The woman sat on the park bench gingerly, tightening the purple, woolen scarf around her neck. It was the middle of winter, and the day was finally starting to end. The season had reached that point where it was no longer magical and Christmassy and romanticized; no more couples were out ice skating and attempting figure eights, no more middle and elementary school children were starting snowball fights with wonderfully malleable white snow, and the streets were no longer coated in what looked like perfect sheets of crisp copy paper.
Instead, the season had reached that point where the woman had to spend twenty minutes in the morning scraping the ice off of her windshield before leaving for work. The streets were now lined with gray and black slush, and her small hands were shaking in their pink gloves. She looked at her hands for a moment, how they trembled despite being encased in warm wool.
The gloves were a Christmas gift from her mother. She received them in the mail the day prior and didn’t have the heart to send them back. She hated that they were pink. In her mother’s defense, she didn’t know yet, and how could she? The woman had been silently trying to internalize the news for about a week now, trying yet failing to arrive at the right decisions: how to break the news to her family, friends, and boyfriend, figuring out the incessant costs, how to knock everything off her bucket list in the months she likely had left. She would probably be fired once she mustered up the courage to tell her boss and coworkers.
“Hi, excuse me! Can I sit here for a quick second?”
The woman jumped. She was already on edge. She looked up to see a nervous student with her hands full of notebooks, looseleaf papers with scribbling on them, and a bright pink lunchbox. She was in high school, no doubt. The pink backpack slung over her shoulder was almost double the size she was. The woman caught a glimpse of a sticker with the word “Yale” on one of the notebooks, along with a sticker that said “hydrate or diedrate.” The student reminded her of a more stressed Elle Woods.
“Sure,” she said with a faint smile. She didn’t need to say it twice. The student offered a grateful smile before collapsing on the bench and opening her backpack. She began sorting the looseleaf papers into folders and the notebooks by size order into her backpack.
The woman closed her eyes briefly. She hated that color now. What had once been her favorite color was now a grim reminder of a diagnosis that she would never forget for the rest of her life.
The woman opened her eyes. If this were a Hallmark or Disney movie, the woman thought to herself, the student would ask if everything was all right. The student would see the contorted expression on her face, the empty eyes holding back tears, the shaking hands, and embrace her. She would tell her about the climatic mammogram, the surgery now on her mind, the thousands of dollars that needed to materialize soon out of thin air. She would break down in her arms and talk to her about her broken dreams, the wedding she was afraid she’d now never live to see, the degree she always told herself she’d go back to college and get when she had saved enough money, the countries like Italy, Brazil, and Australia that she always wanted to travel to. She would talk about the languages she wanted to learn, the books she wanted to read, how her life was still only just getting started. The student would offer her condolences; they would figure something out. She would start a GoFundMe. Her friends would fly in from all of the different states they lived in to support her in her time of need. In a dazzling act of kindness, the necessary funds would be raised.
But this was not a Hallmark, Disney, or even a Dreamworks movie. The woman looked at her hands again, still shaking. She lifted them to her face and closed her eyes again. When she opened her eyes, the student, having sorted all her things away, had opened her lunchbox to take a bag of green apple slices out before zipping up the lunchbox, standing up, and walking away.
Raiya Shaw (she/her) is a student at the University of Central Florida. She has been published in Blue Marble Review, Of Poets & Poetry, and Humankind Zine, among others and is currently a chapter writer and editor for Her Campus, a reader for Black Fox Literary Magazine, and a guest editor for Palette Poetry Literary Magazine.
Instagram: @rairai19