After my grandfather’s memorial service in Arizona, in the high-ceilinged, dark-stoned, weighty kitchen of a vacation rental, my nurse practitioner cousin cuts a cyst three times the size of a bb from the top right portion of my head. She injects lidocaine through a twenty-five-gauge needle attached to a syringe into my scalp to dull the pain of the excision. A part of me wishes she wouldn’t.

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