Sanctuary
Carrie has your left breast clenched in her hands. You want to ask her to be gentler, but how much more vulnerable can she expect you to be? You’re partially naked, and in your opinion, it’s your most fragile and dicey half. She is pushing you against a machine at the edge of the room that looks like a robotic-extraterrestrial limb from an apocalyptic event. Do you, with your left breast apprehensively clamped between two clear anvils, really need to ask Carrie to be kind? You’ve ceded everything to her. What more power can she want?
Right foot forward. Cheek (face cheek, more specifically) against the machine. You know you’re doing it right if you feel like a Looney Tune smacked against cartoon glass. You try to think of a way to bring your adopted goat into the conversation, the warmth that thaws even the worst interactions, but then Carrie tells you to hold still. She walks away to stand behind a desk with a clear shield. You miss her hand, even if her fingers were clinical, and she referred to your body as dense tissue and jabbed at your brown flesh.
“I’m sorry,” she says even though you can’t hear any remorse. “I should’ve asked before I touched you.”
She tells you to take a deep breath and hold it. There is a flat robotic hiss as the machine moves above you. And then you feel the anger of generations of Spartan ghosts channeled through the pressure of sentient potato mashers. This is the moment—the moment your tit is between two metal plates—that The Machines have decided to revolt and kill. And it’s General Mammogram XII leading the charge. Carrie’s made it clear through her body language that this professional torture chamber isn’t conducive to emotions. So you slurp up your tears and think of your goat.
That when you first met her, she jump-sprinted to you. That she climbed into your lap and you didn’t care that she left little heart-shaped dirt prints all over your jeans. Megan, the woman at the adoption center, said, She’s never come straight up to anyone like this before. The goat was in your arms because she’s small enough to do that. You rocked her back and forth and you knew treating her like a baby made you look starved for affection, but Megan didn’t seem phased. Megan asked if you knew anything about goats. You said you did because how hard is it to put someone else first?
“You moved,” Carrie says, annoyed. She says you can breathe and step back from the machine. At first you’re in disbelief that she’s upset. Of course you moved. You’re an animal with fears, after all. But then you’re disappointed too. Older women have been using the word squeeze when they tell you about this test. It’s a lot of squeezing. Squeeze: what you do to a baby’s cheeks, a clown’s nose, the feeling of your body attempting to fit on a crowded subway car. Why is everybody else’s squeeze your debilitating crush? What does that say about you? Before you leave, will they make you sign a form that says you must tell other women the word squeeze too? Carrie makes you do that scan again. You do “much better” this time.
The next position is to stretch your arm out to your side like a discus thrower. Your chin is tilted up to the ceiling, not so much reverent but more like you see out of your periphery an asteroid approaching and you’re stalled with dread. Hold it, breathe in, and hold.
Your goat was picky. She didn’t like the goat food you bought even though it said the word “premium” on it twice. She had rectangular pupils that roamed in so many directions that even when she was relaxed, she looked tweaked out. She answered to her name. Didn’t eat furniture. Bounced off the kitchen wall like a stunt woman when she was excited.
“You’re at a disadvantage,” Carrie says after she tells you to free your breath. You’re more than old enough to have multiple children, she explains, but because you have zero, your breasts are still dense.
You make a joke about prioritizing your career, which in retrospect, wouldn’t work on her. And it doesn’t. You think of saying you had furry children, but that’s an odd thing to say to someone who is already apathetic toward you. Your words can propel her straight into antipathy if you aren’t careful. If you were a man, would she have called being childless a disadvantage? If you were a man, would this tissue-vice-grip machine have gotten beyond the blueprint stage?
“I’ll be back,” Carrie says. So you wait alone.
Your goat, within days, became depressed. The signs of goat depression very much mirror all other species’ depression. Heavy eyelids, stillness at all hours of the day. When you called the adoption center, which does not specialize in goats it turns out, they said she probably missed her friends. They said this casually like it wasn’t the most heartbreaking phrase: a lonely mini-goat. They recommended a sanctuary where she could go for socialization.
“Like a daycare,” Megan said.
When you visited the goat sanctuary with your goat, you were surrounded by experts. They asked you where you got this goat, who would be irresponsible enough to let you live with a singular goat? You said you were trying to do a good thing, but you understood why they looked at you the way they did. That’s never been a good enough excuse for anything.
The doctor wants more images. You look at Carrie and say, “And if I don’t want to?”
She looks back at you with nothing. An expression that can be read, Fall in line soldier. “Didn’t you say,” she says, “you felt a lump?”
You assume the position again. Arm outstretched, chin sky bound. You know she sees dozens of women in a day. That she’s desensitized in a very reasonable way to breasts and the crunching of breasts. But you’re scared, and you would like to be treated as the fragile person you are. Which is rare for you to want to be seen as fragile, but just for this moment, can someone acknowledge how easy it is to break?
“I used to have a goat,” you say as she takes your breast in her hand again. You hear the wobble in your voice, but you don’t apologize for it. She keeps working to fit you on the clear shelf. You know you sound strange, but it’s a relief. Not to always worry so much about sounding put-together.
“Really?” she says.
“She had to go live at a sanctuary. They’re supposed to live in herds.”
“You know,” Carrie says, “I think I’ve heard that before. Right foot back a little. Is she happy there?”
“She is. They send me pictures,” you say.
“You’ll have to show me after.” Maybe it’s because she feels bad for you or maybe you’re making it all up, but you think she’s trying to be kind. “Stay like that. Are you okay?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before she walks back to her small control center.
You can’t nod or say anything without affecting your position.
“Hold,” she says. “Good. Now breathe.”
Jade Jones was born and raised in Southern New Jersey. A former Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, she is a graduate of Princeton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Both a writer and educator, Jade has taught all levels, including elementary, college, and adult learners. A winner of the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, her work has appeared in The Rumpus and Catapult. She is currently the director of operations at Tailored Tutoring LLC.