back to him. I began caressing my butt through my jeans. “Jimmy? Jimmy? Do you see it now? What do you think?”

“That’s a great butt. I’m gonna miss that butt.”

I felt him reach, give my butt a big old squeeze. I thought it was just his hand. It might have been. By the time I looked around, he was holding me.

“It’s gonna miss you too.”

Jimmy had his eyes closed. For a minute, in the cafeteria, with just about everyone wandering what we were doing, he held me and my butt. Jimmy and I grew up together.  When we were 9, we floated in his parent’s pool with him and discussed the comic book store we were going to open. “Loud Explosion.” That was what we were going to call it. I poured the can of baked beans into the toilet while he was on the phone with his mom so he could skip school with me. We took walks to the 7-11 at midnight to buy energy drinks and talk about our girlfriends, the game, the wins and losses. We weren’t going to die together, but we sure as hell were spent time alive with each other.

I patted him on the shoulder, his throwing arm. It was tense, tight. “You’re a good friend, man.”

“You’re a shitty one for dying.”

“Yeah, I know.” And I honestly meant it. It wasn’t my life I didn’t want to leave behind, it was everyone else’s. 

Jimmy whispered something, tensing his grip around me and my butt. The bell rang to mark the end of lunch. I couldn’t make it all out, but later I narrowed it down to one of three things. 

- Please don’t let one go.

- Please, we need to go.

- Please don’t go.

I like to think he said, “Please don’t let one go.” But who knows?

But I totally farted on him, either way.

***

I waited for the school to empty at the end of the day before I left. For some odd reason, I was going to miss this place. No matter how much I dreaded going to school, I at least had a reason to stay when I got there. I stood in the hall, running my knuckles on those steel-gills the lockers have. As much as I wanted to be at practice, I didn’t feel right going.

I felt ashamed.

For the first time since I was diagnosed I felt like a sick person. Not physically; socially. I felt like I was being strained through my own life by cancer, and whatever came out on the other side, through the tiny cracks, would be a thin, runny concentration of whatever I had before. I couldn’t sit around and watch my best friends, my teammates, play ball— I couldn’t stand the idea of seeing them smile and hearing our explicit, unfiltered taunting of one another, in a way only we knew we could get away with. I couldn’t sit there and watch the game I loved go on without me.

I walked out to the parking lot with my head down, finding my mother in a space near the front.

“HELLO DEAR!” My mother shouted as I approached, waving, the windows up. 

  Mom, unfortunately, was not in the best of shape of herself. As I climbed into the car, she was taking big gulps from an aptly labeled BIG GULP soda cup. In the cupholder, she had a bottle of wine, which she filled it with.

Barb, better known as mom, was plump and the hair-style of a twenty year-old. I often wondered what my dad didn’t like about her. She tried. That was what counted. She showered and smelled nice, like a tropical island where thousands of grapes washed up on shore and began fermenting. Of course she had a drinking problem, and this was something I would have to save her from, if I would be alive next month, or next year.

Somewhere down the line when I was gone, she would be alone at home, and she would be standing in my room, clutching a glass, sobbing, because I was dead and she was not, and that is not the math of the universe as we humans know it. 

You are young and then you get old and die, not you are young and die and then the old live. I imagine she would regret not taking me places, like the amusement park or Disney World, but if she could afford it I knew she would. Barb would have the bottle even after I was gone, and I hoped that she would have something else there to help her, because I wouldn’t be around.

As soon as I sat down, she took my hand firmly in hers. “You are my son and I do not want you to die.” She said, honking the horn to stop herself from crying. “And I want to make these last days special for you. So special. So if you want something. You tell me. You need anything, ask.”

“Can I have the keys?”

“For the car?”

“..Yes.”

“See, Mitchell. You are so mature. Yes. Here. Jesus, take the wheel.”

“Now you have to move.”

“Sweety, yes. Of course.”

She took her BIG GULP and poured herself into the backseat. “Drive, my son!”

If you’ve never driven a car with an old, broken transmission, I highly recommend it. It makes the entire experience of driving all the more special. Will I make it to my destination? I sure hope so! I carefully set towards the mall, 20 minutes away. No way I was going home right now. Before getting on the highway, I went around the back of the school, just to see Jimmy and Coach and Gibbs and all of them. They were scattered out on the diamond doing warmups. I almost pulled-over.

“Look, Mitchell! Baseball! You played baseball!”

“I did.”

“How much longer do you have left?”

“Probably a few weeks.”

“That’s good, sweetie.”

I turned on the radio, mom hummed along. 

By the time I pulled into the Pallisades Mall parking lot, my mom was asleep, somehow balancing the soda cup on the seat beside her.

For a while I sat there, listening to her snore.

My clothes were baggy. I’d lost weight. I’d had a headache for the last four days. Every time I ate more than a kids portion, I threw it up ten minutes later. Every day was like I was constantly hungover. There were the lumps on the backs of my calves. I couldn’t do much more than walk up a flight of stairs without having to sit for a few minutes. 

My grandfather, a Korean vet, was in better shape than I was. He was spry when compared to me, six decades separating us. 

Sitting in the parking lot, I thought about killing myself. Not in the same voracity I had when my mom grounded me when I was 13, preventing me from going to the movies. That was the kind of “I’m gonna kill myself!” that came from a life you could actually experience, but were being denied. It was a bargaining tool and your life was a hostage. I had no experiences to experience. I was running out of room. Out of time.

This was different, it didn’t scream and shout. It didn’t come in anything crimson, nothing sharp. It was a thought like a lighthouse, the mist rolling off the sea. Kill yourself. There were birds walking across the tops of the Macy’s, perched on the edge. One just jumped off. Just like that, I turned back to face my mother. 

She was drooling on her blouse.

I wondered why this hadn’t occurred to me sooner. I’m not sure how I expected to die. It wasn’t going to be glorious, no ending credits with a nice song and dance number to close the film. I had no grand slam, no bases loaded. I couldn’t even bunt. If I was lucky, I’d be in a comfy bed, surrounded by people that love me. That was as good as it would get. I might have a cake, maybe a cake with a butt on it. I might get to eat butt for once.

Do I really want to force the people I love to constantly be on-call, waiting for hours or days, just because I might die at any moment? What’s that do for them? I could just step off a roof.

Then I saw it in the rearview-mirror.

The butt that pulled me from the deep.

I scrambled out of the car with an energy I hadn’t felt in months to get a better look. I crouched beside the back tire, peeking across as she came from down the aisle. Even from the front, I could see it extended out beyond her. A butterfly spreading it’s wings.

As she passed by, I found myself needing to sit down.

The butt this woman possessed shall not be overlooked. It had the perfect, unimaginable roundness of a lunar-eclipse, and through it, as the sun shone upon her booty, I could see, like a lit arrow passing through the night, the divide of her crack illuminated through the black leggings she was wearing.

I recalled what Coach had told me.

How I needed to find something to keep me alive, how I needed to hold onto the butts.

This was it. This was what he was talking about.

Yes, I’m a young man with cancer, facing the prospect of an eternal, unconquerable sleep. I have been firmly acquainted with the fact that I will not be indulging in any of the splendors of life. People, including myself, like to pretend that because of my predicament, I have attained a zen-like state of being, where I am conquering temptation of flesh and mind. But if there was one sensation, one feeling, that I could hold onto as I traverse into the void of death, it would be the rising, chemical-rich indulgence of a good, old-fashioned boner.

I left my mother in the car and went to continue my Butt-Quest.

***

The mall was packed. The only other mall I’d ever known was one my grandparents would take me to, it was on the “poor” side of town. The Westgate Mall. It was where Grandma Bess and Grandpa Jack went to walk, sit, and polka. That was it. It was a sad place. The Palisades, on the other hand, was extravagant. It would take years to explore every inch, there must have been 200 different entrances.

I chose the JCPenny.

Immediately, I noticed the butt of the woman at the perfume bar. She had these thin, narrow, black eyebrows that made her look permanently surprised. Her name tag said “Fia,” she was bending over, cleaning the glass of her perfume bar.

I attempted to objectively study her butt rather than be engrossed by only the surface. I took out my cellphone and pretended to text while stealing glances.

What did this butt mean to me? Was it an extension of the soul, or, perhaps, a mere assemblage of evolutionary advantages that helped us become more balanced hunter-gatherers? This butt was smooth. It had a crispness to it, a little bit of a right angle that sloped over her hips. It wasn’t the butt, no. Still, I could feel a distinct, internal connection to this butt. This butt was speaking to me on a level I’d never experienced before. A supernatural connection.

“Do you need help finding something, sir?”

It was some trifling shoe clerk who’d caught me as I was standing in the corner by the door, trying to furnish my love of this butt. Pamela had caught me staring, and I had already broken one of my own rules. Her fingers hovered over the walkie, ready.

“Yes,” I said, “I do need help finding something.”

“And what is that?”

I suddenly wished I had a piece of paper or certificate of my cancer that I could present to her and whoever else as a sort of Get Out of Jail Free card. I had no real-world excuse for staring at her butt. 

“Could you point me in the direction of your bu..” 

“Bu..?”

I wasn’t ready to take the dive to abusive butt-fiend yet. This woman was just doing her job and I happened to be a little too careless. 

Pamela flicked up her wrist, exposing a long sleeve of tattoos. 

“What is that?” I asked, stepping towards her.

“A tattoo,” she could’ve been wearing blood as lipstick at this point. 

Pamela was not into games, even though she’d just one.

“Okay, bye!” I shuffled off, defeated.

“Fucking kids,” I heard her say.

By the time I made it out through the menswear section and into the mall, I was losing it. It had been hours since I’d eaten and I was literally dying, my blood-sugar crashing, I was exhausted beyond anything I had ever known.

It all hurt: my blood, my stomach, my bones, my shoulders, my joints, my legs, my eyes, my teeth. My mouth was hanging open, gasping. I took the pouch of gum Coach gave me and shoved a large wad of it into my mouth. It had no significant taste, but as I chewed and swallowed and chewed and swallowed it felt like I was swallowing a long piece of silk.

And then the silk turned into hair, hair that was getting stuck in my throat. Wet, old hair from a public shower drain. I began to shake and sweat.

They were all watching me. Cackling. I was the butt. They were gawking at me now.

The lights, the cameras, the toddlers, the mannequins, the photographs of people on the advertisements strung across the ceiling. The butts.

All around, I heard the laughing flaps of pedestrian butts as they strolled by. Each cheek slapping the other, SLAP CLAP SLAP CLAP.

I shielded my eyes with the hood of my sweatshirt. No more butts.  Not that mom’s butt, not that old man’s butt, not that young man’s butt, no butts. The noises persisted. “Weirdo,” they said, “look at that kid! So weird! Weird! Because he likes butts!” 

I peeked from beneath my hood. Ten feet from me, a young woman was bent over at the fountain, tying her shoe. Her blue jeans, stretching to hold her butt in her pants, it looked like her cheeks were scowling at me. 

I thought I was just imagining things until the denim on her ass began to distort, warping around like a maelstrom, swelling. Her jeans swirled, the seams morphed into rows of fangs, all snapping at me as I cowered into an Employee’s Only entrance to the mall’s back tunnels. A cafe employee bolted out from the doors with a cart full of milk gallons, almost running me over. 

“Fuck!”

“Uh, do you work—”

“I have cancer, man.”

“Whatever.”

I sat on the concrete and pulled my legs to my chest. There were three distinct lumps that I could feel on the bone near my ankle, extending upwards, little marble-sized growths lodged into my marrow. They flared with pain every day, a kind of deep-seeded, mythological pain, it was as if you physically took heartache and placed it somewhere else in the body. 

The grey, tunneled ceiling bounced back and forth, recoiling. 

I thought now might be an appropriate time to die. If this was going to be my life for the next month or two, I didn’t want it.  

“Stranger?”

There was a kid my age, standing in the middle of the way, looking at me. He was my age.

“‘Stranger?’ Is that how you greet strangers? By saying ‘stranger?’”

“Uhhh, are you okay?”

His face was pocked with acne scars and his flannel shirt draped over a bony frame.  He was so thin that, I imagine if a very large bird, maybe even an extremely large pigeon, were to swoop upon him, it might actually lift him from the ground.

“Yeah, I’m just, you know.” 

“Say what?” 

“I have cancer.” 

“Oh. Wow. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Can you help me up?”

“Shouldn’t you be, like, in a hospital?”

“Have you ever been, like, in a hospital?”

“No. But I’ve seen four seasons of ‘Scrubs.’”

“That’s actually not a terrible representation. But still. I’d rather not.”

“Oh. Do you want me to call someone?”

“No. It’s okay. I’ve gotta get a...present.”

“Me too,” he shook the bag he was holding.

“For who?”

“Uh. Myself.” 

“Oh, okay. Why are you wandering the back tunnels of the mall?”

“Well, I’m here every day.”

“Why are you here every day?”

“It’s just a more efficient way to get around the mall, you know.”

“I meant why are you at the mall every day?”

“Nowhere else to go.”

I decided I had 10 minutes to be this kid’s friend. Here he was, buying birthday presents for himself. Dying or not, he might actually feel worse than I did.

“My name is Mitch.” I shook his hand.

“Farsee.”

“Farsee, hey.” We began walking out of the tunnels. I still felt halfway trapped in whatever had happened to me. The world was high-definition; vivid. Bland colors popped and I blinked every third word. 

As I walked beside him I got a whiffs of Farsee’s scent; heit was like he just figured out how deodorant works after 14 years of neglecting it and wanted to make up for all the lost time.

Farsee twisted his fingers out of anxiety. 

“So, uh, tell me about yourself Farsee.”

“Wellllllllllll..”

For 15 minutes he talked. Non-stop.

I learned that Farsee had actually graduated from high school two years early. He was on his way to a college out of state, a full ride. He had no brothers, no sisters. When he was young, he drank pool water and almost died. As in drank it from a cup. Like, a lot. He drank a lot of pool water from a cup because it looked cleaner than the tap water, which isn’t terrible logic for a 7 year old. Farsee loathed pizza, which made me question my trusting him, but gained it again when he said he wanted to be a professional ghost hunter by the time he was 25. 

I would be dead by then. Maybe he could find me. We could catch up, maybe the the technology to capture me in a container of some sort would exist. I would be the first domesticated ghost.

We passed by a lingerie store with a banner ten feet tall of a woman in black lace. I paused beneath it’s shadow, just to take it in for a second. Farsee was acting like he didn’t notice. I had to lay my cards on the table at some point.

“Farsee. Do you know much about butts? I ask because, well, I am on a quest to discover the magic of butts.” 

I expected him to reprimand me. His eyes grew wide. The Spirit entered Farsee. I’d seen that look before, on infomercials for worship song compilations. Something contagious. He stood up straight, peered around, pulled me to the railing and whispered, “I love butts more than you can understand, Mitch. I love them. Ok? I love butts.”

“Yes,” I said, “Yes. Please, help me in my journey.” I took his shoulder in my hand. 

“Of course. Come, walk with me.”

Farsee had categorized the butts of the mall like tornados. 

There were B1’s through B5’s. B1’s were your standard butts— strictly used as a utility for pooping and sitting. They were operational. B2’s had at least the appearance of being sumptuous. B3’s, he told me, pointing at the Turkish girl selling “Dead Sea Lotion” from her cart in the middle of the hall t, “reflect nature at its best. Unfortunately, the B3 is often offset by a lack of personality.”

“Personality? In butts?” I asked.

“It’s like anything else, Mitch. Butts have personalities. Like dogs and cars. The personality of a butt is what makes a good butt great. Take, for example, Tanya down there.” He pointed a Dead Sea Lotion sales girl on the bottom floor, rubbing white cream on a middle-aged man’s hand, “she has a fantastic butt.“Wonderful. But what does it say? It says, ‘Here’s a good butt.’ And that’s not right. A fantastic butt will surprise you. It will literally stop you in your tracks. It could be in scrubs, or mom jeans, or a pencil skirt.”

“I think I see what you’re saying.” Tanya’s butt was a butt and nothing else. There would be a brief period where I felt stifled by the power of such a thing, but then snapped back to reality at hand. I had to hurry. “What about a B4?”

Farsee patted me on the back, “Oh, Mitch. We need to pay a visit to the smoothie stand. I have something wondrous to show you.”

“Lead the way, friend.”

Farsee took two steps in front of me, setting off in the direction of the food court. It hit again.

I reached for the railing, toppling.

It would be impossible to try to capture the distortion of this moment. I thought that was it.  On level-three of the Pallisades Mall, on the floor beside a Cinnabon. I was going to die as the warm, sugary scent flowed over me like God’s Good Grace. 

“FarSEEEE!” I shouted. He was already crouching by my side. 

“Mitch! I’ll get help!” he ran out of my view.

“Yeah, call your mom,” I said, closing my eyes, laughing briefly, then opening them, watching the ceiling do a cute, little jig. Left and right. Left and right, it spun. “Call mine too. She’s in the car.”

***

It was black for a long time. But probably not very long at all. It was long enough for a part of me, observing this blackness, to think, “this is a long time.” 

I’m not sure it was even possible.

“Shit.”

I was in the hospital. If you can avoid it, don’t wake up in a hospital. Opt-out of that one. Like Florida: great place to go to die, but to live? Not so much. Think of all the better places you could open your eyes. The beach. Your own bed. Next to someone you love who has morning breath and a mess of tangled hair. In the middle of the fireworks on the Fourth of July, with your back on the grass, your head in the lap of your boyfriend. You get none of that. The beds are uncomfortable. There are chirping, wheezing noises coming from every corner. If you’re lucky, someone is not literally dying 10 feet away from you. Wait, I take that back. You’re lucky if they are dying. Have you ever heard the sound of people not-dying? They make too much noise. So, no.  There was a TV, a stand with some juice on it, and a small fleet of machines quietly mumbling to themselves. On the wall beside the door, a whiteboard had written on it, “Your nurse for the night is Leslie!” 

“Hey, you’re not dead!” 

“Farsee!” He was dressed in a tuxedo t-shirt and jean shorts. Classic Farsee.

“Hey, pal. You alright?”

“I guess so. I’m sorry I never made it to the smoothie stand.”

Farsee nodded, “So am I. I would’ve much enjoyed for you to bask in the glory of a B4. Rose, I mean, when she makes a Toledo Twister,” Farsee sat on the edge of my bed like a father explaining the birds and the bees to his son, “they have so much shit in the blender— bananas, chocolate, apples, peaches, raspberries, blueberries, a little bit of pepper— that they have to hold it down while they blend it. Twice. The whole time, the machine vibrates through their body, making their ass jiggle.”

“You’ll have to show me when I get out of here.”

“Definitely, man. But I have a surprise.”

Farsee reached over and buzzed for the nurse. 

“What are you doing?”

“I said I have a surprise.”

Boy, he really thumbed that button. I’m not sure if it was a once-and-done sort of system, but the way he was going at it, Farsee was either calling the entire staff on hand, or he was going to get the most panicked, distraught nurse on this floor.

Rapid clicks came from the hall. A woman burst through the door. “Mitchell? Mitchell? Are you okay?”

It was Leslie. She was doe-eyed, storming to me with an urgency. She pushed Farsee out of the way and began checking me over. Her eyes worked themselves wildly over the charts and graphs, the readings. 

“Oh dear God, I thought you were dying.”

 “I am.”

Farsee gave me a look of approval for that one.

“I mean. I’m. I’m. I meant right now. Dead. I thought you were dead.”

“Do you think this is some sort of joke, Nurse Leslie?” Farsee added from the chair in the corner.

“No, no! Oh, god. I just ruined your life, didn’t I? I am sorry. It’s been so hectic around here. Twenty seven cases of people getting violently ill from eating rice. Rice!”

“It’s okay, Nurse Leslie. He’s just giving you a hard time.”

Farsee chuckled. “Nurse Leslie, Mitchell said he was hoping there was a way to turn the channel, but we couldn’t find the remote. Is there anyway you can help us?”

“Oh, yes. You have to use the actual buttons on the TV. Here, I’ll reach and you tell me when to stop.”

I felt Farsee jet across the room to sit beside me. He took my hand. Before I could ask him what he was doing, he shushed me, pointing silently.

Leslie turned, standing on her tippy-toes, reaching up high for the buttons on the TV in the corner of the ceiling. Farsee began tightening his grip, bitting his lower-lip.

“No,” I whispered. “It can’t be.”

“Yes,” Farsee leaned to whisper in my ear, he gently kissed my forehead, “yes.”

“Is this? This is?”

“Yes, Mitchell. A B5.”

“Farsee. My friend. Thank you.”

I am often prone to hyperbole. It comes with the territory of trying to survive. Keeps things interesting. I like to exaggerate. But I cannot stress enough the sweetness, the symmetry of this butt. In it, I saw God. In its little shelf, it’s finely accented “umph.” I saw the way in which He works, with supple, slight nods to His love for us, that we are to find in one another, but often overlook. The bed I was in became not one of death and discomfort— a hard, steel trap— but a soft, pleasant pillow for my heart to beat on as I perceived this gift. Even in such an ill-fitting, utilitarian garb as scrubs, the butt spoke to me. It did laps around my head, sat at my feet like a delighted old friend, whom I did not remember but, in this moment, it did not matter because we were together again. The butt had a pleasantness existing outside the realm of reality. It shone from beneath the depths of age, stress, and darkness. Let me not forget the way in which the curvature of her back, as she strained herself to reach the stars, so delicately eased into a cresting mound. If the curvature of the earth had an idol, this was it. If you graphed the serendipity of this moment, the points on the X and Y axises would amount to this butt.

“Um, I’ve been through every channel twice.” 

I was stolen from my dream. Farsee was lying on his back next to me, half his body falling off the bed, propping himself up with one leg on the floor, his cheeks quivering.

“This one is great.” I said, “Perfect.” It was the Weather Channel.

“Alright. I’ll be back in a bit to check on you.”

“Please.”

“Yeah, please,” Farsee added.

Leslie gave us a suspicious look before checking off the time she’d been in on the white-board and leaving.

I felt a stirring in my loins. I’d had plenty of erections, sure. They’re not unusual. But this was no such thing. It was a cavernous, stirring feeling. It was the will to survive, all those thousands of years of human evolution telling me that, god damnit, I had to reproduce, to survive, to see more butts.

“Farsee, why do I have this boner?”

“Because you are a human male.”

“This boner feels special. It feels like it’s deeper than my penis.”

“How deep is your boner?”

“It feels so deep right now. I could feel it touching my heart.”

“I wish I had a boner that reached that deep.”

“One day,” I looked at him, my new friend, “You will.”

He looked away. “Mitch, they said you’re refusing chemo.”

“True. Who told you that?”

“Eh, I asked the station-nurse why my brother wasn’t bald. Why though?”

“It wouldn’t do much. Just stick around a few months longer, if that.

“Wouldn’t that be worth it? Think of how many more butts you could see.”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Well, Leslie told me that she thinks it’s because you’re scared of becoming more attached to things you know are being going to be taken away.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Yeah. But come on. More time is more time. Leslie said she’d help you out if you changed your mind. Think about it.”

““Mitchell?” Coach knocked on the door, he took his hat off, holding it in his hands. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll show myself out.” Farsee left the room, heading towards the nurses desk.

“Coach! How is the team?” I sat up in bed. I hadn’t seen him since that day when he told me about Shith’ead. He looked as though he’d been up for days, his eyes were sullen, enshrined in bags. Even his mustache was unkept, and his voice, usually baritone and soothing, was fragile and meek. I thought he might’ve gotten into an accident.

“Coach, you okay?” I asked again.

“Yeah. No. No, I’m not okay. It’s just, it’s seeing you like this.” 

“Coach?”

“You’re just a fucking kid. You don’t deserve this.”

Before I could respond, he burst out in tears, “I’m a fraud. I can’t even keep it straight. I’m a druggie, Mitch. Even when you came to tell me you had cancer. At most of the games this season. While I was in my office. At home. Forgive me, Mitch.” Coach grabbed my hands. The IV tugged, I flinched. My heart-boner vanished.

You never really think people in positions like Coach’s could be so broken. To be responsible for a group of boys, the community puts a trust into people that even if they’re screwed up, broken, that they hold it together long enough to make it through to the next time. I guess that’s the assumption most lies are built on, that people shouldn’t act like humans, like there is a difference between the two. 

“So what you said about the ancient Sumerian butt-god, Shith’ead?”

“Butt-god? Jesus, what? No. I was high on peyote and coke, Mitch. I am so sorry.”

“Does the team know?”

“No. They can’t. I can’t. Not before playoffs.”

“Mitchell?” It was my mother, she was with a small, round woman who was in a grey suit, holding balloons that dragged along the ceiling. “Mitchell, honey. There’s someone here for you.”

For a second, I thought that my mother may have been escorting Death himself to me. This woman looked like she was going to steal my breath. Her eyes were huge, but her shoulders fell low as she slouched towards me, holding out the balloons. “Mitchell, hi. These are for you.”

She gave me the string for the balloons.

“Alice works for the Make-a-Dream foundation, Mitchell.” My mother chirped from the door. She looked absolutely defeated. Her clothes wrinkled, hair a mess, with sad eyes. But she still smiled when she saw me.

“How are you, Mitchell?” Alice blinked too much when she spoke to me, she tilted her head like a confused dog.

“Getting a little tired of people asking me that question, honestly.”

“Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure. Well, Mitchell. I’m here to help. My organization, have you heard of us?”

“Not really.” 

“Well, we work with boys and girls like you to fulfill their wishes. I’m here to ask you if there is anything we can do to make your life a little more special, especially during these final days.”

“Wait, what? Days? What do you mean ‘days?’ I thought I had a few weeks. That’s what they said.”

Everyone in the room once again turned to my mother, and once again, she backed away, with her palm covering her mouth.

“Mitchell, listen.” Alice was taken aback, glancing at Coach and my mother. I could see the burden being placed upon her to now inform me of my new due-date.

I smacked away the balloons. “Mom, what does she mean?”

My mother wouldn’t come near me. She held herself up by the door, pressing her hands over her eyes, while Alice sat next to me, Coach coming beside her.

“I thought I had a few weeks, mom.” 

She left out of the room quietly. Coach followed her.

One by one, the things I loved were leaving me in this room to die. 

I was alone with Alice. She had suddenly become my favorite.

“Mitchell, your cancer has spread faster than anyone would have imagined.”

“They said I had a few weeks.”

“Mitchell, look at me.”

I don’t know what I expected. No, the problem is I knew what I expected. I expected the people I loved and trusted to be there for me. All I had was a drug-induced vision quest bestowed upon me by my washed-up baseball coach and a mother who would drink herself to death. All I had were butts and anger. Anger wasn’t going to do anything for me, so even though Coach was a druggie, what he said still resonated with me. It was up to me to keep myself going now.

“I just want to see butts before I die.”

“Excuse me?” Alice said, “You want to see what?”

“All of the butts.”

Alice looked around, perhaps thinking she was mishearing me. I assured her I was not. 

“Like what kind of butts?”

“The best of butts, the worst of butts. I want to see the butt that will save me.” I told her, “Your butt. I really want to see your butt.”

“My butt?”

When a boy with cancer tells you that he wants to see your butt as he lay dying in his hospital bed, there is not much you can do to protest. 

This is something I wish I would have known earlier on in my prognosis, perhaps it is the greatest gift one can find in cancer.  The slow-burn of death that can turn your life into a happening, rowdy good-time right before you croak. 

Alice got up to shut the door. She stood there with her back to me for a long while, hands on the doorknob. Finally, she turned back to face me.

“Did you see it?”

“I did. You have a wonderful butt, Alice. Has anybody ever told you that? Really, it’s refined. A classic. Your butt, I mean, it says, ‘come, be with me, and I might surprise you later.’ It’s a winky-face butt.”

It was a solid B3. You could tell Alice took zero pride in her body, even though she should have. I don’t blame her. Her job was to be with kids with cancer all day. She was beautiful, though, with the way her back curved slightly to form a little stoop before her butt.

She came and sat down beside me on a chair, blushing. “Not even my husband says things like that. Gosh, this is weird.”

“I’m sorry. But you know, a lot of people miss these things. You seem like you have your plate full, dealing with dead kids all day.”

Alice nodded. “You’ll have to forgive me. I don’t quite know how to help you.”

“That’s okay, I mean, if you can help me see some butts, I’d appreciate it.”

“What kind of butts, Mitchell?”

“All butts. All of the butts. Pandora’s Butts.”

Alice was a woman who I had already had a fond appreciation for. She didn’t disregard my butt-quest in the slightest, at least not vocally. Even if her job wouldn’t allow her to help with my admittedly odd request, I was just glad I got to experience her, and her butt. 

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you like you’d really want me to, but l’ll.. see what I can do.”

“I would appreciate that.”

“You going to be okay tonight?”

“I think so.”

Alice gave me the rest of her soda and disappeared. That night I had convinced myself that if I were to fall asleep, I would never wake. I managed to get the dry-erase board off the wall and into my bed. I would write.

I spit onto it, wiping it clean, and uncapped the blue marker, trying to recall the proper way to compose a sonnet from English class. This is what I came up with. 

Consider I had only just begun a song

It came to happen then, whatever, all

A cancer in my home, two months from Fall

To my friends, my family, so long.

The End of Life commands a quest

Of great Brothers, of butts and men,

There will be a B5 waiting at my end,

“Lay your head upon me and rest.”

Fondly I will know the way in which

Butts regard the truest form of self

I do prefer them big, I cannot fib.

Maker, hear me well, ready my ditch!

Spare mother the dust on my shelf!

A life of butts is what I had to give.

I considered saving it until morning to show Farsee my butt-sonnet. It seemed like something he might appreciate. 

Mom and Coach barely made themselves known the rest of the night. They both simply wandered up to me and said they were sorry, that they were just tired. They’d see me tomorrow. I thought this night might be the closest to alone I’d get in a long time. Alone as in only kind of, sort of alone. Not-dead alone. Farsee, mom, Coach, Alice, Nurse Leslie. They were all gone. This was what death would be like. No, that’s not true. It wasn’t even close to death. I was still alive. I still had time. I did the only thing I knew that would get me to sleep, for sure.

For now, I jerked off and passed out.

***

At roughly 10am I was removed from my room by Alice, and given my clothes along with a super-cool wheelchair. Farsee pushed it for me, whispering into my ear the grade of every butt we passed. 

“B2. B2. Wow, B4. Eh, B3. B3+. B1, get out of here, B1.”

After much silence, my mother and Coach admitted their mistakes in dealing with a dying child. Understandable, I told them, before promising to come back to haunt them. 

I was wheeled through what seemed like miles of white corridors, through doors that opened for cards and codes, and then physically out of the building an into the sun.

We crossed a parking lot to a building that could’ve been a spaceship. 

“You see this, Mitch? You get cancer and they send you to Starfleet. You know why? Because you’re already infected. They can send you to die and no one will care. Why are you sending my friend to die?!”

“Boy, we’re not, calm down.” Coach did not appreciate Farsee’s sense of humor.  

Farsee whispered, “I’ll save you, Mitch.”

It was immaculate. Royal. Like a five-star hotel. The walls gleamed. There was a fountain in the lobby, but the fountain was the size of a pool if a pool was the size of a very small lake. It was the St. Joseph Cancer Center. 

There was a lot of money in the disease.

“Are we going to leave Mitch here to die?” Farsee asked in the elevator. 

I was wondering the same thing.

“No, no. No one is going to die here.” Alice assured me. Coach and mom were holding hands. They glanced at me, at one another, at me, back at each other, looking for approval, or waiting for disapproval.

“Continue,” I said, gesturing towards their grasped hands.

“So if no one dies here, why does the cancer center look like a waiting room for Heaven?” Farsee asked.

“Uhh. Here we are!” Alice chriped.

At the 7th floor, the doors opened to reveal a posh, light-filled ward. A cross between a playpen and a doctor’s office, the colors vibrant, the nurses wearing hand-drawn name-tags. Alice chauffeured us to the waiting area, which would have also been a wonderful place to die, complete with no less than three TV’s, a vending-machine, and four bookcases.

“Mitch, man, I might need to get cancer after this,” Farsee splayed himself out on a couch.

“Don’t think the amenities quite justify the disease, but this is nice.”

Coach hadn’t said a word, frazzled and burned-out. I think he was scared of me, of what I’d say. My mother went to the vending machine, the sound of a granola bar clanked at the bottom. 

“Here, Mitchell. You need your strength.”

“Thanks, mom.” It was shattered, mostly crumbs, from the fall in the machine.

Alice took Coach and my mom, “Can I just run something by you two?” 

They went and huddled out in the hallway. I watched Coach nervously rubbing his fingers down his mustache. Alice very lightly gestured in my direction multiple times.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Farsee asked.

“My funeral, if I had to guess.”

“You know, Mitch, you might be like Jesus.”

“What?” 

“You could be the Butt-Jesus. You could die so our butts may live again.” This was the second time someone had mentioned Jesus and butts.

“In a world without hemorrhoids,” I hoped.

“And poop.”

“How are we supposed to live without poop?” I asked.

“You’ll figure it out, Butt-Christ.”

“Farsee, I’m glad I met you. You’re like, you’re like all of my apostles in one brown child.”

“I will spread your message, even after you are gone.” Farsee bowed, kissed his palm, and then solemnly placed it on his butt.

“We’ll be back in a bit,” Alice began to roll me away. 

“Wait.”

Coach was standing in the back of the room, pale as a ghost. My mom pushed him towards me. “Mitch, I’m sorry if I let you down. If we let you down. You know, we may not have cancer, but we’re still sick. I’m just proud I got to be your coach. Even for a little. So the team signed this for you.”

Coach handed me a baseball, it was filled with scribbled signatures. All of them were the same.

  “All of these signatures just say ‘Mitch,’” I said, confused.

  This was enough to make Coach’s voice crack, “I told them to write something special.”

Jimmy had also drawn a picture of a cat with whiskers, it looked like a butt. 

“Thank you. Hold onto it for me?”

“Sure, sure.”

Alice placed her hand on my shoulder. 

She wheeled me out of the room, around a corner, down a long hall, through some security doors, and into a posh wing that was more relaxed. Less noise. Less colors, but still, ritzy. There were soft, amber tones on the walls and floors. Gold-plated door-knobs.

So, of course, it was the hospice. 

“This is exciting, Alice. I hope you get a promotion just for this wheelchair ride.”

She took a short stroll around the corner to a room, the door ajar. At the threshold, Alice stopped, kneeling to speak to me.

“Alright. So. Here’s the deal.  Her name is Cora. She doesn’t have much time either. That’s all I’m telling you.” 

With a strength I did not know Alice possessed, I was shoved into the room. I found myself barreling towards the window and the air-unit, which was the size of a coffin. Not quite sure how to work the brakes the chair, I simply threw my feet on the floor and skidded. 

I turned around to see Alice pulling the door shut, and a pale, entrancing girl wearing a white and red cap watching me from a hospital bed. She looked a bit unamused, sighing, throwing down her magazine.

“Are you lost?”

“Well, I don’t know where I am, if that’s what you mean.”

“Right. You must be the butt-kid.”

Unsure of how I felt about being referred to as the “butt-kid,” I squirmed in my chair. Though, if all else, it was better than “cancer-boy,” or “lumpy-bones.”

“I’m Cora. No, wait. That’s your name. I’m Mitch.”

“You’ve got a strange chin. What’s that growing on it?” She worked her own bald chin.

I grew warm. Already with the sass. Who was she to insult my chin? My chin was great. It was “presidential,” a mossy rock. I let it slide. There was an odd tranquility to her room. No letters. No cards. No balloons. Nothing but her and that magazine. The TV was on mute, the QVC channel hosts silently babbling about.

“Do you know why I’m here?” I asked.

“For real? You mean they didn’t tell you?”

“No.” 

Cora chuckled. “Guess.”

“Is this some sort of almost-dead adolescent speed dating event?” I hobbled to the end of the bed. 

“You wish.”

I did sort of wish. She was cute.

“I don’t know. I mean, you are here, so. You have cancer too?”

“Yeah.”

“What flavor? Cinnamon?”

Cora took off her cap for a moment, rubbing her scalp. I had expected all heads to maintain a smoothness, even in baldness, but Cora’s was uneven. She laughed, lost in a thought. Then went silent. She laughed again. I waited. She touched her arms. Her neck. The room puttered into silence. A simple movement of my legs caused entirely too much noise.

It struck me. “You have butt cancer.”

Cora snapped at me, “It’s called anal cancer, but yeah. Pretty much.”

“Wow. Wow. What? What can you tell me?”

Cora began to blink a lot. “Well,” she blinked, “I mean, it’s like all cancer. We don’t really know what caused it. But,” she blinked more, huffed, “they’ve operated on so much of my asshole that I don’t really have one anymore. I’m 18 and I’ve got fucking butt cancer and I shit like an old lady and I want to die, well I wanted to die, and then it came back so now I’m dying again..Have you ever bled out of your ass, Mitch?”

“No. Not once.”

She scoffed, started tapping on her hip. “I actually think something’s wrong if there isn’t blood in the bowl. In 18 years, I’ve had more hands on and in my ass than in my hands or up my shirt. But I bet you don’t want to touch my butt, do you? Do you?”

Let’s be honest, here: we all know what you’re supposed to say in this situation. You’re supposed to say, “no, absolutely not, anal cancer patient, I do not want to see or touch your ass.” You’re supposed to placate the awkward by silently walking up to the anal-cancer patient, whoever you are, and giving them the most sincere hug of your life until one or both of you are in tears. 

,I just wanted kiss her. I’m not sure if it was because I thought it’d help her or it’d help me. It’d probably not help her. It would definitely help me feel better. I’d never kissed her. Or a girl. Anyone except my mom, who I guess is a girl, but not really. Maybe not her. So maybe I didn’t want to kiss Cora, but the idea of her. A blank sheet of paper with her name on it, a few of her better qualities listed below in pen. Her essence. Her honesty, her perseverance.

But I couldn’t do that.

And yet, here she was, across from me.

Cora would be wonderful to kiss. She wore lipstick. Bright red, against that pale, sickly glow made her all seem unreal. I didn’t even want to kiss her on the butt. The butt was an afterthought now. Just the lips, We could work with that. But she did have a butt, and it was killing her. How slowly, or quickly, I wasn’t sure. She had that air, that calmness that said to me it wouldn’t be long. A tranquility, you could tell. Of course it hurt. Of course it sucked. She had something to hold onto, and that’s what kept her from giving up. We all had our own butt-quest. Maybe Cora’s was in that magazine. Maybe it was underneath that hat. Maybe it was in a book somewhere, in a page near the end when the characters realize what has gotten them through all that shit. When they look back and realize what it was that pulled them through. That without the struggle, there would be no hope.

That’s when it struck me like a lash on the back. In my 15 years on this Earth, all of which were quickly coming to a close, I had never touched someone else’s butt, not a one. 

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Cora went back to pretending to read. 

I took the magazine, slowly, and removed it from her hands. “I would actually really enjoy that, Cora. If it’s okay with you.”

I stared, infinitely, into her eyes. 

A bird took off from the windowsill.

I climbed into bed beside her. I didn’t touch her butt. Not at all, not even a little. Didn’t even think about it.

Cora rolled her fingers on my palm while she told me about blood farts, and then period shits— both things I had no idea existed until this very moment. Things that made cancer seem kind. I told her Blood Fart would be a great name for a punk band.

I realized this was only possible because of the cancer. It forced me to bypass my initial skepticisms, my nervousness.

I was doing what I could with what I was given.

We reached the threshold of sudden-adoration where you can’t figure out another way to hold hands, or you get thirsty, or how you’re sitting becomes uncomfortable, and you realize you might actually have to speak to one another again, which is scary, because you’re not dying right now, even if you are dying, you’re just there, and then you have to admit that you really don’t know this person at all, but you’ve just spent the last 20 minutes pretending you do, and that needs to stop now, because, well, it just does.

“So what’s your deal, Mitch?”

“My deal?”

“Come on. You know. Butts? Really?”

“You don’t know about the butts.”

“Tell me about butts, Mitchell.”

“I used to play baseball. I used to be pretty good, too. My coach, he told me about the Ancient Sumerian Butt-God, named Shith’ead. He told me about how, if you listen to butts, you can hear them whispering the secrets of the universe.”

“That’s kind of fucked up.”

“He was taking psychedelics.” I patted on my shirt pocket, realizing then what had happened at the mall. “Chewing them, actually.” I handed her the empty pouch he’d given me.

She put it up to her nose, sniffed. “But you still listened to him.”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

Cora shrugged. “Whatever you have to, right?”

“You gonna die soon?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are you scared?”

“Usually,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I could feel her watching me. After a minute, she took my wrist, lifted herself up, and put my hand underneath her. Her butt consuming my hand, my wrist, a bit of my forearm.

It was happening.

I gently dug my fingertips into her cheeks. It was soft, softer than the softest couch or love-seat. Silk had nothing on butts. This butt was not on the scale, not a B5, nothing. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t about the butts, I knew it now. It was never about the butts.

“What’s your favorite part about my butt, Mitch?”

I was spinning. Cora’s butt felt better, softer, warmer, than anything I could have ever conceived. I stammered. I had to tell myself to breathe.

I heard Farsee in my head. He was saying, “If you fuck this up...”

I let my hand relax. The warmth of Cora’s butt began to permeate my hand, my bones.

I placed my head on her shoulder. 

“Nothing. But I really like your lips.”

It wasn’t long before I found myself drifting, pulling myself in and out of being so content, so okay, I could actually fall asleep. It was the first time I had thought, maybe, possibly, of those experimental procedures. Maybe it would be worth it for another month or two of living. Maybe the hair-loss wouldn’t be so bad. A couple more days with Cora. A few more minutes with my hand resting beneath her butt, or us just sitting together, silent. I thought that even if I couldn’t muster the strength to walk, I could always find the energy to lay beside a nice person and be alive, for whatever time I had left.

“Cora, I just want you to know, your butt is perfect. Even with the cancer. I can’t even tell.”

I waited for a response. Then waited some more. I assumed that maybe that comment had crossed a line, somehow, and the moment seemed to slip away. Did I just fuck it up? Wait, was there even an “it?” Did she have butt implants? Was she self-conscious? Of course she was. Shit. What was I supposed to do now? 

I kept my head on her shoulder, scared to move. Maybe I could pretend to be asleep. Or dead.

A warm trickle fell onto my forehead. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cora was turned, looking out the window. I saw the lipstick smeared across her teeth as she grinned at the setting sun with my hand on her butt.