Carla, the waiting room pro, shuffled through the coffee table offerings and brought back three magazines. She offered me one. I couldn’t read a word, but flicked through the pictures of aspirational houses, aspirational bodies.

“Remember those real-life tragedy movies we watched with Gran?” I said.

“Mm?” Carla was trying to silently rip out a recipe.

“They didn’t have so many waiting rooms.”

“This isn’t a tragedy. You don’t know the results.”

“Not yet. But any minute now — ”

I hoped my name would be called in that instant. Instead, there was the receptionist’s typing, Carla’s covert page-tearing, someone else coughing, Liam sighing.

“Dead again,” he said, not looking up from the game he was playing on Carla’s phone.

Then, my name was called.

+

My favorite movie had been about a stadium roof collapsing under the weight of snow, trapping people in small spaces inside. Gran always had the lights off, to make it more like a cinema. Her cigarette glowed in the dark. I watched its movement and called it her firefly, not knowing they were real creatures that existed in other countries.

Gran died in her sleep with ash on her pillow and a scorch hole in her nightgown. At the funeral everyone agreed it was how she would have wanted to go. I couldn’t understand, then, how the time and manner of your dying could be an ambition.

+

I was searching on my phone before we were even in the carpark. Mortality was allocated time periods and split into percentages.

“Don’t look stuff up. It won’t help,” Carla said. For years, she was better qualified to talk about medical procedures. Her big toe was relocated to her hand after she crushed her thumb to uselessness on a fishing trip. She had to relearn how to grip things, how to walk, but now you wouldn’t know. She was proud of her body’s make-do pragmatism.

But the statistics were irresistible. I pictured one hundred women all my age. Then, I pictured the predicted number of them crumpling to the ground after one year, after five, after ten.

+

When I woke from the surgery, I wanted to curl back into myself and let the humans get on with their world. Nurses took my blood pressure again and again. Still only something over something, they frowned, telling off my blood in the manner of a parent who is not angry just disappointed.

It was two in the morning before I could string words together. The night nurse sponged my face and offered to wash my feet. She reassured me that while it had been more complicated than they had planned, the surgeon did very neat work. Did I know he was an excellent violinist?

“Please don’t leave me,” I said.

“I must,” she said quietly, and I knew it had been selfish to ask. She was almost out the door when she turned back.

“I nearly forgot,” she said. “Your sister and nephew were here. Left you this.”

She stuck a post-it note where I could read Carla’s writing. Chin Up!!

+

A frail ancient woman in the bed by the window gave instructions over the phone to her husband throughout the day: turn the dial until it beeps, put the soap in first, make sure the chicken is piping hot.

Let her rest, I wanted to yell at him. Let us all rest!

The nurse changing my dressings gave a sharp intake of breath. I couldn’t see my own back and there were no mirrors. Carla was there, so I asked her to take a photo. She and the nurse both counseled that it was probably best not to.

“Things always look worse as they’re getting better,” Carla said.

I insisted. Carla passed me my phone.

As children, we spent summers poking around rock pools hoping for something repulsive. At night we had sat cross legged on each other’s beds, too hot to sleep, taking it in turns to peel the sunburn from each other’s backs.

When I saw the photo of my wound, it looked like something we might have found waiting in one of those pools. And I’d been cultivating it under my own skin, all this time.

+

Liam was at his dad’s so I slept in his room. Carla’s said to knock on the wall in the night if I needed anything.

In the early years, I didn’t expect much from Liam; I wasn’t good with babies, and every toddler I’ve met behaves like a bad drunk. But nine years on, Liam was still remote. He was in reading recovery at school. Carla wasn’t worried. She said he’d catch up and who cares if he’s never bookish. Who cared? I cared. I brought him books, which he accepted stoically, like fair punishment. I read the first chapters to him to spark his interest. He picked at his scabbed knees, inscrutable.

But lying in Liam’s room, half-stupefied by painkillers, I felt close to him. Yes, there was the bookshelf with uncreased spines. But there were glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling. On his wall were swimming lesson certificates for submerging his head and floating. On his bedside table was a dead bee in a walnut shell coffin, and a little jar with his impossibly small milk teeth. When Carla saw the jar she shuddered and went to move it. I told her it was fine. I understood that instinct to keep all bits of yourself near.

+

Wind had shaped the trees along the coast into permanent angles. We sat in the car and watched the waves smashing into the shore. A sign warned against swimming. Farther out, where the water moved like something turning in its sleep, surfers paddled and waited. A guy we went to school with had drowned out there the previous month after he hit his head on his board. I’d been in hospital for the memorial, so we watched the video of it on Carla’s phone, sitting there in the carpark. Drone footage showed his friends forming a huge circle with their boards, and his best mate paddling to the center and scattering his ashes.

We were both impressed by the production.

“Is that a thing, now?” I asked. “Funerals viewed from above?”

“I guess if the situation calls for it.”

“What song would you want played at yours?”

Carla shook her head. “I know what you’re doing and I don’t want to play. This conversation isn’t necessary.”

+

In the supermarket the free-range ham costs forty-five percent more than the caged ham. I asked the butcher if that meant the free-range pig faced death with forty-five percent more equanimity than his caged brother.

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” he said.

“Stop looking for meaning in everything,” Carla said as she pushed the trolley to the baking goods aisle.

“It’s research. I’m thinking of moving to the country,” I said.

“You’re being ridiculous.”

The supermarket had been her idea, saying I needed a change of scene. I think she regretted it.

At the checkout, Carla packed bags with ruthless efficiency. Tins with tins. Jars with packets. Bananas positioned on top like a crown. In the five months after the accident and before her toe was transplanted, she had kept forgetting she couldn’t grip things with her right hand. She knocked over drinks, pawed at door-handles.

“You’re really good at this,” I said. I sounded sarcastic but my admiration was real.

+

I sat up in bed, scrolling up and down through mortality percentages. I knew them by heart, but if I kept looking maybe I would find a message, like tea leaves or a death metal song played backwards. Carla brought me a cup of tea and I covered my phone.

“Sleep well?” she asked.

In the stadium movie, there was an old-timer caretaker who prophesied the roof coming down. Everyone ignored him.

“Yeah, good thanks.”

A roof was slowly collapsing, and I was the only one who could hear the beams creaking. I was the only one who could see the roof.

“I’m going to work this morning, then I’ll come back at lunch and get you for your appointment.”

“Okay, sounds good!” I said, and Carla nodded. The right answer.

+

The doctor sat behind the desk and referred to his notes like a newsreader. The histology report described the tumor and excised tissue like a clock. A suture marked twelve o’clock, a blue ink dot marked three, a black ink dot marked nine. The doctor explained how they had carefully sampled the cells around the edge at every minute, to check if they got it all. They had unfortunately found some cells (throat clear) that they would have preferred not to.

“What time are the bad cells?” I asked.

“That’s not really relevant.”

“What time?”

“They’re between one and seven but, really, forget the clock thing.”

Carla placed her hand on my arm, quietening me as the doctor talked next steps.

I rested my chin in my hands and shut my eyes. The room of one hundred women formed a circle that I saw from above. I could feel Carla’s pulse in her hand and my pulse in my throat. I could hear the seconds hand of my watch, moving towards the approaching hour. I needed to tell Liam that I understood the teeth. With every tiny thud, a star dropped from the ceiling, a woman slumped to the floor.

I opened my eyes, focused on Carla’s hand with her brute toe-thumb holding me to her, or her to me, proof right there that miracles happen.

+++