I am walking up to the open-air stage to see a Christmas play. Many people are already gathered at the bottom of the stage, and some even crouch further up on the stairs. 

I want to get a good look, so I squeeze my way in through the crowd until I am just before the edge of the stairs and then wiggle in place, ready to watch the show. I glance to my left, then to my right. It turns out my totally unplanned spot is one of the best, if not the best. And to add to that, a second discovery comes right after, though this time not only for me but also for the rest of the audience: this live Christmas show is not only gonna be interactive, but feature puppies.

Moments later, the show begins. We are all caught up in the story when different sorts of puppies (especially little goldies and labs) begin to appear on the wooden stairs, right between the crouching people. Their little doggy bodies are dressed in elf outfits and each pup sits on the wood looking around all clueless until we, the audience, collectively spot them. 

Naturally, people are quick to cheer as soon as they lay eyes on them, and especially do so because seeing them feels unexpected. The crowd cheers and coos, and the puppies run down to meet them, allowing themselves to be pet, picked up, and played with before trotting even further down the stairs and disappearing all together into the crowd. 

With the puppies gone, the audience cools off their excitement and shits to watch the stage, but the puppies reappear on the same stairs, and receive the same sudden warming reactions. 

We’re all caught by surprise. Somehow, these puppies seem to only let themselves be spotted once they’ve already taken their positions, plopped on their tiny butts on the wooden stairs of the stage, and never while they’re getting into place, walking up the stage, or even walking around at all.

With their second reappearance came more petting and playtime as they descended into the crowd again, and disappeared just as they did the first time. 

The people of the crowd quickly forget yet again all about them, and they appear right back on the stage for the third time, and then a fourth, and a fifth, again and again. Always unnoticed, and always pulling the same delighted reaction from the audience. 

One puppy in particular catches my eye when it appears on the stairs right ahead of me: a mix of Pomeranian and Corgi. Its body has the Pomeranian’s fluffy fur and the Corgi’s distinctive short legs, making it an irresistibly charming little guy. 

I pick it up. The softness of its fur slides right between my fingers. Although it takes a while for me to finally reach its body, once I do, my fingers wrap securely around and pull the little creature closer to nuzzle its nose into my own. 

Ah—the bubbling joy!

After the brief snuggle, I sit its body down and amuse watching it scamper down the stairs and vanish into the rest of the crowd.

The energy of the puppies is infectious, even more so because you’re immediately able to tell just by looking at them that they have no clue of the effect they have on people.

Soon enough, the little Pomeranian-Corgi concoction pup reappears on the stairs, just as the rest of them always do: with the same sudden and unexpected entrance, the same innocent canine ignorance, and for the same intense reaction from us in the crowd.

*

After the Christmas play, now back at home, Mother began asking me about the Pomeranian puppy, going on and on, almost as if hinting that I should get one.

“Mother, I’m never going to get a Pomeranian puppy.”

“Yes, I know, they might be a small breed, very energetic, and their leg bones fragile…”

I nod. She isn’t wrong. “Yes, everything you just said is true, but there’s one main reason that is the root of all of them; that sums why I won’t get a Pomeranian puppy—” I began making my point, holding up my index finger to build up to it. I was ready to tell her all about my reason, how they’re literally bred to be small and deformed on purpose. How their tiny lungs make it hard for them to breathe and how that is not a defect, but something knowingly done to them to be small in size—but I was distracted as I raised my arm to gesture. 

Something caught my eye. Something odd. I pause, staring at my left shoulder.

“Hey, Mother, do you know what this bump is right here on my left shoulder?” I say and begin to poke my finger at it. It feels strange, as if I can’t feel my skin at all. The whole area is numb and the bump is poking upward out of my skin like the tit of a lemon. “What the…”

“That’s just your skin, honey. Some part of it grew thicker there,” Mother said from somewhere in the distance.

I kept poking at it. “Uh—no, it’s not. Look, it’s also here—”

I point further down to my forearm and press a finger onto my skin. It sinks smoothly in a way your skin should probably never do, with no resistance. In it, is a gap between two thick metal brackets that are clamped to muscle right beneath my skin. Oddly enough, that collapse reminds me of the fur on that Pomeranian.

The two weird and never-had-I-ever-seen-anything-like-them-before pieces of metal are rectangular, bulging out, and somehow more obvious now that they were just a moment before my eyes fell on them. I’m sure that if they were always that thickness, I would have most definitely already noticed them being there, but all I can do now is hold my wince in and inspect them closer. My guess is that they must be at least two inches thick and three inches wide—that’s a little hard to miss for a block of metal sitting right under your skin.

I turn my arm around. There is another piece of metal just a few inches above my wrist. There are three of them. At least three of them. 

My skin is thinning like a sheet of filo dough and starting to stretch uncomfortably over the protruding metal beneath like I am turning into a walking human vacuum bag all of a sudden. Perhaps a soon-to-not-be-walking human vacuum bag.

Somewhere in the corner of my vision, Mother had already turned pale.

“Mother, what is that?”

“I’ll tell you what that IS—,” she twists her lips and paces, annoyed, pissed and in disbelief. Too many distinct emotions that somehow still don’t cover the full experience of that feeling someone gets when they think the sentence: “oh, that bitch—”.

She paces on while I continue to hold my left arm suspended in the air in front of me like a half-zombie, half-girl mix—a mix which I argue would be very effective at reducing my dating pool to people who read bizarro fiction and creeps who own pomeranians.

“When we went to Carmen (our GP) and she did that procedure on you, she put those brackets in there,” she starts, still pacing around the room, losing herself in her frustration.

Oh yeah—the procedure. I remember now. Little flashes of it appear before my eyes. I remember the long grey tubes that were attached to my forearms on both the top and bottom, and same for the left as for the right. So THAT is how and where those thick as hell silicone tubes were connecting to! Well, I wasn’t told anything about THAT.

Mother keeps pacing and hyperventilating as if she knows Carmen had not only done this on purpose, but did so knowing it was the last procedure she had in her agenda before she planned to vanish off the face of the earth, forever.

“She was supposed to take them out at the end!”

I watch Mother take a seat on the edge of the bed, rocking back and forth and beginning to wail. Great—so Carmen had forgotten to remove the brackets from my arm, my skin had now begun to thin out so much that it is both painful and a literal miracle it already hasn’t ripped off from the weight of the brackets, and now Mother is turning into a fucking WHALE! Or no, sorry—she is just wailing. My bad. That means that she is crying like someone died. Regardless, it’s very annoying. Since that ‘wail-whale’ misunderstanding had already been made, a thought creeped up that perhaps I would actually prefer to have her turn into a whale, especially if that means there’s a chance I won’t keep hearing her anymore.

Speculatives aside, for now Mother is still very much human, just as much as I am; except she is fine and I am the one whose doctor half-assed a procedure on and turned into a fucking FRIDGE MAGNET!!! UGH—I can barely hear my own heavily judgemental thoughts over the sounds coming out of her at this point, and still, I need to be the one to comfort HER!?!

“…so we’ll get them out. Hey, listen—we’ll get them out. Stop crying. We’ll just call her, and she’ll do it.” 

I kept reassuring her. She kept crying and hyperventilating.

My left arm is still stretched out, as if it is contagious and holding it in the air makes perfect sense to contain it that way. At this point I don’t mind it as much, though I would have expected that being in that pose would’ve caught me at least one Gomez Addams, but no. Shame.

Wait a minute, let’s think about it for another second. Maybe it is a smart move to hold out my arm this way after all. I am trying to balance the weight of the metal under the skin from the top of my arm so that gravity does not do its thing and rip my skin off, yeah! The things I do actually make sense, I knew it!

Unlike the puppies that kept shifting on and off the stage earlier today, I doubt my skin would have an encore, though I promise I’d be just as happy seeing it rebuild itself again and again as I did seeing the puppies. Oh, but maybe I don’t want to have my skin ripped off again and again…

During my silent inner tangent, Mother took the freedom to step it up a notch and turn from Beluga to Orca, which I still didn’t understand. What’s all the fuss about? I’ve already gone through all of my other medical procedures months before even seeing Carmen, and that also included that MRI. I could have easily been lazy about it and postponed it until after Christmas, but I chose to get it over with before going to see Carmen.

“Hey, Mother—at least I didn’t get an MRI.” I took me a second after I said that, and then the horror of it dawned on me too. “OH, THANK GOD I DIDN’T GET AN MRI!”

And now we’re both freaking out.

Like mother, like daughter.

Two peas in a pod.