When you get sick or when you’re hurting, there’s this place you can go to and get inside this box. Let’s call it the Diagnosis Box. And you don’t even have to take off your clothes or wear a paper gown; you are not made to put your feet up in stirrups, or bend over or drink something godawful. You just step inside the Diagnosis Box wearing your jeans or your business suit if you’re on your lunch hour and you stand with your hands on your hips and your legs spread like a freaking superhero.
The box has glass sides and outside the box is a really smart doctor, who has the knowledge of all medicine, its specialties and subspecialties and more than a working knowledge of the human mind and heart. This is the only doctor and the only test you will need. The doc walks around the box and sees all of your inner workings. He can spot, instantly, a blockage or a tumor or a malfunction and knows instantly how to cure it.
And everything can be cured.
You come out of the box, and the doctor, in a sweeping gesture, shows you a table full of desserts with little placards in front of them. In front of the coconut pie is a placard that reads “pernicious anemia” and in front of the triple layer red velvet cake there’s a placard that reads “vertigo.” And so on. The more dire your illness the higher number of desserts you are prescribed. And that’s it. Everyone leaves the Diagnosis Box healthy, happy, and sugar-filled.
Kathy Fish’s extraordinary collection of short fiction, Wild Life, is available from Matter Press.
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