Amy Loyd-Plax

This first appeared on Fictionaut



They leave their marks like fingerprints, these amyloid plaques
.When the doctor said the words, I heard Amy-Lloyd Plax, hyphenated, like the architect: Frank-Lloyd Wright. 
"Dr. and Mrs. Lloyd Plax invite you to the wedding of their daughter Amy," I giggled in the examining room.
Those rusty finger print shapes, they form a blackout curtain between me and yesterday -- the CSI tv show plot or my breakfast choices. They form a wall between now and everything that happened before or in another place.
People say there's nothing wrong with me, that I'm still sharp. A friend reads a story I wrote over the weekend and says it isn't possible that I'm going downhill. 

That's because she doesn't see the fury of my effort to find a word among the tangles and pull it out. I go through long silent struggles to recall names that used to bubble up irrepressibly.It took 90 seconds to recall "irrepressibly." Sometimes I just delete the sentence that exhausts me.
I think about the PET scan, its bright places and its dark ones, but the month-old picture I recall may not even be a true map of my brain today.
The rusty fingerprints might already have spread wider, erasing in their path the tunes to folk songs that I sang at summer camp and the names of boyfriends, once so crucial to my happiness.
PET scans have expiration dates, like milk. Stand still too long, and oops! That puppy's spoiled.
Amyloid plaques are fuzzy spots in amongst the sharply defined lines and crisp shapes of neurons and dendrites; they remind me of crystallized brown sugar on the surface of a flan. It took me two minutes to remember goddamn “flan.”No one knows exactly what degree of memory loss corresponds to what amount of plaque-ness.
When I no longer know you, what signal will you give to remind me that you and I once loved?  Love. 

Amy Lloyd marries Frederick Plax on a private island, far away from everyone else,  just as darkness closes in around her. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You Only Get One Question (first published by Anchala Studios in 2018)

Image
          I met her husband in a greasy coffee shop on the run-down side of town -- his choice. I suppose he thought the locale fit my role. I had been bedding his wife, after all. That made me trash.         He was a middle-aged tugboat carrying 300 pounds of fat on swollen ankles and too-small feet. He’d come with a bad attitude. The husbands always do. They never consider why their wives go looking elsewhere for pleasure. Or maybe they do consider, but the answer that comes back is the only one they can sit with: Some bad influence (me) is to blame for their darling Dottie or sweet little Sally-Jo going astray.         “Jesus, how old are you anyway?” he asked.         “That’s a boring question,” I said. “Of all the things you could ask at a time like this, you want a number?”       ...
Read more

A Conversation With a Ghost

Image
This must never get out in the press, for it would cause widespread panic. The priests would surround my house, not to mention the police and possibly the army. Castor Desayuno has come back from the dead! Yes, the butcher himself! You are saying to yourself right now, or possibly to your beloved who sits beside you in the morning sun with her hair down and a cup of café con leche in her sleepy grasp, 'Castor Desayuno cannot possibly be walking the earth. You must be mad!' You are protesting, ‘But we saw his head on the end of a bayonet, paraded through the streets of San Cristobal. We saw his body lowered, headless, into a grave over which no priest said the holy words.' But as surely as I stand before you at this moment, I saw Castor in the flesh, last night. He was a hungry ghost, desperate for conversation. He beckoned to me to sit beside him on the steps to the Shrine of the Eternal Madonna, the very one where he was cut down in the middle of fornicating wi...
Read more

Market Day

Image
I just needed a little more time, a moment only, to answer Melek's question, though not to make up an answer. I had that ready. I always had the answer ready because the question was always the same. I needed time to compose my face into a mask of perfect submission. He expected women to be submissive. I turned away from the window and faced him, my eyes downcast and my posture stooped, and whispered, "No, my husband. I do not know the name of the man in the market who bumped into me and said 'Excuse me.' He was nothing. He was a nobody." I knew what his next accusation would be; by then, I could have recited this tired, familiar script in my sleep. "How did you know he was a nobody if you didn't look at him, eh? Did you raise your eyes and look him in the face? Are you my wife or a whore?" Cue the kettledrums. Cue the dancing bears. This was where I lowered my head and wailed a protest of innocence to be followed by a walloping sla...
Read more