*Featured Artwork: “Rails 3” by Francis Raven

Ticket to Ride

by Audrey R.L. Wyatt

I’ve bought this ticket before. I remember it clearly. I didn’t intend to go to the ticket booth; no one plans to ride this particular roller coaster…

When I first met Mary at the entrance gate, she had a speculum in her hand. Not the usual amusement park paraphernalia. Toward the end of the exam, she found a lump in my neck and handed me my ticket. Line formed in radiology. When I finally got my seat it was small, stuck in a cluttered corner, and I began to feel fear looking up that steep first hill.

The clickety-clack of the chain moving the undercarriage forward was deafening. As the car chugged upward toward the specialist my ticket was taken and I was given a wristband. Apparently, I was not limited to just one trip.

As I plunged down the big hill they stuck needles in my neck, determined to discover the quality of the growth within. This led into an upward curve and another incline, and a repeat of the same procedure when the first elicited no information.

Maybe I’d grown too old for roller coasters, but I wasn’t enjoying the ride. I was plunged into a tunnel, dark as pitch – the poking, probing and prodding yielded nothing definitive.

Just out of the tunnel there was a second huge ascent, not something you often see on a roller coaster. As I was hauled, clickety-clack, up another hill I explained to my daughters that I needed to have surgery. I hugged their sobbing bodies as we plummeted downward, trying to reassure them, trying, without success, to keep them off the coaster.

Surgery done, the ride slammed to a stop. The cancer was removed and I was pronounced cured. The car coasted blithely back to the platform and I leaped out, walking away without a backward glance.

************

I went to see Mary again the other day. As I was getting ready to leave she pulled out a ticket. She had a sad, resigned look on her face. Terror welled up inside me. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of the roller coaster. But here – now – I couldn’t even bear the thought of another ride.

It didn’t matter if the circuitous track was the same as before. I knew the big hill filled with the clickety-clack of tests and pronouncements would be there, and the painful plunge as I was forced to terrify my children yet again. I could only hope I’d return to the platform at the end, able to leave the ride behind.

This time the line started at mammography. When I finally got my seat, in the procedure chair, the ride operator looked at me and told me to get off. She said I didn’t need to ride today. They had apparently reserved this seat for someone else. So I leaped out, walking away without a backward glance.

* Ticket to Ride has been published previously in Survivor’s Review in 2008.

Contributors:

Author Audrey RL Wyatt

Audrey RL Wyatt’s novel, Poles Apart, has been honored with numerous awards and her essays and short fiction have been published in various forums, both print and online.

The founder of Southeast Valley Fiction Writers near Phoenix, Arizona, and Bay State Writers in Southeast Massachusetts, she currently lives in Los Angeles where she teaches workshops on Memoir Writing. Find her at: http://www.audreyrlwyatt.com./

Artist Francis Raven

Francis Raven’s books include Architectonic Conjectures (Silenced Press, 2010), Provisions (Interbirth, 2009), 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). He homeschools his sons in Philadelphia.