Colonoscopy Spaghetti

When you feel a stab in your gut, go to the doctor for a colonoscopy. Tell them young people are dying left and right these days. Just ask my mother. Make them dig deeper when the procedure yields nothing. Open up your belly flaps like a book. Reassure the surgeons that it’s just routine, after all. They need to see inside, measure the highways of your digestion, discover what love looks like cannibalized. Is my mother atomized into protein and fiber? Reach down and massage the hot spaghetti. Initiate peristalsis. There is so much rot to expel. Shame weighed twice as much on my mother’s bathroom scale. See what the doctors unearth from your stomach. A clump of rice, undigested. A stolen heart, beating. My mother said eat more. Hide the best parts of her in your thighs, in globules of glistening fat. The parts that never seem to leave you. 

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, Ghost Parachute, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications, and has been selected for Best Microfiction 2024. She’s on Twitter @ezhang77.