Sheila Black

EPIC

My son uses epic often as an adjective-
crowing Epic Fail, when I spill the milk or
Epic Excellence, of the grease-lake
of quarter pounder with cheese,
mostly as a compliment, but sometimes
as an insult, moaning Epic Alert when I
unreel a story which fills with hot air,
which doesn't move a bit. I could sing
our shared bodies as epic, though they
are small. I could sing of interventions
and surgeries-that medicalized war of
pin and hook and brace, but that is so
often the lie, leaving out what has marked
us most-the spare, the strange, the
in-between. As a teenager, I pictured it
as walking the length of a public beach
in my wet one-piece, the other teenagers,
heads bobbing under their headphones
to a music I would never hear. The knowledge
plain as sunlight, that my body, my legs
would never be attractive in any ordinary
sense, though people with fetishes might
feel otherwise, the kind who post on
late-night chat rooms: Women with one leg
wanted. Dwarf desired. Once, my son and
I, past midnight in an Albuquerque emergency
room for fluid on his hip, were tended by
a young orthopedic resident, handsome as
a doctor on a soap, engaged to be married
"in the spring," so overcome at actually
running into two people with our particular
condition, he expounded at length on
our multiple anomolies, using such meaty
words-achondroplasia, displasiac,
refulgent-instead of being offended,
I felt blessed. This is what it is, I thought,
to be simply seen. Not the epic, but the
matter of us-all those glances away,
when someone wanted to say something
and didn't.

Sheila Black is the author of a chapbook How to Become a Maquiladora (Main Street Rag, 2007), and two full-length collections House of Bone and the recently-released Love/Iraq both published by CustomWords Press. Black was born with x-linked hypophosphotomia (XLH), more commonly known as vitamin D resistant rickets.