Rewind

She had hoped no one would notice the quick hot flood down her right leg. Maybe the ombré rain-grey of her long full skirt would hide it. Maybe it hadn’t touched the skirt yet. But she could feel that it had reached the hole in her pantyhose, continued sliding down and hit the floor. She tightened her thigh muscles and pulled her legs together, a useless gesture now.

On the other side of the high counter, the department secretary excused herself and picked up the ringing phone. Maybe she was still unaware of the disaster. Molly pulled a Kleenex out of her purse and pretended to drop it. She bent over and dabbed at the floor. Still bent, she took a few steps and placed the tissue carefully in the bottom of the wastebasket. She straightened up and met the gaze of her department head.

Not, thank God, the one who had hired her three years earlier, during the first exacerbation. That one, Betty, had tutted like a disapproving nanny at every symptom, every failure to perform. The NMO (a stupid disease that no one had ever heard of, which she referred to as “an MS-type thing”) had hit her eyes that time, leaving her in a strange limbo of shadowy forms – not dark, the way she’d always envisioned blindness, but over-exposed, whited-out. Writing wasn’t hard, as she knew the keyboard. She’d memorized the path to every class, counting steps and touching landmarks. But to read the students’ work, she’d had to use a Zoom magnifier that made one word nearly fill the screen. Betty had acted as though she’d known the disease was coming, and cheated the university, selling them a pig in a poke, her handicapped and damaged self.

She smiled and stammered a few words that she would forget immediately, then escaped to her office. So the NMO was going for the bladder this time, as well as the legs. It was a stealthy viper, always lying in wait. Well, now she knew. She had a cane; she would buy some pads. Passing menopause, she had given away the remaining Kotex, setting them out in the women’s restroom for others’ emergencies. Now she was rushing back in time past puberty, to training pants and then, eventually, diapers. Doing a Benjamin Button. Perhaps we all do, if we live long enough; we slide down the far side of that unfeeling bell curve. The legs would forget how to walk. The fonts would get larger and larger, until she forgot which alphabet blocks to use to spell her disease. The numbness would spread, unthreatening as sleep. And beyond that the blankness – black or white? We don’t know. We don’t remember.