The time Mom rebuked us for joking about the funny mark on her neck that looked like a hickey,
the time she swore up and down it wasn’t actually a hickey, the time she pointed to it weeks later
as proof it could not have ever been a hickey, the time she laid out in the sun having slathered her
body with baby oil and burned to a crisp, the time when the strange mark began to thicken and
take shape, the time she laid out in the sun having slathered her body with baby oil and burned to
a crisp, the time her husband called her a hypochondriac to discourage her from medical care,
and the time she laid out in the sun having slathered her body with baby oil and burned to a crisp,
the time her husband insisted she was a hypochondriac again and that the mark was just a
birthmark and nothing more, the time she called me to tell me about the growing mark, the time I
insisted she go to the doctor, the time I demanded she go to the doctor and offered to pay, and
still yet the time she laid out in the sun having slathered her body with baby oil and burned to a
crisp, the time she finally went to the doctor he told her it was advanced stage two melanoma, the
time she went to Duke University for an experimental treatment that was a precursor to T-cell
therapy, the time she spent with her young son before the cancer returned, the time I was
brushing her hair and noticed that her course hair had changed—softened—and asked about her
cancer, the time she insisted her blood work was clean, the time we learned her cancer returned
despite her “clean bloodwork,” the time I watched the cancer spread across her body and to her
brain, the time her eyes lost focus and began suffering motion sickness, the time she went back to
Duke, the time the unethical doctor debulked her because he wanted cells for his study because
she was patient zero for his experimental treatment, the time he impugned my questioning his
judgment by asking “are you studying to be a nurse,” the time she became a nullity after the
aggressive surgery, the time she lay on her death bed insisting to her husband that he not lay her
to rest in a light colored coffin, the time she passed away quickly because the nurse put her on
the wrong oxygen, the time we went to buy her a coffin and her husband bought a light blue
coffin because it was on sale, the time her body slipped into the moist ground redolent of
petrichor.

Author Bio: C. Christine Fair is a Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. She completed her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago. Her creative pieces have appeared in Hyptertext, Lunch Ticket, Bangalore Review, Glassworks, and Existere Journal of Arts, among others in addition to her prodigious scholarly work. She causes trouble in multiple languages: Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. She is a student at the Writers Studio.