I.

The end of June scorched the earth and sweat dripped off me as I stood over the stove, pulling up pieces of fried chicken out of their golden baths of grease. It’s so hot here in Alberta that the metal picnic benches in the parks are bowing and warping under the invisible weight of the air, and lucky us, we have no air conditioner. You just got home from running errands. It was a Saturday, June 26, and I asked you for help. The board came out, as did the knife.

A yelp a moment later, when, while holding the fruit steady, you somehow got shocked by a watermelon. Fire and ice coursed through your hands simultaneously, central and peripheral nervous systems begging for help as you jerked your hands back from the knife handle.

Bizarre. Unusual. Not anywhere near the realm of “normal.”

One quick discussion and call with your mother later, and you were headed to the ER just in case Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were somehow predicting the future back in 1963 and you were turning into the world’s first X-man. I stayed behind to finish the chicken job, not thinking too much about it at first. While the experience was weird, it wasn’t the first odd event that had happened in our lives since this year began, and I thought you’d be checked over, told it was nothing and sent on your way. A one-off. A fluke.

The chicken pieces were all fished out and safely cooling on wire racks suspended over silver baking sheets. I finished your job slicing the watermelon and I ate what I could hungrily, as there was no use facing an hours-long wait in the ER waiting room on a Saturday on an empty stomach. I packed. I tidied. I got no phone call from you giving the all-clear, so it was time to head over. An hour has passed, maybe an hour and a half.

I’m pulling into the hospital parking lot when the phone finally rings and I hear your stuttering voice. While fat was splattering all over the stovetop and I was guarding for fire, enough time had passed that a CT scan had been run. Remember that X-men joke from two or three paragraphs ago? Suddenly that wasn’t so funny anymore because the mutation the doctors found in your gene line was not the kind that gave you superpowers, but the kind that plants a seed of death in your head. I don’t have time to dodge as a nuclear warhead comes screaming out of the sky and detonates on the hood of my car, turning our life into a smoking crater labeled with four little words melted into my skin and eyes:

“They found a tumour.”

II.

There are a lot of things you like that start with the prefix “astro-”: astronaut, astronomy, ad Astra para Aspera. I don’t think ‘Astrocytoma’ is going to be on that list anytime soon. We float in space, our skin baked by the radiation of the sun’s rays as more and more razor-sharp meteorites fly past, inches from us.

“We caught it in time.”

“It won’t affect personality or memory.”

“Imaging shows it’s not a glioblastoma.”

“We’re going to wait and see.”

“We caught it in time.”

“We caught it in time.”

“We caught it in time.”

My thoughts balloon as bubbles over my head, held inert by the vacuum of space even as the next one comes crowding and bumping gently underneath it. A brain tumour. Gord Downie died from a brain tumour in two years, didn’t he? But his was a glioblastoma. Your mom had cancer when you were a baby, but God saved her life. She survived. God can do anything; give sight to the blind, give words to the mute, give sound to the deaf. Nothing is impossible with Him. I know He can heal you.

But will He?

I’m facing the real possibility of becoming a widow, and you’re only thirty-one. I’m not even thirty yet.

Please, Lord, if it is Your will, please heal my husband. If not, help me to accept this.

But I’m not even thirty yet.

We stare down at the earth below and hope and pray for a way to defeat the rebellious stars fortified deep in your grey matter.

III.

June bleeds into July, which blurs into August. The seizures come and go; the seizures are king here, each one demanding a royal escort to the only hospital in the city with a neurology ward. Once there, we fight and flail and flounder for hours against brick walls mixed with red tape and mortared with bureaucracy. It’s life and love in the time of COVID-19, and apparently, there’s no niche, time, and space for you, even though your tumour is the size of a mandarin orange. My greatest fear is that, in the face of utter exhaustion and apathy from a pandemic that seems to drag on forever, you will die before ever getting any help.

We fight fire with fire; second recommendations are drawn up, and what seemed inoperable before now has a way in. Glimmers of light start to pierce through the fog as the tumour board decides on August 9 to operate, debulk and remove what they can. A date is set for September 8; we call in our army and prepare to wage war against the thing in your head. We both take time and leave of absences from work. You get on EI; my parents drive all the way from Newfoundland so that boots can be on the ground. Everything is as ready as it can be, and we hold our breath as we watch the news and see the Delta COVID cases spike up and up and up, and the ICU beds fill.

Less than twenty-four hours to go before the surgery. I make one last pop bottle run to the depot before everything goes down when the cell phone rings and it’s you again. I know to look for falling Fat Mans and Little Boys when I hear the tone of your voice.

“Honey, the hospital called. My surgery is cancelled indefinitely.”

I hang up and wail to God because at that moment I know that’s it. With the stroke of a pen, however necessary it is, you are going to die.

IV.

Oh captain, my captain. You stare down the armies of Thanos, your skin burning, your arm and iconic shield shattered like glass. I can do nothing to help; you alone are left in the light as the darkness and the valley of the shadow comes to devour you. But even as you stare into an empty future, God has heard you, and He’s not done yet. The radio crackles to life.

“On your left.”

Portals of golden light open up, and your army comes flooding in from familiar and unexpected places. Dr. Joe Vipond shares your cry for help on Twitter, and a fellow Albertan suggests you de-anon yourself. You do, and the next thing we know, CTV News is contacting you for an interview. We face the real, dangerous possibility of going viral, but decide to proceed with six words: you deserve the chance to live. Family comes through the portals next, then friends and church family. You post the scan of your brain tumour on Twitter and Facebook with a simple request for help; it explodes. In less than forty-eight hours it is shared on Twitter over ten thousand times. The requests for interviews roll in: CBC, Global News, Sherwood Park News, Radio CBC, City News. Even The National wants an interview, but we turn that down because they request it for a Sunday. Our friend Allison, an RN, makes a post about our situation, and it reaches the attention of the political opposition in Alberta; even Rachael Notley, the former Premier of Alberta, shares your post. CBC’s Rick Mercer shares it too. Angry calls and letters flood in from all directions, aimed at the powers that be that stand in the way of you getting your surgery. More people flood through the portals, offering prayers, funding to help cover the difference between EI and your usual job salary, meals so I can fully focus on taking care of you during recovery. Reddit becomes involved. Your tumour picture appears in an article in the Calgary Herald, calling it a symbol of the failure of the government of Alberta during the fourth wave of the pandemic. As they all gather, the message on their lips becomes clear: you deserve the chance to live.

Avengers, assemble.

Faced with thousands upon thousands of Albertans angry, heartbroken, and spurred to action on our behalf, within two days your surgery is rescheduled for September 22, two weeks later. This time, the date is carved in stone. No changes this time. No eleventh-hour cancellations. Praise You, Lord, for You have heard us and caused this to happen. Your fingerprints and signature are everywhere on the golden portals.

V.

Fast forward to today, four months later. The surgery was completed, a prognosis delivered; five to seven years without treatment, ten to fifteen years with. We opt for treatment. The prognosis is not the best news in the world, but it is better than we had hoped; God is good, even in the valley of the shadow of death. Chemo and radiation start at the same time, and we brace ourselves for suffering, but surprisingly, you are doing okay over halfway through the treatments. You are bald now, sure, but you are not throwing up ten times a day, or even once a day. You are tired, but not to the point of being unable to rise from bed. People who know you are amazed, saying that if they did not know better, they would never have known that you were sick at all.

But I know.

I know God’s presence here like the leaves know the wind.

JUDGE’S COMMENTS: I loved the writing in this piece. I was hooked and fascinated with the story and the writing by the second paragraph, and on several occasions I had to stop reading to marvel at a turn of phrase or some unusually brilliant imagery. One example is this sentence: “We stare down at the earth below and hope and pray for a way to defeat the rebellious stars fortified deep in your grey matter.” The first paragraph of section III is so strikingly written that I again had to stop to sort of catch my breath. Beautiful writing for such a poignant, gripping story. I think, with some minor proofreading for a few nitpicky issues, this could be submitted to a periodical that would fit with its values and perspective.