Cardiologist

I tell the girls to leave me alone and go play with the shaggy dog out in the yard, because somehow, I'm chatting online with the Eloise Gardner. The one who starred in Pig People the classic 1987 horror film about pigs who use human heart valves, and then human kidneys, then human arms and human penises — they get more human than pig. I've seen this woman naked on a bale of hay, squeezing her breasts together with one arm (presumably protecting her heart from the Pig Surgeon) while fighting for an anesthetic mask in the other. And I want to tell her I've laid down naked in hay before, so I know how much that scene must've hurt and how her back must've been bloody and scratched up after, but I don't want to sound like a perv, so I keep on saying annoying fan things like what does it feel like to be part of cinematic history? and is John Fillati really an asshole? And she's telling me that Fillati only eats raw meat and kraft macaroni, when my mom comes in with a package addressed to me and my brother who lives in Albuquerque, the brown paper is sun-bleached white and the address is in a language I can't read. It's from my cardiologist, Mom says, excitedly, and just then, I remember meeting her cardiologist, five years ago. A tiny woman, with bobbed blond curly hair, like Shirley Temple had walked off the screen of Little Orphan Annie but the transition from pixels to cells had aged her fifty years and almost killed her. My Cardiologist, Cindy, mom says. And I think: Oh, right. Cindy. The bleached paper is so thinned the package opens itself when I hold it, and inside is my first two-piece swim suit — green and glittering with mermaid scales, sand still on it.There's more lost things: my mother's chipped swan planter, a half empty box of Waffle Crisp Cereal, my size 12 pink Velcro Keds, the old kitchen faucet, one of those lava rocks that went around the hastas, the handheld fan Grandpa Willie would blast himself with in the summer. There was some kind of flying bug too — but it escaped before I could see it.In the chat, the Eloise Gardener is still typing & telling me this old dogs still got legs. Theres something in the works. And the girls come in, with the stray dog, except they've put strawberry jam on him, so it looks like he's bleeding and they're filming him walking around the room, zooming in with the camera when the jam slides down his side and on to the carpet.I type seriously! what?cant wait to see in the chat, then yell at the girls to film the stray dog outside, but they say, that the plot necessitates filming inside the house & what can I say to that? Mom comes back in and slams the door behind her, and says, you didn't even notice I left the room and you didn't even ask how my cardiology appointment went. And I say, do you even know who ELOISE FUCKING GARDNER is?Well Cindy says that I'm sick and it's serious and I probably have three years.And I cry and scream because it's not fair, didn't Cindy just give those years back?